Fans pick 100 books like Little Golden America

The poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography engagingly recounts his travels to Cuba, Haiti, Japan, and Spain during the Civil War. The book's centerpiece is his 1931-1932 trip to the Soviet Union. He visited as part of a contingent of twenty-two African Americans hired to make a film on race relations in the United States.

The film project never panned out, but Hughes took advantage of the situation to visit Soviet Central Asia. He understood that his hosts tried too hard to convince American visitors of the progress made under the Soviet regime. But his autobiography also conveys the wonderful strangeness of being in a country officially committed to antiracism, where people of color had opportunities for education and advancement.  

In 1929, George Counts, a professor at Columbia Teachers College who was sympathetic to Soviet experiments in education, bought a new Ford, shipped it to Moscow, and braved 10,000 kilometers of mostly unpaved roads to see the Soviet Union, then undertaking a massive industrialization drive.

I was aware that the Soviet highway system was underdeveloped but was nonetheless shocked to learn details like the fact that the Soviet Union had no gas pumps; Counts poured pails of gas into his car through a funnel. His road trip helped me better understand Americans’ optimism about the Soviet project and Soviet visitors’ love of American technology.

This book allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of six visitors from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. A big part of the collection's appeal is that the authors were not neutral observers but committed socialists. Armed with preconceptions about capitalism, they offer provocative perspectives on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

The book includes work by three authors little-known in English translation (Grigory Machet, Vladimir Korolenko, and Vladimir Bogoraz) and travelogues by three famous writers, the novelist Maxim Gorky, who visited in 1906, and the Soviet poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, who visited in the 1920s. 

In 1980, the novelist Vassily Aksyonov, whose hipster characters loved rock’n’roll and all things American, fell afoul of the Soviet state; stripped of his Soviet citizenship while in the United States, he decided to stay.

His memoir chronicles his efforts to make sense of a country that often failed to match his idealized preconceptions. Like Ilf and Petrov, whose travelogue was one of his points of reference, Aksyonov undertook a road trip from New York to California and back.

He was sometimes overawed by American technology, critical of American cultural vacuity, and able to laugh at his own disorientation. His first thought when he saw rats in Washington, DC, was that they must be pets, maybe gerbils.    

The follow-up to his acclaimed book What Belongs to You, Cleanness is a relatively short but gorgeously executed novel about an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. It gives snapshots of his relationship, as well as dating app hooks ups – for better or worse. Greenwell is one of the greatest writers of our time, and he turns each sentence beautifully. 

The Schneirs did not write the first book on the famous case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, New Yorkers who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and put to death by the U.S. government in 1953. But for 20 years after its publication in 1965, their book became the definitive version of how the Rosenbergs had been victims of a grave miscarriage of justice, convicted of a crime “that never occurred”.

When the Schneirs published a revised version in 1983, its claims directly conflicted with those of another 1983 book, The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, which argued that during World War II, Julius Rosenberg had absolutely been a spy who shared atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. These divergent views led to a very public debate over the Rosenbergs’ guilt.

Jonathan Waterlow’s book It’s Only a Joke Comrade looks at humor in the Stalinist period, exploring how average citizens used humor to understand the contradictions of their daily reality and to relieve stress. Looking at the way Soviet leaders were mocked Waterlow investigates how people subversively commented on policies that left them hungry and poorly clothed, joking for example that Stalin rid himself of pubic lice (crabs) by announcing he would create a crab collective farm, causing even the lice to flee in terror. Jokes also touched on policy issues such as five-year plans, repression, and even the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, showing how people thought about and discussed these issues. Furthermore, Waterlow looks at the social aspects of telling jokes, which could have dire consequences if told to the wrong person. He studies how jokes helped create and reinforce trust circles, challenging old notions of atomization in the USSR. This witty,… show more.

For an intriguing, first-hand account of the art and life of the greatest ballerina of our time, don't miss this grand read. Natalia Makarova, the prima ballerina of them all gives this thrilling autobiography life as she describes not only her roles at the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg and at American Ballet Theatre in New York City, but also her daring escape from KGB agents in London where she defected. Glorious photography crowns this amazing achievement. On a personal note, my life changed after seeing her dance—first in a video of Giselle and then later in person at the Metropolitan Opera House. 

Having read The Long Walk, like so many others, I wondered about the identity of the character known as Mr. Smith, so I was intrigued to discover that Linda Willis had spent some ten years researching this character.

As I had myself spent three years trying to locate evidence to authenticate the story in my own book, I could empathize with all Linda’s frustration in following dead ends and scrabbling down rabbit warrens. 

I find it fascinating how rich a source Russia has been for talent and how poorly it has utilized them or ejected them. I liked Gamow’s personality and his informal style. Most of all, I find it amazing how multifaceted his talent was and that he was not afraid to come up with ideas—some fruitful, some mistaken, but always original—in any area of science, regardless of whether he had the proper training in it or not.

The only disappointment was that the autobiography stopped at one point. To me, Gamow symbolizes one of the most important characteristics of scientists: curiosity. In addition, I learned a great deal about the conditions for science in the early period of the Soviet Union.