Fans pick 91 books like The Unfinished Bombing

I was transfixed by Kelman’s story, masterfully, sympathetically narrated. It’s populated by few monuments, and the one squatting at the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site is modest and understated. Here even the place of those dark events was in dispute.

Blending history with a gripping account of the struggle over public memory, and centering Native people, Kelman chronicles the modern search for the site (and meaning) of one of the most gruesome acts of government violence in American history, at Sand Creek, where U.S. troops slaughtered more than 150 peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho campers (mostly women and children) in November 1864.

The Colorado Pioneer Association commemorated (and glorified) the sordid event in 1909 with a Denver monument cataloging Sand Creek as a Civil War battle. But a search for truth and reconciliation would challenge and remake this public memory, and Kelman is an unrivaled guide in that process.

Monument Wars, like no other book I’ve read, explains the essence of the “monument”—what it is, what it’s supposed to do, and how it does it (or fails to do it)—in the context of American history.

Monuments freeze time and aspire to “closure,” setting heroes or momentous events and their meaning, literally, in stone. But our national lives and history do not stand still, and public memory thus changes with time, often with fraught consequences.

Savage brilliantly examines and illuminates this dissonance, focusing on the most important monumental space in the United States—Washington, D.C., and the National Mall.

Smart, surprising, and accessible, this account of the national capital’s contested terrain offers a vivid case study of how Americans remember, sometimes forget, and increasingly contest their past through sculpture, ceremonial landscape, and the theatrics of the built landscape.

Civil War statues have long been the gold standard for America’s monumental public landscape.

They are the public sculptures and architectural features we are now rediscovering, sometimes with horror, and arguing over, after years of mute service as park furniture and pigeon roosts. Brown’s book is a definitive history of these classic, heroic monuments.

Beautifully written, perceptive, and illuminating, it explains their history, offering readers an engaging and invaluable background and context for understanding how and why they were erected, and how they’ve not only reflected American culture but have propelled it, particularly (as the title suggests) towards militarization and the affirmation of racial and class hierarchies.

Reading Civil War Monuments focuses our view on monumental things all around us that we’ve never really seen.

Iconoclasm isn’t new. The word means, literally, “image destroying.”

History is littered with instances going back to Antiquity. But something fresh is happening right now in the United States.

Smashing Monuments is a lively, bracing, much-needed account of the iconoclasm roiling contemporary America’s public landscape, particularly in the wake of the white supremacists’ murderous march in Charlottesville in 2017 and George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police in 2020.

Captivating reportage and historically informed analysis, from the unique perspective of a scholar of art history and law, propels our reconsideration of American public icons, their origins, their sometimes-sordid purposes, their standing, and what might replace them.

Thompson doesn’t fully answer this last question, but she rouses us to rethink U.S. public history, commemoration, and the form and function of monuments themselves.

With keywords like "history of Oklahoma" and "basketball," this book seems an unlikely candidate for one I love.

Sam Anderson’s deftness as a writer, however, makes it a great read, even for a non-sporto coast dweller like me. He interweaves a story of the OKC and the NBA, describing the tension between “boom” and “process” that shaped both. Trust him, trust the process.

Release Me is an anthology that looks at the legacy of Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District through the eyes of various authors tapping a plethora of literary styles and devices. Through Release Me, the voices of the oft-unheard ring out. The legacy of the Greenwood District lives. 

Having grown up gay in a small town in the South, this resonated with me as an out gay man in a big city in my twenties, because it got everything about being gay in a small Southern town right: the tone, the emotion, the terror, and most of all, it got how there are more of us in those small Southern towns than we realize at the time, and how leaving for bigger, “better” places isn’t always the answer. 

When I studied the civil rights movement, nobody told me about Clara Luper or the Oklahoma City sit-ins, which took place a year and a half before the Greensboro sit-in. I didn’t even realize there was segregation that far west. Someday Is Now helps fill that common knowledge gap, but it’s also a solid introduction to “separate and unequal,” as well as a portrait of a teacher and civil rights activist who should be better known. It left me wanting to learn more about Luper and the children who joined her, especially Luper’s nine-year-old daughter Marilyn, who by her own account proposed the sit-in—without ever having heard of one!

In every story in this heart-rending collection, the protagonists—all of them Indigenous people—are dealing with some of the most challenging circumstances that can be imagined: the tragic deaths of loved ones, the trials of trying to rebuild one’s life post-incarceration, and the fallout from substance abuse, to name just some of the difficulties the stories address. At the same time, most of the protagonists exhibit some form of resilience in response to these challenges, and I was deeply moved by the variety of this resilience, by the characters’ determination, and by Johnston’s insights into their experiences. I also love the ways in which the stories are connected by place: All of them unfold in Oklahoma, and Johnston brings their settings to life.

Henderson was a homesteader and teacher in the Oklahoma panhandle and this collection of her writing creates a compelling first-hand portrait of the Dust Bowl. Impeccably detailed about rural farm life, from the days of prosperity to the bare-bones existence necessitated by hardship, Henderson is a thoughtful, ponderous guide. “Out here we thought the depths of the depression had been fathomed some time ago when the sheriff subtracted from the very personal possessions of one our neighbors a set of false teeth that he had been unable to pay for.”