Love The Man Who Lived Underground? Readers share 100 books like The Man Who Lived Underground...

Two decades ago, I was preparing for my first book promotion trip to Australia and New Zealand. I asked my (Aussie) publisher to recommend two books to learn more about Australia and its history.

The first was In A Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, which I had heard of. The second was Cooper’s Creek, which I hadn’t. It’s a stunning, scary, edge-of-your-seat short history about an expedition in 1860 that set out from Melbourne into the vast, empty, broiling interior of the country, with the mission to find a route to the lush northern coast. Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned.

The book is taken from first-hand accounts by the explorers, and is novel-like in its dramatic twists and turns. 

This book takes the author on the ultimate high-altitude adventure, an attempt to summit the highest mountain on Earth.

It is a sobering account of the commercialization and false promises behind various mountaineering groups that pitch the summiting of the mountain to people rich enough to think they have the stamina to conquer it, but who really have no right being there in the first place.

Everest and the people who attempt to climb it have always intrigued me and this book was a stark reminder that it is a place to be revered and respected, or risk its wrath. 

I was impressed by how the American-style gumshoe was brought to Berlin before and during Nazi rule. I love noir, and this is a great example. I was taken with how Kerr’s irony speaks through his Bernie Gunther and gives a nuanced message about the choices we make when evil is around us.

Gunther has a moral compass in a regime that lacks one, and he struggles to do his duty as a cop under a regime that is not only corrupt but a low point in human morality. I watched as Nazi leaders appeared as flawed and little, cynical and also driven by a base ideology. It gave texture and believability.

Though long out of print, this book is still available in a 1980s paperback edition online.

Raised in the remote Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Brown became one of the world’s foremost wilderness experts, and rescued dozens of hikers lost or stranded in this vast East Coast wilderness. So far, so good. But Brown’s story is also about Native Americans and their lost way of life: he was trained as a youngster by Stalking Wolf, an Apache Indian who taught him how to live off the land and follow animal (and human) tracks invisible to others.

The book is about survival techniques, yes. But it’s also a meditation on a lost way of life, our relationship with the natural world, and the lessons that nature can teach us. 

Butler argues that the large increase of police assaults and killings of black men is not a breakdown in law enforcement or the activities of a few rogue cops. The system is doing what it has been designed to do. Police hurt black men, according to the author because “that is what they are paid to do.” Butler maintains that the Chokehold “is a way of understanding how American inequality is imposed.” It is a tool of oppression. One outcome of the Chokehold is mass incarceration. The construction of the thug is a means of justifying the Chokehold. Butler traces the “Ape” or “dehumanization” thesis.

The book contains loads of data showing how in city after city black people are disproportionately targeted by police officers. Programs such as Obama’s My Brothers’ Keeper ignores women and plays into perpetuating stereotypes of black men as the primary victims of racism.

I’ve read this book twice and probably will read it a few more times before I die. It’s that good.

The story of a young Black man (named Not Sidney Poitier) traversing the U.S.A. is a picaresque, hilarious, heart-breaking tale about trying to find yourself.

Eighteen-year-old Not Sidney is surrounded by people who only see his race or his wealth, or conversely by geniuses who have succeeded despite themselves and, although they see Not Sidney without the cultural labels, are of little help in his quest to find his mission in life. 

The first time I read this book, I was spitting coffee laughing. The second time, my heart broke. I am curious what my next read will evoke.

I loved this beautifully written book for its depiction of how the death penalty worked in the Jim Crow South. I loved the compassion shown by the characters, both black and white, and the attempt by Gaines to reveal the complexity of crime and punishment in an era that may not be so different from our own. 

As a law clerk in the 1980s in the Deep South, I witnessed the legacy of the system that Gaines describes.

I loved this book most because my late father recommended that we read it together when it first came out in the early 2000s. To me, it demonstrates Everett’s brilliance with a pen, and he captures the Black experience in America well, especially identity negotiation.

He was speaking about racial assimilation before I even knew the word for it. I love how he narrows the gap between the Black and the Black who prescribes to white norms. The voice actor who read the book was so entertaining that I have listened to it almost daily for the past five months!

This in-depth account of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study is considered a classic in the field of medical ethics. Though Greg Dober and I have recently discovered the true origins of the Public Health Service’s “non-treatment study” and former Surgeon General Thomas Parran’s critical role in the ugly saga, Jones’s book is still the best chronicle available, and lays out a devastating narrative of how a sophisticated but uncaring and racist scientific establishment could annually examine and not treat hundreds of unschooled Alabama sharecroppers suffering from a deadly disease. 

I recommend this book because James Baldwin’s brilliant voice and profound writing explore the intersection of personal truths and deeply held beliefs. Baldwin masterfully captures the youth and naivety of John Grimes as he wrestles with sexuality, faith, and the pervasive racism of his time.

This book brilliantly brings these struggles to life while showcasing Baldwin’s gift for conveying complex emotions and societal pressures with intimacy and precision.