100 books like The Jewish Century

This is an extraordinary study about life in and around the strait between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, home for Iñupiaq, Yupik, and Chukchi people and many other lively things, before and after the arrival of Russian and American colonial powers.

I admire the nuanced way in which Demuth exemplifies how capitalist and communist resource management transformed not only human but also animal cultures (whales, for example, strategize against whaling ships).

This is a remarkable book that defies categorization. Establishing a concept of property that existed between private property and the property of the state, Pravilova imaginatively unites a seemingly unrelated collection of topics: forests, rivers, icons, copyright, archaeological treasures, and much more besides. She offers a profoundly new way of thinking about property and about Russians’ attitudes towards ownership. Deeply rooted in the particularities of Russia, the book also raises issues of universal significance.

This is a book of uncommon imagination and historical reconstruction. It focuses on the life of the eccentric Baron von Ungern-Shternberg and uses the Baltic German aristocrat’s adventures to reveal key characteristics of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet years. Especially striking is the book’s geographical scope, which ranges from Austria to Mongolia and stops at many places in between. Written in engaging and fluid prose, the book is a truly original work of historical imagination that allows one to understand Russia and its place in the wider world—and in Asia, in particular.

This very compelling book explores a critical topic in the history of the USSR. In clear and expressive prose, it tells a crucial story that reveals a great deal about the Soviet project, about the relationship between ideology and politics, and about the scope and limits of authoritarian state power. It ultimately shows the striking irony that the USSR’s atheistic establishment found itself trying to replicate the spiritual and emotional offerings of the religion(s) that it simultaneously sought to destroy.

I’m pretty certain Invisible Man is The Great American Novel. Some lines make me laugh aloud: “I would remain and become a well-disciplined optimist and help them to go merrily to hell.” But the moments that really sing for me are those that ring with humor, horror, tragedy, and beauty all at once.

Near the end, during a moment when the nameless narrator hides and listens to some men telling a story, he aches with the urge to laugh while realizing what’s been said isn’t only funny: “It was funny and dangerous and sad.” The book reminds me that all of those things can be held in my head at once. 

Dante's Divine Comedy is an epic poem in three volumes. It's perhaps the most beautiful poetry the world has ever seen.

Read it in Italian! Even if you can't read Italian, read it in Italian. Read it out loud, and you'll see what I mean. The language is so beautiful. Then read it in translation.

In it, Dante describes three worlds. The inferno is hell. An intermediate world called purgatory represents the hardest efforts that we make to be good people on Earth. The third volume is paradise.

The entire book was a huge influence on my early writing, which launched the life planning movement. My first book was divided into three segments: Childhood (inferno), Adulthood (purgatory), and Maturity (paradise), representing “the hero’s journey.”

I think Scott is one of the most creative social scientists working today, and this book is probably his strongest work.

Scott flips the script and focuses attention on the strategies subordinates use to navigate and deal with the power of their social superiors. He has great faith in the abilities of ordinary people to mock and hoodwink the powerful and to create for themselves little refuges from kings, bosses, and overlords.

I go back to this book all the time because it is a treasure trove of wonderful anecdotes, too.

Trouillot explains like no other why we need to care about how history is made.

Whatever your area of expertise or level of knowledge about Haiti, Trouillot will make you care about the country’s forgotten history. Each essay in this volume demonstrates why we remember certain aspects of the past and ignore others and how those ignored parts are so often not just forgotten but actively silenced.

I teach this book to history undergraduates and graduate students alike. They always tell me that it was one of their favorites. It’s also a book that I wished I had known when I started studying history.

I’ll read anything Steinberg writes for his stellar reporting and subtle reflections on transmitting outsiders’ stories.

Nineteenth-century Americans dreamed up Liberia in West Africa and sent freed and free-born African Americans there, only to receive many back in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as a result of civil wars.

In Staten Island, many settled in Park Hill Avenue. Tracking two men who fled Liberia’s wars or diminished prospects, the book finds they brought Liberia with them. Rufus Arkoi had to leave secretly, while Jacob Massaquoi had to fake identity to survive.

The men’s American experience heartbreakingly replays their Liberian pasts which vitalize yet drive them into conflict.

As revealing about America as it is about Liberia, this book compels and troubles the reader in thought-provoking ways.

I often reread this marvelous book, the result of the author’s 1990s fieldwork with Hungarian Roms, for its relevance to all seeking to live aslant from mainstream culture’s obsession with economic growth and so-called success in those terms.

Stewart shows how the horse-trading Roms he lived among made the market a heroic arena where the movement of money is key, and where the luck Roms typically live by is given center-stage in consummate acts of bargaining.

Historically, the Rom are our only people living without a dream of homeland, and the centrality of interaction—with Gadje, non-Roms—to their lives, where unbelonging drives exchange, and exchanges become futures, is pertinent to all who will have to disinvest from belief in property, becoming traveling strangers in our increasingly unpredictable world.