Here are 100 books that The Ten Thousand Things fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a Stanford professor who became fascinated
with oil and everything it does to for us and to us. For years I traveled the
world talking to the people who know petroleum: executives in the big oil companies,
politicians and activists, militants and victims, spies and tribal chiefs. Blood
Oil explains what I learned and how we can make our oil-cursed world better
for all of us.
Oil isn’t the only natural resource that can
curse: the Belgian colonizers inflicted decades of extraordinary brutality on
the peoples of the Congo while extracting their ivory and rubber.
Hochschild
paints horrific vistas of extreme greed and violence, and also tells the
stories of the heroic individuals who resisted it. I didn’t know much about
real ‘The Heart of Darkness’ before reading this book—now I know that the true
savages were the Europeans.
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, King Leopold's Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver.
In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce…
Early in life, I felt the presence of a “guardian angel” who would take my hand and accompany my mind to imagine distant cultures. I grew up in Florence, and in our history, there were so many tales of people coming from afar, and of Florentines traveling across deserts and oceans. And as time passed, I would be drawn to beautifully written true stories which opened windows onto different epochs and dramas of life in both near and far-flung places of the world.
Warned by a Hong-Kong fortune-teller not to risk flying for a whole year, the author – a vastly experienced Far East war and revolutions correspondent of the German Der Spiegel – took what he called “the first step into an unknown world.” It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years he ever spent: he was marked by death and instead he was reborn. Geography expanded under his feet. Magnificently written in the best traditions of travel literature. A full immersion into the invisible world and belief systems that shape Southeast Asian cultures.
Warned by a fortune-teller not to risk flying, the author - a seasoned correspondent - took to travelling by rail, road and sea. Consulting fortune-tellers and shamans wherever he went, he learnt to understand and respect older ways of life and beliefs now threatened by the crasser forms of Western modernity.
William Shawcross in the Literary Review praised Terzani for 'his beautifully written adventure story... a voyage of self-discovery... He sees fortune-tellers, soothsayers, astrologers, chiromancers, seers, shamans, magicians, palmists, frauds, men and women of god (many gods) all over Asia and in Europe too... Almost every page and every story…
Early in life, I felt the presence of a “guardian angel” who would take my hand and accompany my mind to imagine distant cultures. I grew up in Florence, and in our history, there were so many tales of people coming from afar, and of Florentines traveling across deserts and oceans. And as time passed, I would be drawn to beautifully written true stories which opened windows onto different epochs and dramas of life in both near and far-flung places of the world.
In this wondrous book on Caravaggio, the world of Naples unfolds from the inside through an electrifying reading experience. Written with grace, almost every sentence imparts an epiphany. The author challenges us to undertake soul-work, even if one is a secular reader. Reading becomes an act of empathy and passion. In the words of Wallace Stevens, potential readers will become ‘necessary angels’.
A Profound New Look at the Italian Master and His Lasting Legacy
Now celebrated as one of the great painters of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio fled Rome in 1606 to escape retribution for killing a man in a brawl. Three years later he was in Naples, where he painted The Seven Acts of Mercy. A year later he died at the age of thirty-eight under mysterious circumstances. Exploring Caravaggio's singular masterwork, in The Guardian of Mercy Terence Ward offers an incredible narrative journey into the heart of his artistry and his metamorphosis from fugitive to visionary.
Early in life, I felt the presence of a “guardian angel” who would take my hand and accompany my mind to imagine distant cultures. I grew up in Florence, and in our history, there were so many tales of people coming from afar, and of Florentines traveling across deserts and oceans. And as time passed, I would be drawn to beautifully written true stories which opened windows onto different epochs and dramas of life in both near and far-flung places of the world.
This masterpiece - believed to be the oldest full-length ‘novel’ in existence - is an extraordinary exploration of human feelings, emotions, and relations as fresh and beguiling today as when it was first written one thousand years ago. I include this as non-fiction because it is a true account of daily life at the Heian Japanese court. Lady Murasaki’s characters draw the reader into their passion and terrors in an uncannily modern way, still so alive today. Readers will find themselves immersed in a strange and distant culture whose inhabitants’ loves, rivalries, suffering and follies they can easily identify with. It is an astonishing diary disguised as a “novel”, one of the greatest classics of all time, surprisingly written by a woman.
"What Waley did create is literary art of extraordinary beauty that brings to life in English the world Murasaki Shikibu imagined. The beauty of his art has not dimmed, but like the original text itself retains the power to move and enlighten."-Dennis Washburn, from his foreword
Centuries before Shakespeare, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji was already acknowledged as a classic of Japanese literature. Over the past century, this book has gained worldwide acceptance as not only the world's first novel but as one of the greatest works of literature of all time.
In my writing, food is a means to explore culture and understand the world. I’ve been described as a ‘culinary detective’. I collect and create eclectic, evocative recipes from around the globe so I can travel from my kitchen when I'm back home in London. The Nutmeg Trail follows my multi-award-winning books, Fire Islands and Samarkand.
Delving into the bloodiest and most tragic period of spice’s past, Milton’s novel reveals the extraordinary link between nutmeg and colonisation. It was the seed from which the British Empire grew. If fiction is your preferred way to explore history – and what a history spice has! – then this is the book for you.
The tiny island of Run is an insignificant speck in the Indonesian archipelago. Just two miles long and half a mile wide, it is remote, tranquil, and, these days, largely ignored.
Yet 370 years ago, Run's harvest of nutmeg (a pound of which yielded a 3,200 percent profit by the time it arrived in England) turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and the British Crown. The outcome of the fighting was one of the most spectacular…
I'm a Dutch author and lawyer specialized in international criminal law. My expertise is the role of women leaders in times of conflict, crisis, and change – especially during war and in post-conflict societies. Women are traditionally portrayed as victims, while it is precisely women who show genuine leadership skills in times of conflict, crisis, and change. I've done research on women’s armed resistance in the Netherlands in WWII, and am an expert on the lives and resistance work of Hannie Shaft and the sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen. In addition, I've done research in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and saw the same patterns in these conflicts and the impact on the generations after.
A remarkable and incredibly brave epic saga of a young woman struggling with the inheritance of her father who grew up in the colonial era of the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies and who had been interned in a concentration camp by the Japanese as a child and her mother who had been abandoned as a little girl at the end of WWII because her parents were Nazi sympathizers and were therefore imprisoned. The author grew up in California, USA, with many questions about her family’s identity and secrets in the war. A courageous book breaking the taboo of shedding light on ‘the other side.’ The author is a personal friend of mine.
An engrossing, epic saga of one family’s experiences on both sides of WWII, All Ships Follow Me questions our common narrative of the conflict and our stark notions of victim and perpetrator, while tracing the lasting effects of war through several generations.
In March 1942, Mieke Eerkens’ father was a ten-year-old boy living in the Dutch East Indies. When the Japanese invaded the island he, his family, and one hundred thousand other Dutch civilians were interned in a concentration camp and forced into hard labor for three years. After the Japanese surrendered, Mieke’s father and his family were set free…
My first travel memoir, Finding Myself in Borneo, has won three awards. I hold a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Communication from Florida State University. I worked internationally for 45 years, becoming an expert in the field of communication for social change. I directed and produced a number of award-winning documentary films/videos, popular multimedia initiatives, and have written numerous articles and books in my field. I worked and lived in Asia, Africa, and Russia for a total of 18 years and traveled to over 80 countries on short-term assignments. In 2015, I settled in New Mexico, using my varied experiences, memories, and imagination in creative writing.
Bali is known as a peaceful Hindu "paradise” in Asia. But today most tourists are ignorant of its tumultuous history. In my book I travel by sea on a freighter from Singapore to Jakarta, and journey through Java to Bali. Before reading Hanna’s book, I too was largely ignorant of the invasions Bali had experienced before tourists came: centuries of domination by Muslim sultanates; then early 1800s, the Dutch alongside the French; then the British, followed by the Dutch again in 1816. Next, Bali’s people joined the fight for independence before Japan invaded in 1942. The Dutch returned in 1945, so back to the struggle for independence 1945-1949. Within Indonesia, Bali had to fight hard to maintain its Hindu religion and culture. A peaceful paradise?
This book tells the story of Bali--the "paradise island of the Pacific"--its rulers and its people, and their encounters with the Western world.
Bali is a perennially popular tourist destination. It is also home to a fascinating people with a long and dramatic history of interactions with foreigners, particularly after the arrival of the first Dutch fleet in 1597. In this first comprehensive history of Bali, author Willard Hanna chronicles Bali through the centuries as well as the islanders' current struggle to preserve their unique identity amidst the financially necessary incursions of tourism.
Illustrated with more than forty stunning photographs,…
When I was studying Japan in graduate school, my advisor once told me that he hoped I wouldn’t pursue research in women’s history, calling it a fad. He was wrong, but it took me well over ten years to figure that out. Thanks to colleagues and friends, I helped build the field of Japanese women’s history in English, especially for the early modern period. As professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine, I remain committed to the possibility of uncovering the lives of yet more amazing women who challenge the stereotypes of docile wife and seductive geisha all too prevalent in fiction set in Japan.
Few seventeenth-century women traveled as far as Cornelia van Nijenroode. Born on the island of Hirado off the coast of Kyushu around 1624 to a Dutch father and Japanese mother, she was taken by the Dutch East India Company to Batavia, Indonesia, in 1637. A family portrait now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam shows her with her first husband and daughters. Alas, he died young, leaving her prey to fortune hunters. When her second husband refused to allow her to continue with her commercial enterprises, she tried to divorce him, a struggle that took her all the way to Holland. Her story highlights the dangers of marriage when one is a wealthy widow, but also Cornelia’s grit in standing up to a legal system stacked against her.
In 17th-century Batavia, Cornelia von Nijenroode, the daughter of a geisha and a Dutch merchant in Japan, was known as ""Otemba"" (meaning ""untamable""), which made her a heroine to modern Japanese feminists. A wealthy widow and enterprising businesswoman who had married an unsuccessful Dutch lawyer for social reasons found that just after their wedding, husband and wife were at each other's throats. Cornelia insisted on maintaining independent power of disposal over her assets, but legally her husband had control over her possessions and refused to grante her permission to engage in commerce. He soon began using blackmail, smuggling, and secret…
I have been fascinated with travel and adventure stories since I read The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. I finished a whole Walter Scott book; with a dictionary balanced on one knee because Jeanie Deans decides to walk from Edinburgh to London. Romance? Bah! Humbug! I’d rather journey into The Heart of Darkness, follow the hobbits to Mount Doom, or ride a sandworm with Paul Atreides. Show me a lone traveler thrown into the middle of an unfamiliar, confusing culture and you have my full attention. Naturally, when I started typing out my first manuscript, it just had to be a fantasy adventure about an Iban headhunter.
This is one of those books that I had to put down a couple of times previously because the protagonist’s flaw hit too close to home. Jim is so ashamed of his past cowardice that each time his identity is found out, he will travel farther away from the spreading Western colonies. A Western marauder eventually invades the Malay and Bugis community where he lives, and Jim has to bear the consequence of speaking up for the man in good faith. After so many years, this book is still one of my top favorites because Jim finally stops running and faces his fear. He ultimately becomes the hero that he has always wanted to be.
'To the white men in the waterside business and to the captain of ships he was just Jim - nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced.'
Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman - 'as unflinching as a hero in a book' - who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an Eastern port. His life is blighted: an isolated scandal assumes horrifying proportions. An older man, Marlow, befriends Jim, and helps to…
I learned to read young. No really young. I was 3. For more than 40 years I have been a voracious reader. And on top of that, I will read nearly anything, and have for years. From Nancy Drew to Little House. Anne McCaffrey, Louis L’Amour, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Catherine Coulter, Patricia Briggs and so many more. My preference and passion is fiction but what genre changes with my mood. If you’re willing to take a chance on something new, check these books out!
This one is a contemporary story and is another of my favorites because it’s got more than a little bit of action keeping you going even if you’re not interested in the romance part of the story.
There are actually two stories/romances going on in this one, one now and one during WWII. The characters are real people with strengths, flaws, hopes, and dreams, and bonus, they are just as insecure about themselves and their interactions with each other as the rest of us are.
And they make me laugh. Like really laugh. Bonus points to the audiobook because the performances were amazing.
Troubleshooters: They Never Let You Down. The fourth addictive romantic suspense novel in New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann's Troubleshooters series, filled with thrilling adventure, excitement and passion. In OUT OF CONTROL, Savannah von Hopf and Navy Seal Ken 'WildCard' Karmody are lost in a hostile jungle with no choice but to place their trust in one another...
When Savannah von Hopf's uncle is kidnapped in Indonesia there is only one man she can turn to help: Navy Seal Ken 'WildCard' Karmody. But before she has the chance to ask for his help, she finds herself caught up with…
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