100 books like Spectacular Realities

This isn’t a recent book, but it remains one of my favorite dives into the underworld! Who doesn’t like a salacious rag sheet or a grisly murder? It focuses on sexual danger in Victorian London and has everything: tabloid journalism, child prostitution, and narratives about Jack the Ripper and the “bad women” he killed!

All these stories uncover the ways that the general masses made sense of new sexual categories and illuminate how legislators and politicians used those categories to both challenge and push women out of public spaces and back into so-called traditional gender roles.

I remain fascinated by how the story of a serial killer could be subverted to instead denigrate white women (racialized as Other because of class) who were in public spaces where they didn’t belong. Or how often those same working-class white women used the ideas of sexual danger to show that it was, in… show more.

There are many books about the glitz and the cultural icons that we associate with Weimar Berlin. This one gives us a broader and deeper picture. Instead of concentrating on a few writers and artists, it anchors the city’s creative explosion in mass-market newspapers and their readers, turning our eyes to people in the streetcars and cafés and the stories they read about their own lives. We can read about sensational crimes just as Berliners did, and we find the prototypes of modern art in the layout and content of newspapers and in the chaos of the streets where they are hawked.

This book taught me that there are always sources for determined historians to find on any topic. Like most good stories about subcultures, It reveals the influence of the marginalized on the mainstream, even when it’s been hidden from history.

Chauncey explodes the false perception that gay men before the 1960s did not share a common culture but were closeted and isolated from each other. I love his humanizing use of unpublished personal sources like diaries. He also reveals how the pathologizing of homosexuality by medical professionals accidentally supported the creation of vibrant gay communities.

Rarely have I learned so much from such an engaging book. This is my favorite history book of all time.

This is an extraordinary book: stories, in the voices of those who experienced it, about living in public housing projects in Chicago before these homes were demolished starting in the 1990s. Of course, there are memories of crime, gangs, drugs, violence, police brutality, sickness, and death: sometimes understood as the product of urban life, capitalism, and racism, but also as the product of individual mistakes and failures. But mostly these witnesses tell of community, of self-respect and determination, of learning to survive and even resist.

Students in my urban history class in a prison education program in Illinois reminded me that “urban” in their world—which was often precisely the world of High-Rise Stories—meant not the city as a whole, but the inner city, the world of the street, of the marginalized, of people of color. This is a compelling window into that story, told by people who lived it:… show more.

I love David Sedaris’s writing. He is so observant and has a brilliant ear for dialogue. I’ve read his diaries, which are some of the source material for this book of essays. The title refers to him learning French whilst living in Paris.

His attempts to read his essays to the class are often met with contempt by his French teacher, who barely disguises her scorn at his efforts. But, respect for David’s work ethic–he often spent the whole day on his French homework, so determined was he to crack the language. Another life lesson: there are no shortcuts–you have to put the work in.

There are many terrifying monsters, but few were as feared as the beast of Gévaudan, which terrorized the French countryside in the 1760s.

Said to be, variously, a werewolf, a dog-hybrid, a hyena, or some unknown beast, it was blamed for killing many dozens of villagers. The French government sent top hunters to kill the beast, and conspiracy theories ran rampant. I recommend Monsters of the Gevaudan because I love the way it blends history, folklore, and investigation into a compelling mystery.

Don’t believe the mystery-mongering TV shows offering wild theories: the truth is in this book—and it’s stranger than fiction. 

A story is not the words that you write down. That’s a narrative. A story is what your audience builds in mind for themselves when they receive the narrative.

If I give you a six-word story: For sale. Baby’s shoes. Never worn. You don’t just see an advertisement. You think about the lives of the people who placed the advertisement, right?!

What you just did in your mind is how stories work, and Roland Barthes was the first to recognise this. His book is a series of articles demonstrating the mythology that lies behind the words and symbols we are fed in everyday life.

My knowledge gap theory of how stories work owes a great deal to Roland Barthes, and this book in particular.

A wonderful evocation of many aspects of everyday life in Europe’s 2nd biggest city. Who were “the people” and where were they in the social hierarchy? This book looks at the beginnings of a consumer culture: what did ordinary families earn and what did this enable them to buy. Where and how did they live? How did working Parisians dress, what did they read, how did they spend their holidays? It’s all there!

Ned Ward was a tavern keeper in the early 1700s, and this little-known book offers an extraordinary time capsule. It allows the reader to travel back some three hundred years to the grimy streets of London that feel at once alien and familiar.

The lions and other exotic animals in the Tower of London, the freshly-domed St Paul’s Cathedral, the filth and noise, the danger and the stink. All of it is here, not to mention the fabulous dialect of the time, offering the most wonderful dictionary of terms for sex workers, thieves, lawyers, and every trade imaginable. All history fans should read this book.

You’re probably picking up a theme here - I love an underdog, books that go largely unnoticed. Ron Rosenbaum spent most of his career writing for The Village Voice, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and many others. The Secret Parts of Fortune is a collection of some of his best stuff. Someone described Rosenbaum as “one part intellectual and one part private eye,” and these essays will definitely lead you down a rabbit hole, taking you places you’ve never even considered to venture. My point of entry was A Killing in Camelot, about the unsolved murder of Mary Meyer, an artist and Washington socialite who turned up murdered on a D.C. canal towpath in 1964. As the title suggests, there is a Kennedy connection – isn’t there always.