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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America
Larry McMurtry · 245 pages
In this dual biography, McMurtry explores the lives, the legends, and above all the truth about two larger-than-life American figures. With his Wild West show, Buffalo Bill Cody helped invent the image of the West that still exists today--cowboys and Indians, rodeo, rough rides, sheriffs and outlaws, trick shooting, Stetsons, and buck-skin. His most celebrated protégée, the short, slight Annie Oak
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
Mark Harris · 496 pages
The epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde-and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood, and America, foreverIt's the mid-1960s, and westerns, war movies and blockbuster musicals-Mary Poppins, The
Superman Versus The Ku Klux Klan: The True Story Of How The Iconic Superhero Battled The Men Of Hate
Rick Bowers · 160 pages
1959: The Year Everything Changed
Fred Kaplan · 322 pages
Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed America While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that fo
The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
Lucy Worsley · 336 pages
From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to the cosy crimes of the Golden Age, renowned historian Lucy Worsley explores the evolution of the traditional English murder―and reveals why we are so fascinated by this sinister subject.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Steven Levy · 455 pages
Today, technology is cool. Owning the most powerful computer, the latest high-tech gadget, and the whizziest website is a status symbol on a par with having a flashy car or a designer suit. And a media obsessed with the digital explosion has reappropriated the term "computer nerd" so that it's practically synonymous with "entrepreneur." Yet, a mere fifteen years ago, wireheads hooked on tweaking e
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love
David Talbot · 480 pages
Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.
Hamilton: The Revolution
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeremy McCarter · 287 pages
Offers a behind-the-scenes view of Hamilton the musical, detailing the many dramatic episodes in Alexander Hamilton's life.
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson · 322 pages
"Explores the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. Play has always been more important than most people realize. In this vivid examination of the power of play and delight, Steven Johnson offers a surprising history of popular entertainment. Roving from medieval kitchens and ancient taverns to casinos and shopping malls, he locates the cutting edge of innovation
The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby · 357 pages
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence
The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault)
P.J. O'Rourke · 267 pages
With his typical wit and keen analysis, O'Rourke looks at the way the post-war generation somehow came of age by never quite growing up and somehow created a better society by turning society upside down.
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc · 546 pages
Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop has been a generation-defining global movement. In a post-civil rights era rapidly transformed by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop gave voiceless youths a chance to address these seismic changes, and became a job-making engine and the Esperanto of youth rebellion. Hip-hop crystallized a multiracial generation's worldview
The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House
Kate Andersen Brower · 336 pages
America's First Families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous, and heartwarming, The Residence reveals daily life in the White House as it is really lived through the voices of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and
Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States
Bill Bryson · 417 pages
Bill Bryson turns away from the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture. In Made in America, Bryson de-mythologizes his native land - explaining how a dusty desert hamlet with neither woods nor holly became Hollywood, how the Wild West wasn't wo
How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country
Daniel O'Brien · 254 pages
"Make no mistake: Our founding fathers were more bandanas-and-muscles than powdered-wigs-and-tea. As a prisoner of war, Andrew Jackson walked several miles barefoot across state lines while suffering from smallpox and a serious head wound received when he refused to polish the boots of the soldiers who had taken him captive. He was thirteen years old. A few decades later, he became the first popul
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
Joshua Zeitz · 345 pages
Blithely flinging aside the Victorian manners that kept her disapproving mother corseted, the New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in American
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's
Frederick Lewis Allen
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 416 pages
One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, stagi
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
Peter Biskind · 506 pages
"Easy Riders, Raging Bulls vividly chronicles the exuberance and excess of the times: the startling success of Easy Rider and the equally alarming circumstances under which it was made, with drugs, booze, and violent rivalry between costars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda dominating the set; how a small production company named BBS became the guiding spirit of the youth rebellion in Hollywood and ho
Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights
Jessica Kerwin Jenkins
Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940
D.J. Taylor · 353 pages