On the Marble Cliffs


Ernst Jünger - 1939
    The narrator and protagonist lives on the marble cliffs as a botanist with his brother Otho, his son Erio from a past relationship and Erio's grandmother Lampusa. The idyllic life is threatened by the erosion of values and traditions, losing its inner power. The head forester uses this opportunity to establish a new order based on dictatorial rule, large numbers of mindless followers and the use of violence, torture and murder.

Unforgiving Years


Victor Serge - 1971
    Victor Serge’s final work, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.The novel is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

Madame


Antoni Libera - 1998
    Madame is an unexpected gem: a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity, which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth.Our young narrator-hero is suffering through the regulated boredom of high school when he is transfixed by a new teacher --an elegant "older woman" (she is thirty-two) who bewitches him with her glacial beauty and her strict intelligence. He resolves to learn everything he can about her and to win her heart.In a sequence of marvelously funny but sobering maneuvers, he learns much more than he expected to--about politics, Poland, the Spanish Civil War, and his own passion for theater and art--all while his loved one continues to elude him. Yet without his realizing it, his efforts--largely bookish and literary--to close in on Madame are his first steps to liberation as an artist. Later, during a stint as a teacher-in-training in his old school, he discovers that he himself has become a legendary figure to a new generation of students, and he begins to understand the deceits and blessings of myth, and its redemptive power.A winning portrait of an artist as a young man, Madame is at the same time a moving, engaging novel about strength and weakness, first love, and the efforts we make to reconcile, in art, the opposing forces of reason and passion.

Days and Nights of Love and War


Eduardo Galeano - 1978
    In this fascinating journal and eloquent history, Eduardo Galeano movingly records the lives of struggles of the Latin American people, under two decades of unimaginable violence and extreme repression. Alternating between reportage, personal vignettes, interviews, travelogues, and folklore, and richly conveyed with anger, sadness, irony, and occasional humor, Galeano pays loving tribute to the courage and determination of those who continued to believe in, and fight for, a more human existence. The Lannan Foundation awarded the 1999 Cultural Prize for Freedom to Eduardo Galeano, in recognition of those "whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry and expression." Originally published in Cuba, Days and Nights of Love and War won the Casa de las Am�ricas prize in 1978.

The Complete Maus


Art Spiegelman - 1980
    By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance.

East Wind: West Wind


Pearl S. Buck - 1930
    The story follows Kwei-lan as she begins to accept different points of view from the western world, and re-discovers her sense of self through this coming-of-age narrative.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps


Yitzhak Arad - 1987
    Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution.... Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go."--New York Times Book Review..". some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read.... the authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." --Raul HilbergArad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps.

Victoria's War: A Novel


Catherine A. Hamilton - 2020
    Victoria's War is a work of historical fiction about 19-year-old Victoria Darski, a Polish Catholic woman sold into slavery during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and Etta Tod, the 20-year-old deaf daughter of a German baker who buys Victoria. Poland, 1939: Eager to study literature at the University of Warsaw, Victoria waits with bags packed. But Hitler invades Poland and classes are canceled. German officers burst into her family's home in Lagody, shoot and kill Victoria's sister when she cries, and take Victoria and her mother to work in a sewing factory commandeered by Nazis. Making military shirts, Victoria sews a straight pin inside the collars in defiance. At a secret resistance meeting, Victoria and her friend Sylvia are captured and then sold as slaves, along with thousands of other women. Germany, 1941: When Victoria is purchased to work in the Tod family bakery, Etta tries to protect Victoria, bringing food and companionship to the attic where Victoria is held. Etta is caught and sent to Hadamar Institute, where she is killed. This spurs Victoria to help rescue a group of mothers and babies from starvation. One of those women is her friend Sylvia from the sewing factory. ------"Victoria's War is a compelling story of a young Polish woman caught in the vise of the German invasion of Poland at the opening salvo of World War II. Written in an engaging literary style that captures the textures of Polish life, Catherine Hamilton's gripping novel is a must read!" -- Dr. Richard C. Lukas, author of Did the Children Cry? and The Forgotten Holocaust"Some stories that need to be told are never told. They languish in a limbo of forgotten stories that should never have been forgotten. Catherine Hamilton's novel Victoria's War resurrects one of these stories. In language intimate and natural and yet touched by the poetry of truth, Hamilton tells the story of a young girl who is the victim of war. Too often, we think only of the men who go to war, do heroic things. We forget the other victims and heroes of war, the women like Victoria in this brilliant novel." -- John Guzlowski, author of the award-winning Echoes of Tattered Tongues"In Victoria's War we follow the life of one Polish woman caught in the machinations of a war that has no pity....Based on the life of a real woman subjected to Hitler's forced labor program, Victoria's War reveals the hatred and fanaticism against Poles in Nazi Germany and the specific vulnerabilities of women that made their lives a living hell. Hamilton's story about a largely ignored aspect of women's history is emotionally evocative and rich in detail." --Sophie Hodorowicz Knab, author of Wearing the Letter "P" Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany, 1939-1945

Miracle at St. Anna


James McBride - 2001
    Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany and by the experiences of the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division in Italy during World War II, Miracle at St. Anna is a singular evocation of war, cruelty, passion, heroism, and love. It is the story of four American soldiers, the villagers among whom they take refuge, a band of partisans, and an Italian boy, all of whom encounter a miracle - though perhaps the true miracle lies in themselves.

No End Save Victory: Perspectives on World War II


Robert Cowley - 2001
    Some highlights include Caleb Carr on Poland in 1939, the only campaign that Hitler won; Stephen E. Ambrose on a pivotal battle to take the Rhine; John Keegan on the siege of Berlin; Victor Davis Hanson on the charismatic and controversial Gen. Curtis LeMay; William Manchester on Churchill's failure to influence the French; and Antony Beevor on the battle for Stalingrad. The pieces have appeared in print only once before in the respected MHQ: The Military Journal of Military History.

Mila 18


Leon Uris - 1961
    Leon Uris's novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists. Here, painted on a canvas as broad as its subject matter, is the compelling story of one of the most heroic struggles of modern times.

The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit


Elias Canetti - 1968
    In a series of sharply etched scenes, he portrays the languages and cultures of the people who fill its bazaars, cafes, and streets. The book presents vivid images of daily life: the storytellers in the Djema el Fna, the armies of beggars ready to set upon the unwary, and the rituals of Moroccan family life. This is Marrakesh -described by one of Europe’s major literary intellects in an account lauded as "cosmopolitan in the tradition of Goethe" by the New York Times. "A unique travel book," according to John Bayley of the London Review of Books.

On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History


Thomas Carlyle - 1841
    

Don Quixote de La Mancha, Volume 1


Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra - 1605
    Don Quixote, errant knight and sane madman, with the company of his faithful squire and wise fool, Sancho Panza, together roam the world and haunt readers' imaginations as they have for nearly four hundred years.

The Dream of Heroes


Adolfo Bioy Casares - 1954
    The problem is that Gauna can only dimly remember what happened: he was out on the town with his raucous, reckless friends when a masked woman appeared. Several hours later, gasping and horrified, Gauna awoke at the edge of a lake. Three years later, he tries to solve the mystery the only way he knows: by re-creating the same situation and reliving it- despite the warnings of his secret protector, the Sorcerer.In The Dreams of Heroes, Adolfo Bioy Casares assembles magicians, prophetic and brave women, shamefully self-conscious men and Buenos Aires under the rubric of a sinister and mocking fate, and thrusts them forward into the dizzying realm of memory, doom and cyclical time. Written in 1954 and never before published in America, The Dream of Heroes stands as a predecessor of and model for a whole school of European and American novels that followed but never quite matched it.