The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death
10 best books like The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (Jill Lepore): Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate, The Woman Reader, Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, The Best American Essays 2011, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception, In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature
| Author | Kate Summerscale |
| ISBN | 1608199134 |
"I think people marry far too much; it is such a lottery, and for a poor woman--bodily and morally the husband's slave--a very doubtful happiness." --Queen Victoria to her recently married daughter Vicky.
Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry...
| Author | Wendy Moore |
| ISBN | 0465065740 |
Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal like an English country maid yet tough and hardy like a Spartan heroine, she would live with him in an isolated cottage, completely subservient to his whims. But after being rejected...
| Author | Belinda Jack |
| ISBN | 0300120451 |
How have women read differently from men through the ages? In all manner of ways, this book asserts.
This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women's reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the...
| Author | Katherine Sharpe |
| ISBN | 0062059734 |
A compelling and troubling exploration of a generation raised on antidepressants, and a book that combines expansive interviews with substantive research-based reporting, Coming of Age on Zoloft is a vitally important and immediately engrossing study of one of America’s most pressing and omnipresent...
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America
| Author | Christopher Turner |
| ISBN | 0374100942 |
One of The Economist’s 2011 Books of the Year
A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011
Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher...
| Author | Edwidge Danticat |
| ISBN | 0547479778 |
The Best American Series®
First, Best, and Best-Selling
The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites . A special...
The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945
| Author | Michael Burleigh |
| ISBN | 0521398029 |
This is dry and slow going, but a fascinating read. It's an examination of Nazi social policy through the lens of their crazy racist ideology. The authors get points for putting words like "Aryan" and "gypsy" in quotation marks every single time and for their refreshingly dour assessment of some of their...
Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe
| Author | Craig Koslofsky |
| ISBN | 0521896436 |
What does it mean to write a history of the night? Evening's Empire is a fascinating study of the myriad ways in which early modern people understood, experienced, and transformed the night. Using diaries, letters, and legal records together with representations of the night in early modern religion,...
| Author | Debora L. Spar |
| ISBN | 1591396204 |
Despite legislation that claims to prohibit it, there is a thriving market for babies spreading across the globe. Fueled by rapid advances in reproductive medicine and the desperate desires of millions of would-be parents, the acquisition of children—whether through donated eggs, rented wombs,...
| Author | Christopher Woodward |
| ISBN | 1400030862 |
In this enchanting meditation on ruins, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. With an exquisite sense of romantic melancholy, we encounter...
| Author | Harvey Levenstein |
| ISBN | 0226473740 |
There may be no greater source of anxiety for Americans today than the question of what to eat and drink. Are eggs the perfect protein, or are they cholesterol bombs? Is red wine good for my heart or bad for my liver? Will pesticides, additives, and processed foods kill me? Here with some very rare and...
| Author | Rachel Pepper |
| ISBN | 1573447889 |
Transitions of the Heart is the first collection to ever invite mothers of transgender and gender variant children of all ages to tell their own stories about their child's gender transition. Often "transitioning" socially and emotionally alongside their child but rarely given a voice in the experience,...
Sincerity: How a Moral Ideal Born Five Hundred Years Ago Inspired Religious Wars, Modern Art, Hipster Chic, and the Curious Notion That We All Have Something to Say (No Matter How Dull)
| Author | R. Jay Magill Jr. |
| ISBN | 0393080986 |
People have long been duped by "straight-talking" politicians, confessional talk-show hosts, and fake-earnest advertisers. As sincerity has become suspect, the upright and honest have taken refuge in irony. Yet our struggle for authenticity in back-to-the-woods movements, folksy songwriting,...
What makes somebody a Loser, a person doomed to unfulfilled dreams and humiliation? Nobody is born to lose, and yet failure embodies our worst fears. The Loser is our national bogeyman, and his history over the past two hundred years reveals the dark side of success, how economic striving reshaped the...
Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States
| Author | David Hackett Fischer |
| ISBN | 0199832706 |
Fairness and Freedom compares the history of two open societies--New Zealand and the United States--with much in common. Both have democratic polities, mixed-enterprise economies, individuated societies, pluralist cultures, and a deep concern for human rights and the rule of law. But all of these...
| Author | Joshua Jelly-Schapiro |
| ISBN | 0385349769 |
A masterwork of travel literature and of history: voyaging from Cuba to Jamaica, Puerto Rico to Trinidad, Haiti to Barbados, and islands in between, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of each society, its culture and politics, connecting this region’s common heritage to its...
| Author | A.N. Wilson |
| ISBN | 0091931525 |
With all the panoramic sweep of his bestselling study The Victorians, A. N. Wilson relates the exhilarating story of the Elizabethan Age. It was a time of exceptional creativity, wealth creation and political expansion.
It was also a period of English history more remarkable than any other...
The Taste Of War: World War Two And The Battle For Food
| Author | Lizzie Collingham |
| ISBN | 0713999640 |
I don't feel able to give this book full justice after having read it once.
It is, indirectly, a statement of the radical potential of history and the understanding of history: the past was different to the present, the present is the creation of the past, the future will be different to the present....
| Author | Steven Marcus |
| ISBN | 0393302369 |
Taking as his point of departure the authors, the audience, and the texts of Victorian writings on sex in general and of Victorian pornography in particular, Steven Marcus offers a startling and revolutionary perspective on the underside of Victorian culture. The subjects dealt with in "The Other...
| Author | David Damrosch |
| ISBN | 0805080295 |
Adventurers, explorers, kings, gods, and goddesses come to life in this riveting story of the first great epic--lost to the world for 2,000 years, and rediscovered in the nineteenth century
Composed by a poet and priest in Middle Babylonia around 1200 bce, The Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed...
The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages
| Author | Nancy Marie Brown |
| ISBN | 0465009506 |
The medieval Catholic Church, widely considered a source of intolerance and inquisitorial fervor, was not anti-science during the Dark Ages — in fact, the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day. Called “The Scientist Pope", Gerbert of Aurillac rose from...
| Author | Suleiman Osman |
| ISBN | 0195387317 |
Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman...
Travel in the Ancient World
| Author | Lionel Casson |
| ISBN | 0801848083 |
The only book of its kind in any language, Travel in the Ancient World offers a lively, comprehensive history of ancient travel, from the first Egyptian voyages recorded in Old Kingdom inscriptions through Greek and Roman times to the Christian pilgrimages of the fourth and sixth centuries. Rich in...
Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, Weimar Germany brings to life an era of unmatched creativity in the twentieth century—one whose influence and inspiration still resonate today. Eric Weitz has written the authoritative history that this fascinating...
| Author | Jane Brox |
| ISBN | 0547055277 |
Brilliant, reminiscent of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift in its reach and of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time in its haunting evocation of human lives, offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history—from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of...
