56 books like PrairyErth

A small lifeboat is spotted off the coast of Chile in 1821, below the gunnels skeletal men cling to a pile of human bones. Nathaniel Philbrick opens his National Book Award-winning story with an almost incomprehensibly brutal scene and rarely takes a breath for the remaining 300-odd pages. Considered to be the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is the true story of a ship stove in by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the harrowing survival of some of its crew. 

In 1907, at the Carlisle Indian School (Carlisle, PA), a scrappy Native American football team coached by Pop Warner invented the passing game and revolutionized the game of football as it was being played by the Ivy League schools with deadly results. (So many players were dying from injuries, President Teddy Roosevelt almost banned the game in 1905.) Sally Jenkins’ book is eye-opening history that throws open the doors to the Carlisle Indian School and grippingly tells the story of how the “Carlisle Redmen,” as they were called, became the darling of the nation, and eventually took on Harvard in a legendary 1912 game pitting two young running backs against each other: Jim Thorpe and Dwight Eisenhower.

If you’re a football fan and/or have an interest in Native American history, this book entertains with Pop Warner’s famous trick plays (e.g., the “hidden ball trick”) and the Harvard boys performing the… show more.

Are you a baseball fan who grumbles about modern players being overpaid and coddled? If so, this book will transport you to baseball’s roughest epoch, and reward you with a ballbag of “Who knew?”s as to how the game was played and fought in the late 1800s. Back then, a different species of men took the field, men who would not recognize our 21st-century diamond dancers, who slip on gloves for every occasion: catching, batting, even sliding.

A quick sampler of Who Knew?s. In 1884, an ump commanded, “Striker-up!” A pitcher could hit a batter as many times as he wanted, and the batter had to take it. The pitcher could be fined for such abuse, but the only way a batter got to first was by hitting the ball. A pitcher could “twirl the sphere” and baffle the hitter until the pitches “twisted his mental trolley.” A twisted mental… show more.

Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin ranks among the top of Isaacson’s excellent biographies.

He provides thorough detail and background of Franklin’s life, examining him through the eyes of the quintessential American: an entrepreneur, a writer, a small businessman, a cosmopolitan, and a statesman (albeit lacking the higher offices). 

Isaacson briefly treats Franklin’s religious views and the reasons why Franklin moved away from the Puritan faith of his forebearers and embraced a creed more akin to deism. 

This historical novel in verse brings the Kansas prairie alive in all its beauty and harshness. The story is tense with few light moments as young May B is stranded alone in a sod house as blizzards rage outside. She’s a realistic heroine, tempted to despair but ultimately finding hidden sources of strength. Oh, and she suffers from dyslexia. Sometimes I think novels in verse will be too artsy or literary, but they’re actually easy to read, right? Perfect for a struggling reader, perhaps one with dyslexia.

Win By Two is the true story about a Kansas City drug dealer and a private school teacher, bonded together through basketball. This is a powerful story about race, leadership, and what can happen when people get outside of their comfort zones and build bridges in their community. It also challenges our internal biases that we may not even know exist.

Lois Ruby is a YA veteran who has more than 20 books to her name, many of them historical fiction, including the beloved Steal Away Home, which appeared on basically every year-end best list back in 1994. She also happens to be my mom. And her latest book, which takes place during the “red scare” of the 1950s, is among her best. It’s a tense story about a baseball-crazy 13-year-old boy whose parents are accused of being communist sympathizers, turning his life upside down when he’s supposed to be studying for his bar mitzvah. The clock-ticking backdrop, leading up to the notorious execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for supposedly passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviets, gives the whole book terrifyingly high stakes.

Scott Thomas was nominated for a Bram Stoker award for his spine-chilling story about four famous horror writers who are invited to spend Halloween in a haunted house as a publicity stunt, only to find themselves tormented by the unholy entity that roams its silent halls. Clearly an expert on the horror genre himself, Thomas brings a much-needed new twist to the haunted house trope and elevates it to a fearsome new level. But this novel’s real strength lies in its character development. A horror story only works if you care enough about the characters to hope (and pray) for their survival, and by the end of this one, you’ll feel like you’re clinging to old, familiar friends as they fight for their lives.      

The fact that the capitalist class organizations, with their use of capital strike and flight, lobbying, funding right-wing “grassroots” organizations, think tanks, media, and Chicago school intellectuals, wanted to drive economic policy in a certain direction does not inevitably lead to the conclusion that they would have succeeded in achieving these goals. Neoliberal policies could not have been implemented in even a nominal democracy without at least a modicum of support from its victims. Remarkably, large sections of the American electorate vote for and support policies that favor the very business class that has profited from their economic decline. This is the first book to describe the abandonment of the Democratic Party by less-educated Whites which had a significant effect on the American shift to the right from the 1970s onward. My co-authors and I explore this shift in up-to-date detail in our book.

Bring on the Blessings is one of the finest series I have ever read. I am always eager to find a new series that keeps me waiting for the next installment. Blessings by Beverly Jenkins is the best example I can think of.

When I read about the all Black town that took in 5 orphans and raised them, I got so caught up in each of their stories. I learned so much. Beverly calls her type of writing "edutainment." I now know why. Based on the true town in Kansas (Nicodemus) settled in the migration of the dusters of the civil war, I was all in. Fictional characters based on a real town make me want to visit the historic site.

My heart melted when the little mute girl finally spoke, the car thief who became a mechanic, and the whole town that deals out punishment by making those… show more.