Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and hunger.

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

Forget everything you think you know about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Previous books and films, including the brilliant 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, have emphasized the supposed glamour of America's most notorious criminal couple, thus contributing to ongoing mythology. The real story is completely different -- and far more fascinating. In Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of... (more)

The Greatest Generation Speaks

by Tom Brokaw

"I first began to appreciate fully all we owed the World War II generation while I was covering the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day for NBC News. When I wrote in The Greatest Generation about the men and women who came out of the Depression, who won great victories and made lasting sacrifices in World War II and then returned home to begin building the world we have today--the people I called the... (more)

Rainwater

by Sandra Brown

A romantic historical novel from bestselling thriller-master Sandra Brown, about an independent woman who runs a boarding house in Dust Bowl Texas.

Dear America

Christmas After All

The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift

by Kathryn Lasky

In her fictionalized journal, eleven-year-old Minnie Swift recounts how her family dealt with the difficult times during the Depression and how the arrival of an orphan from Texas changed their lives in Indianapolis just before Christmas 1932.

Bud, Not Buddy

by Christopher Paul Curtis

It’s 1936, in Flint, Michigan, and when 10-year-old Bud decides to hit the road to find his father, nothing can stop him. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a national bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an... (more)

The Greatest Generation

by Tom Brokaw

"In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. There, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties... (more)

Water for Elephants

A Novel

by Sara Gruen

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met... (more)

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression

by Eleanor Roosevelt

Impoverished young Americans had no greater champion during the Depression than Eleanor Roosevelt. As First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt used her newspaper columns and radio broadcasts to crusade for expanded federal aid to poor children and teens. She was the most visible spokesperson for the National Youth Administration, the New Deal's central agency for aiding the needy young, and she was adamant in insisting that... (more)

English Creek

by Ivan Doig

In this prizewinning portrait of a time and place -- Montana in the 1930s -- that at once inspires and fulfills a longing for an explicable past, Ivan Doig has created one of the most captivating families in American fiction, the McCaskills. The witty and haunting narration, a masterpiece of vernacular in the tradition of Twain, follows the events of the Two Medicine country's summer: the tide of sheep moving into... (more)

A History of the Twentieth Century: The Concise Edition of the Acclaimed World History

A History of the Twentieth Century: The Concise Edition of the Acclaimed World History

by Martin Gilbert

Martin Gilbert, author of the multivolume biography of Winston Churchill and other brilliant works of history, chronicles world events year by year, from the dawn of aviation to the flourishing technology age, taking us through World War I to the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt as president of the United States and Hider as chancellor of Germany. He continues on to document wars in South Africa, China,... (more)

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS 1STEDSara Gruen

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS 1STED

by Sara Gruen

FDR - The War President, 1940-1943 : A History

FDR - The War President, 1940-1943 : A History

by Kenneth Sydney Davis

FDR: The War President opens as Roosevelt has been re-elected to a third term and the United States is drifting toward a war that has already engulfed Europe. Roosevelt, as commander in chief, statesman, and politician, must navigate a delicate balance between helping those in Europe--while remaining mindful of the forces of isolation both in the Congress and the country--and protecting the gains of the New Deal,... (more)

Red-Dirt Jessie

by Anna Myers

Jessie, a girl living in the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Depression, tries to tame a wild dog and help her father recover from a nervous breakdown.

Scottsboro: A Novel

by Ellen Feldman

A powerful novel about race, class, sex, and a lie that refused to die. Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A... (more)

War Heroes: Voices from IraqAllan Zullo

War Heroes: Voices from Iraq

by Allan Zullo

FDR : The New Deal Years : 1933-1937 : A HistoryKenneth S. Davis

FDR : The New Deal Years : 1933-1937 : A History

by Kenneth Sydney Davis

Davis's compelling narrative chronicles Franklin Roosevelt's period of greatest adversity and triumph, detailing the storms of the years prior to World War II, the opposition from left and right, and the extraordinary spirit FDR brought to politics and society.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who... (more)

Gypsy : a memoir

by Gypsy Rose Lee

Gypsy Rose Lee was an American original -- a woman who transformed the striptease into an art form and bewitched audiences around the world. This colorful autobiography follows Gypsy from her childhood in a ragtag vaudeville troupe to her glittering career as the queen of burlesque. Readers meet Gypsy's indomitable mother, who launched her onto the stage at age four, as well as Florenz Ziegfeld, Fanny Brice, and... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: the great depression

by John Steinbeck

by Jeff Guinn

by Tom Brokaw

by Sandra Brown

The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift

by Kathryn Lasky

by Christopher Paul Curtis

by Rick Bragg

by Tom Brokaw

A Novel

by Sara Gruen

by Eleanor Roosevelt

by Ivan Doig

by Martin Gilbert

by Sara Gruen

by Kenneth Sydney Davis

by Anna Myers

by Ellen Feldman

by Allan Zullo

by Kenneth Sydney Davis

by Carson McCullers

by Gypsy Rose Lee