Books like The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

01

Killers of the Flower Moon

David Grann · History

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in northeastern Oklahoma were being murdered.

A kindred history read.

02

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

John Carreyrou · Business

Bad Blood is Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou's account of Theranos, the blood-testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that claimed its proprietary technology could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single finger-prick of blood.

A kindred history read.

03

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important works of narrative nonfiction published in the twenty-first century.

A kindred history read.

04

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand · Biography

Unbroken follows Louis Zamperini from his juvenile delinquency in Depression-era California to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he ran the 5,000 meters at nineteen and briefly caught Hitler's attention.

A kindred history read.

05

American Prometheus

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin · Biography

Kai Bird and Martin J.

A kindred history read.

06

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe · History

Say Nothing opens with a scene that sets its register precisely: Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, is dragged from her Belfast flat by a gang of masked strangers in December 1972 and never seen alive again.

Both dig into justice.

07

A Theory of Justice

John Rawls · Philosophy

A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, is John Rawls's attempt to construct a systematic alternative to utilitarianism in political philosophy.

Both dig into justice.

08

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Robert Nozick · Philosophy

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is Robert Nozick's 1974 response to John Rawls and a foundational text of libertarian political philosophy.

Both dig into justice.

09

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote · Memoir

Truman Capote's account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — and of the investigation, capture, trial, and execution of the killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock — is the founding document of the true crime genre and one of the most admired works of American nonfiction of the twentieth century.

Both dig into justice.

10

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

Both dig into justice.

11

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

Michael J. Sandel · Philosophy

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

Both dig into justice.

12

Know My Name: A Memoir

Chanel Miller · Memoir

Know My Name is Chanel Miller's memoir of being sexually assaulted behind a dumpster at Stanford University in 2015, being identified publicly as only "Emily Doe" throughout the subsequent trial, and the experience of navigating a legal process while the perpetrator — Stanford swimmer Brock Turner — became the more visible subject of the story.

Both dig into justice.