90 books like The Johnstown Flood

I’m grateful to see how the narrative about Columbus, the Pilgrims, and European colonialism has changed since I was in elementary school, but for someone who was taught that Columbus was a kind of hero-genius, this book was a revelation.

One of its most powerful lessons is how efficient pre-capitalist systems of commerce were; the Incan Empire, which was far bigger than the Holy Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire, never experienced famine because they prioritized life and well-being over gold and profit. This book also shows how flora in the Americas exploded during the sixteenth century, leading to the Orbis Spike, or the beginning of anthropogenic environmental change.

The lessons from the pre-Columbian, pre-capitalist, and pre-Enlightenment world are invaluable for confronting contemporary problems of American democracy and environmentalism today.

This is the now classic work on why “advanced” civilization developed in some places and not others in human history. It remains a controversial issue.

A psychologist, ecologist, and geographer with a background in field study in New Guinea, Diamond makes a strong argument that there are environmental reasons for these differences. Ranging across all the continents and thousands of years of human history, I found it hard to put down and even harder to understand how Diamond can work in so many fields at once!

Some do not like this daring book. But nobody has surpassed it yet. 

Dead Wake is fact that reads like fiction. Not often do I choose a book already knowing how it ends. His artistic rendering of the world in 1915 is alone worth the read. He introduces us to the passengers of the SS Lusitania, who they are, why they are on the ship, and he makes us care.

Larson limns Captains Turner of the Lusitania, and Schweiger of the U-20, the Imperial German submarine. The author carefully choreographs the final voyage of the doomed ship. The sinking is not the end of the story. 

The last third of the book is devoted to what happened after the torpedo hit. Captain Turner survives the attack as well as many of the passengers. This is a beautifully researched, but heartrending read. 

Delivered from Evil covers ten incidents of mass murder and serial killing. In each well-written narrative, Franscell tells the story of the crime, the criminal, and the victims. Even the most devoted crime buff will learn something new from Franscell’s thorough research and unique style. I appreciate the attention he gives to the survivor’s stories and their experience with the life-altering effects of trauma.

The extreme length of Fall and Rise put me off until my agent Matthew Hamilton persuaded me to take the plunge.

Just as he’d promised, I found myself deeply engaged in the lives and ultimate fates of Mitchell Zuckoff’s large cast of real-life characters, whose personalities, back-stories, and ambitions are rendered with impressive immediacy.

Of course we already know the outcome of this tragic story, yet the book possesses remarkable narrative dynamism. Hovering over most of its pages is the unnerving question, “Which of these people will survive?”

My first Gregg Olsen book, Starvation Heights, told the story of a serial-killing “doctor” who operated in the area of my hometown in the early 1900s. The Deep Dark, tells the story of the 1972 northern Idaho silver-mine disaster that occurred not far from my current home. After exhaustive research and interviews with survivors, Olsen thoroughly conveys the lifestyle of a hard-rock miner, working under the constant threat of death thousands of feet underground. Along the way, Olsen lays out the chain of events that led to the worst disaster in Idaho’s history. 

A little over three decades after writing The Johnstown Flood, McCullough used his uncanny ability to connect with history subjects to create the best biography of John Adams ever written. 

Titling it simply John Adams, McCullough walks readers through the life of one of America’s greatest revolutionaries and second president. With this book, McCullough takes Adams out of his vaunted place in the American pantheon of patriots and brings him back down to earth.

We get to know the world and family into which John was born in 18th-century Massachusetts. We learn how his humble beginnings as a farmer’s son and the Protestant work ethic that still permeated New England during his youth forged him into a tenaciously hard worker. 

But Boston was not yet the metropolis it is today, and this small colonial city could not hold Adams’ ambitions for long.

McCullough explores Adams’ path to revolution,… show more.

While this is a rather scholarly book with a bit of an intimidating title, I was surprised by how enjoyable of a read it was. 

Through this work, Woolf explores what it meant to be a native to Gaul, the traumatic experience of the Roman conquest (estimates of Gaulish deaths are in the millions), and how the Gauls and Romans shaped the culture of the region moving forward.

With expert skill, Woolf shows that the process of romanization in Gaul was not just a case of Roman forcing the Gauls to act Roman or the Gauls imitating Roman ways to placate their new overlords. Instead, it was a process of cultural give-and-take, in which both sides took on aspects of the other. 

It’s truly fascinating stuff. 

What an exciting tale! I've done lots of research about life on the American frontier during the Revolutionary War, but Gary Paulsen provided information that was new to me about British attacks on small frontier villages and prison ships anchored in New York Harbor. I couldn't stop reading. The author alternated the fiction story with nonfiction segments providing further explanation. Rather than interrupt the reading, they enhanced it, elevating the excitement I felt as Samuel searched for his missing parents.

This superb book provides deep insights into the relationship between Indigenous peoples and encroaching European settlers and convincingly emphasizes that the striving of land developers, such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Patrick Henry, was a major cause of the American rebellion. He describes in detail the Native societies, their customs, interactions, and political alliances. The early chapters provide accounts of settlers of both sexes who were captured, adopted, nurtured, and trained by the Natives. In the case of the Girty brothers, their seizures led to their wartime careers as accomplished, multi-lingual interpreters and as fighting partisans in the British Indian Department. In addition to an amazing array of Native tribes, two companies of Butler’s Rangers operated out of Detroit assisted by the Girtys.