John McWhorter’s 6 favorite books that are rooted in history

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Linguist and Columbia University professor John McWhorter is a podcast host, the author of 20 books, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His new book, Pronoun Trouble, explores the recent evolution in how we present ourselves and address one another.

‘James’ by Percival Everett (2024)

Everett masterfully makes real the quieter agonies of slavery, including the looming threat of pitiless violence for even looking at a white person before they look at you. By having Huckleberry Finn’s Jim and other slaves speak standard English and use Black English only to assuage whites, Everett gives a richer sense of their humanity than is possible when we only read them speaking in dialect. Buy it here.

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‘The Evolution of Everything’ by Matt Ridley (2015)

Here’s a master class on a key idea: that complexity tends to emerge gradually from the ground up rather than being planned. A great deal of what defines our existence—money, morality, many technologies—basically just happened. Ridley gets you seeing through a new lens. Buy it here.

‘Dominion’ by Tom Holland (2019)

Holland is a spellbinding storyteller, here recounting how Christianity created the bedrock of Westerners’ sense of what is ordinary today, whether one is observant or not. The separation of church and state, individualism—these would have seemed bizarre to most humans before Christianity. Buy it here.

‘G-Man’ by Beverly Gage (2022)

Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover is a page-turner I could barely put down. Hoover was a closeted obsessive, spending a career on an Ahab-like quest to uncover a nonexistent “deep state” of communists, as well as the possible infidelities and—wouldn’t you know?—homosexuality of those he deemed dangerous. Buy it here.

‘Year of Wonders’ by Geraldine Brooks (2001)

Brooks works magic in this exquisite historically based novel about an English village enduring the bubonic plague. I’m supposed to say that the Covid pandemic makes this novel “more relevant than ever,” but I would have cherished it just as much before 2020. Buy it here.

‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison (1970)

For me, this novel was the best “book I hadn’t read” in 20 years. I was in awe of the nuance Morrison achieves in her character portraits, singling out both men and women and understanding them deeply as they all cope with making the most of life in a small Ohio town under just-short-of–Jim Crow rule. Henry James, move over. Buy it here.