78 books like Zeitoun

I loved this book because it’s a World War II story (my favorite time period), which I can’t get enough of, and its protagonist, Marie-Laure, is a young blind girl. By the time she’s twelve, she has learned to navigate Nazi-occupied Paris from a miniature of the city her father has built for her.

This is a girl with many fears, her blindness being just one, but she pushes through them all in order to help her country overcome its worst nightmare. Her bravery is off the charts!

I am a historian of early America, including the American Revolution, though I'm not a huge reader (or writer) of conventional military history. Published in 2001, Elizabeth Fenn's book was in many ways ahead of its time in emphasizing how military outcomes—and strategies—were often contingent on other seemingly unrelated factors. In this case, she argues that smallpox was a decisive force in the American War for Independence. The continental scope of her study, moreover, provides a link between that war and the ultimately successful military offensives that the independent United States inflicted on disease-weakened Native American peoples in the post-revolutionary era.

Climate change may well be increasing the frequency and intensity of violent storms and hurricanes, but they are certainly nothing new.

This is a vividly written account of what has been dubbed one of the worst natural disasters to have ever hit the United States, the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900. The narrative is constructed using the letters and reports from Isaac Cline, a meteorologist working at the US Weather Bureau at the time.

The storm described in this book occurred 124 years ago, yet readers will find eerie precursors to the issues we hear being discussed globally today: despair at our seeming hubris and disturbing unpreparedness in the face of increasingly volatile and unpredictable natural events.

Back when people understood hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters as literally being "acts of God," they sensibly concluded that human intervention could not prevent them. Yet that language—and its wide-ranging implications for public policy—has persisted, even as scientists have come to understand the physical causes of disasters and, increasingly, to believe that no disaster is wholly "natural." Ted Steinberg shows how government and corporate leaders' perpetuation of the idea of disasters as "natural" or even divinely ordained helps them to evade responsibility and avoid meaningful policy changes that might prevent future catastrophes. (Ripped from the headlines, climate change denial is a prime example!) Gripping case studies of famous disasters like the Chicago Fire and the San Francisco earthquake make this serious book a compelling read.

Though this book is not a study of movement organizing, it shows just how necessary the task of political and economic empowerment remains, if people are to escape cycles of low wages, dangerous work, persistent racism, and public neglect. This book inspired me, and even more so my students, for the connections it uncovered in a declining North Carolina railroad town: a growing, fiercely competitive, and radically unsafe poultry processing industry; persistent neighborhood segregation and racial disrespect, despite the widespread integration of Blacks and women into workplaces; the exclusion of Blacks and poor whites from local political power; the growth of mother-only and time-pressed poor families increasingly reliant on low wages and cheap food to get by. These are only a few of the topics Simon compressed into his lucid and readable portrait of the tragedy of chicken and the unfinished business of our time.

Christopher Morris's chronological scope is break-taking, and not all five hundred years of his story deal directly with the hurricanes and other disasters that have routinely afflicted the Lower Mississippi River region. The Big Muddy describes the interplay between humans and the environment, and especially human efforts to engineer the boundaries between wetlands and dry agricultural acreage (first for rice, and later for cotton). After more than a century of hubris-laden and profit-driven tinkering, the Katrina disaster was more or less inevitable—and very much in keeping with the region's tradition of inequitably sharing both the short-term benefits and long-term costs of environmental disruption.

I am sure everyone remembers where they were on the day of September 11, 2001. I was in Mexico, having flown past the Twin Towers the day before.

This is the first real-life account I have read about what happened on the ground that day and is a moving depiction of an everyday hero. As a reader, you can only imagine if you could have acted in the same way.

This non-fiction account introduces us to Welles Crowther, an equities trader and former firefighter who always carried a red bandanna in honor of his father. In the South Tower that day, directly after the attack, he used that bandanna to shield his face from smoke as he led people to safety, returning into the South Tower over and over again until it collapsed.

He sadly didn't survive, but his legacy as the "Man in the Red Bandanna" lives on in… show more.

I first heard about this story of extraordinary heroism while listening to a podcast interview with one of the survivors of a plane crash in 1972.

The plane was carrying an entire football team and their families between Uruguay and Chile. A search party could not find them in the icy ridges of the Andes, and it came down to two of the survivors who, despite malnutrition and the extreme weather and terrain, made a days-long trek to find help. Thanks to them, the remaining survivors could be located and rescued.

While many readers might shudder at the lengths the group went to in order to survive (cannibalism), what shone for me was the selflessness of the two survivors who trekked for days to find help.

As someone who lived in New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, I often wondered why different communities bounced back from that terrible flooding. Mark van Landingham finds that, despite low levels of English fluency, education, and income, the Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American community of Village De L’Est brought back more people and businesses than any other part of the city. Within a year they were back to 90% capacity of pre-Katrina levels. This community's residents – connected to each other through Catholicism and a shared language and history – worked collectively to help evacuees who had scattered across the country. Through collective action, they rebuilt their community even better, adding in new schools, medical centers, and even urban farms.

The Tin Roof Blowdown shows us New Orleans, and the surrounding areas the days after Katrina raged havoc. Taking into account the lives that have been traumatized as crime and murders increased nine-fold. Detective David Robicheaux of Iberia Parish finds himself in the midst of a murder in an old-time neighborhood, as he tries to figure out if the murder of a local black boy during a robbery was racially motivated or not. The details and stories of this horrific tragedy show the bleakness of the aftermath and that not only did many reach their deaths, but how many who survived died also. No order exists as Robicheaux tries to unravel his latest mystery.