100 books like The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

The first part of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography provides a fascinating, clear-eyed glimpse into the emerging world of science fiction as the young Asimov grows up in New York, works in his immigrant parents’ candy store, and dreams of writing stories.

There’s a certain innocence in the pre-war world where young kids were dreaming up science fiction, and Asimov is at his best here, relying on extensive diary records to recall his first meetings with Campbell, Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard, to name a few. A window into a long-vanished world, it is never less than compelling.

Growing up in New York around the same time as Asimov was Fred Pohl, young, ambitious, argumentative, and occasionally brilliant.

We meet many of the same people – and see the same events – that Asimov describes, in a somewhat different light, as Pohl forges his own path through the emerging world of science fiction, as an agent, editor, and writer in his own right.

It’s beautifully written and again, provides a fascinating insight into that long-ago world, complete with its many petty feuds – that the socialist Pohl was banned from the first Worldcon only to start his own competing event across the street is a marvelously entertaining anecdote recounted both here and by Asimov.

Merrill, a brilliant editor and writer in her own right, was a rare woman to cut through the chauvinistic world of the Golden Age writers.

The book recounts her journey as a writer (she wrote the classic SF story “That Only a Mother”), editor (as in the ground-breaking 60s anthology England Swings SF), her short-lived marriage to Fred Pohl and her fascination with socialism. It certainly gives you a different view of the male-dominated world of science fiction at the time, and an insight into one of SF’s important practitioners.

Anthony Boucher straddles the history of both crime fiction and science fiction.

As the founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he has an oversized role in the history of the genre. As a crime writer, he gave his name to the Anthony Awards, which are handed out every year at the annual Bouchercon.

His SF story “The Quest for Saint Aquin” is a classic. None of this, admittedly, has much to do with Rocket to the Morgue, Boucher’s roman-à-clef mystery set in pre-WW2 California in which the emerging world of science fiction comes to glorious life. A young L. Ron Hubbard makes an appearance, as do Robert A. Heinlein and the rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons.

The mystery matters less than the characters, who though moving under different names are all very much true to life.

The author is a sociologist who rode the rails, on and off, alongside homeless youth in the early 1930s. He did not disguise himself or pretend to be “one of them.” Instead, he chronicled their stories in oral histories that are intimate and thorough depictions of how young men and women existed on the road, what was important to them, what they yearned for, how they protected themselves, and each other. As a sociologist and chronicler of groups within society, the author remained true to his obligations as an academic not to glorify, white-wash, or romanticize what he saw. As a result, the experiential dimensions of this book are incredibly robust and meaningful.

Ribuffo could have portrayed his subjects—three mid-century Christian fundamentalists—as social or cultural misfits. Instead, he made a powerful case that these men—and others like them— were a product of the American mainstream. First published in the 1980s, when the so-called new Christian right was in its ascendancy, the book encouraged readers to check any temptation they might have felt to dismiss Protestant fundamentalists as political outliers who would disappear of their own accord. Generous almost to a fault, Ribuffo gave me plenty of advice during my own research to avoid any suggestion that there was anything un-American about fascist sympathies in the interwar years. 

Financial crises are not only catastrophic because of their devastating economic consequences. They also unleash radical political forces undermining the foundations of our free and open society. Widely praised for his work on Germany in the interwar years, Harold James is the best historian to describe the vicious circle of crisis, radicalization, and national isolation in the 1930s and to discuss the question: can it happen again?

This is a little-known gem by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder (best known for his play Our Town). Published in the 1935, it’s a contemporaneous account of Depression-era America, following the misadventures of traveling salesman and religious zealot, George Brush. 

Coming off as preachy and self-righteous, George sparks ire and outrage wherever he goes. Yet, he’s a sincere and decent person. At the end of his misadventures, George is humbled and begins to broaden his views, making him a complex, sympathetic character.

Though renowned during his lifetime, Wilder has been largely forgotten in favor of flashier contemporaries. All of his works are worth rediscovering, but Heaven’s My Destination is closest to my heart as it was a major inspiration for my own book.  

Barbara Small’s novel is about the interwoven lives of a Black family and a White family facing the challenges of surviving while raising their children in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression.

The vivid language and sense details of Faith’s Reckoning transported me completely into the very different worlds the characters experienced in this riveting page-turner. What I loved most was how they transformed their suffering into a desire to improve the worlds they inhabited, not only for themselves but also others. The personal reckonings they made by changing their lives evoked a depth of empathy that has changed me.

These characters continue to stay in my heart, and like friends I cherish them still. In fact, I hope to see a sequel and a movie one day!

When the Great Depression hit and jobs were scarce, there was no point in hanging around at home. 

“Prices in Europe were down to rock bottom,” wrote Albion Ross of his first overseas trip in 1930. “In addition, Mussolini’s government, for some inscrutable Fascist reason, was offering students a fantastic third-class railway ticket that took you from the Channel ports round and about through France and Italy for next to nothing.”

He found a spot in Berlin with the New York Evening Post and later The New York Times. Apart from a stint in the military during the war, he remained an overseas reporter for years.

His memoir is extraordinary because it is short on derring-do and long on sensitivity about what he witnessed. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Ross nor his book are much remembered. I would not have known about it if he had… show more.