Fans pick 100 books like The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Like Anderson, Gertrude Stein had a sense of humor about gay Paree. Who else would write someone else’s autobiography?

I love her tone of detached amusement when describing the artistic titans of the Lost Generation. If you don’t get it, try the recipe for Alice B. Toklas brownies. 

Relayed in the voice of his nine-year-old self, Solito tracks Zamora’s harrowing three-thousand-mile trek from his home in El Salvador to join his mother and father in California.

To reunite with his parents, he must leave behind everything else he has ever known: his village, his friends, his grandparents, and his beloved Tia Mali. What is supposed to be a two-week journey turns into a two-month odyssey, as he makes his way north by bus, boat, and foot, accompanied by a group of strangers who, in time, close ranks to nurture and protect him like a second family.

This affecting story, told with such innocence and immediacy, makes evident the individual, human costs that are too easily overlooked by reporting on US immigration and the staggering statistics that it invariably emphasizes.

When I first read Zweig’s memoir, I initially thought it was pretentious name-dropping, mentioning one prominent fin de siècle Viennese writer or musician after another. Only years later did I warm to his memories describing a world that existed before the cataclysm of World Wars and the ultimate fate of Europe’s Jewish citizens.

In reading other memoirs from the period (such as Ernst Krenek’s–not available in English), it’s possible to see that Zweig was writing from a position of enormous privilege while also reflecting the very essence of cultural life in a world where culture was perhaps its most important characteristic and distinguishing element. 

Allende loves her Chilean homeland with a longing, a tenderness, an exasperation derived from the country’s turbulent history and her long experience of exile and emigration in Venezuela and the United States.

This book made me fall in love all over again with the country, which I first visited a quarter century ago – and it will make you fall in love with it too, whether or not you’ve ever visited Chile.

With a novelist’s imaginative flare, Allende travels through time and across borders, searching her memory to tell the story of her lonely childhood, her remarkable family, the tumults that forced her abroad (including the death of her father’s cousin, President Salvador Allende), and a long life lived at a distance from the place she still calls home, regardless of decades of displacement.

While writing a paper about Douglass in graduate school in the 1990s, I learned that he had to overcome two obstacles to establishing an authentic voice in his own book.

First, abolitionists argued against slavery by claiming it dehumanized the slave. While that could be true, this theory could not account for charismatic Black writers like Douglass who were anything but dehumanized. Second, slave narratives in the antebellum era often followed a certain formula that limited the narrator’s originality.

In one striking passage in the Narrative, Douglass overcomes both restrictions by evoking an image of his body that offers visual testimony to creatively push back on these limiting conventions: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost [felt during cold nights during enslavement], that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”

I read a lot, and this book always shows up in my top five all-time favorites.

Lovingly written, Blight draws a compelling picture of a complex, endlessly fascinating human being. I love the power of Douglass’s words and voice. In my opinion, this is a great book about the man who arguably may be the greatest African American our country has produced. He was a voice for social justice in a time and place where speaking up brought real physical risk. 

What does it mean to be free—and how can you prove that you are? Millward’s utterly engrossing book demonstrates how significant Black women’s reproductive sexuality was to their pursuit of freedom. Following the formal end of US participation in the international slave trade in 1808, white enslavers placed unprecedented demands on enslaved Black women to bear more children. Because the laws defined the child according to the mother’s free or unfree status, enslaved women literally birthed the property of white enslavers. But what if a currently enslaved person proved that the womb from which they entered the world belonged to a free person? Millward shows how Black women and their descendants paved their own pathways to freedom.

This book opened my eyes to the effectiveness and consistency of the Republicans elected to Congress in 1860 in advancing their antislavery agenda, for example, by immediately abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and requiring any new states to prohibit slavery in their Constitutions.

This book describes the earnestness with which these members of the Senate and House pursued their antislavery agenda over the vehement objections of the Democrats from states that had remained in the Union. At the same time, they were quite sensitive to the defects in the original Constitution that had permitted slavery within any of the original 13 states that had retained it. So, they amended the Constitution not once but three times to put an end to slavery and establish political equality in the United States. 

Moses was her name because she was determined to see her people set free.

Drawing upon the biblical Moses, the book outlines the parallels between the lives of Moses (who led his people to the Promised Land) and Harriet Tubman (who was guided to freedom by the North Star). This book provides children with the inspiration to serve as leaders. They recognize that they too can combine faith and freedom to make a difference in the world.

I love how author/illustrator Don Tate re-discovered and brought to life this true story of an office clerk who risked everything to become a conductor, and took it upon himself to be the record keeper, of the Underground Railroad. With his painstaking records, he reunited countless families torn apart by slavery and preserved an important piece of history. “It wasn’t his job to do,” the book says, “but William thought these written records might help someday.” This message—that we often have to step beyond what may be our “job” to help others and make a difference—will linger in the hearts and minds of kids who experience this powerful story.