100 books like The Schoolhouse Door

It’s hard to know quite where to begin with this book–there is so much to love.

This book tells the story of the Great Migration of African American people out of the South across the United States to Chicago, New York, California, and beyond; it transforms and fills in a crucial part of American history that every American should know to understand our present day. But for me, what I love most starts with the way Isabel Wilkerson cares for people’s stories. 

Wilkerson tells this decades-long, sweeping, under-told story through individual stories that are so detailed and compelling, so thoroughly contextualized with historical research, that I was completely enmeshed in these people’s lives, their struggles, their loves, and their feelings. I cared. In the years since I read it, stories from the book often come to my mind, teaching and guiding me like the words of a beloved relative. 

Before moderating a Smithsonian panel, I mentioned this book to Astronauts Mae Jemison and Leland Melvin.

It prompted a conversation (among people who’d sat atop rockets that shot them into outer space) where they agreed that the most frightened they’d ever been was while driving at night near the Cape Canaveral. The book, about Harry T. Moore’s lonely war against domestic terrorism, lays bare the source of their fear. Murdering Black people was how White Supremacy kept its power in the states where the space program was based.

Florida had the highest lynching rate per capita, and Brevard County, where NASA launches rockets, was the playground of the Klan. Moore became their target after registering 100,000 people to vote in a gubernatorial election. After this book, Florida will never seem the same. 

Throughout the 1960s, NASA tried in vain to lure Black engineers to its Southern Centers.

The agency had its excuses, but as I began to talk to NASA’s Black pioneers, I began hearing vivid descriptions of the terror that kept their friends from going to work with them at NASA. This thought-provoking examination of one of the darkest chapters in American history helps lay out a source of their reticence.

The book delves deep into the socio-political, racial, and cultural factors that led to the widespread practice of lynching. Brundage skillfully portrays the complex web of prejudice, fear, and power dynamics that fueled this brutal form of violence. Through his detailed analysis, we gain a chilling picture and the backstory of what kept NASA so White.

While researching a documentary, I tripped over an interview with George Reedy, White House press secretary from 1964-65.

Reedy had also worked in Pres. Johnson’s Senate office, and he spoke about how thirteen days after the Sputnik launch, he and an aide to Alabama Senator Lister Hill plotted to use the space program to transform the South. This book fleshes out much of that story. While it primarily delves into the economic development and transformation of the South, it also provides valuable insights into Johnson’s tenure as a senator.

The book highlights how Johnson used his political acumen to advocate for policies that would improve the economic conditions of his region. He understood the importance of federal investment in infrastructure, education, and healthcare to lift the region out of poverty.

Politics, ambition, and science collided when NASA announced that a small rock that fell on Antarctica contained tiny fossils of ancient life on Mars. Advance plans for the public report were kept secret while coordinated all the way up through President Bill Clinton. Aides wondered if the great discovery would help his re-election. But after a televised press conference and the subsequent media circus, many qualified scientists disputed the claimed fossils. NASA is still searching for past or present life on Mars.  They will surely take greater care in reaching future conclusions, won’t they? And if you may wonder why an alleged DC sex worker had prior knowledge of the “breakthrough,” read ace Washington Post reporter (now retired) Kathy Sawyer’s brilliant and thorough account.

This is a children’s version of the book that inspired the movie.

Like everyone else who saw that movie, I was blown away by the story – I was also thoroughly ashamed that I hadn’t heard about these amazing women before.

I’m no math whizz, so making all those impossibly complicated calculations – on which people’s lives would depend – is already completely beyond me. But doing so with such dignity and determination in the face of the daily grind of petty prejudice and poisonous ignorance puts them in the superhero category.

I was in tears in the movie, and once again when reading the book.

Arthur C. Clarke is my favorite of the “Big Three” giants of the golden age of science fiction. His clear prose and hard-science background mix with big ideas, optimism, and flashes of poetic brilliance, and these qualities are all just getting off the ground in his first novel. Clarke wrote it in 1947, right after he had left his work as a radar engineer for the RAF.

It is the realistic story of an international effort to put men on the moon, written 10 years before NASA was founded and 22 years before humanity succeeded. I was amazed by the foresight into the difficulties in administration, fundraising, secrecy, public relations, anti-science zealotry, good ol’ engineering, and problem-solving as they sent humanity on its first moonshot. It’s a real case of art inspiring life, as Clarke and other visionaries showed other engineers that the fantastic was feasible.

Award-winning, highly authoritative, comprehensive, and accessible history of the long campaign for a large space telescope by astronomers and NASA program officers. One of the most penetrating studies of how NASA constructs and operates major space missions, and how access to space has changed “what it means to be an astronomer.”.

In contrast to Marooned (and, in fact, just about every other SF space novel of the ’60s and ’70s) is this short and very dark masterpiece. The first winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, this novel about the aftermath of a doomed mission to Venus is Malzberg’s dark answer to the over-optimistic view of space exploration that was prevalent in the post-Apollo period, and a stark reminder that the universe is an unforgiving and dangerous place.

Okay, so you’ve read Dune, you’ve read Starship Troopers, you’ve read 2001: A Space Odyssey, and maybe you’ve even read From Earth to the Moon and The First Men in the Moon. Seen the movies, too (or maybe you cheat and say you’ve read the books when you’ve only seen the flicks). Bet you think that makes you an expert on science fiction about space, right? Not even close! If you want to read more than just the well-known classics everyone else has, find these books. Some have become obscure and are now out of print, but they’re not hard to find; try ABE, eBay, and local second-hand bookstores. They’re worth searching for, and then you’ll really have something to talk about.

This high-tech thriller about three astronauts stuck in Earth orbit aboard an Apollo spacecraft (in an earlier version, it was about one astronaut in a… show more.