textiplication.com

I’ve only got one so far:

My friend Pyegar recommended this to me. A history teacher and textbook author, James Loewen was frustrated by the way that history textbooks cloud the real stories in American history. The book reexamines a number of personages, events, or sequences in history, the stories we all think we know, in the light cast by primary historical sources. How important was disease in the early colonization of the Americas? Why did my mother learn a different version of the Civil War and Reconstruction growing up in Louisiana from the one I learned in in the suburbs of DC? What shadows does the largely revered Wilson presidency cast on us to this day? How nasty was Columbus, anyway? Pretty nasty. Beyond a doubt the worst human being we celebrate with a holiday, even if you include all of the Presidents in Presidents’ Day.

It’s a very judicious, careful, open-handed book, not a shrieker. It’s not another People’s History of the United States, which I found so one-sided that I trusted it less the more I read.

I have to say that this book changed the way I think about nearly everything.

What other books are so good and so important that everyone should read them?