The best books that overturn received wisdom

Although not as well known as Fanon’s later critique of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, this book (first published in 1952) brilliantly captures the postwar turmoil when questions of race, oppression, national and personal identity were suddenly ripe for re-examination and reinvention – as, in many ways, they are again now. Fanon’s revolutionary call to resist being defined by others and determine our own destinies speaks directly to our Black Lives Matter moment. But it also speaks to anyone who has been displaced (as my family was during World War Two), or refuses to be pigeon-holed and characterized as others might want. A great book for anyone looking to push back against the rising global tide of illiberalism and forge a more hopeful and more understanding future. 

A book that grapples with the complicated question of historical memory and subverts one assumption after another about the way the Holocaust has come to occupy a central place in our thinking. As Novick shows and as I know from my own family history, our collective memory has in fact zigzagged between willful forgetting, rewriting and mythologizing the past, overhasty moral judgment, and flat-out error. Novick’s is one of a number of brilliant books – Tony Judt’s Postwar is another; Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands yet another – that go beyond the simple exhortation “never forget” and make us realize that if we don’t want to repeat the horrors of World War Two we need to know a lot better what it is we need to remember in the first place.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, I knew bad things were happening in Northern Ireland and I had a sense that what we heard on the BBC was one-sided and not to be trusted. This book is a revelation, not only in making sense of the Troubles on both sides of the sectarian divide but also in telling the story from the inside, with an intimacy of detail to make you gasp over and over. It’s a real page-turner, full of unforgettable characters forced to navigate the daunting moral consequences of their own and others’ actions. By the end, their stories will break your heart in a hundred different ways.  

Leovy takes a deep dive into Los Angeles, my adoptive hometown, and argues that much of the violence and mistrust of authority rocking our poorest Black neighborhoods is not – as is commonly assumed – the result of excessive law enforcement but rather the opposite. On the streets of South LA, the police are often glaringly absent, and as a result the worst crimes go unsolved, if they are investigated at all, and any semblance of community policing or trust-building becomes impossible. Leovy finds the most wrenching of narrative vehicles to drive her point home – an LAPD homicide detective and South LA resident who has to confront a tragedy in his own household.

In my reading life, there is a clear before and after Flaubert’s masterpiece, because it challenged everything I thought I knew about reading itself. Although rooted in the realist tradition, Madame Bovary forces us to question everything – about the reliability of language, about tone, about the solidity of what and who is being described, about the very ground beneath our feet. Is Flaubert seducing us, or making fun of us, or both? Are we moved because the book is funny, or sad, or are we, the readers, merely ridiculous? Nothing reads quite the same way after Madame Bovary. And that’s a good thing, because while it makes readers warier and more self-aware, it also inspires them to love books more deeply.