Here are 100 books that The Scapegoat fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have often been asked why I became an expert on vampires. The answer always goes back to my childhood, when I went to horror and sci-fi movies and watched old vampire movies on TV. In 1976, I published my first book of poetry, The Dracula Poems. My vampire interest eventually combined with my background in Russian literature when I discovered Perkowski’s Vampires of the Slavs. I obtained my Ph.D. in Slavic Folklore from UVA and have kept up my interest in this fascinating subject ever since. I am planning another book on the period known as Magia Posthuma when there were “epidemics” of vampirism around Austro-Hungary.
Carlo Ginzburg has written a great deal about witches and is an expert in ‘microhistory’–the archaeology of the marginalized and forgotten elements of human history.
This book is a culmination of his more academic research, in which he discusses not just witches but (importantly for me) the putative undercurrent of Central European shamanism in the witchcraft trials in Northern Italy. What does that have to do with vampires? I have long held a hypothesis that Friuli, where the benandanti (reputed to leave their bodies at night to fight witches), is a region where Slavic vampire folklore may have come into contact with Western European witchcraft beliefs.
I have often been asked why I became an expert on vampires. The answer always goes back to my childhood, when I went to horror and sci-fi movies and watched old vampire movies on TV. In 1976, I published my first book of poetry, The Dracula Poems. My vampire interest eventually combined with my background in Russian literature when I discovered Perkowski’s Vampires of the Slavs. I obtained my Ph.D. in Slavic Folklore from UVA and have kept up my interest in this fascinating subject ever since. I am planning another book on the period known as Magia Posthuma when there were “epidemics” of vampirism around Austro-Hungary.
Elizabeth Miller is one of the foremost scholars on Dracula and the literary (and cinematic) vampire. Although my research has focused on folklore about vampires and similar beings, you can’t really discuss the significance of vampires without discussing Dracula.
Elizabeth’s book tells you about Bram Stoker’s sources, his writing process, the geography of Dracula, and Vlad the Impaler, among other things, separating out facts from wrong ideas that have gotten passed around in popular culture. This book was invaluable for the chapter in my book discussing the novel Dracula.
To see our full range of Dracula studies, go to "Kindle Store" and search for DESERT ISLAND DRACULA LIBRARY.
Was Vlad the Impaler the inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula? No!
Did Stoker write about Transylvania from first-hand experience? No!
Has the model for Count Dracula's castle been found? No!
Must Count Dracula stay out of the sunlight? Absolutely not!
Literary sleuth Elizabeth Miller exposes these and numerous other popular distortions and fabrications that have plagued our understanding of Stoker and his famous novel.
Where is this nonsense coming from? This book will tell you.
I have often been asked why I became an expert on vampires. The answer always goes back to my childhood, when I went to horror and sci-fi movies and watched old vampire movies on TV. In 1976, I published my first book of poetry, The Dracula Poems. My vampire interest eventually combined with my background in Russian literature when I discovered Perkowski’s Vampires of the Slavs. I obtained my Ph.D. in Slavic Folklore from UVA and have kept up my interest in this fascinating subject ever since. I am planning another book on the period known as Magia Posthuma when there were “epidemics” of vampirism around Austro-Hungary.
I will argue that the rapid increase in attention to the folkloric basis of the vampire legends in English-language literature is the result of the work of the late Prof. Jan Perkowski, whose book The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism changed my life. I left a fairly lucrative high-tech career to get my doctorate in Slavic Folklore at the University of Virginia, where (full disclosure) I became Perkowski’s teaching assistant.
In 2006, I was asked to write the Preface for a collection of all of Perkowski’s seminal writings on the Slavic vampire. Vampire Lore is a compendium of his complete books, as well as harder-to-obtain articles about more arcane aspects of vampire folklore, in one solid volume.
My copy is well-worn, as this volume contains not only The Darkling but two other complete volumes, including Vampires of the Slavs and Vampires, Dwarves, and Witches among the Ontario Kashubs.…
Perkowski (Slavic languages and literatures, U. of Virginia) found that Slavic folk belief in vampires came to the New World with Kashubian emigrés to Ontario, Canada. The anthology contains this bicultural Slav's collected oral histories and writings on this Slavic mythology since the 1970s, e.g., The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism (1989), and translations of others' works on this tradition. The book concludes with charted analyses of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the linguistic conflation of assorted demons. Illustrations include an East European map of traditional religions, and b&w photographs of churches and cemeteries. Some references are not translated into…
I have often been asked why I became an expert on vampires. The answer always goes back to my childhood, when I went to horror and sci-fi movies and watched old vampire movies on TV. In 1976, I published my first book of poetry, The Dracula Poems. My vampire interest eventually combined with my background in Russian literature when I discovered Perkowski’s Vampires of the Slavs. I obtained my Ph.D. in Slavic Folklore from UVA and have kept up my interest in this fascinating subject ever since. I am planning another book on the period known as Magia Posthuma when there were “epidemics” of vampirism around Austro-Hungary.
Serious students of vampire folklore are aware that the motif is found all over Eastern and Central Europe. Gabor Klaniczay is a Hungarian historian whose research focuses on witches and other supernatural entities in the cultures of Austro-Hungary and its environs.
This book showed me so many things that I and other American readers get wrong. For example, most people believe that the “blood countess,” Erzebeta Bathory, drank the blood of local virgins, but Klaniczay shows that these reports were actually constructed to get her out of the way of an inheritance scheme. Klaniczay is also an expert on Central European shamanism, and this led to my assertion that vampire lore incorporates some shamanistic beliefs.
This book of essays is concerned with aspects of religion, magic, and witchcraft in medieval and early-modern Europe, with particular reference to Central Europe. Drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological work including that of Elias, Geertz, Bakhtin, and Turner, the author gives special attention to the history of the body and of gesture, of symbolism and representation, and shows how these dimensions can be related to religious and mystical beliefs and practices.
Among the topics discussed are conflicts in twelfth-century Christianity and the tensions between popular religion and learned urban Christianity; heretical and nonconformist behavior in the twelfth…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by religion, initially in struggling with individual belief and later with its place within the social and political world. As a bioethicist, I studied and worked with patients and practitioners as they dealt with religious and moral concerns in healthcare. Then, as an international human rights advocate, educator, and governance development practitioner, I engaged with people of faith and secularists in the struggle to protect human rights and dignity as well as to attempt to promote peacebuilding in the post-conflict areas in which I worked, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Cote d’Ivoire.
Post 9-11, a cottage industry of neo-atheists emerged, arguing that religion inherently leads to violence and should be shunned in civilized society. Jessica Stern counters this in an insightful study of terrorism.
While religion has been associated with some of the most heinous acts of terror in recent times, she avoids simple slogans in favor of in-depth interviews with the terrorists themselves. Representing a variety of religious traditions, she explores their motivations and rationales and finds that religion is not the source of violence but, in most cases, is a tool exploited by opportunistic leaders to motivate and justify acts of violence by their followers.
I find it a well-written corrective to the neo-atheists.
For four years, Jessica Stern interviewed extremist members of three religions around the world: Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Traveling extensively-to refugee camps in Lebanon, to religious schools in Pakistan, to prisons in Amman, Asqelon, and Pensacola-she discovered that the Islamic jihadi in the mountains of Pakistan and the Christian fundamentalist bomber in Oklahoma have much in common. Based on her vast research, Stern lucidly explains how terrorist organizations are formed by opportunistic leaders who-using religion as both motivation and justification-recruit the disenfranchised. She depicts how moral fervor is transformed into sophisticated organizations that strive for money, power, and attention. Jessica…
I’m a teacher, a student, and a reader by trade (that is, a university professor), and I spend most of my time trying to understand social and political power: why some people have it, and others don’t, how it circulates and changes (gradually or suddenly), why it sometimes oppresses us and sometimes liberates, how it can be created and destroyed. I mostly do this by reading and teaching the history of political theory, which I am lucky enough to do at McGill University, in conversation and cooperation with some wonderful colleagues.
I think this little book is invaluable for its portrayal of power, not as power over others or as power to do something but as power with other people.
It took me a long time to appreciate this insight, and I still think there is a lot to disagree with and dislike about Arendt’s work in general, but I am indebted to her argument that human power is rooted in solidarity.
Political theorist, philosopher, and feminist thinker Hannah Arendt's On Violence is an analysis of the nature, causes, and significance of violence in the second half of the twentieth century. The public revulsion against violence and nonviolent philosophies continues to diminish in the twenty-first century. In this classic and still all too resonant work, Hannah Arendt puts her theories about violence into historical perspective, examining the relationships between war and politics, violence and power. Questioning the nature of violent behavior, she reveals the causes of its many manifestations, and ulitmately argues against Mao Zedong's dictum "power grows out of the barrel…
Michelle Coles is a novelist, public speaker, and former civil rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice. As a 9th generation Louisianan, she is highly attuned to the struggles that African Americans have faced in overcoming the legacy of slavery and the periods of government-sanctioned discrimination that followed. Her goal in writing is to empower young people by educating them about history and giving them the tools to shape their own destiny. Michelle, named to the John Lewis Foundation’s 2022 list of Good Troublemakers, lives in Maryland with her husband and their five sons.
Angel of Greenwood is a fantastic young adult novel about two young kids who fall in love in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the cusp of the Tulsa Massacre, a harrowing event in which their prosperous Black community was burnt to the ground by white vigilantes.
By setting a normal teen romance against this backdrop, the reader can appreciate how disruptive racism is to people’s attempts to live a normal life and how lasting the damage can be.
Angel of Greenwood by Randi Pink is a piercing, unforgettable love story set in Greenwood, Oklahoma, also known as the “Black Wall Street,” and against the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Isaiah Wilson is, on the surface, a town troublemaker, but is hiding that he is an avid reader and secret poet, never leaving home without his journal. Angel Hill is a loner, mostly disregarded by her peers as a goody-goody. Her father is dying, and her family’s financial situation is in turmoil.
Though they’ve attended the same schools, Isaiah never noticed Angel as anything but a dorky, Bible toting…
Like everyone else, I have life-long experience of caring and not caring for things; being sometimes careful and other times careless. Communication has been my central interest as a historical sociologist, and I’ve been considering its relationship to care (attachment, affection, worry, and burden) and security. I have always liked the word care, employing it often in the sense of warm attachment, but I have been looking at how care can at times enact control, violence, or abandonment.
Starting with the public claim that Canadian society exhibits social indifference to the racialized and gendered violence connected to murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, Granzow interrogates the presumed absence suggested the word indifference, showing that it hides something present and active: a social investment and authorization of this violence as part of the maintenance of the settler-colonial state.
Looking at the city of Edmonton historically, ways that this investment – or commitment – has materialized are elaborated, including a policing initiative (Project Kare) that collects demographic information on individuals expected to be subject to (colonial) violence and the former Charles Camsell Hospital that incarcerated Indigenous peoples from where many disappeared. This impacted my thinking on the contradictions inherent to the notion of care and the place I call home.
In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as "indifferent" to high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true. Invested Indifference makes a startling counter-argument: that what we see as societal unresponsiveness doesn't come from an absence of feeling but from an affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable. Kara Granzow demonstrates that mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space have been used to entrench violence against Indigenous people in the social construction of Canadian nationhood.
As a lifelong Kentuckian with a lifelong fascination for history, true crime, biography, and the supernatural, once I started writing, I pursued these and related topics. The writer Charles Fort’s research methods interested me: he read old newspapers looking for forgotten stories. That seemed a good way to find little-known information. I am a lecturer in the English Department at Eastern Kentucky University and have spent two decades reading old newspapers issue by issue between classes and taking notes on possible stories. The books on my list also include much detail on entertaining obscurities, and I hope you enjoy them.
Of the many strange stories from Kentucky, this book concentrates on ones from Lexington/Fayette County with a witty writing style that strikes a balance of history and humor.
Young-Brown covers several remarkable duels, frontier violence, racism, and the notorious prostitute Belle Brezing. One of the most remarkable stories concerns Col. William Breckinridge, a congressman who delivered lectures to young women on the importance of chastity yet was involved in a sex scandal that destroyed his career.
Historical true crime is well-represented by the story of golf pro Marion Miley, whose 1941 murder could be the topic for a book of its own.
Filled with tales of infamous duels, cheating congressmen, and much more, Wicked Lexington, Kentucky offers the first collection the city's rowdy and ruckus history .
Despite its illustrious beginnings as the "Athens of the west," Lexington has always had a darker side lurking just beneath its glossy sheen. It didn't take long for the first intellectual hub west of the Alleghenies to quickly morph into a city with the same scandalous inclinations as neighboring Louisville and Cincinnati. From Belle Brezing's infamous brothel of the late 1800s, frequented by some of the city's most prominent businessmen, and once pardoned by the…
When my late wife Margo Wilson suggested, over 40 years ago, that we should study homicides for what they might reveal about human motives and emotions, her idea seemed zany. But when we plunged into police investigative files and homicide databases, we quickly realized that we had struck gold, and homicide research became our passion. Our innovation was to approach the topic like epidemiologists, asking who is likely to kill whom and identifying the risk factors that are peculiar to particular victim-killer relationships. What do people reallycare about? Surveys and interviews elicit cheap talk; killing someone is drastic action.
Florida-based historian David Courtwright is best known for his analyses of the history of drug addiction and the drug business in the United States, but this volume is a fact-filled page-turner on America's lethal violence problem. Courtwright describes a frontier culture in which a reputation for violent capability was an essential social asset and persuasively explicates its similarities with the situation that faces single young men in America's underserved inner cities to this day. The interdisciplinary scope of Courtwright's scholarship guarantees that any reader will learn a great deal from his book. I found it unputdownable.
This book offers a look at violence in America - why it is so prevalent, and what and who are responsible. David Cartwright takes the long view of his subject, developing the historical patterns of violence and disorder in this country. Where there is violent and disorderly behaviour, he shows, there are plenty of men, largely young and single. What began in the mining camp and bunkhouse has simply continued in the urban world of today, where many young, armed, intoxicated, honour-conscious bachelors have reverted to frontier conditions. "Violent Land" combines social science with a narrative that spans and reinterprets…
