Fans pick 100 books like Weeping Britannia

The Ghost Map is the fantastic story of an important Cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

The book swept me along with its narrative, plunging straight into the fetid world of Victorian London. Johnson weaves together the stories of the people affected, and the desperate hunt by Dr. John Snow to understand the cause of the disease. He also provides fascinating descriptions of the dangers to life in a time before sewers, and the evolution of such systems that ultimately transformed city life.

I definitely look at toilets, pipes, and sewer grates differently after reading this book.

This book is my favorite historian, Rohan McWilliam, writing about his favorite thing, London’s West End.

It’s about actors and singers and dancers and the audiences that flocked to their performances. It’s about the West End being a place of extremes, where cutting-edge ‘high culture’ lived next to accessible popular culture and sex work. McWilliam’s notion of the West End as the first ‘pleasure district’ was the first time I understood how opera houses and theaters and department stores and nightclubs and restaurants and street performers somehow all go together and add up to more than the sum of the parts.

It’s a scholarly achievement and an entertaining read. 

As some reactions to the first season of the television show Bridgerton have made clear, many people need to believe that Black people first arrived in Britain after World War II, and that Britain + the past = whites only. But it wasn’t so!

Black people have been British, and part of British history, for hundreds of years. I’m embarrassed how little I learned about Black Britons in studying British history in college and graduate school; this book has been a fantastic way to learn more.

I thought I had read enough about Queen Victoria to last a lifetime, but I was wrong! This amazing book offers a new perspective on Queen Victoria as “an Indian Maharani” as well as  “British monarch,”  and explores not just what India meant to the queen, but what the queen meant to Indians.

This lyrical, book-length essay is a meditation not so much on a diagnosis as on one of its most visible expressions—tears. Exploring depression through the lens of the phenomenon of crying, The Crying Book is loaded with facts both esoteric and banal. Yet it is also deeply personalized by author Heather Christle’s reflections on her own struggles with depressive episodes, as well as on the deaths of other poets to suicide, and the allure and danger of romanticizing such acts. Christle’s loose, fragmentary approach gives her the freedom to wander far and wide as she considers the art and act of crying, allowing depression to surface as an experience that is at once individual and deeply embedded in its cultural and historical contexts.

You can trust Pinky McKay. A Lactation Consultant with decades of experience who has worked with thousands of parents, there’s not a baby problem that she hasn’t encountered and solved. This compassionate book covers the many reasons baby may be crying and is loaded with solid, kind, useful, practical advice to help frazzled parents soothe their precious bundles. Importantly, it also has baby feeding information you can trust. Written with bite-size ideas so that tired parents can read it in five-minute chunks if they choose, Pinky’s empathy for babies and parents can be felt on every page.

This book, by Kirk Wallace Johnson tells the story of a bizarre heist that took place at the British Museum of Natural History in 2009.

The thief, Edwin Rist, was a 20-year-old American flute student who broke into the museum to steal hundreds of priceless, exotic bird specimens, many of which were collected by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the 19th century.

What first drew me to the book was that I knew Edwin’s dad back when I was in grad school. But what kept me turning the pages was the writing and story. The book explores the world of Victorian-era fly-tying and the obsession that collectors have with rare feathers.

Rist, who was also an avid fly-tier, had planned the heist to obtain feathers for his own collection, which he intended to sell to other collectors. Many of the collectors and fly-tying enthusiasts knew that the feathers probably… show more.

This infamous child killers work remains banned in my home country (UK) but is widely available online. Brady and Hindley (his partner) were child killers, both incarcerated for life and both died in prison.

This book was read for curiosity only, whilst writing my own ‘inside the mind of a psychopathic killer’ narrative, I wanted to understand how a ‘real serial killer’ would really think. He wrote The Gates of Janus whilst incarcerated at Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital.

Brady’s intention was that it be published anonymously, however, this could never be allowed to happen. It is in 2 parts 1) He describes his involvement in the 6 murders from the perspective of ‘understanding himself’ and part 2) His advice as offered to law enforcement in solving such future cases (in this it falls flat).

I recommend it only if you want to understand his thought process – just as Hitler’s Mein… show more.

I don’t know if misery loves company but I’m convinced that failure does. When their projects fall flat, my kid likes nothing better than to hear about the wreckage of mine: romantic fiascos, flunked tests, athletic defeats. Joe Moran’s “book of solace,” If You Should Fail, is in part a compendium of stories like these, in part an effort to dislodge our tendency to think of human beings as winners or losers at all. “To call any life a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives,” Moran writes. “A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.” 

This is the book that really turned me on to political history – though I suppose I must have been interested already, or my parents wouldn’t have bought it for me for my fourteenth birthday! It’s a fairly light read, but it’s a great way of learning the outlines of what happened in British politics in the thirty-odd years after 1945. When it was published it still seemed as though Margaret Thatcher would be Prime Minister forever …