100 books like The Turkish Embassy Letters

First published in 1839 this is a fascinating history of Ireland from an outsider’s perspective. De Beaumont, a Frenchman, was a grandson of Lafayette and a lifelong friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America. He visited Ireland in 1835 and two years later L’Irlande appeared in two volumes, with an English translation later that year. An intellectual tour de force, the book was an immediate bestseller and remained popular for decades. His contemptuous howl of outrage directed at the British administration in Ireland reverberated down the nineteenth century.

This is an intriguing account of a lesser known period in Irish History, an unusual focus on a surprisingly successful and wealthy time. Stopford Greene was an Anglo-Irish historian, the daughter of a Protestant Archdeacon and the granddaughter of a Bishop. In this remarkable book, using material contemporaneous with her chosen period, she explores the centuries after Ireland had recovered from the Norman Invasion when it had developed a rich and sophisticated society and a thriving trade with the Continent of Europe. All of this ended with the devastation of the Tudor conquest and England’s subsequent genocidal policies.

A committed nationalist, Alice paid from her own pocket for the guns which were run into Howth Harbour in 1914 to help with the Rising.

The fascination of this book is its portrayal of the human cost involved in the fall of a civilisation. After the Bolshevik Revolution the cream of Russian society, including most of the aristocrats, the professional classes, the officer class, the middle class, fled Russia with little but the clothes on their backs. Being Francophone, most of them sought refuge in Paris only to find there destitution. Grand Dukes who formerly had palaces, country estates and scores of servants, now drove taxis, waited at table, washed dishes; Grand Duchesses embroidered for fashion houses (the lucky ones), all yearning for their homeland and being, as time passed, regarded with less and less tolerance by the French.  

The book is a reminder that catastrophe waits only for opportunity.

Susan Nagel charted Marie-Thérèse's life during the turmoil of the French Revolution. The only survivor of the royal family locked in Temple Prison, despite the harrowing experience of her family’s demise and the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette’s daughter emerged as a remarkably strong figure in French history.

Marie-Thérèse journeyed from the horrors of the Temple prison and her family’s death to a dignified role at court when she married her cousin and the monarchy returned after the Revolution and Napoleon’s empire. I was amazed at how little I knew about Marie-Thérèse—she was even queen for 20 minutes when her husband reigned and abdicated!

Despite ever louder calls to “follow the science,” vaccine skepticism only seems to be rising.

Maya Goldenberg’s arguments helped me see why handwringing over the “war on expertise” fails and how we could do better. She shows that the crisis is rooted in declining public trust of medical institutions. Vaccine Hesitancy helped open my eyes to a critical fact: Medical skepticism is a rational response to a history of research scandals, corporate misconduct, and discrimination.

I honestly believe that had public officials paid attention to books like Vaccine Hesitancy, the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic would not have torn Americans apart. 

This book is an optimistic narration about one of the most amazing and important achievements in medical history.

It is written by Donald Henderson, the doctor who led the eradication campaign against the arguably most severe and incurable disease in history. Smallpox killed or disabled hundreds of millions of people and remains so far the only virus to have been deliberately eradicated globally.

This story is an ode to the unlimited power of science, education, and multilateralism. It shows how, led by a few people and a lot of positive stamina, the world got together and overcame all hurdles despite technical challenges and political division in a highly fragmented post-war world.

Echoing recent events with Covid – and hopefully providing a blueprint for tackling climate change – it shows how we can stand together when circumstances require it and achieve what seemed for ages completely impossible. An inspiring example for… show more.

I can’t describe this book better than the author describes it: “While the American Revolution may have defined the era for history, epidemic smallpox nevertheless defined it for many of the Americans who lived and died in that time” (p. 273, 275).

Most of what I thought I knew about the Revolutionary War period ended up adjusted after reading this book. In straightforward prose that still manages to be poetic, Pox Americana forced me to examine both my educational history and the ways I had ingested and processed my education. 

This evocative book addresses the conundrum of writing about an Indigenous place barely mentioned in narratives foundational to U.S. history. For Fenn, this was the ancestral homeland of the Mandan of the Northern Plains, once a flourishing hub of Native life.

This is history-writing at its finest, expertly braided from threads of archaeological, climatic, geological, epidemiological, and ethnographic evidence and enriched by Fenn’s eye-opening journey to North Dakota. Neither denying the impacts of European-American settler expansion nor portraying the Mandan merely as passive victims, the book led me on a journey of discovery that revealed complex interrelationships of colonialism, geography, and Indigenous persistence.

Reading just one newspaper advertisement for a runaway slave makes New York slavery real. Reading an entire book filled with more than 750 advertisements haunted me, especially when I found notices written by my own Dutch ancestors, like Coxsackie’s Hendrick Hoeghtelen, who in 1761 advertised for a man named Anthony, who spoke good Spanish, had one eye, and was marked with smallpox. Whatever became of Anthony? I wish I knew.

The combination of actual copies of the ads alongside transcription added to the power of the book. I come back to its pages again and again. 

This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the world’s great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.