My Forbidden Face by Latifa which chronicles the plight of a teenager living in Afghanistan when the Taliban invades her village in 1996. While in high school in the 1960s, Anne Frank’s Diary was required reading. This should be added to that list. It records recent history from a young person’s point of view, about a terrifying reality most of us will, hopefully, never live.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jan/29/firstchapters.reviews (opening chapter)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53693.My_Forbidden_Face (reviews)
Lost Discoveries by Dick Teresi is a science book written for the masses. Teresi manages to explain the history of mathematics with its details and horrors early mathematicians experienced in their desire to apply numbers to reality. However, I greatly appreciated his explanation of how Galileo disproved the earth was the center of the university: with the aid of research in Arabic scientific texts. This book also perused global historical references for other presumed Western scientific concepts.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lost-Discoveries/Dick-Teresi/9780743243797
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64888.Lost_Discoveries (reviews)
Dictionaries with word origins – any one of them! As a child, I read the huge family dictionary that surpassed the Bible in its width. Why? Because it had L, OE, ME, Fr, AS and more mother tongues that revealed the secret history of words, from Latin, Old English, Middle English, French, Anglo-Saxon, German, Greek and others. For a mind to time travel across eons within just one word was an ecstatic adventure. It still is. However, purchasing an affordable paperback dictionary with this information is a Himalayan adventure. In 2019, the movie The Professor and the Madman presents ageing Mel Gibson and Sean Penn revealing the boring, tedious 40+ year long plight of Oxford University to publish a comprehensive English dictionary. (Yes, the movie was boring and tedious but as a writer, it had its entertainment value).
https://www.etymonline.com/
https://www.lexilogos.com/english/dictionary.htm (variety of on-line dictionaries)
Alice Delaney Walker - Teacher, Writer, Traveller 