I’m currently listening to books on my drive to work and back, would love to learn more about history but it can’t be too dry. I want something that keeps my interest and leads me to reading more non fiction. Usually I’m a romance and fantasy reader.
by pumpkinspiceturtle
7 Comments
Nonfiction history isn’t usually my cup of tea, but Candice Millard is a great author for this. Very engaging narrative-driven writing style. I read *Destiny of the Republic* for a book club a few years ago and really enjoyed it.
*Girly Drinks* by Mallory O’Meara is the global history of woman and alcohol, it’s really interesting. She talks about different brews around the world – including more isolated communities in Africa and South America – how women have, historically, been brewers and how it’s important to a lot of women’s financial freedoms. And then also gender norms around drinking, and what’s an appropriate drink for a woman, and then later business women who ran breweries, distilleries, or wineries. Prohibition, and then the rise of tiki culture in the 1960s. It’s really fun.
*Motherland* by Julie Ioffe is a much more somber book about women in modern Russia, starting with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. She intertwines the stories of her great grandmothers, who were Jewish women and worked in the sciences, with the stories of prominent Russian women. She talks about the impact of Russian communism of their lives, and then Stalin’s reign, World War II, and the impact WWII had on women, right up until current day with Putin. It’s fascinating – Russian womanhood and feminism is a whole different beast than American womanhood and feminism.
Kate Lister has written *A Curious History of Sex* and *Harlots, Whores, and Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale* that are a lot of fun.
*Necropolis* by Kathryn Olivarius is dryer, but incredibly fascinating and kind of insane, it’s a history of New Orleans and yellow fever, and how the city embraced yellow fever as both an economic force and a way to reinforce racial hierarchy. Like the city was gross, because the city government refused to implement any public health policies.
*Unruly* by David Mitchell is a comedic history of English monarchs.
*Normal Women* by Philippa Gregory is a very long history of English women, starting with the Norman Conquest in 1066.
*Killers of the Flower Moon* by David Grann is about a 1920s conspiracy to steal the oil-rich land in Oklahoma out from under the Osage people, was recently a movie.
I’m not much of a nonfiction person, but I quite enjoyed propaganda girls by Lisa Rogan
It’s about a couple women who worked in various parts of the American propaganda department during ww2
I recently really enjoyed Longitude by Dava Sobel.
You might find microhistories a really good way to explore historical topics. They are history books that focus on a single issue through time.
Krakatoa by Winchester
Anything by Mary Roach is good.
I really liked The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women in the CIA by Liza Mundy.