Keegan, John, The First World War, Vintage, 2000.

This book is a vivid account of the causes and progress of World War I, drawing on diaries, letters, and action reports of the time. Keegan concludes that the war was unnecessary.

Keller, Helen, The Story of My Life, Bantam Classics, 1990.

Born deaf and blind, Keller refused to be crushed by her disabilities and went on to become an effective suffragist, pacifist, social reformer, and author. She helped start several foundations that in the early 2000s continue to help the deaf and blind. This joyful, perceptive, and beautifully written autobiography is credited with helping to change social attitudes toward the disabled.

Nies, Betsy L., Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s, Routledge, 2001.

Nies draws on psychoanalytic theory, anthropology, and literary theory to argue that the rise of eugenics served as a palliative...