100 books like Undercurrents of Power

By Kevin Dawson,

Here are 100 books that Undercurrents of Power fans have personally recommended if you like Undercurrents of Power. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Deep Range

Helen M. Rozwadowski Author Of Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans

From my list on human's relationships with the underwater world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated with the ocean starting when I was a kid growing up on the Great Lakes. While I sailed and swam in Lake Erie’s freshwater, I dreamed of and read about oceans. My career as a historian and writer has been dedicated to exploring the human relationship with the ocean, especially the underwater realm so often left out of maritime history and literature. My greatest joy is that other historians have joined my quest. The books I’ve selected include some I used as sources in writing ocean history and others by historians who are themselves plumbing the ocean’s depths. 

Helen's book list on human's relationships with the underwater world

Helen M. Rozwadowski Why did Helen love this book?

This sci-fi romp by an author more famous for space fiction takes an unusual dive into the ocean’s depths, where pole-to-pole zones of plankton cultivation and whale ranching provide food to feed the earth’s enlarged population. Using a typical trope of maritime fiction, Arthur C. Clarke introduces readers to this future world through a neophyte whale warden whose past as a spaceman colors his experiences and perceptions of his new ocean surroundings. Compared with outer space, Clarke’s ocean is fuller of resources, and also more mysterious, but emerges as a place that promises to foster peace and understanding.

By Arthur C. Clarke,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Deep Range as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A man discovers the planet’s destiny in the ocean’s depths in this near-future novel by one of the twentieth century’s greatest science fiction authors.
 
In the very near future, humanity has fully harnessed the sea’s immense potential, employing advanced sonar technology to control and harvest untold resources for human consumption. It is a world where gigantic whale herds are tended by submariners and vast plankton farms stave off the threat of hunger.
 
Former space engineer Walter Franklin has been assigned to a submarine patrol. Initially indifferent to his new station, if not bored by his daily routines, Walter soon becomes…


Book cover of Neptune's Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea

Helen M. Rozwadowski Author Of Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans

From my list on human's relationships with the underwater world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated with the ocean starting when I was a kid growing up on the Great Lakes. While I sailed and swam in Lake Erie’s freshwater, I dreamed of and read about oceans. My career as a historian and writer has been dedicated to exploring the human relationship with the ocean, especially the underwater realm so often left out of maritime history and literature. My greatest joy is that other historians have joined my quest. The books I’ve selected include some I used as sources in writing ocean history and others by historians who are themselves plumbing the ocean’s depths. 

Helen's book list on human's relationships with the underwater world

Helen M. Rozwadowski Why did Helen love this book?

The title Neptune’s Laboratory invokes knowledge of the oceans through science alongside the equally central role imagination has played in the human relationship with the sea. Antony Adler astutely observes how its mirror-like qualities encouraged scientists, politicians, and the public since the early 19th century to use the ocean to spin utopian fantasies and explore dystopian fears. Most importantly, he reminds readers that our propensity to fathom oceans to project the fate of the human species and our planet offers an important key: imagination could chart a course toward a better future.

By Antony Adler,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Neptune's Laboratory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An eyewitness to profound change affecting marine environments on the Newfoundland coast, Antony Adler argues that the history of our relationship with the ocean lies as much in what we imagine as in what we discover.

We have long been fascinated with the oceans, seeking "to pierce the profundity" of their depths. In studying the history of marine science, we also learn about ourselves. Neptune's Laboratory explores the ways in which scientists, politicians, and the public have invoked ocean environments in imagining the fate of humanity and of the planet-conjuring ideal-world fantasies alongside fears of our species' weakness and ultimate…


Book cover of Mr. Limpet

Helen M. Rozwadowski Author Of Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans

From my list on human's relationships with the underwater world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated with the ocean starting when I was a kid growing up on the Great Lakes. While I sailed and swam in Lake Erie’s freshwater, I dreamed of and read about oceans. My career as a historian and writer has been dedicated to exploring the human relationship with the ocean, especially the underwater realm so often left out of maritime history and literature. My greatest joy is that other historians have joined my quest. The books I’ve selected include some I used as sources in writing ocean history and others by historians who are themselves plumbing the ocean’s depths. 

Helen's book list on human's relationships with the underwater world

Helen M. Rozwadowski Why did Helen love this book?

This fantasy by the prolific and well-known American novelist Theodore Pratt follows the adventures of a bespectacled bookkeeper who becomes a fish, serves the American navy during the Second World War, and swims off to evolve a better species of humanity, free of those qualities that provoked global conflict. Reflecting scientific and popular embrace of the idea that life, including the human species, evolved from the sea, Mr. Limpet combines pointed commentary and humor with the growing cultural fascination of the undersea prompted by submarine warfare. Rare today because of its publication shortly after American entry into the war, the novel inspired the more well-known 1963 film The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

By Theodore Pratt, Garrett Price (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Mr. Limpet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

Helen M. Rozwadowski Author Of Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans

From my list on human's relationships with the underwater world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated with the ocean starting when I was a kid growing up on the Great Lakes. While I sailed and swam in Lake Erie’s freshwater, I dreamed of and read about oceans. My career as a historian and writer has been dedicated to exploring the human relationship with the ocean, especially the underwater realm so often left out of maritime history and literature. My greatest joy is that other historians have joined my quest. The books I’ve selected include some I used as sources in writing ocean history and others by historians who are themselves plumbing the ocean’s depths. 

Helen's book list on human's relationships with the underwater world

Helen M. Rozwadowski Why did Helen love this book?

Ann Elias demonstrates how visual media – photography, film, art, and museum displays – re-cast coral reefs in the early 20th century from dangers to navigation into fantastical but familiar and inviting spectacles. Coral Empire reveals photographers, artists, and scientific explorers as they rendered the undersea modern yet colonial. Using technology, indigenous knowledge, and their own visions, they presented the oceans as wild, untouched spaces full of resources that invited exploitation, conquest, and tourism. Desire-fueled uses of the undersea obscured the destructive nature of human activities on coral reefs, now abundantly apparent, while the power of the visual for imagining and knowing the undersea remains.

By Ann Elias,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Coral Empire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From vividly colored underwater photographs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to life-size dioramas re-creating coral reefs and the bounty of life they sustained, the work of early twentieth-century explorers and photographers fed the public's fascination with reefs. In the 1920s John Ernest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated and often highly staged photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a virgin, unexplored, and fantastical territory. In Coral Empire Ann Elias traces the visual and social history of Williamson and Hurley and how their modern media spectacles yoked the…


Book cover of Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

Noel Keough Author Of Sustainability Matters: Prospects for a Just Transition in Calgary, Canada’s Petro-City

From my list on myth demonstrating why sustainability matters.

Why am I passionate about this?

Injustice has always motivated my research and activism. I have always been fascinated by nature and by the complexity of cities. For 25 years I have pursued these passions through the lens of sustainability. In 1996, I co-founded the not-for-profit Sustainable Calgary Society. My extensive work and travel in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, have given me a healthy skepticism of the West’s dominant cultural myths of superiority and benevolence and a keen awareness of the injustice of the global economic order. My book selections shed light on these myths and suggest alternative stories of where we come from, who we are, and who we might become. 

Noel's book list on myth demonstrating why sustainability matters

Noel Keough Why did Noel love this book?

In these times of Black Lives Matter, emboldened white-supremicists, and with European dominance descendant, Born into Blackness is a revelatory and blunt dose of historical reality. I was not fully aware of the centrality of the slave economy in Europe’s rise to global dominance. Most importantly, I was ignorant of the level of cultural, political, and economic sophistication of the African nations when the Portuguese first explored the west coast of Africa. I had some understanding of the Haitian revolution and its manifestation of the enlightenment ideals, but this book opened my eyes to the historical ripples of the revolution: the Louisiana purchase, ceding much of present-day Southern US from Napoleon’s France; the sale and forced-march of thousands of slaves into the cotton-growing south, fueling an economic take-off that made the US an imperial power.

By Howard W. French,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Born in Blackness as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In a sweeping narrative that traverses 600 years, one that eloquently weaves precise historical detail with poignant personal reportage, Pulitzer Prize finalist Howard W. French retells the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in America and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanising engagement with the "darkest" continent.

Born in Blackness dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures whose stories have been repeatedly etiolated and erased over centuries, from unimaginably rich medieval African emperors who traded with Asia; to Kongo sovereigns who…


Book cover of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

Katherine Paugh Author Of The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition

From my list on the Dobbs decision in deep historical context.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Associate Professor of Atlantic World Women’s History at the University of Oxford. The history of race, gender, and childbearing is my passion and my profession. The Dobbs decision pissed me TF off and inspired me to write this list. I hope you enjoy these books, and never stop questioning why women’s reproductive lives are controlled so minutely and why their reproductive labour is unpaid and unacknowledged.

Katherine's book list on the Dobbs decision in deep historical context

Katherine Paugh Why did Katherine love this book?

Jennifer Morgan’s history of childbearing in the Black Atlantic cracked open an entirely new field, exposing how American society has for centuries relied on Black women’s work as mothers. Her attention to the role of reproduction in the perpetuation of racial slavery in the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exposed how European imperialism had, from its inception, relied upon pushing Black women into dual roles as labourers in the fields of new world plantations and also as labouring mothers. Morgan’s analysis of European travel literature highlights how white men’s perceptions of Black women’s bodies was shaped by these dual roles, as for example in the recurring trope that depicted African women as able to suckle infants over their shoulder whilst attending to other sorts of labour. 

By Jennifer L. Morgan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Laboring Women as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in…


Book cover of Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace

Raven Maragh-Lloyd Author Of Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age

From my list on internet activism (hint: the kids are actually alright).

Why am I passionate about this?

I write about race and technology, and specifically the histories of Black folks as they influence online activities, from memes and community-building to care networks and activist efforts. I use theory, research, and most importantly lived experiences to tell the story of Black digital practices. The books I choose here represent how diverse my thinking is when it comes to this topic: from fiction to non-fiction, these works are as fluid yet meaningful as I think identity is, on and offline.

Raven's book list on internet activism (hint: the kids are actually alright)

Raven Maragh-Lloyd Why did Raven love this book?

I fell in love with this book as a young graduate school student at the University of Iowa. Curled up in my tiny 500-square-foot apartment, I devoured the book, not realizing morning had turned into afternoon and then evening.

At a time in the early 2000s when "serious" scholarship largely included Black people using technology in condescending and pathologizing ways, I read Everett sharply responding with counter-evidence of Black publics' involvement at every turn of media developments.

The book, I remember, made me feel like writing a counter-history that places "us" at the center is not only possible but transformational.

By Anna Everett,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Digital Diaspora as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Gorée: Point of Departure

Curdella Forbes Author Of A Tall History of Sugar

From my list on genre-busting love and other improbable things.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was born in a Jamaican far-district just before independence. That historical fact is only one aspect of my in-between childhood. My daily imaginative fare was European fairy tales; my mother’s stories of growing up; and folktales, rife with plantation monsters, that my grand-uncle told. There was no distance between life and those tales: our life was mythic. The district people were poor. So they understood inexactitudes profoundly enough to put two and two together and make five. They worshipped integrity, and church was central. Inevitably, genre-crossing, “impossible” realities, and the many ways love interrupts history, were set in my imagination by the time I was seven and knew I would write.

Curdella's book list on genre-busting love and other improbable things

Curdella Forbes Why did Curdella love this book?

For me, growing up in the Caribbean, books that don’t separate between the “naturalistic” world and so-called “other” worlds, always ring uniquely true. Gorée is a transnational story set in Castries, St. Lucia, New York City, USA, Dakar, Senegal, and London, England. It’s the story of a family whose great losses parallel the loss of Africa's children through the transatlantic slave trade and the difficult, if not impossible, return of those stolen away. The novel’s love and loss stories are all in some way are filtered through the door of no return on Gorée Island in Senegal. The stories are not told in the physical realm only and do not only rely on physical portals. Barry's loves and lovers must return to the past and make the journey in spirit too.

By Angela Barry,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Gorée as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A contemporary portrait of estrangement, this novel explores the African diaspora and the encounters made by people of African descent as they journey from New York to London, St. Lucia, and Senegal. Traveling to Africa to meet her ex-husband’s new family, Magdalene and her daughter Khadi are brought face-to-face with the perils of forgotten pasts—both social and cultural. And when Khadi's trip to the slave port of Goree takes an unfavorable turn, certain divisions in global culture become evident, making this a powerful investigation into the continuing repercussions of the slave trade.


Book cover of Omenana to Infinity

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki Author Of Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature In A Pandemic

From my list on introduce you to African speculative short fiction.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an African speculative fiction writer who had long hoped to see the development of African speculative fiction being embraced by the larger SFF community, it was a joy to see all these anthologies showcasing the works of Africans and platforming them for a larger audience to see. And it's been a joy as well to contribute to this growth both as an award-winning writer and editor of African speculative short fiction. 

Oghenechovwe's book list on introduce you to African speculative short fiction

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki Why did Oghenechovwe love this book?

Omenana to Infinity is an anthology of collected works formerly published in Omenana Magazine. The anthology is edited by Mazi Nwonwu and Chinelo Onwualu, like the magazine its stories are culled from. The duo also founded and edited the magazine which is the first African, exclusively speculative fiction magazine. It's important to me because it contains some of the earliest works of speculative short fiction by African writers I would read as an issue of a magazine and did a great lot in platforming speculative fiction writers on the continent. 

Book cover of Black Europe and the African Diaspora

Laura Visser-Maessen Author Of Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots

From my list on Black Europe.

Why am I passionate about this?

My current research centers on the organizing strategies of 20th and 21st-century Black activists in the U.S. and western Europe and on the U.S. as a reference culture for European anti-racism movements, particularly in my native country, the Netherlands. I believe the recent Black Lives Matter protests in Europe are an example of the effectiveness of diasporic politics and the next phase in a much longer history of homegrown activism. Foregrounding ‘Black Europe’ as an independent field of study accordingly helps to create much needed critical knowledge about Black Europeans’ history, agency, and needs as we navigate further into the volatile twenty-first century, while simultaneously challenging the perimeters of diasporic meaning and the centrality of ‘Black America’ within.

Laura's book list on Black Europe

Laura Visser-Maessen Why did Laura love this book?

As one of the first scholarly attempts to investigate the Black experience on a continental scale (as opposed to in individual European nations), this edited volume presents a good introduction to the multifaceted questions and approaches that emerge when studying this topic. Offering insights from various scholarly disciplines and 20th and 21st-century case studies from individual countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands, it provides thoughtful essays that explore the meanings of ‘Blackness’ and belonging in Europe, and the roles the local, national, global, and metaphysical play within (imaginary) diasporic discourse and identity. As such, it invites critical thinking about the strengths and limitations of the usability of ‘Black Europe’ as a concept and unit of analysis.   

By Darlene Clark Hine (editor), Trica Danielle Keaton (editor), Stephen Small (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Black Europe and the African Diaspora as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and "Black Europe" itself as lived and perceived realities.

Contributors are…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in African diaspora, Slavery, and West Africa?

African Diaspora 24 books
Slavery 306 books
West Africa 27 books