The best books about the working class

Have you ever heard the story of Sinnetta Lambourne, the Romany girl who was the wife of Queen Elizabeth II’s great-grandfather? Her husband, the Reverend Charles (Charley) Cavendish-Bentinck was a man ahead of his times in his outlook. He followed his heart, against the wishes of his family and titled relatives. A generation earlier, Charley’s parents had been at the centre of a Regency-era scandal. His mother, married to the ‘richest commoner’ in the country, was the Duke of Wellington’s niece. Just weeks after the Battle of Waterloo, she eloped with her lover…

Discover the untold story of the British royal family’s recent history.

The big time, professional minstrel show lasted much longer than most people realize, from its origins in the 1840s to the early television era in the 1950s—more than 110 years. What was it, really, and how did it change over this long period? Why was it considered acceptable for so long, by almost everyone—even by many black Americans? What finally brought it down? This book explores its entire history, focusing particularly on the 20th-century mass media we know so well, radio, recordings, film, and television. Minstrel shows were featured in all of them, often performed by major stars and sometimes by blacks themselves. Major controversies are described, as is the surprising popularity of the format in Britain. This concise history of a now-controversial form of entertainment shows how we can too easily accept widely endorsed beliefs.

The River Road is an evocative novel about becoming a runner in 1972. Filled with compelling stories of runners, running, history, the 1972 U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials and the Munich Olympics, it brings to life an era in which the U.S. competed for gold in nearly every distance running event. As many of the sport’s icons dominate their events in Eugene and prepare for Munich, fifteen-year-old Lenny prepares for his first season of varsity cross country. Inspired by Jim Ryun, Frank Shorter and Steve Prefontaine, Lenny also learns that Olympic distance runners have come from Minnesota and trained on the same River Road on which he runs. A world of running lore that he never knew existed is opened to him and helps him begin to explore and realize his own ability to run.

“Protest” music is largely perceived as an unsubtle art form, a topical brand of songwriting that preaches to the converted. But popular music of all types has long given listeners food for thought. Fifty years before Vietnam, before the United States entered World War I, some of the most popular sheet music in the country featured anti-war tunes. The labor movement of the early decades of the century was fueled by its communal “songbook.” The Civil Rights movement was soundtracked not just by the gorgeous melodies of “Strange Fruit” and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but hundreds of other gospel-tinged ballads and blues.

My book is an anecdotal history of the progressive movements that have shaped the growth of the United States and the songs of all genres that have accompanied and defined them.

In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house—a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf—in Detroit’s majority-Bangladeshi “Banglatown.” Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to the bungalow in her new city where she gardens, befriends neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption.

Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricably linked with victory. One of NPR’s Best Books of 2021.

As an only child isolated within a troubled family, F. Scott Service found solace in fantasy and imagination, until a fateful day led to the discovery of his father’s Korean War field jacket. What began as innocent emulation and approval, eventually spiraled into a calamitous loss. Faced with a grievous divorce, post-traumatic stress, homelessness, substance abuse, and failure, one night communing with a loaded pistol became the mechanism for self-clarity.

Playing Soldier powerfully captures the unlearning of expectation, the celebration of individuality, and the nourishing of self-acceptance once buried by cultural stamps of approval and societal convention. Braided with humor, courage, fear, despair, and hope, his unflinching story of passage into adulthood and beyond stands as an inspiring example of how he re-forged his true, original self.

In recent years, I have followed national survey data which showed that the stable, marriage-based working-class family of the past was weakening before our eyes. I wanted to understand why, so I dove into the history of the working-class family; and I also looked in-depth at what has happened recently as the good factory jobs that supported most working-class men, and some working-class women, moved overseas or disappeared into computer chips. The result is my book, Labor’s Love Lost. I hope that Shakespeare isn’t upset about what I have done to his title.

Scots: The MitherTongue is a classic of contemporary Scottish culture. It is a passionately written history of how the Scots came to speak the way they do and acted as a catalyst for radical changes in attitude towards the language. Kay vigorously renews the social, cultural, and political debate on Scotland's linguistic future, and argues convincingly for the necessity to retain Scots for the nation to hold on to its intrinsic values. Language is central to people's existence, and this vivid account celebrates the survival of Scots in its dialects, literature, and song. The newspaper Scotland on Sunday chose Scots: The Mither Tongue as one of the best 100 Scottish books ever written. 

For the first years after I moved to Colorado, my impractical strategy for overcoming homesickness was to avoid any music or books that inspired nostalgia. Thirty years later however, music seems to me a powerful way to connect past and present, triggering memories at the same time as it offers new experiences. When  I was unable to travel to England during the COVID-19 pandemic, I turned to the music and lives of composers whose relationships to home and travel shaped the pursuit of their craft—Antonín Dvořák, Béla Bartók, and Benjamin Britten. Distant Melodies tells the stories of their American sojourns as they try to reconcile new surroundings with nostalgia for their homelands. The backdrop is my own changing relationship to England, Elgar’s music, and the idea of home. 

Set against the background of the Great Depression, this lyrical new novel is a powerful story of courage, survival, and friendship. Deep in the American South there once existed turpentine labor camps, notoriously squalid and hazardous environments. 

Swallow Hill is such a labor camp and three individuals, Delwood Reese, Rae Lynn Cobb, and Cornelia Riddle, each end up at this labor camp for their own personal reasons. There they come up against a dangerous boss man, a woods rider who goes by the name of Crow. Even as the three forge a strong bond, they will be forced to come to terms with the events of their past in order to escape the slave-like encampment, and seize the chance to begin again.