74 books like My Invented Country

I love Stein’s unapologetic and brazen queerness at a time when that was not exactly appreciated. Toklas was Stein’s lifelong lover, with whom she shared her life in Paris.

To me, this book feels like a love letter. My favorite scene is the one in which Toklas and Stein invite the struggling artists of Paris to dinner and then sit them opposite paintings they themselves have made in order to keep them from arguing. Stein’s wit is as lively as ever in this book, and–it’s simply the best example of a hoax autobiography I can think of. And it certainly puts paid to any notion that an autobiographical text might be stable or even a little truthy.

Words do marvelous things as they emerge out of Stein’s brilliant mind. 

Relayed in the voice of his nine-year-old self, Solito tracks Zamora’s harrowing three-thousand-mile trek from his home in El Salvador to join his mother and father in California.

To reunite with his parents, he must leave behind everything else he has ever known: his village, his friends, his grandparents, and his beloved Tia Mali. What is supposed to be a two-week journey turns into a two-month odyssey, as he makes his way north by bus, boat, and foot, accompanied by a group of strangers who, in time, close ranks to nurture and protect him like a second family.

This affecting story, told with such innocence and immediacy, makes evident the individual, human costs that are too easily overlooked by reporting on US immigration and the staggering statistics that it invariably emphasizes.

Subtitled Memoires of a European and conceived as missive to future generations, this book provides an exemplary account of the Continent in the first half of the twentieth century, with its many upheavals, rendered from the perspective of an exemplary individual: “an Austrian, a Jew, an author, a humanist, and a pacifist,” Zweig remarks, “I always stood at the exact point where these earthquakes were the most violent.”

He began writing the book in the mid-thirties when the rise of the Nazi party motivated him to leave Austria, first for England and later Brazil. Along the way, he recounts the details of his life and work in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, and elsewhere, as he became one of the leading figures in European letters, before the Second World War wrought destruction on his entire generation.

This book moves me whenever I open it, no matter the chapter, no matter the page.

It presents the harrowing tale of Douglass’s flight from slavery as a young man with a degree of urgency and detail that is not found in his other writings.

But it is the account of his travels through Europe and North Africa as a man of almost seventy, finally free to pursue his lifelong wanderlust, that is perhaps most poignant: “I had strange dreams of travel even in my boyhood days,” he writes. “I thought I should some day see many of the famous places of which I heard men speak, and of which I read even while a slave.”

In between Paris and the pyramids, Douglass repeatedly compares what he sees in the Old World with what he knows so well, and often so painfully, of American ideals, values, and aspirations.

Chief Pfeifer was the first ranking officer to arrive at the World Trade Center on the morning of the attack. He was in the area to investigate a report of a gas leak when he saw a plane crash into the North Tower.

He was being followed by a film crew for an unrelated documentary. The film footage shows him in the WTC lobby as he tries to determine what is going on and as he and others begin the rescue operation that would engulf virtually the entire FDNY and turn tragic when the Twin Towers collapsed.

This book takes you beyond the news coverage and provides a first-hand account from a ranking FDNY member who was on the scene. 

The September 11th terrorist attack is a difficult history to introduce.

Picture books can be a good way to start the conversation, especially with 8 and 9-year-olds. In This Very Tree, Sean Rubin broaches the topic through a remarkable Callery pear tree in the Twin Towers plaza which survived the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Rubin’s poignant artwork conveys both the destruction of that terrible day in New York City and the rebuilding efforts afterwards. Informative and lengthy back matter provides more information to complement the brief illustrated text. This picture book leaves the reader with an ultimately hopeful outlook of resilience and renewal. 

Louise Richardson’s book is an insightful investigation for people who want to understand the motivation of terrorists and their supporters, especially those who engage in suicide terrorism. She makes a persuasive argument that suicide terrorists are motivated by political objectives understood in the broad sense of this term. They have long and short-term political objectives among which are revenge, renown, and reaction. She refers to these motives as the three Rs. She contends that those who engage in suicide operations are disaffected individuals supported by a community that espouses a legitimizing ideology, be it political, religious, or both. As result, their deep-seated grievances can turn into deep-seated resentment against powerful nations which they blame for intervening in their own country. For example, they oftentimes blame the US government for maintaining a presence in Islamic countries, including supporting despotic and nepotic regimes, such as the present Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 

Towers Falling takes place in New York City fifteen years after the terrorist attacks.

Fifth grader Deja has no idea what happened in 2001 or the impact it has had on the present. When her teacher begins a unit on September 11th, Deja’s father becomes angry. He doesn’t want Deja to know what happened to the Twin Towers. With the help of classmates, Deja unravels the history of her city and her family.

The perspective of a child learning about the September 11th attacks from the distance of time is made all the more powerful by Deja’s personal circumstances, living in a homeless shelter with an ailing father. This is a poignant story with a strong main character learning to live with the past and move forward. 

This book describes the early career of Judy Melinek, M.D., who was a forensic pathology fellow in New York City just months before the 9/11 attack.

I liked this book because it is a first-hand account of the forensic investigations that she and her team conducted regarding the deaths that occurred that fateful day.

Dr. Melinek describes the many other investigations she conducted during her time there. While most forensic pathologists have boring personalities, Dr. Melinek knows she works in a ghoulish profession and, therefore, writes with wit and is real. "Nobody shakes hands in the autopsy suite."

During the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when I was working on my own book and the motif of demolition was suddenly inescapable, this modest children’s book was published. In lovely gouache, Maira Kalman encapsulates the story of the salvaged fireboat John J. Harvey and its heroic journey on that dark day. As I struggled to make sense of a world falling apart, this book was a breath of fresh air. Kalman shows how to meld urban history and tragedy in a tale told with supreme deftness and charm that ennobles, no matter your age. Above all, her volume stands as a hopeful tribute to the power of collective human action, against all odds, to turn the tide.