... some leisure reading:

Here are some accessible favorites of mine and some justifiably popular classroom standards. Except perhaps for some of the "Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism" titles, none of these books should intimidate the average history-lover with Western Civ behind her. A few are out of print or hard to find, but many public libraries perform interlibrary loans.


France (chronologically):

Little Saint, Hannah Green (A journalist probes a village’s past through its matron saint, Sainte Foy)
A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth Century France, Ann Wroe
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (A nest of medieval heretics)
The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis (Crime and suspense in the 1500s)
The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Robert Darnton (Six case studies of life in 

        prerevolutionary France)
Journal of My Life, Jaques-Louis Ménétra (A prerevolutionary craftsman’s memoir)
The Memoirs of Madame Roland: A Heroine of the French Revolution, Evelyn Shuckburgh, ed. (Written while in prison 

        before her death by guillotine)
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama (Colorfully told, conservatively slanted)
Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, Ruth Harris (On the 1858 origin and subsequent growth of France’s 

        world-renowned shrine and pilgrimage site)
Célestine: Voices from a French Village, Gillian Tindall (Private letters help to reveal a village’s history)
The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, Alain Corbin (A war-induced outburst)
The Life of a Simple Man, Emile Guillaumin (A memoir of peasant hardship)
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France (1885-1918), Roger Shattuck
Mémé Santerre: A French Woman of the People, Serge Grafteaux (A working class account of early twentieth-century life)
The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village, Pierre-Jakez Hélias (A professor splendidly recalls how his Brittany "became 
        French" in the first half of the twentieth-century).
Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, Marc Bloch (An eventually executed French historian ponders 
        France’s quick 1940 defeat by Hitler’s army)
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There, Philip Hallie (How 
       French villagers hid Jews from Nazi-ruled French authorities)
Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor, Charles de Gaulle (A national hero recalls the post-WWII era)
Village in the Vaucluse, Lawrence Wylie (A sociologist’s study during the 1950s)
The Oysters of Locmariaquer, Eleanor Clark (A cultural history of oystering in Brittany)
The Foreign Student, Philippe Labro (A Frenchman’s 1954-55 year at Washington and Lee College).
A Life of Her Own: A Countrywoman in Twentieth Century France, Emilie Carles (A bestseller in France)
My France: Politics, Culture, and Myth, Eugen Weber (Essays by a revered historian of France)
Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik (Insightful essays on the Paris of the 1990s)


Central and Eastern Europe (chronologically):

The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln (By a Jewish widow and mother 1690s; More descriptive than introspective)
Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village, Serg Schmemann (An American journalist’s study of his 
        family native village)
The Radetsky March, Joseph Roth (A novel about the late Habsburg empire)
From the Fair, Sholom Aleichem (Jewish life in late nineteenth century Russia, from the author of "Fiddler on the Roof")
In the Storm, Sholom Aleichem (A turn-of-the-century novella about Russian Jewish choices)
The Wandering Jews, Joseph Roth (A Jewish novelist’s pre-Holocaust analysis of Jew-Gentile relations in Europe)
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig (An Austrian man of letters evokes pre-WWI Europe)
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor von Rezzori (A superb picture --especially "Skushno" and "Troth"-- of Jew-Gentile 
       relations in Pre-WWII Eastern Europe)
Journey to Poland, Alfred Döblin (A German novelist seeks his Jewish roots in 1924)
What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books, Heinrich Böll (A fiction writer’s memoir of Nazi-era 
       Germany)
The Approaching Storm, Nora Waln (An American journalist’s account of life in Nazi Germany)
Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, Alison Owings (10+ brief personal histories)
My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, Peter Gay (A historian’s memoir)
Survival at Auschwitz, Primo Levi (An Italian chemist’s classic account of surviving of a Nazi death camp)
Patterns of Childhood, Christa Wolf (A German’s memoir of Nazi era and post WWII Germany)
Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968, Heda Margolius Kovály (Life in Soviet-ruled Czechoslovakia, richly 
        depicted)
A World Apart, Gustaw Herling (A Polish Nobel Laureate’s account of a Soviet prison/labor camp)
Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century, Modris Eksteins (A 
        Latvian emigré historian on the traumatized Baltic region)
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghost After Communism, Tina Rosenberg (On the facing of distasteful Soviet-era 
        pasts by post-Soviet Poles, Czechs, and Germans)
Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, Slavenka Drakuliƒ (Croatian reflections on Communism’s imprint)
The Germans, Gordon Craig (A narrative overview of German history)
Dreams and Delusions: National Socialism and the Drama of the German Past, Fritz Stern (Essays)


General and Miscellaneous European (chronologically):

 A History of Knowledge: The Pivotal Events, People, and Achievements of World History, Charles Van Doren
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, Carlo Ginzburg
The Bürgermeister’s Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth Century German Town, Steven Ozment
Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany, Carlo Cipolla
The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, George Mosse
Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture, 1815-1914, Peter Gay (Gay’s final word on his most-loved 
        subject)
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins (On cultural anxieties and shifts before 
        and during World War One)
The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell (World War I’s effect on sensibility and language)
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Bythe (Traditional life related through brief testimonies)
Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves (A gentleman scholar’s classic 1929 memoir)
The God That Failed, Richard Crossman, ed. (Rich retrospections of six one-time communists)
Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, Carlo Levi (An anti-fascist’s 1936 exile in Southern Italy)
Fontamara, Ignazio Silone (A novel of village life under Mussolini’s Fascism)
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell (A 1936 account of Spain’s civil war)
The Spanish Cockpit, Franz Borkenau (A 1937 account of Spain’s civil war)
Family Sayings, Natalia Ginzburg (Life under Italian Fascism)
The Tiber Afire, Fabio Della Seta (A memoir of Jewish life in Rome during WWII)
A Cornish Childhood, A.L.Rowse (An historian’s memoir of his youth in Cornwall)
Women of the Shadows, Ann Cornelisen (On the wives and mothers of rural Southern Italy after WW II)
The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners, Margaret Visser
Western Attitudes Towards Death from the Middle Ages to the Present, Philipe Ariès
An Intimate History of Humanity, Theodore Zeldin (Quirky essays on human feelings, hopes, and disappointments, mostly 
        through French examples)
The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War, Samuel Hynes (A soldier’s eye view)


The Non-Western World (chronologically):

 Islam, Christianity, and the West: A Troubled History, Rollin Armour
Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small Town Japan, Dr. Junichi Saga (Traditional life conveyed through 
        brief testimonies)
Japan/China, Nikos Kazantzakis (Two 1935 voyage journals by the Greek novelist)
Kabloona, Gontran de Poncins (A French aristocrat’s 1941 stay among the Eskimos)
From a Chinese City, Gontran de Poncins (An ethnic Chinese enclave in Vietnam, described in 1955)
Toward Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru (The politicized 1941 memoir of a jailed Indian nationalist)
My Days, R. K. Narayan (A South Indian novelist’s 1973 memoir)
Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss (A French anthropologist among Brazilian Indians in the 1940s)
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Jung Chang (A graphic three-generation biography from twentieth century China)
Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family, Doung Van Elliott (An elite family navigates the 
        French and American presences)
Minor Heresies, Major Departures: A China Mission Boyhood, John Espey (A Presbyterian-bred scholar)
Out of Place, Edward Said (A Palestinian-American academic and activist’s memoir)
Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers his Armenian Past, Peter, Balakian (Recalls Armenia’s "forgotten 
        genocide")
The Sun at Midday, Gini Alhadeff (A Sephardic Jewish family memoir)
Our of Egypt, André Aciman (A flamboyant Jewish family’s life in Egypt)


Africa (chronologically):

 The Interesting Narrative, Oluadah Equiano
Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, Philip Curtin, ed.
Segu, Maryse Condé (A sweeping novel featuring Islam and the slave trade)
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (A much read African novel depicting the Ibo’s first contact with missionaries and 
        administrators)
Travels in West Africa, Mary Kingsley (A Victorian woman describes her travels during the 1890s)
Magomero: Portrait of an African Village, Landeg White (Malawi)
Dark Child, Camara Laye (An African childhood amidst French colonization)
Aké: The Years of Childhood, Wole Soyinka (The Yoruba Nobel laureate’s memoir)
Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, Bessie Head (Oral histories of life in Botswana)
Facing Mount Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta (The Kikuyu viewed anthropologically by one of their own)
Child of Two Worlds, Mugo Gatheru (A Kikuyu memoir of British colonization and African resistance)
Not Yet Uhuru, Oginga Odinga (A Luo memoir of British colonization and African resistance)
Life Histories of African Women, Patricia Romero, ed.


The United States (chronologically):

 World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe (The journey of East European Jews to America and the life they found and made)
Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light, Tyler Stovall
1939: The Lost World of the Fair, David Gelernter (Unibomber victim Gelernter uses fictional characters to recreate the 
        futuristic New York World’s Fair)
A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biograpaphy
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and How I Grew, Mary McCarthy
Mount Allegro and An Ethnic at Large, Jerre Mangione (An Italian-American recalls the pre-WWII era)
The Temple Bombing, Melissa Fay Greene (An Atlanta rabbi feels called to oppose Jim Crow)
At a Century’s End: Reflections 1982-1995, George F. Kennan (Essays by an American elder statesman).
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, Christopher Lasch


Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism:

The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Charles Taylor
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Stephen Toulmin
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel C. Dennett
All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Marshall Berman
Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought (1890-1930), H. S. Hughes
Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politic and Culture and Thinking with History, Carl Schorske
Prophets Without Honor: Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World, Frederic V. Grunfeld
English-Speaking Justice, George Grant
Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972, Lewis Mumford

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell