The most recommended cultural heritage books

Ocean Vuong writes in a poetic prose that transforms memories into fragments that linger in your mind. His choice to write this book as fictionalized letters to his mother was deeply beautiful and heart-wrenching. This is a book that took me on a journey through the Vietnam War, my first queer experiences, and the journey of finding out what it means to become American.

I loved this evocative and moving novel, winner of the Voss Literary Prize, for its accurate portrayal of the personal conflict that doctors often struggle with (particularly female doctors) as they try to balance the demands of work and family life.

It follows a day in the life of pregnant family physician Dr. Dina Ronen as she attends to the diverse needs of her patients and her young family while struggling to reconcile with the demanding ghosts of her personal and collective past. This is a beautifully constructed and visceral work from Australian family physician Leah Kaminsky.

We greatly admire this born-digital “scalar book” for its attempt to build a decolonizing “counter-archive” out of one of the most in/famous western archives of Indigenous materials. Edward S. Curtis was an early 20th-century photographer, whose major collection, The North American Indian, defined the stereotypic image of the vanishing Native. It succeeded in capturing and “othering” Natives as somehow heroic and stoic, but also primitive and gone. In consultation with many Native tribes, this digital book reveals how Curtis’s work “performs,” or does that work of western archives. By juxtaposing his compelling images with short essays that contextualize and thus humanize his photographic subjects, this project allows us to acknowledge and repair the injustices of the past in the present.

I was a religious studies minor in college and love reading about traditional religious practices. When I met Nigerian American author Okey Ndibe at a writing retreat in Kenya, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy of his second novel. This satirical novel gives new life to the meaning of worship. When statue buyer, Ike Uzondu steals an African sculpture from a New York shop and sells it in his ancestral village in Nigeria, the two worlds collide and we witness the cost of modernity to the human spirit

This collection of short stories offers a contemporary Hawaiʻi full of flawed characters who face challenges both unique to the islands and universal in motivation.

Kahakauwila explores the concept of paradise and the price paid for it. They are stories that capture the spirit and tenacity of Hawaiʻi, the nuanced layers of its social fabric, and brings me home every time I read them. 

The first time I read it, I was alone in a cabin in the woods in the middle of my first writing residency. Suddenly I was no longer pressed up against a wood stove trying to stay warm. Through her gifted storytelling, all the sights and sounds and smells of home came rushing in, both comforting and familiar.

You don’t need to know Hawaiʻi to enjoy this book, but by the end of reading it, you will feel like you do.

Grounded in historical fact, The Orenda (The Magic) tells the story of Jesuit missionaries caught up in the war between the Wendats (Hurons) and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) living on the shores of Lake Huron in the mid-1600s. It’s a very dark book, with its depictions of ritual torture not for the squeamish, but it perfectly captures the time and culture of two very different civilizations, grappling to understand one another. Bowden does an excellent job of capturing the thoughts and outlook of the Wendat war chief Bird, and the French missionaries struggling to Christianize his village.

I loved this book because it helped me to understand the Indians’ way of thinking and their outlook on the world.

The key contribution of this book was the systemic understanding of cultural heritage. The collected articles and case studies represent a holistic and integrated concept of cultural heritage. Seeing cultural heritage as a social and political construct, as the authors describe it, opened the door for two new approaches:

First, the integration of different types of heritage that are usually treated separately, e.g., intangible heritage, tangible heritage, etc. And, second, starting to focus on the social parts of cultural heritage, basically the role of people. In my personal view all heritage is only relevant if it is relevant to people, and this book helped me to shape this conviction.

I truly admire how the author connects the different government levels and doesn't shy away from the obvious complexity this brings forward. This big-picture approach is a refreshing alternative to many case-focused articles and books and naturally speaks to my… show more.

The Zone of Interest, a novel by Martin Amis, tells a story that might not be to everyone’s taste—a love triangle among two Nazi officers and an officer’s wife, against the backdrop of the death camp in Auschwitz.

The late novelist’s trademark cunning and wit is a perfect counterpoint to the obviously somber material. No one would expect that a story set in Auschwitz might contain piercing (and very dark) humor, but Amis pulls it off.

His prose is jumpy, elliptical, highbrow, and lowbrow throughout. The reader may be surprised to find herself sympathizing with the officers at times, while marveling at the horrible compromises forced upon a concentration camp prisoner. The Zone of Interest is a triumph of tone, voice, and pyrotechnic prose. 

This groundbreaking volume paved the way for a modern understanding of urban heritage and, by this, enabled more focus on resource qualities that can be used to respond to climate change.

Even a few years old, this book marked an important milestone in the evolution of a modern heritage understanding that is now often called the New Heritage Approach. Leveraging the since-then prevalent concept of cultural heritage as objects (buildings), this book elaborates based on the recommendation for the historic urban landscape, an idea of urban heritage that consists of different layers, functions, etc., and emphasizes the relations and connections between these different entities.

I lived in Bangkok for six years. This is the rare novel that captures the sounds, the smells, the spirit, and spirituality of the place. Bangkok in fact is the main character, with supporting roles by humans who make their lives there, from the nineteenth century to the present and into the not-so-distant future, when water lays permanent claim to a city built more or less at sea level. You can expect lyrical writing and engaging characters, whether human or urban.