Here are 96 books that Whose Names Are Unknown fans have personally recommended if you like
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I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
The family stories in this book bring history to life on a personal level. The five families are connected by their immigrant experience, but they approached food in different ways, from family-oriented German biergartens to kosher delis to imported olive oil. Each new wave of immigrants brought their own unique traditions to America, and the neighborhood evolved as each successive group brought something new to the metaphorical table.
I find the tension between maintaining food traditions and adapting them to a new nation fascinating. It also made me think about how much each group contributed to the American diet.
“Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round.” — Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World
97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits—shopping, cooking, and eating—of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
This book made me want to pour a glass of cider. Diane Flynt writes about her hunt for heirloom apples as the owner of Foggy Ridge Ciders in Virginia. Along the way, she shares the rich history of apples in the South.
Her writing is poetic. I could almost taste the apples and smell the evening air in the orchards as she checked on her trees. Flynt makes a strong case for why we need agricultural diversity and how the terroir of place is important for the food we produce.
My only regret in reading this book is that Flynt is retired, so I’ll never be able to taste her fine ciders.
For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was central to the region for over 200 years. Colorful characters abound in this history, including aristocratic Belgian immigrants, South Carolina plantation owners, and multiple presidents, each group changing the course of southern orchards. She shows how southern apples, ranging from northern…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
I love books that challenge our accepted knowledge of the past. For over 100 years, textbooks have told children that Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical reaper. Spoiler alert—it turns out the textbooks were all wrong.
Ott takes us through the whole story—how the reaper was actually invented, how the McCormick family created a monopoly on farm equipment, and how they eventually created a monopoly on history. I especially enjoyed the final section of the book, which explains exactly how historians preserved and manipulated history to serve the McCormick company’s ends.
Harvesting History explores how the highly contentious claim of Cyrus McCormick's 1831 invention of the reaper came to be incorporated into the American historical canon as a fact. Spanning the late 1870s to the 1930s, Daniel P. Ott reveals how the McCormick family and various affiliated businesses created a usable past about their departed patriarch, Cyrus McCormick, and his role in creating modern civilization through advertising and the emerging historical profession. The mythical invention narrative was widely peddled for decades by salesmen and in catalogs, as well as in corporate public education campaigns and eventually in history books, to justify…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
This book is delightful. Shapiro is one of my favorite food historians. I recommend all her books, but if you’ve never read her before, start here.
It’s full of surprising and unexpected stories. Eleanor Roosevelt extracts culinary revenge, Eva Braun drinks champagne while worrying about her weight, and Helen Gurley Brown binges on sugar-free gelatin. These stories left me thinking about my own relationship with food and what that says about the society we live in.
'If you find the subject of food to be both vexing and transfixing, you'll love What She Ate' Elle
Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt dished up Eggs Mexican (a concoction of rice, fried eggs, and bananas) in the White House?
Or that Helen Gurley Brown's commitment to 'having it all' meant dining on supersized portions of diet gelatine?
In the irresistible What She Ate, Laura Shapiro examines the plates, recipe books and shopping trolleys of six extraordinary women, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Eva Braun. Delving into diaries, newspaper articles, cook books and more, Shapiro casts a different light on…
I’ve always liked to imagine how things might have been. In my thinking, a good historical novel is a story set inside the larger world of the time, like a nesting doll with a story inside a story. I look for accurate research, well-developed characters, a unique storyline, and dialogue that comes alive on the page. I expect the history to be a backdrop for a story of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. This is what I like to read and how I have written my novels set during the Civil War, Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, and the home front of World War 2.
I love well written historical fiction set in many different time periods. Death of a Rainmaker is a historical mystery set in 1930s Oklahoma during the height of the Dust Bowl days.
It includes fascinating information about rainmaking scams, the Civilian Conservation Corps, severe climate changes, Depression politics, Government programs to aid citizens, and rural life during the 1930s. The main character is a small-town sheriff trying to do the right thing with limited resources. Supporting characters are diverse and well developed.
The mystery unfolds with delicious precision. Death of a Rainmaker meets my criteria for a great read.
Finalist for the 2019 Oklahoma Book Awards, Fiction
"The murder investigation allows Loewenstein to probe into the lives of proud people who would never expose their troubles to strangers. People like John Hodge, the town's most respected lawyer, who knocks his wife around, and kindhearted Etha Jennings, who surreptitiously delivers home-cooked meals to the hobo camp outside town because one of the young Civilian Conservation Corps workers reminds her of her dead son. Loewenstein's sensitive treatment of these dark days in the Dust Bowl era offers little humor but a whole lot of compassion." --New York Times Book Review
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in western Sonoma County, California, surrounded by forests, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet this idyllic setting was shaken by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; civil rights riots; Nixon and Watergate; the Pentagon Papers; Weather Underground bombings; Patti Hearst with a machine gun; and four students killed at Kent State. These events led me to major in Politics at UC Santa Cruz and become an investigative journalist. I soon realized the U.S. is built not only on equal rights and freedom but also on systemic disparity, injustice, and violence.
Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.
Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in the vast farms of California and the brutal exploitation of the owner classes. The Joads are slapped with the bitter understanding that the promise of California exists largely in myth. Yet always Steinbeck returns to the promises of human connection and even happiness that beckon from just over the next…
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
Because of the presence of my four beloved grandparents throughout my growing up years, (all four of my grandparents even attended my wedding), I’ve always enjoyed relationships with older people. My comfort with older people translates into my friendships where many of the women in my life are quite a bit older than me. These intergenerational relationships offer wisdom and experience that informs my own life. I hold an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and have written one novel for adults and one for middle-grade readers. My past jobs include being a television engineer, an adjunct professor, and a publishing professional.
Single and self-sufficient Dottie O’Connell farms her 300 acres with strength and independence, not needing anyone. When she finds herself the primary caretaker to her friend’s young daughter Mattie after the girl is orphaned by a tragic fire, Dottie suddenly is thrust into guardianship with a young person she had no desire to raise. While I admired Dottie for taking on such a life-changing responsibility, at times I couldn’t fathom Dottie’s choices involving the girl. Thankfully, the author peels away the layers of Dottie’s wounds, allowing us at least to understand her while maybe not agreeing with her. Each of us has a Dottie story that influences our decisions for good or for bad.
This is an unforgettable debut novel about the nature of forgiveness, the debts we owe, and the mysteries of what we call grace. When Dottie Connell adopts her best friend's daughter out of a combination of spite and loyalty, she must confront her ideas on motherhood, sexuality, and God. Set in rural Ohio, "This Heavy Silence" spans ten years in Dottie's life. She loves the land despite its bitterness and hardship. She raises her adopted daughter and farms her family's three hundred acres in a time and place unaccustomed to independent women. Her struggle to buy back the farm comes…
I’m a historical novelist originally from Ohio. In Civil War lessons at school, we learned about battles and generals and read The Red Badge of Courage and other books centering on men’s experiences. With the exception of Florence Nightingale, women were largely absent from the discussions. I want to know about the women. As an adult, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, where I learned of the mill workers, mostly women and children, who, in 1864, were arrested and sent north by Federal forces for making Confederate cloth. Their fates largely remain a mystery, and I wrote my book in order to imagine what we may never know.
I love stories about ordinary women living through extraordinary times. In this story, the protagonist, Joetta, a North Carolina yeoman farmer who does not share the Confederacy’s view on slavery, attempts to stay neutral during the Civil War despite the ever-growing costs.
I admired the way Everhart deals with the relationship between Joetta and her teenage sons, boys old enough to assert their independence and choose their own way, no matter how much she may wish they chose differently.
From the author of The Saints of Swallow Hill, an evocative, morally complex novel set in rural 19th century North Carolina, as one woman fights to keep her family united, her farm running, and her convictions whole during the most devastating and divisive period in American history, perfect for readers of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles.
Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and…
I grew up in rural Iowa in the 1950s and 60s, a place far removed from most of the world. Our town had no movie theater, no library, no anything except for a truly excellent baseball field. So we played – day, night, with full teams or three brothers or all by yourself. We also were tasked by our father with caring for the diamond, which was the home park for the local semi-pro team, the Cascade Reds. When I left town – fled would be a better description – I took my love of baseball with me. I played baseball in Vietnam, watched games in Hiroshima, Japan, Seoul, Korea, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City, and St. Louis. I could go on like this for a long time, but I think you get the picture.
This novel is less well-known, and much more accomplished, than the movie based on it – Field of Dreams. Where the movie is sappy, the book is lyrical and warmly nostalgic for a time and place – rural Iowa in the 1970s. There is a clear magical realism vibe to the whole thing. The plot structure of the novel is a very shaggy dog involving a baseball field in a corn field, the kidnapping of a famous novelist and numerous dead people coming back to life. The book is big-hearted and much of the writing is luminous.
The inspiration for the beloved film Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella is the story about the beauty and history of baseball, and the power and endurance of a dream.
“A moonlit novel about baseball, dreams, family, the land, and literature."—Sports Illustrated
“If you build it, he will come.” These mysterious words, spoken by an Iowa baseball announcer, inspire Ray Kinsella to carve a baseball diamond in his cornfield in honor of his hero, the baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. What follows is both a rich, nostalgic look at one of our most cherished national pastimes and…
I’m fascinated by the mind-body-spirit’s impact on our human experience. Especially the aspect of mind, because deep within us resides the shadow-self described by Carl Jung. Most of us spend our lives hiding this part, but it’s there, waiting to pounce. These are the stories I tell, and with my background in Health and Wellness and in Creative Writing, I write paranormal, supernatural, and horror stories containing the simple truths about our human experience. All are designed to bring out the shadow lurking within and expose it to the light. As a counterpoint to these dark tales, I write evocative poetry, uplifting children’s stories, and some educational books with my writing partner, Derek R. King.
I love The Story of An Hour: Short Storyby Kate Chopin because this tale has a delicious plot twist and portrays irony at its finest. I resonate with the feminist message — the oppression and the realization of what the heart truly desires and the heartbreak of that being ripped away. Very emotive. I felt what the main character was feeling and didn’t see the ending coming. This is my favorite type of story and the kind I love to write.
