Books like Color: A Natural History of the Palette
12 books with a reading profile close to Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay. Outward-looking and clear-cut; a moderate read.
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1
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
Also outward-looking · history, narrative
In this historical account, Nathaniel Philbrick examines the fifty-year period beginning with the 1620 arrival of the Pilgrims and culminating in the devastation of King Philip’s War.
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2
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
Erik Larson reconstructs the final 1915 voyage of the luxury ocean liner Lusitania, tracking its path from New York toward the Irish coast during the early stages of World War I.
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3
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
Thomas Cahill argues that during the fifth century, as Germanic tribes dismantled the Roman Empire and burned its libraries, the classical tradition survived only on the remote island of Ireland.
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4
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan moved beyond the deep South to establish a stronghold in the American Midwest, specifically Indiana.
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5
The Bookseller of Kabul
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
Following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad lived with the family of Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul who risked imprisonment to preserve Afghan literature.
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6
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride
Also clear-cut · history, narrative
Daniel James Brown reconstructs the 1846 Donner Party disaster through the specific experiences of Sarah Graves, a twenty-one-year-old newlywed traveling west from Illinois.
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7
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
In 1925, British explorer Percy Fawcett entered the Amazon jungle to locate a hidden civilization he named "Z," believing it to be the birthplace of complex South American culture.
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8
The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
In the early 1940s, the United States government constructed Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a secret city carved out of rural farmland to house seventy thousand residents working on the Manhattan Project.
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9
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
Garrett M.
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10
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
Also clear-cut · history, narrative
In October 1972, a Fairchild FH-227D carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed into the remote glaciers of the Andes Mountains.
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11
The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
by Erik Larson
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
Erik Larson chronicles the five months between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the surrender of Fort Sumter.
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12
Germany
Also outward-looking · history, narrative
Neil MacGregor examines five centuries of German history through the lens of thirty specific objects and monuments.
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