Here are 100 books that The Red Gods Call fans have personally recommended if you like
The Red Gods Call.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I love being outdoors and I’ve been fortunate to spend much of life under the open sky, both professionally and personally. Learning about the landscapes I’ve visited on my outdoor adventures or helped protect through my professional conservation and writing work is both fulfilling and inspiring. Skilled writers deepen my understanding of the diverse, intricate, and complicated natural world. Whether I’m reading to better understand the policies and histories that have shaped our public lands or about the adventurers who inspire me to get out there, I always find immense value and enjoyment when reading about the landscapes we share.
Aldo Leopold was a Forest Service ranger stationed in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest when he first began advocating for a new approach to managing national forests. Leopold’s visionary thinking and diligent advocacy resulted in the first-ever Wilderness Area in the U.S.—the Gila Wilderness Area, established in 1922—more than 40 years before the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964. A Sand County Almanac is Leopold’s best-known work and follows his efforts to restore a patch of cut-over farmland in Wisconsin while also articulating his vision of a land ethic where humans and nature are intertwined and care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. His beautiful writing resonated strongly with me when I first read A Sand County Almanac more than two decades ago, and his vision remains as important now as ever.
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac has enthralled generations of nature lovers and conservationists and is indeed revered by everyone seriously interested in protecting the natural world. Hailed for prose that is "full of beauty and vigor and bite" (The New York Times), it is perhaps the finest example of nature writing since Thoreau's Walden. Now this classic work is available in a completely redesigned and lavishly illustrated gift edition, featuring over one hundred beautiful full-color pictures by Michael Sewell, one of the country's leading nature photographers. Sewell, whose work has graced the pages of Audubon and Sierra magazines, walked…
Biology is the study of life, and I cannot think of anything more important. It’s like being interested in what’s happening to the ball when you are playing the ball game. I was very fortunate to have grown up in close contact with nature and it led me down this path. I love discovering intricate mechanisms not by thoughts but with data. Those discoveries almost always turn out to be surprising and more than what had, or could be, imagined and assumed.
I received this book from my father as a Christmas present at age 16, in 1956. The author is a Professor of Zoology who made one of the most stunning discoveries of biology of the last century: honeybees communicate direction and distance of a food source they had found to their hive-mates, within the darkness of their hive.
The code involves the movements of their bodies in a "dance," that gives directions with respect to the position of the sun, but at the same time that position shifts with time, the bees without seeing it take into account its movement in the sky, to within about 15 minutes. His experimental proofs deciphering the bees' "dances" are simple and direct, as was his writing of them. The book was and still is an inspiration, a revelation of nature's beauty that no one had seen before.
Over half a century of brilliant scientific detective work, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Karl von Frisch learned how the world, looks, smells, and tastes to a bee. More significantly, he discovered their dance language and their ability to use the sun as a compass. Intended to serve as an accessible introduction to one of the most fascinating areas of biology, Bees (first published in 1950 and revised in 1971), reported the startling results of his ingenious and revolutionary experiments with honeybees.
In his revisions, von Frisch updated his discussion about the phylogenetic origin of the language of bees and also…
Biology is the study of life, and I cannot think of anything more important. It’s like being interested in what’s happening to the ball when you are playing the ball game. I was very fortunate to have grown up in close contact with nature and it led me down this path. I love discovering intricate mechanisms not by thoughts but with data. Those discoveries almost always turn out to be surprising and more than what had, or could be, imagined and assumed.
This book is by an insect physiologist named Vincent G. Dethier. This book reveals the amazing and beautifully intricate behavior and physiology of a common moth (generally considered a pest). Expectations were high as his previous book To Know a Flywent beyond the physiology and elevated the common housefly to a comic character through his sketches. Tent-Makersis about the common "Tent caterpillars" that infest fruit trees and he includes sketches of these animals in their natural environment. This book, though small in size, is concise, succinct, and explores the physiology and behavior of these animals as they face one problem after another throughout their whole life cycle of a year. It is a work of sound scholarship derived from a close look at natural history. It is an in-depth view in non-technical language on a topic not generally penetrable to a general audience but here presented for the…
Study of the life cycle of a colony of eastern tent caterpillars. This book traces this insect's special life history within the total context of nature, discussing both the larger and smaller worlds these creatures encounter during their life span.
As an evolutionary biologist and an advocate for women, and in particular, mothers in the sciences, I love to read about the stories of other female scientists talking about their work and the challenges they’ve faced. We need more accounts of what it’s like to grapple with both the idea and the actuality of becoming a mother in a competitive, male-dominated field that requires so much of its scholars.
In this book, we meet the author, a biologist, at a fork in the road. She has completed her doctoral studies, but in doing so, lost much of her love for her field. She is on the cusp of full adulthood, and lot of big, heavy decisions await.
I loved going along with Van Hemert on her epic journey across the north as she used the time to consider what she wanted in life and why she loved biology to begin with. The juxtaposition of stunning vistas and intimate soul-searching made for an engaging and comforting read.
During graduate school, as she conducted experiments on the peculiarly misshapen beaks of chickadees, ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert began to feel stifled in the isolated, sterile environment of the lab. Worried that she was losing her passion for the scientific research she once loved, she was compelled to experience wildness again, to be guided by the sounds of birds and to follow the trails of animals.
In March of 2012 she and her husband set off on a 4,000-mile wilderness journey from the Pacific rainforest to the Alaskan Arctic. Travelling by rowboat, ski, foot, raft and canoe, they explored northern…
I have always been interested in military history and wanted to become a professional soldier. I benefitted especially from three years as the American liaison officer on the staff of the German 12th Panzer Division. German Army organization, planning and decision-making, troop leadership, and training are outstanding and made a deep impression on me. I received a superb education as a historian at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, which required history to be written from original source documents, not secondary sources uncritically accepted. My standards emphasize attention to detail in military planning and operations, and archival work in English, German, and French. As do the authors that I have selected.
Conventional histories give the French a free pass concerning the causes of World War I: the French leadership is commonly described as being literally out-of-touch (on a battleship coming back to France). Schmidt’s brilliant archival research shows that the French were fully aware that the Austrians were going to issue an ultimatum to the Serbs and encouraged the Russians to support a Serb refusal and a Russian military attack on Austria. (My addendum: the French plan is a mirror image of the Russian plan – the French would tie down the Germans in the West and the Russians hordes would overwhelm the Germans in the East.)
Auch wenn die Genese des Ersten Weltkriegs - der "Ur-Katastrophe" des 20. Jahrhunderts - als gründlich erforscht gilt, verzeichnet die Geschichte des Kriegsausbruchs immer noch Bereiche, deren Bearbeitung bislang vernachlässigt wurde. Zu ihnen gehört die französische Außenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914. Obwohl in der wissenschaftlichen Kontroverse der Zwischenkriegszeit kein Konsens über Motive und Absichten des "forgotten belligerent of July 1914" (John W. Langdon) gefunden werden konnte, sind dem Gegenstand nach 1945 nur wenige Untersuchungen gewidmet. In dieses bislang kaum beachtete Terrain stößt die Studie vor. Nicht zuletzt auf der Grundlage neuer Quellen entwirft sie im Gegensatz zur älteren Forschung von…
From the moment my grandmother told me that books were not created by magic, but that real people write books (I was five years old) I knew that I wanted to become a writer—as surely as did Anne in Anne of Green Gables. Themes of the joy, the complexity, and responsibility of friendship and family, of working together despite great challenges to overcome obstacles for purposes beyond ourselves, and of doing that while sometimes working through stages of grief all resonate with me, are all part of my life. The books I’ve recommended, as well as the books I’ve written, contain those themes.
I love this group of very different women from Smithfield College who band together amid the Great War and set sail to nurse in war-torn France.
Armed with good intentions but few practical skills and little knowledge of what they’re getting into, nothing is as they imagined—not the lodging, the lack of welcome, the unimagined obstacles, or the many differences in personalities that challenge them. Still, they buckle down to learn critical skills by doing, overcome countless obstacles while surviving dangerous characters and circumstances, work through their own personality clashes and prejudices, and accomplish more than they or anyone expected.
The gift and beauty is that in banding together to accomplish the impossible they develop deep and lasting friendships. Band of Sisters is rich in inspiration desperately needed in our time.
"A crackling portrayal of everyday American heroines...A triumph." - Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue
A group of young women from Smith College risk their lives in France at the height of World War I in this sweeping novel based on a true story-a skillful blend of Call the Midwife and The Alice Network-from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig.
A scholarship girl from Brooklyn, Kate Moran thought she found a place among Smith's Mayflower descendants, only to have her illusions dashed the summer after graduation. When charismatic alumna Betsy Rutherford delivers…
Romance and chick-lit books hooked me as a young adult. It was this genre that inspired me to write. Since publishing my first book Gut Feeling in 2012 I’ve since written three chick-lit novels and a holiday rom-com screenplay. The fiction world of perfectly unperfect romance never fails.
This is the most touching love story I have ever read. I do not tend to read period dramas, and so I was hesitant to read a book set during the first world war. However, this book had me in tears so many times. I read this book over ten years ago, yet it is still my favorite love story of all time to date. Beautiful, just beautiful.
Set before and during the Great War, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experience of the war itself.
I’m a poet, literary critic, translator, and biographer, and I grew up partly in France. I became obsessed with Max Jacob when I was twenty. Max Jacob—mystic, poet, painter, and suffering lover—took hold of me, and I found myself writing poems to him, in his voice, in my sketchbooks. They were among my first published poems: he redirected my life. A few years later I stumbled into writing his biography, never imagining that it would take thirty-five years: it came out from W. W. Norton in 2020, along with my most recent book of poems So Forth. I teach Comparative Literature in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
A perpetually useful and inspiring book. Shattuck’s study of modern art in France came out in 1955 and remains a lively source for understanding how key artists—Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire—absorbed and reshaped traditions in writing, painting, and music, and launched the ethos of avant-garde aesthetics in the 20th century. A master storyteller, Shattuck situates his artists in their time, place, and culture with novelistic flair.
I have written 13 books and over 200 national magazine articles on U.S. Military weapons and am Field Editor for the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine. The story of the World War II weapons and campaigns have been widely covered but the First World War is sometimes all but forgotten. Those who are not familiar with America’s rather brief, but important, role in the conflict often do not realize how the First World War helped make the United States one of the world’s “superpowers.”
Numerous fascinating first-hand accounts of American “Doughboys” who saw front-line service in World War I. Many of the stories are poignant and personal.
I’m a historian of modern Europe and France and have focused my research and writing on the First World War for almost 30 years now. The war remains the “original catastrophe” of the catastrophic 20th century and continues to shape our world in decisive ways here in the 21st century. I don’t think there are many topics that are of clearer and more urgent interest, and what fascinates me most is how every day, individual people experienced these colossal events, events that seemed only very personal and intimate to most of them at the time. It is with this in mind that I’ve chosen the books on my list.
A day-to-day chronicle of a remarkably observant Frenchman who served from the beginning to the end of the war, this fascinating book is full of minute observations, perceptive insights, and the real, gritty texture of military life, service at the front, visits home, and confrontations with civilian life and politics. Barthas recounts all of this with an engaging immediacy and passion that makes the reader sad to part company with him at the war’s end.
The harrowing first-person account of a French foot soldier who survived four years in the trenches of the First World War
Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. Barthas' riveting wartime narrative, first published in France in 1978, presents the vivid, immediate experiences of a frontline soldier.
