Books like The Wordy Shipmates
12 books with a reading profile close to The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. Outward-looking and clear-cut; a moderate read.
-
1
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
Victoria Finlay tracks the physical origins of artistic pigments by traveling to the remote geographical sources of the rainbow.
-
2
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.
-
3
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.
-
4
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.
-
5
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.
-
6
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.
-
7
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.
-
8
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
Also outward-looking · history, narrative
Jessica Bruder documents the lives of older Americans who, after the 2008 financial crisis, abandoned traditional housing for a life on the road.
-
9
The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement
Also clear-cut · history, narrative
Sharon McMahon, a former high school government teacher, profiles twelve lesser-known Americans whose choices, often made quietly, changed the country, from the founding era through the civil rights movement.
-
10
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
by Timothy Egan
Also outward-looking and clear-cut · history, narrative
Timothy Egan chronicles the environmental disaster of the 1930s Dust Bowl by following several families who remained in the High Plains rather than fleeing to California.
-
11
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.
-
12
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.
Get picks matched to your own reading on papr.
Get papr
