Here are 100 books that The Letters of Henry Adams fans have personally recommended if you like
The Letters of Henry Adams.
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I grew up in Washington State. My father and my uncles fought in WWII; one was captured in Africa, and one was the first to fly over the Himalayas. My father wanted me to be a missionary, but I was drawn to the world. I became a runner and loved the camaraderie in track and field, but I was uncomfortable in college and didn't like my coach. I wanted to go far away. I began my career as an aide in the U.S. Senate but left and became a journalist in Afghanistan. Each of these books is a story of courage, camaraderie, and survival. I hope you enjoy them.
I loved learning that Theodore Roosevelt was the most beloved man in America when he was president. Is there any politician in recent memory we would call beloved?
I liked how he, as a young man, after losing his wife and his mother to illness on the same day, persevered. I liked that he, an aristocrat, went out West to be a man, where he stood his ground and punched a man in a bar, pursued and brought two outlaws to justice, and that as a politician, he kept speaking to a crowd after being shot by a gunman.
I didn't like that he all but started the Spanish-American war, but I liked that he rode with his back straight through gunfire in Cuba. Then I learned that he was ashamed of his father, who bought his way out of the Civil War. That was why, I thought, he had…
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
“A towering biography . . . a brilliant chronicle.”—Time
This classic biography is the story of seven men—a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician—who merged at age forty-two to become the youngest President in history.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize,…
I am a historian who focuses on the political history of the United States during the 20th century. My particular interest focuses on the history of the Republican Party & the American presidency. I am curious about how individuals acquire political power and their use of it. I was drawn to write a book about the friendship between Roosevelt and Lodge because of my fascination with the friendship among Eastern elites and how Lodge served as a mentor to Roosevelt in helping him achieve prominence in United States politics. Despite the many books on T.R. no one has ever written a narrative about his relationship with Lodge.
Despite being written in 1961, Harbaugh’s work remains the best one-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
I found the book extremely thorough and even handed. I also believe it is a great work to introduce those who have not read a book about Theodore Roosevelt before. Harbaugh, who taught at the University of Virginia for many years, explains the complex issues Roosevelt confronted with great clarity making this survey about the Rough Rider a great choice for anyone who is interested in learning about one of the most fascinating figures the United States has ever produced.
Letters and the memoirs of Roosevelt and his contemporaries provide an in-depth portrait of the man, his political career, and his presidency. Bibliogs
I am a historian who focuses on the political history of the United States during the 20th century. My particular interest focuses on the history of the Republican Party & the American presidency. I am curious about how individuals acquire political power and their use of it. I was drawn to write a book about the friendship between Roosevelt and Lodge because of my fascination with the friendship among Eastern elites and how Lodge served as a mentor to Roosevelt in helping him achieve prominence in United States politics. Despite the many books on T.R. no one has ever written a narrative about his relationship with Lodge.
Garraty’s classic work written in 1953, remains the best biography of the New England politician and was a vital source for my own research. The first historian to have access to the senator’s papers, the author who taught history at Columbia University, has written a scrupulously researched book detailing the Bostonian political life.
While I believe Professor Garraty portrayed the relationship between Lodge and Roosevelt as less contentious than it was, Garraty had to contend with the senator’s protective grandson, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Lodge Jr had control over his grandfather’s papers and Garraty may have been forced to tread delicately in his portrayal of the Boston politician.
I am a historian who focuses on the political history of the United States during the 20th century. My particular interest focuses on the history of the Republican Party & the American presidency. I am curious about how individuals acquire political power and their use of it. I was drawn to write a book about the friendship between Roosevelt and Lodge because of my fascination with the friendship among Eastern elites and how Lodge served as a mentor to Roosevelt in helping him achieve prominence in United States politics. Despite the many books on T.R. no one has ever written a narrative about his relationship with Lodge.
A wonderful biography of the journalist, poet, and diplomat.
Taliaferro’s narrative gives the reader a broad understanding of the political and diplomatic events which shaped the United States and the Republican Party from 1838-1905. Hay, like his close friend Henry Adams was a prolific letter writer and a man of strong opinions.
Within the text one gets a detailed description of not only what Hay’s relationship was like with Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, but also his complex relationship with Henry Cabot Lodge and others within the political and diplomatic circles of Washington, D.C.
From secretary to Abraham Lincoln to secretary of state for Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay remained a major figure in American history for more than half a century. His private life was as glamorous and romantic as it was privileged. This first full-scale biography since 1934 is a reflection of American history from the Civil War to the emergence of the nation as a world power as Woodrow Wilson is about to take office.
If Henry James or Edith Wharton had written a novel describing the accomplished and glamorous life and times of John Hay, it would have been thought implausible—a…
I am a member of an unfortunate tribe, the tribe of grieving mothers who write. Upon learning that my newborn son was profoundly brain-damaged, I kept a diary. Writing those pages helped me make sense of his prognosis and figure out how to care for him before he died. Later, my diary helped me write my memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life which went on to be named a “Best Book” of the year by both Library Journal and the Boston Globe. Today, I write and work with other writers trying to craft their own stories of loss. Each experience of grief is unique. The five memoirs I’m recommending give voice to a variety of maternal losses — from stillbirth to murder. While each of these memoirs is powerful in its own way, the love in them is universal.
Upon receiving the news that her two young daughters had been killed by a drunk driver, Genevieve Jurgensen didn’t think she could go on, let alone ever write about her loss. Fortunately for us, she eventually found a way to tell this story. Through letters to a friend, she draws us in, circling the pain of that terrible day, musing about the mysterious ways in which loss can coexist with a happy, ongoing life. With its raw and intimate feel, the book is a profoundly moving testimony to the complicated process of healing.
What do you do, how do you live, when both of your daughters are killed on the same afternoon?
On April 30, 1980, Genevieve Jurgensen found herself facing that question when she lost her four- and seven-year-old daughters to a drunk driver. Here she presents her search for an answer.
As well as being a novelist (ten published books to date), I’m a Senior Lecturer in Prose at Liverpool John Moores University. My current academic fields of interest are the role Johanna van Gogh-Bonger played in Vincent’s rise to fame, the silencing of women involved in creative pursuits, and the consideration of a novelist’s ethical and moral responsibilities when fictionalising a real life. My true passion lies in the creative uncovering of those erased stories, and in adding to the emerging conversation. That’s why I’ve shifted from writing contemporary to historical novels. I’m also known as the international, bestselling author Caroline Smailes (The Drowning of Arthur Braxton).
I maintain that the only way to gain a true understanding of Vincent van Gogh is to identify his role in seemingly peripheral narratives.
This book considers the Van Gogh sisters, and gives stunning voices to their previously untold narratives. An intimate and necessary insight into the siblings’ relationship, their struggles with mental health, and their intelligent observations of the changing social climate are given.
Without doubt, to recognise Vincent fully, there’s a need to both navigate and to appreciate the female relationships that influenced him.
The lively and revealing correspondence that Vincent van Gogh maintained with his art-dealer brother Theo is famous as a source of insight into the mind of one of the most celebrated artists of all time. But what of Anna, Lies and Willemien van Gogh, with whom Vincent had intimate and sometimes turbulent relationships? It was an argument with his oldest sister, Anna, in the aftermath of their father's death that provoked Vincent to leave the Netherlands and never return.
The Van Gogh siblings grew up at a time when long-distance travel by train first became possible. As each went their…
My engagement in the topic has two distinct vectors, academic, and personal, or, if you wish, existential. My academic engagement began when Buber's son Raphael (1900-91), who served as the Executor of the Martin Buber Literary Estate, invited me to assemble and edit his father's writings on the "Arab Question." He explained that of all of his father's publications, his ramified writings promoting the political and human dignity of the Palestinian Arabs spoke most dearly and, as a citizen of the State of Israel, most immediately to him. I accepted Rafael's invitation with alacrity, for like Raphael I'm an Israeli by choice, having emigrated to the country in 1970.
Examines
how the architects of the conflict worked to influence and indoctrinate their
respective ideologies in the ordinary soldiers by analyzing the battle orders,
pamphlets, army journals, and recordings of radio broadcasts in Hebrew, Arabic,
and English. Through two overarching narratives – the official and unofficial,
the propaganda and personal letters, Dear Palestine reveals the fissures
between ‘sanctioned nationalism’ and individual experience and identity. This
book reminds one that everyday individual’s fears, bravery, hubris, base
cruelty, lies, and fantasies are as important in history as the preoccupations
of the elites.
In 1948, a war broke out that would result in Israeli independence and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Over twenty months, thousands of Jews and Arabs came from all over the world to join those already on the ground to fight in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab Liberation Army. With this book, the young men and women who made up these armies come to life through their letters home, writing about everything from daily life to nationalism, colonialism, race, and the character of their enemies. Shay Hazkani offers a new history of the 1948 War…
I'm a Frenchman with a great interest in the history of the Second World War, specializing in the correspondence of Allied soldiers. Almost 20 years of collecting WWII letters led to the publication of my first book Till Victory which was an award-winning bestseller in France, before it was released in English worldwide in 2021. I also host a podcast (Till Victory: a podcast about WWII and Peace), where I interview British and American veterans, and have made documentaries such as Red Beret & Dark Chocolate or The Missing Highlander. It's all about trying to understand what the young men who fought and died to liberate my country went through when they were my age.
This book is more about the impact of war on the families of those who never returned from it. There isn’t a lot of combat content, but some of the letters are extremely moving. On the other hand, the title of the book is misleading, since some letters are indeed "last letters home," but they are in fact the last ones written before the soldier went home... In any case, although this book focuses exclusively on the British troops, it allows us to enter the intimacy of families torn apart by the war with great emotion.
For many of those who lived through it, the Second World War was the most exciting, dynamic and frightening time of their lives. This wonderful collection of contemporary letters tells their stories - from the battlefields of Europe to the bombed out back streets of London, from the conflict in the skies to the hardships of the home front.
Last Letters Home doesn't show just one side of the war. By concentrating on different themes - lovers, siblings, separation and reunification - Tamasin Day-Lewis paints an unparalleled picture of the daily lives of men and women at war. Through letters…
I have always been a voracious reader and was blessed with parents who filled my home with books, who read to me, and who exposed me to both true and fictional stories that expanded my heart and nourished my imagination. I grew up on Christian biographies, along with devouring history and novels. I was shaped, nourished, and strengthened by the stories of real men and women who lived lives that mattered, and who understood that God never puts His children in times, in places, or in circumstances where He cannot enable them to shine brightly, and where they cannot speak truth and compassion into the darkness.
The sheer, transcendent beauty of the language in this book would have made me love it even had I not found the story engaging, and the powerful, personal truth of the story it tells would have made me love it even if the prose had been awkward and lackluster.
The marriage of the language with the deeply personal story of a young American couple finding their way through love, marriage, and friendship to the love of Christ, and then facing the ultimate test of their young faith, will mark you forever. I will warn you that I finished the book in floods of tears!
A heart-rending love story described by its author as “the spiritual autobiography of a love rather than of the lovers” about the author’s marriage and search for faith.
Vanauken chronicles the birth of a powerful pagan love borne out of the relationship he shares with his wife, Davy, and describes the growth of their relationship and the dreams that they share.
A beloved, profoundly moving account of the author's marriage, the couple's search for faith and friendship with C. S. Lewis, and a spiritual strength that sustained Vanauken after his wife's untimely death. Replete with 18 letters from C.S. Lewis,…
As a military wife, and daughter, sister, mother, and mother-in-law to military members, I gained a strong perspective of what it is like to be behind the scenes, keeping the family together and building my own career while supporting the important missions of the men around me. In my reading, I’m drawn to historical fiction, as I feel it makes the stories come alive for me. I love a good story, and what entertains and informs even better than the documented facts are the dialog, relationships, and emotions of the characters. So it seems only natural to write about the amazing women behind the curtain in history in the engaging and memorable form of novels.
This is a collection of the letters between President Woodrow Wilson and his future second wife, Edith Bolling.
I already knew a bit about the role of Edith Bolling Wilson during her husband’s presidency. Reading their actual letters both shocked and entertained me. Woodrow Wilson, unlike his staid, professorial reputation, was quite the romantic.
It made me realize there was much, much more to their story, and it sent me on a journey to discover a relationship that changed the course of history.
