Five best books on catastrophes, natural and otherwise

John Kelly's latest book is The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best books list on catastrophes, natural and otherwise, including:

The Great Influenza
by John Barry (2004)

It took the collective genius of mankind four years and billions of francs, pounds, marks and dollars to slaughter 10 million men in the trenches of World War I. The influenza pandemic spawned by the war achieved much more with much less. Between 1918, when the first flu cases appeared on the desolate Kansas plains, and 1920, when the pandemic expired in the back places of Asia, the virus killed 50 million to 100 million people. In "The Great Influenza," John Barry catches the sweep of the worst biological disaster in human history in a multilayered account that encompasses the interrelationship between war and disease, the politics of Wilsonian America, and the reflexive obtuseness of the bureaucratic mind. Patriotic parades that had to be held, troop ships that had to sail, draft quotas that had to be met created large pools of vulnerable young men in the teeming military establishments in the East and Midwest. The doughboys spread the disease to the civilian population, then carried it to Europe. What makes "The Great Influenza" a standout in the vast literature on the 1918 pandemic is Barry's description of the seminal role it played in the modernization of American medicine and science. It's a novel lens through which to view the flu, one that dramatizes the critical role that crises have in driving human progress.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about quantum theory

David Kaiser is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the Department of Physics. His books include How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.

For the Guardian, Kaiser named his top ten books on quantum theory. One title on the list:

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, by Chad Orzel (2009)

If physicist Chad Orzel's dog, Emmy, can get the gist of the uncertainty principle, Bell's theorem, and even quantum teleportation, so can you. An expert in the latest efforts to harness the weird features of quantum theory in the laboratory, Orzel has a knack for helpful analogies. Best of all, his book broaches many of the latest ideas and developments, delivering an accessible account every bit as engaging as classics such as Gamow's Mr Tompkins, now brought up-to-date.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten horse books

Belinda Rapley is the author of the Pony Detectives series. She is a British Horse Society Instructor, has a National Diploma in Horse Studies and has spent time working in show jumping and flat racing.

Rapley named her top ten horse books for the Guardian. One title on the list:

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

I can't read this book or watch the film without at least one packet of tissues next to me. It's a timeless reminder to me of the fate horses and ponies have – they're the only pet we have which is sold on when they're outgrown, get too old to carry on doing what they were bought to do, or when they're simply no longer wanted. They're likely to experience many different homes and different fortunes through their life. With each move they have to settle into new routines and yards, make new horsey friends and wait while their new owners work out how they tick. Although Black Beauty holds up to the mirror the thoughtless cruelty of the Victorian world she inhabits, I think her voice still serves as a modern day reminder for all horse owners to think of the world from our horse's perspective, rather than our own. My own horse, Zano, will stay in my care forever to avoid any of the fates Black Beauty endured.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Black Beauty is among Mary King's five top books on the equestrian life, Megan Wasson's eight great books about horses, and Lauren St. John's top ten animal adventures.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on Hollywood

Leo Braudy is among America's leading cultural historians and film critics. He currently is University Professor and Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. His books include The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon.

For the Wall Street Journal, Braudy named a five best list of books on Hollywood, including:

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
by Peter Biskind (1998)

By the early 1970s, old Hollywood was moribund—the studio system had withered, unable anymore to connect with the mass audience of its golden years. Ticket sales had plummeted to 15.8 million in 1971 from 78.2 million in 1946, Peter Biskind says in "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," his engrossing chronicle of what came next: an upheaval in the film business caused by an array of young filmmakers. Directors such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, allied with actors including Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson, set about creating some of the decade's iconic films—"Star Wars," "Jaws," "Taxi Driver," "The Godfather," "Chinatown." We know the movies well; Biskind tells us what was going on behind the scenes. He chronicles the betrayals, hostilities, confusions, missteps and general pettiness that can bedevil any collective artistic venture, but he also artfully mixes in production details, biography and salacious gossip, creating a vivid portrait of a vibrant time. In the end, Biskind says, success spelled the end of the creative ferment. Describing Spielberg at a party teasing John Travolta for owning a lesser Learjet, the author notes: "Money was the solvent that dissolved the tissue of the '70s like acid on flesh."

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Steven J. Ross's five best books on politics & the movie industry, Stefan Kanfer's five best books on remarkable Hollywood lives, and Jane Ciabattari's five best list of novels on Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about exploration

Max Jones is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at The University of Manchester and author of The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice.

In 2003 he named his top ten books about exploration for the Guardian. One title on the list:

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922)

The title of Cherry-Garrard's account of Scott's last Antarctic expedition refers not to the polar journey, but to the trek he endured with Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers in search of the eggs of the emperor penguin. The three men barely survived the first journey ever attempted during an Antarctic winter, experiencing temperatures as low as -77.5ºF (-25.3ºC), only to die only a few months later. Mourning for his lost friends, disillusioned by war and assisted by his neighbour George Bernard Shaw, Cherry-Garrard composed a work which transcends the confines of the expedition to offer a powerful meditation on the nature of exploration and intellectual curiosity in the modern world.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Worst Journey in the World is on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on navigators, Ian Marchant's top ten list of books of the night, and the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on winter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best trilogies

Ken Follett emerged in the book world with Eye of the Needle, an award-winning thriller and international bestseller. After several more successful thrillers, he published The Pillars of the Earth and its long-awaited sequel, World Without End, a national and international bestseller. Follett's new historical epic, The Century Trilogy, opened with the bestselling Fall of Giants which is followed by the newly released Winter of the World.

Follett named his five best trilogies for The Daily Beast. One entry on the list:

The Millennium Trilogy
by Stieg Larsson

Once you start you can’t stop reading, and the main reason is Lisbeth Salander, one of the great literary characters. She’s vengeful yet sympathetic, scary but sexy, and so logical that everyone thinks she’s crazy. I wish I had created her.

Read about the other trilogies on the list.

Lisbeth Salander is one of Anne Holt's top ten female detectives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best accounts of great African journeys

Tim Jeal is the author of the acclaimed biographies Livingstone, Baden-Powell, and Stanley, each selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. He was selected as the winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

His latest book is Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure.

One of Jeal's five best accounts of great African journeys, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo
by Redmond O'Hanlon (1996)

If you love books by famous explorers and have a masochistic yearning to write up your own historic trek, it's tough now that there is so little left to discover. But a book about a great journey is still possible if you possess the skills of an outstanding travel writer and a major novelist, along with the courage of a red-blooded Victorian. Redmond O'Hanlon has all the above and erudition too. His tragicomic masterpiece, "No Mercy," brilliantly chronicles his predictably doomed quest to locate not a river's source but a leftover dinosaur allegedly living in a remote Congolese lake. After hypnotic portrayals of his traveling companions and endangered animals, including the infant gorilla he adopts and falls in love with ("his dark brown eyes were milky-white at the edges, the black skin in the middle of his low forehead was furrowed with three vertically curved worry lines"), Mr. O'Hanlon, by then ill and disoriented, dramatizes the struggle in his head between different versions of reality (Western science versus the African sorcerer's "logic of a dream"). He describes his own near breakdown in the jungle among rats, driver ants and sweat-drinking bees as he clutches his fetish: a piece of monkey fur wrapped around a child's finger bone.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about Hitler and the Third Reich

Anthony Read's books include The Devil's Disciples: The Lives and Times of Hitler's Inner Circle.

In 2003 he named his top ten books about Hitler and the Third Reich for the Guardian. One title on the list:

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer

For me, this is the grandaddy of them all, the standard work by which all others on the subject are still measured. A brilliant and respected journalist, Shirer was actually there for much of the time and it shows. Erudite, comprehensive and detailed, always lively and readable, it is the model of what a popular narrative history should be. My own copy has been read and referred to so often it is falling apart.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on the English Revolution of 1688

Steven Pincus is professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668, and England’s Glorious Revolution: A Brief History with Documents.

His latest book, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, has won a number of prizes, including the 2010 Morris D. Forkosch Prize given by the American Historical Association.

With Sophie Roell at The Browser, Pincus discussed five top books on the English Revolution of 1688, including:

The Anglo-Dutch Moment
by Jonathan I Israel

The next book on the list, Jonathan Israel’s The Anglo-Dutch Moment was the crowning achievement of [the view that one really needs to place Britain in a much broader international context]. Israel’s collection of essays, and most importantly his own contributions to the volume, were extremely innovative and extremely important. But they seem to have had little effect. What was really exciting about Israel was his pushing for placing things in a European context, and indeed an extra-European context, though Israel doesn’t go quite that far in the book. But most British historians and people working in this field have in fact turned much more inward, and talked about the relations between England, Scotland and Ireland. That had the effect of moving the discussion away from Europe and the broader European issues that Pieter Geyl had asked for and Jonathan Israel demanded. I felt, in a sense, that it was a lost opportunity. It was that tradition, which had become a dead end, that I tried to follow up and develop more in my book.

Can you tell me a bit more about the Israel book? I’ve always been a huge fan of his, I have to confess.

He’s a wonderfully innovative scholar. There’s another really, really important contribution that Jonathan Israel made in The Anglo-Dutch Moment, and, again, something that has largely gone unnoticed. His argument was that there was a Dutch invasion and the Dutch transformed the English polity and then the British polity. It was a real revolution. There was revolutionary change, and it came from outside. Israel was the first person to break the consensus about the un-revolutionary nature of the English Revolution of 1688-9. Where I differ from Israel is that I draw on everything he says and say he’s absolutely right, but he’s underestimated the extent to which there was a radical tradition developing within England itself. The reason why the radical Whigs in England turned to William was precisely because they thought he was sympathetic with their ideas.

So you’re recommending the book largely for the contributions by Israel himself? Because there is also an essay in there saying the revolution was conservative.

Yes, there’s John Morrill’s essay on Trevelyan which says exactly that. But the Israel essays are a book almost in and of itself. They’re really incredibly innovative and well researched.

Read about the other books Pincus tagged at The Brower.

The Page 99 Test: 1688: The First Modern Revolution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best tales of stormy couples

Amanda Bennett's books include In Memoriam (1997, with Terence B. Foley), The Man Who Stayed Behind (1993, with Sidney Rittenberg), The Death of the Organization Man (1990), and the recently released memoir, The Cost of Hope.

For the Wall Street Journal she named a five best list of tales about stormy couples, including:

Travels With Myself and Another
by Martha Gellhorn (1978)

Take but one look at classic photos of Ernest Hemingway as Big Game Hunter and you'll realize whose voice he preferred the sound of. Martha Gellhorn, the second of his four wives, always hated the thought that, having married him, she was doomed to be a footnote in his biography. After reading this volume of remembered travels, I might vote him a footnote in hers. Glamorous, witty, fearless, poisonously acerbic, selfish and probably mean, she was one of the few female foreign correspondents for the rest of us to daydream about. She did the Spanish Civil War, took a rickshaw to see Zhou Enlai in hiding on the eve of the revolution; and rode a dynamite boat carrying supplies to D-Day. She hates pretty much everything here: The German delegation that bumps her from the last room in a hotel consists of "a short man who resembled an irritated warthog and two subservient underlings." Imperial and demanding herself, she rails against despotism, imperialism and racism: "Always delighted to grab any privileges I can get, I don't like the sense of being privileged by law." She does a hilarious cameo of her spouse, who appears only as the Unwilling Companion, or U.C.: "He was able to sit with a bunch of men for most of a day or most of a night or most of both a day or a night... all of them fortified by a continuous supply of drink, the while he roared with laughter at reminiscences and anecdotes. It was a valid system for him."

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books about dark journeys

Iain Sinclair is the author of many books, including Downriver, Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, and Ghost Milk: Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympics.

For The Week magazine, he named his six favorite books about dark journeys, including:

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

A compulsively readable account of an alcohol-fueled hallucination in an alien landscape — a reckless danse macabre through the Mexican Day of the Dead. The physical struggle to shape a literary masterpiece from years of abortive travel informs every hard-won sentence.

Read about the other books on the list.

Under the Volcano is one of Iain Gately's five best books on the pleasures and hazards of drink.

Also see Iain Sinclair's list of five novels that capture the spirit and rich history of London.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on wine

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on wine:

The Billionaire's Vinegar
by Benjamin Wallace

When a scion of the Forbes family paid a record $156,000 for a single bottle of wine at auction in 1985, he thought he was getting a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeauxone that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson. The truth proved far murkier. Delving into the controversy provides author Benjamin Wallace ample opportunity to explore the fervor at the heart of wine collecting.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

--Marshal Zeringue