2020 Book Concierge: Books For History Lovers

DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:

NPR's Book Concierge brings together some of the year's best books in a handy, searchable guide - hundreds of books this year, more than 380 new recommendations, which is a lot. So we asked some of our colleagues to help narrow it down to four books that may satisfy the history buffs out there.

To kick it off, I'll start with one of the books I wrote about. It's called "Race Against Time." It's by Jerry Mitchell. He's a Mississippi investigative journalist, and I've been a longtime fan of his. And his memoir doesn't disappoint. It's a page-turner that really reads more like a mystery novel, but it's frighteningly real. It recalls his reporting over the years that ultimately resulted in justice for some of the most notorious murders carried out by the Ku Klux Klan.

Mitchell takes readers inside the investigations and prosecutions that decades later held Klansmen to account for killing civil rights leaders and workers in Mississippi and for killing four Black girls dynamited in a Birmingham church. Now, I covered most of those trials for NPR. But Jerry's memoir recreates those historic events in riveting detail that even I didn't remember.

EMIKO TAMAGAWA, BYLINE: I'm Emiko Tamagawa, arts producer for Here & Now, and I'm recommending "Roadside Americans" by Jack Reid. The title says it all. This is a book about hitchhiking. So why should you care about it? - because Reid uses the practice to examine shifts in American culture during the 20th century, from being an economic necessity during the Great Depression, a part of the counterculture in the 1960s.

By the late '70s and '80s, hitchhiking was seen as dangerous. The hitchhiker was often depicted in TV and film as a deranged psychopath. "Roadside Americans" transports the reader to a time when Americans actually gave people rides without being paid for it.