10 books for fans of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women
- 1
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
More about this pick
A botanist and indigenous scholar combines scientific training with traditional plant wisdom to argue for a reciprocal relationship with nature based on gratitude rather than consumption.
★ 4.50 Goodreads (177.7K ratings) - 2
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
by Gabor Maté
More about this pick
Working with Vancouver's most marginalized addicts, Maté reveals addiction as trauma's symptom rather than moral failing—a radical reframe of how we treat suffering.
★ 4.48 Goodreads (24.3K ratings) - 3
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
by Lori Gottlieb
More about this pick
Therapist Lori Gottlieb's own crisis forces her into the patient's chair, revealing the messy, funny, heartbreaking reality of healing from both sides of the couch.
★ 4.37 Goodreads (411.2K ratings) - 4
Shadow Divers
by Robert Kurson
More about this pick
Deep-wreck divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler find an unidentified German submarine and embark on a six-year quest to solve one of WWII's last mysteries.
★ 4.37 Goodreads (36.9K ratings) - 5
Our Crime Was Being Jewish
by Anthony S. Pitch, Michael Berenbaum
More about this pick
358 Holocaust survivors share 576 vivid memories in their own words—true insider stories including teenagers who witnessed their parents and siblings taken. Pitch preserves these testimonies as the survivors themselves demanded: 'Who else will tell it?'
★ 4.50 Goodreads (881 ratings) - 6
Facing the Mountain
by Daniel James Brown
More about this pick
Japanese-American soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team earned unprecedented honors fighting in Europe while their families remained imprisoned in American internment camps. Brown weaves together battlefield valor and homefront injustice into an essential WWII story.
★ 4.48 Goodreads (12.6K ratings) - 7
Digest of The Boys in the Boat
by A Reader's Companion
More about this pick
Lower-middle class American rowers face off against Hitler's regime in 1936 Berlin, turning sports into political statement. The underdog story gains power from its historical stakes.
★ 4.44 Goodreads (9 ratings) - 8
The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777
The Revolution Trilogy • Book 1
by Rick Atkinson, John Sterling
More about this pick
From Lexington to Princeton, Atkinson reveals how amateur militiamen evolved into a Continental Army capable of challenging the world's premier military force. Individual courage emerges from institutional chaos.
★ 4.43 Goodreads (10.4K ratings) - 9
A Dream So Big: Our Unlikely Journey to End the Tears of Hunger
by Steve Peifer, Gregg Lewis
More about this pick
Steve Peifer abandoned managing 9,000 software consultants to provide daily lunches for 20,000 Kenyan children. From corporate America to solar-powered African computer labs, an unlikely transformation story.
★ 4.34 Goodreads (284 ratings) - 10
How China Escaped Shock Therapy
Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy
by Isabella M. Weber
More about this pick
Instead of embracing Western shock therapy, China's reformers fought fierce internal battles over gradual marketization. Weber reveals the ideological contests that shaped modern China's economy.
★ 4.32 Goodreads (276 ratings)