100 books like The Year We Disappeared

What if you got hit by lightning? What if the lightning came from inside your body? What if you are such an obsessive writer and researcher that you then had to trace the supply chain of the failed medical device that did that to you?

KS does body writing as a research quest, taking her battered heart back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of answers to the question of what, exactly, she’d been carrying around in it. The sense of vulnerability—medical, economic, and otherwise—that she creates within the narrative is so felt that I couldn’t shake it when I was done reading.

As a woman, I have experienced my share of sexism but it dims in comparison to what Lester faced in the 1950s and 1960s. When applying for a job at a bookstore, a young Lester is told the store can’t hire girls because they only have one toilet. Her plucky response—she could use the same toilet as the men—is one reason I enjoyed this book so much. 

Lester is repeatedly pushed to the sidelines even as she takes up the fight for civil rights, devoting herself to bettering the lives of others while setting aside her own dreams—for a time. Luckily Lester never completely loses her nerve. Her second act is a fun adventure to follow for those who have faced their own setbacks, no matter their gender.

I have a fascination with countries that don’t fully exist and have visited a few myself. So when I learned that Chude-Sokei was from a country that really no longer exists, I was hooked. The country in question was not one I recognized. Biafra was a short-lived African state that declared independence from Nigeria in 1967. 

What kept me reading the book though was the humor Chude-Sokei uses to describe his unique situation as the “first son of the first son” of a leader of a country that was “killed” in 1970, as his mother puts it. Chude-Sokei’s tales of growing up an African in Jamaica followed by his yearning to become a Black American in Inglewood, Los Angeles will resonate with anyone who ever struggled with their identity.

As a female journalist who has lived and worked abroad, including in sometimes unsafe situations but excluding war, I was drawn to Miller’s story about covering the Vietnam War. In 1970 young American women were not supposed to go to Vietnam. They were supposed to get married, and Miller did—to a member of the military whose job proves her ticket to Vietnam.

As one of the rare female reporters in Vietnam, Miller captured stories her male colleagues couldn’t or wouldn’t cover such as how young Vietnamese girls were often tricked into the sex trade. An outsider in the “old boys club” of news and war Miller is able to understand better than her male colleagues how the war is impacting the locals who have in some ways been made outsiders in their own country.

Why did anti-Chinese violence continue to rise even after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, reaching a terrible peak in 1885 and 1886?

In a powerful reinterpretation of Chinese exclusion, Beth Lew-Williams reveals how the 1882 act was deliberately limited in scope, poorly funded, and loosely enforced—because immigration policy at this time was still governed by diplomacy. Only in the late 1880s, with China perceived as weak, did the US unilaterally abrogate its treaty obligations and move toward outright exclusion.

The chronology really matters here: for Chinese immigrants it was a question not just of entry or exclusion, but of life and death. Deftly situating anti-Chinese violence in overlapping regional, national, and international contexts, Lew Williams shows how the idea of the immigrant “alien” emerged in tandem with national citizenship during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. 

This book provides simple words and warm illustrations to reinforce the concepts that violence is never okay and that toddlers and preschoolers can learn to manage their anger without hitting. I appreciate the gentle, yet straightforward way it addressed the unacceptable behavior while offering positive things to do with your hands like hugging, helping, and shaking. The illustrations are colorful, playful, and age-appropriate. Young children adore this book and ask to listen to it again and again. As a bonus, at the end, the author included additional tips for parents and caregivers about how to handle unsafe hitting.

Roxane Gay’s memoir writing is brilliant! So is her collection of personal essays written by women who have experienced sexual harassment and rape.

Gay’s painful introductory piece on learning to understand her own experience of being gang raped at age twelve as “not that bad” illuminates the problem with rape culture. Women learn to blame themselves. 

As the essays by other authors make clear, rape culture is bad and women are often denigrated when they speak out, but they must come together to foment change. Whether the essays focus on workplace harassment or date rape, they all hold key lessons for the importance of women’s sexual autonomy at work.

Arias’ book is the product of nine years of intensive ethnographic research in three favelas (shanty towns) of Rio de Janeiro. This enables him to assess how local community leaders deal with the parallel power of drug gangs that become entrenched in their neighborhoods. Unable to rely on the police, who are violent and corrupt, community leaders are forced to find ways to coexist with actors who represent a substantial financial and military threat to their authority. In terms of methodology, this is a really impressive piece of research!

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.

If you’re interested in learning about domestic violence from a cross-cultural perspective, the literature on domestic violence in anthropology is an excellent place to look.

This is the second book by Jennifer Wies and Hillary Haldane, two anthropologists who have carved out a space for understanding how to apply anthropological insights to actual domestic violence work. This book offers cross-cultural ideas for how to do just that from a variety of anthropologists working all around the world who continue to work together on this issue from an applied anthropological perspective.

Both Wies and Haldane are mentors of mine, and Haldane was a huge support in the development of my own research. I have also collaborated with several of the authors in this book and can attest to the excellence of their research.