Thom and Beth Atkinson's Top Book Recommendations

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

1

Wanderlust

A History of Walking

This volume provides a history of walking, exploring the relationship between thinking and walking and between walking and culture. The author argues for the preservation of the time and space in which to walk in an ever more car-dependent and accelerated world. less
Recommended by Thom and Beth Atkinson, and 1 others.

Thom and Beth AtkinsonShe says that ‘to trace even an imaginary route is to trace the spirit or thought of what passed there before’. (Source)

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2

Coming Up for Air

George Bowling, the hero of Orwell's comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.
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Recommended by Thom and Beth Atkinson, and 1 others.

Thom and Beth AtkinsonIt’s all about the loss of that idyllic Britain, and loss of that perfect imagined England. (Source)

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3
The aerial bombardment of London during the Second World War is one of the most significant events in the city’s modern history. Between 1939 and 1945, London and its environs experienced destruction on a huge and deadly scale, with air raids and rocket attacks reducing entire buildings and streets to rubble. The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps—meticulously hand-colored to document the extent of the damage being wrought on the city and surrounding areas—represent a key record of the destruction wrought by the Blitz, the impact of which can still be seen in the capital’s urban and... more
Recommended by Thom and Beth Atkinson, and 1 others.

Thom and Beth AtkinsonBlack means a building is totally destroyed, purple means it was damaged beyond repair (Source)

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4

Small Wars

An-my Le

Recommended by Thom and Beth Atkinson, and 1 others.

Thom and Beth AtkinsonBecause of the triggers she’s seen in America, she views the landscape as a mythological landscape of war. (Source)

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5

The Things They Carried

A classic, life-changing meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling, with more than two-million copies in print

Depicting the men of Alpha Company—Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three—the stories in The Things They Carried opened our eyes to the nature of war in a way we will never forget. It is taught everywhere, from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in...
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Karl MarlantesBut when O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried he came down to absolute real brass tacks. It was no longer surreal, it was like here’s a list of what a grunt carries, an infantry soldier… (Source)

Caroline PaulA beautiful book by a writer who fought in Vietnam. (Source)

Eugene Gu@realDonaldTrump Tim O’Brien is the author of the book The Things They Carried, which was about the Vietnam War. Must be very triggering for Trump since he dodged the draft multiple times with fraudulent doctors’ notes for fake bone spurs like a coward. (Source)

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