100 books like The Quickest Kid in Clarksville

Running was magic to Kathrine Switzer. But she grew up in a time when most people thought women were too fragile to run a race, especially a 26.2-mile marathon. The illustrations are vibrant and the text well-written, with a “Pat, Pat, Pat” refrain which expands as Kathrine runs faster and faster. The story revolves around how Kathrine entered the Boston Marathon in 1967 when it was a race for men only. She was almost stopped during the race by an angry Race Director, who also believed women should not run a marathon. Kathrine persevered and finished! Since 2008, more than 10,000 women have officially entered to run the Boston Marathon. 

The beginning of Wilma Unlimited pulls you in as it describes a tiny girl who weighed just four pounds at birth. As a child Wilma was sickly, contracting both scarlet fever and polio. The story is beautifully written with stunning illustrations. Information about the 1940s, segregation, and the love and support of a mother who had 22 children, is seamlessly woven in. Who could put down a story about a girl who once wore a heavy steel brace on her leg, but, through perseverance, went on to win three gold medals in track-and-field at the 1960 Olympics?

One of the things I love most about this book is the foreword, which was written by Fauja himself – Fauja, the oldest person ever to run a marathon. Fauja was unable to walk until he was five years old and after he walked, he was still very weak. People were always teasing him and telling him he couldn’t do things. There’s a wonderful refrain that runs through the book: “But Fauja did not listen and Fauja did not stop.” At 89, he completed his first marathon. He ran marathons from London to New York to Toronto. The book ends with the Toronto Marathon, in which Fauja set a new world record as the oldest person to run a marathon.

Marathon Mouse is a fun story for our littlest runners. Most of the mice living under the bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island didn’t like the commotion of Marathon Day. But Preston did. Preston braved the crowds and big shoes to run the Marathon himself. And near the finish line, his family, who had told him races weren’t for mice, were there cheering him on.

Marathon Mouse is the only one of my book recommendations about an animal marathon runner. But, as with the books here about people, Preston, the Marathon Mouse, has perseverance and determination and feels joy when he’s running.

A collaborative book written in verse by award-winning Debbie Levy and JoAnn Allen Boyce who was one of twelve African American students who desegregated Clinton High School in eastern Tennessee in 1956. Brown vs. Board of Education ruled to integrate schools in 1954, but integration didn’t happen easily or quickly. We tend to know more about the Little Rock Nine of 1957 because national journalists published what became iconic photos of the tense struggle of courageous Black teenagers breaking through white hostility to attend a white high school. The earlier event in Tennessee was equally fraught (but less photographed). To have Boyce’s memory of events and her ability to articulate her feelings and Levy’s lyrical bent makes this an enlightening read.

I read two great memoirs for a panel I moderated about daughters and fathers. At the event, I enjoyed watching Leslie Absher and Leta McCollough Seletzky meet and realize how much they had in common.

Both authors had dads who kept secrets— big, political secrets. Leta Seletzky’s dad worked as an undercover officer for the Memphis Police Department in the 1960s: he was “The Kneeling Man” in the famous photograph taken after King’s death. 

This may sound odd, but I related to Leta Seletzky’s emotional tale of how she gradually got to know her father, as an adult, by uncovering the many layers of his life story. 

Not for the squeamish, this gothic tale of a depraved serial killer in rural Tennessee is probably the closest Cormac McCarthy ever came to writing a horror novel. For all the sordidness, the power of the author’s language shines through. I enjoyed the humor, pathos, and psychological insight woven in throughout

As with other McCarthy novels I’ve read, this book contains beautiful sentences and phrases, as well as searing images, that have lingered in my mind for years.

One of the first contemporary novels to take climate change seriously, and still one of the best.

The plot concerns a woman who finds millions of Monarch butterflies living in the valley near her Tennessee home, only to discover once scientists arrive that they have been driven from their native home farther south by the accelerating pace of global warming.

The novel takes a strong political stance but still manages to avoid becoming didactic, a real achievement when you consider how polarizing a subject climate change has become.

This book not only provides a chapter on the State of Franklin era (1780s) but several leading up to it, beginning with a survey of eastern Tennessee topography, its native peoples, and the earliest encroaching exploration and settlement of Europeans. Several more chapters of the region’s history follow the information on the failed statehood attempt. Along the way the author captures the spirit of the various people groups who called this region home, detailing many individuals such as Attakullakulla, Nancy Ward, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, and John Ross, among others.

Several books have been written about the Battle of Shiloh, fought on April 6 and 7, 1862. This is no surprise, as the battle was one of the very first large-scale engagements of the war, with more than 100,000 combatants and producing 23,000 casualties. That staggering butcher’s bill stunned the nation and created a deep-rooted interest in remembering the contest. A National Cemetery was created in 1866, and Shiloh was one of the five original military parks established by Congress in 1895. The park’s interpretive thrust has shaped the outline of the traditional narrative of the battle ever since.

In the 1960s, Edward Cunningham offered a corrective to that traditional narrative, in an unpublished academic thesis. Discarding long-held, preconceived notions, Cunningham hewed closer to the primary sources to provide a deeply insightful new interpretation of the battle. Unfortunately, he never found a publisher for that thesis—until 2009. Though Cunningham had… show more.