Here are 100 books that The Musical Life fans have personally recommended if you like
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In 2019, I spent a year traveling around the world with my husband and two small kids. These days, we still travel whenever we get the chance, soaking up as many cultures, landscapes, and experiences as possible. Wherever we go, we read books set in our destination, usually by local authors, which deepens our connection to the places we visit. But you donāt need a plane ticket for a good book to transport you overseas. Here are a few of my favorite reads guaranteed to immerse you in faraway lands, even as you sit on your favorite couch at home.
Just as I turned to Trevor Noahās memoir for answers about apartheid while in South Africa, I devoured this book while in China to more deeply understand how the country was shaped by Communism.
The authorās personal history is frightening and rawāat times hard to readābut it is important to understand a few layers deeper than what the news can offer or, in my case, what tourists get served on visits to China. Itās a wrenching story that has stayed with me for years.
Few books have had such an impact as Wild Swans: a popular bestseller which has sold more than 13 million copies and a critically acclaimed history of China; a tragic tale of nightmarish cruelty and an uplifting story of bravery and survival.
Through the story of three generations of women in her own family - the grandmother given to the warlord as a concubine, the Communist mother and the daughter herself - Jung Chang reveals the epic history of China's twentieth century.
Breathtaking in its scope, unforgettable in its descriptions, this is a masterpiece which is extraordinary in every way.
Iāve always adored stories of courageous, sometimes outrageous women who forge aheadinto the unknown, survive in strange lands in troubled times, pursue their career dreams. Like my favourite picks, Iāve relished my own adventures in distant countries (Libya, Czechia, Kyrgystan, Mongoliaā¦), while always earning my crust from writing. From motivational research in Dublin and London, I switched to financial journalism in Holland, where I met and was inspired by ground-breaking journalist Nel Slis whose story Iāve told in my book Hellcat of the Hague. Now Iām settled in London to concentrate on my novels and short stories and be near my family, I hope you love these books too.
Award-winning novelist Molteno takes us on a mesmerising journey of discovery, tracing the origins of her fictional worlds. From the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, in small English towns or huge Indian literary festivals, she engages with people she meets and is inspired by them. Through these vignettes she threads reflections on the creative processāwhy we write, and what fiction does for us. Through Marionās clear and involving writing, we encounter not one but several truly remarkable women, as she weaves the emergence of her writing life into her own much-travelled and absorbing story.
Award-winning author Marion Molteno takes us on a magical journey of discovery into the life of a writer and her readers.
From book events in small English towns to huge literary festivals in India and Pakistan, from the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, she traces the roots of the fictional worlds she has so brilliantly created in her novels.
Weaving through these vignettes are reflections on the creative process, her own and anyone's - her own journey as a writer, what fiction does for us, and the vital relationship between writers and readers.
With an ability toā¦
Iāve always adored stories of courageous, sometimes outrageous women who forge aheadinto the unknown, survive in strange lands in troubled times, pursue their career dreams. Like my favourite picks, Iāve relished my own adventures in distant countries (Libya, Czechia, Kyrgystan, Mongoliaā¦), while always earning my crust from writing. From motivational research in Dublin and London, I switched to financial journalism in Holland, where I met and was inspired by ground-breaking journalist Nel Slis whose story Iāve told in my book Hellcat of the Hague. Now Iām settled in London to concentrate on my novels and short stories and be near my family, I hope you love these books too.
Among a tiny handful of intrepid women travellers in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Freya Sterk stands out. Not only for her courage in going where no woman or man had gone before in remote and dangerous Middle Eastern regions and for her unique mastery of their languages, but also for her own beautiful writing. Largely self-educated, she is adopted by the Royal Geographical Society and lionised as an explorer. And she revels in the limelight. Knighted by the Queen at age 82, Freya emerges as appealingly human and fallible, and unusually democratic in her dealings with the people she meets in these remote regions. Her biographer has created a brilliant, absorbing, and penetrating picture of this flamboyant woman.
A New York Times Notable Book ā¢ Finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction
āHighly readable biography . . . The woman who emerges from these pages is a complex figureāheroic, driven . . . and entirely human.āāRichard Bernstein, The New York Times
Passionate Nomad captures the momentous life and times of Freya Stark with precision, compassion, and marvelous detail. Hailed by The Times of London as āthe last of the Romantic Travellersā upon her death in 1993, Freya Stark combined unflappable bravery, formidable charm, fearsome intellect, and ferocious ambition to become the twentieth centuryās best-known woman traveler.ā¦
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorāand only womanāon a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
After seventeen years of researching media use in the Soviet Union, I found I was hooked for life on the problems of totalitarianism. I went on reading about Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the East German Stasi and wrote several novels based on what I had read. In 2009, I saw an exhibition of paintings called āLooking for Owners.ā Some of the pictures were extremely beautiful works by well-known artists which, I was surprised to learn, had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Their rightful owners had never been traced. I knew at once that there was a story in this.
Christabel Bielenberg was Anglo-Irish, her husband was a German lawyer, and they were close friends of Adam von Trott and other German oppositionists. Christabel was in Germany throughout the war, and her book gives an absorbing account of daily life in the Third Reich.
It was a dangerous world. How do you stop your child from telling the Nazi gardener that his mother listens to the radio with her ear pressed against the set? What do you do when a friend says something imprudent? How do you react when a homeless Jewish couple asks for shelter? When your husband is in prison, what do you say to the Gestapo officer in charge of his case?
I was thoroughly drawn in. Christabel felt like someone I could have been friends with.
On 29 September 1934, at the German Embassy office in London, Christabel Bielenberg officially became a German citizen. Having met her German husband Peter two years prior, Christabel decided to renounce her British citizenship, planning to start married life with Peter in Berlin. Though Adolf Hitler had risen to power in 1933, Christabel and Peter were convinced the German people would see through the newly elected chancellor.
But soon Christabel found herself living under the horrors of Nazi rule and Allied bombings as the war progressed. Closely associated with resistance circles, her husband was arrested after the failure of theā¦
I am a professor at Mississippi State University and a historian of World War II in general and, more specifically, of WWII intelligence history. My interest stems from a research topic that my Ph.D. advisor recommended and that became the subject of my dissertation ā Operation Fortitude, which was the deception plan that provided cover for the Normandy Invasion. While my own research interests are focused on the intelligence history of the Normandy invasion, I am increasingly drawn to intelligence history or novels that showcase the people, technologies, and other theaters of war.
As the title of this book indicates, Lily Sergueiew was a double agent during World War II. She volunteered to become a spy for the Germans although she never intended to fulfill that role. She was determined to fight the Germans in her own way ā as a double agent in the employ of the British. Sergueiew kept a diary of her activities from when she first approached the Germans until she quit working for the British in late June 1944. After the war, Sergueiew used her diaries to write a memoir in French. Before her death in 1950, she translated her memoir into English, and most of it was published posthumously in France in 1966 and in England in 1968. I recommend this book because it provides insight into why a young woman would choose to fight against the Germans who occupied her beloved France, the training that sheā¦
During World War II Nathalie ""Lily"" Sergueiew, a woman of mystery, confidently seduced the German Intelligence Service into employing her as a spy against their British enemy. Little did they know that this striking woman - who turned heads when she walked into a room with her little dog Babs - would in reality work with their enemy against them. Her diary chronicles her years as a double agent for the British from 1940-1945 under the code name Treasure. From the moment she conceived the idea of becoming a double agent, Lily faced challenges on two fronts: first, she hadā¦
I started conducting primary research about the Holocaust in the 1990s, when I spent a week interviewing my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor and a pious Hasid, about his life. Fascinated with the survival of his faith, I applied for and received a grant from the Religion News Service to explore spiritual aspects of the Holocaust. I also sought to answer my sabaās question: How did Israelis end up fighting their 1948 War of Independence with Nazi weapons such as the Mauser he had received? I answered it in the 2015 PBS documentary I directed and produced, A Wing and a Prayer, and the 2020 nonfiction book I wrote, Saving Israel.
While I direct Penn Stateās Holocaust Education Initiative and produce and write documentaries, books, and articles that involve the Holocaust, I am not an expert on this topic. I am a student of it. Studying the Holocaust for 30 years, I gaze in awe at the frontiers that remain to be explored. X Troop offers one of the latest examples. Prior to reading it, Iād never heard of the German and Austrian Jews who became British commandos during World War II. One of the lessons I picked up: We should follow these menās examples of turning weaknessesāin their case, coming from enemy territories and facing suspicion and persecutionāinto strengths. This is far from a perfect book. As I read it, I found myself time and again wishing it showed more and told less. In several key spots, I wanted to better understand what these commandoes did and how they did.ā¦
THE UNTOLD STORY OF BRITAIN'S MOST SECRETIVE SPECIAL FORCES UNIT
June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich falls across Europe. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan - a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees. This top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Others simply call them a suicide squad.
From British internment camps, to the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp, Leah Garrett follows this band of brothers who will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis.
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: āAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?ā Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itā¦
For fifty years I've studied the British sailing navy, fascinated by its workings, the slow communications, the vagaries of the winds and tides. In parallel with my work in archives, I've sailed in most of the European waters described in Convoys. I worked at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, for 27 years, leaving as Deputy Director in 2000. Since then, I've taught postgraduates and written about Nelson and the British government (Britain against Napoleon), and became convinced that Britain came very close to being defeated by Napoleonic France. If Napoleon had not thrown it all away by his invasion of Russia in 1812, I might be writing this in French, with a very different script!
Huw Davies takes a long look at the tactics and training of the British army over a long period, culminating in the victories and defeats in this war. And there were extraordinary highs and lows in these twelve years.
He identifies the innovators, brilliant, hardworking men who changed the way cavalry and infantry worked, and the important decisions made in the Horse Guards in London. A new, well-written analysis.
A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe
"Superb analysis."-William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal
At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army's military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The army's leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernization-both in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology.
I became interested in the genre of memoir during the lockdown when I found myself reflecting on my past during the extended solitary periods. Looking through a shoebox of old letters put me in touch with the person I had once been. I then discovered that the act of writing downmemories opened up areas that I had forgotten about or that had faded almost to nothing, and suddenly they became quite vivid. I decided to create memoirist.org for writing at a more literary level and only publish highly polished pieces. Memoirist now has many followers and some posts have nearly a thousand views.
A memoir that deals with the everyday life of an office worker in 1950s/60s London seems like a joke and, indeed, when it came out, it was treated as such but there is some kind of poetry in this exploration of the humdrum. The manuscript was discovered in the slush pile by a rare editor who grasped the humour of what would appear to be an empty life but a life that Smith is content with. She lived with her parents until her twenties then moved into various lodgings, descriptions, and inhabitants of which are examined in detail. Smith had many short-term boyfriends, usually meeting them at a 'social club'.
Chapters are minimalistic and quirky but I wondered if some could be expanded and if she had missed some opportunities. Not a lot happens as Smith moves through life as a secretary making her observations, some grotesque, some unusual, someā¦
Part memoir, part comic monologue, this is an ensemble of mishaps and anecdotes that, taken together, reveals the ups and downs of one woman's life. Relentlessly self-deprecating, Sylvia Smith's diary at first seems to relay the humdrum, everydayness of living, yet it steadily gains momentum as a darker undertone gathers force. Interspersed between humorous tales of first-date disasters and "get-rich-quick" schemes gone awry, the reader is thrown off-balance by the loss of sexual innocence and a pervading sense of loneliness. As Sylvia stumbles from one temporary job to another, and through a variety of furnished flats, her deadpan delivery isā¦
Dr. Onyeka Nubia is a pioneering and internationally recognised historian, writer, and presenter. He is reinventing our perceptions of diversity, the Renaissance, and British history. Onyeka is the leading historian on the status and origins of Africans in pre-colonial England from antiquity to 1603. He has helped academia and the general public to entirely new perspectives on otherness, colonialism, imperialism, and World Wars I and II.
He has written over fifty articles on Englishness, Britishness, and historical method and they have appeared in the most popular UK historical magazines and periodicals including History Today and BBC History Magazine. Onyeka has been a consultant and presenter for several television programmes on BBC.
New Perspectives shows us that Black British history is a complex field of historiography. No longer should we look at it as a sketchy, speculative, politically correct apologia for historical investigation. But rather see, that for more than three generations scholars have worked very hard to establish a vigorous pedagogy. It is a pedagogy that supports wider British histories, but subverts the traditional trajectories of those narratives. This book introduces us to some of the major developments in Black British history and it is an excellent place to start for a reader who knows very little about this subject.
For over 1500 years before the Empire Windrush docked on British shores, people of African descent
have played a significant and far-ranging role in the country's history, from
the African soldiers on Hadrian's Wall to the Black British intellectuals who
made London a hub of radical, Pan-African ideas. But while there has been a
growing interest in this history, there has been little recognition of the
sheer breadth and diversity of the Black British experience, until now.
This collection combines the
latest work from both established and emerging scholars of Black British history. It
spans the centuries from the firstā¦
Iām a writer of novels set in Saxon England. I studied the era at both undergraduate and graduate levels and never meant to become a historical fiction writer. But I developed a passion to tell the story of the last century of Early England through the eyes of the earls of Mercia, as opposed to the more well-known, Earl Godwin. Iām still writing that series but venture further back in time as well. I might have a bit of an obsession with the Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Iām fascinated by the whole near-enough six hundred years of Saxon England before the watershed moment of 1066, after which, quite frankly, everything went a bit downhill.
Finally, one of my recommendations has lots of pictures in it. The Death of Anglo-Saxon England charts the closing century of Saxon England. This book was written for a general audience and is a thoroughly engrossing read. I can remember taking it with me on day trips so that I could find a corner and stick my head in the book, and my version is replete with many, many bits of paper sticking out from the pages. Complete with all the images and pictures, the author presents an easy-to-understand and chronological account of the events that led to the Norman Conquest of 1066. Iām not saying I agree with everything in this book, but itās a very good starting point for those with a growing interest in the period.
Perhaps the best-known fact of English history is the Norman Conquest of 1066, which dispossessed the Anglo-Saxon royal house, marginalized English cultural values and began the near total exclusion of English figures from influence in the realm. The events of that year form the end-point of this study which focuses on royal succession and the descent of the crown during the last century of the Anglo-Saxon period. The text examines questions of factional conflicts, external raiders and warrior kings, and attempts to explain why the English dynasty proved vulnerable to usurpation during the 11th century. Of central importance is theā¦