100 books like The Day the World Ended

If you want one book to understand how the first month or so of World War 1 played out, there is only one place to turn. Tuchman’s book is beautifully written, with a rich tapestry of characters and events, it covers the major events in Europe in August and early September 1914. It is largely seen through the eyes of ‘great men’—the military and political leaders of the day—which makes it slightly dated by today’s standards, but the skill and humanity of the reader and the sheer scope of the narrative will keep you in their thrall.

Climate change may well be increasing the frequency and intensity of violent storms and hurricanes, but they are certainly nothing new.

This is a vividly written account of what has been dubbed one of the worst natural disasters to have ever hit the United States, the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900. The narrative is constructed using the letters and reports from Isaac Cline, a meteorologist working at the US Weather Bureau at the time.

The storm described in this book occurred 124 years ago, yet readers will find eerie precursors to the issues we hear being discussed globally today: despair at our seeming hubris and disturbing unpreparedness in the face of increasingly volatile and unpredictable natural events.

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.

This rollicking history of hurricanes takes us from the sixteenth century (and before actually) to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. Schwartz is a dogged researcher who has mastered the science of hurricanes and explains them well. He also has a great eye for social history and makes his points by telling anecdotes and stories. He tips his hat to the French master of longue durée history, Fernand Braudel, and Sea of Storms highlights long-term continuities in hurricanes and their destructive paths.

He shows that although the region known as the Caribbean stretches across North, Central, and South America, varying greatly in terms of languages, history, environment, and more, the annual threat of hurricanes brings it together and provides an excellent advantage point for its study.

Concerns about global warming have focused much attention on glaciers and their relentless retreat. Carey shows that too much of the research has focused on the science of glaciology and the ice-capped mountain peaks themselves, overlooking the people who live near them. He studies the Peruvian Andes, the Cordillera Blanca, the site of devastating avalanches, and much contemporary research. Carey illuminates how local Indigenous people have built their lives around and protected themselves from glaciers and how they are confronting climate change. He also reviews their interactions with scientists and technicians.

In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers is a rare combination of excellent science and captivating narrative (disclaimer--Mark Carey was my PhD student).

We’ve been told ‘the market knows best’ for a long time, and we’re now seeing the economic, political, and environmental breakdown which comes from arranging society around the market’s diktat. Worse, we’ve been here before.

In Late Victorian Holocausts, the late historian Mike Davis documents the most shocking historical consequences of organising societies to please the market. In the heyday of the British Empire, London’s obsession with ‘leaving it to the market’ extended to letting profit dictate who should eat and who should starve.

After the British stripped away traditional social networks on which the majority could depend in times of crisis, people found that ‘the market’ demanded food be shipped from where it was needed, to where there was money. The loss of millions of lives to famine was not the result of ‘backwardness’ and ignorance, but of ‘modernity’ and the market. 

Other, newer books on the Battle of Berlin are available. And Ryan’s other books, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, are more famous. But The Last Battle is the book whose style and mood I most try to emulate in my own writings.

Ryan interviewed many of the participants, collected reams of documents from both sides—at a time when the Cold War was at its height—and the result is a wonderful book. You can smell the cigarette and gunsmoke, picture the military and political leaders talking, laugh or cry at some of the vignettes.

Beevor’s book on Berlin is better history—thanks to the sources he was able to access—but Ryan is my ‘go-to’ book if I want to feel and experience the fall of Berlin.

I’m an Eastern Front buff—especially the beginning of the war and its end. And this is the very best book on the first six or so months of the titanic clash between Hitler and Stalin. Robert Kershaw is one of the best (largely) WW2 historians because he gives the ordinary soldier a voice. There are other books that go into greater detail on specific actions, and it is more German than Russian focused, but for an overview from Leningrad to the Crimea, with the emphasis on the Moscow axis, it’s the best general read by some distance.

Smith traces the historical arc of rum from local colonial consumption to becoming a major export by the nineteenth century.

I am amazed at how much history Smith captures by focusing his study on one type of alcohol. With his attention to how European and African drinking habits shaped rum consumption, he demonstrates how rum cut across gender, class, and race relations.

With their knowledge of distillation and introduction of resources new to the Americas, Europeans increased alcohol’s potency. Alcohol took on political as well as economic significance when colonial officials used alcohol revenue to govern. Without displacing fermented drinks, distilled liquor introduced new dynamics in the production and consumption of alcohol.

I love that he emphasizes how common consumption spurred taverns and other drinking establishments, which facilitated socialization that frequently contravened social norms, such as elite men who conversed with poor and working-class women and African and mulatto drinkers… show more.

This book provides a synthesis of the ‘region’s place in world politics and the global economy.’ Its applicability to the Latin American region in the context of international relations theory is a salient feature of this book which lends credence to these insights in this sense, there is a commonality of thinking in both books, and adds intellectual creditability to the meshing of both logics. It is a key insight.