Stephanie Flanders's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Stephanie Flanders recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Stephanie Flanders's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
A uniquely personal exploration of the origins of international law, centring on the Nuremberg Trials, the city of Lviv and a secret family history

When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg trial.
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Recommended by Stephanie Flanders, and 1 others.

Stephanie FlandersThis is a fantastic and very impressive book. (Source)

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2

Negroland

A Memoir

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac—here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author’s rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.
 
Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them...
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Recommended by Stephanie Flanders, and 1 others.

Stephanie FlandersWe tend to read about the civil rights struggle or the story of poor blacks in the South, but not so much middle class African-American society. (Source)

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3
Hisham Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. Twenty-two years later, the fall of Gaddafi meant he was finally able to return to his homeland. In this moving memoir, the author takes us on an illuminating journey, both physical and psychological; a journey to find his father and rediscover his country. less
Recommended by Barack Obama, Stephanie Flanders, and 2 others.

Barack ObamaAs 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)

Stephanie FlandersIt’s about a UK-based writer whose father disappeared in Libya. (Source)

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4

Secondhand Time

The Last of the Soviets

From the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, comes the first English translation of her latest work, an oral history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia. Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and speculating on what will rise from the ashes of Communism. As in all her books, Alexievich gives voice to women and men whose stories are lost in the official narratives of nation-states,... more
Recommended by Sam Freedman, Stephanie Flanders, and 2 others.

Sam Freedman@martinbright It's amazing. Have you read Second Hand Time? Best book of the century so far for me. Just incredible. (Source)

Stephanie FlandersThe power comes from the stories themselves, the people she found and talked to. (Source)

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5
How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue...
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Bill GatesI did find his historical analysis, which makes up the bulk of the book, utterly fascinating. (Source)

Brad FeldThe Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War: This book was a grind, but it had a lot of good stuff in it. It’s only 784 pages so it took more than a day to read it. If you are trying to understand what is going on in the current American economy, and why the future will not look like the past, this is a good place to start. (Source)

Satya NadellaCovering everything from the combustion engine to the flush toilet—and judging recent breakthroughs with a skeptical eye—this work of economic history “concludes that innovation is the ultimate source of dramatic improvements in the human condition,” says Nadella. (Source)

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