100 books like Palimpsestic Memory

By Max Silverman,

Here are 100 books that Palimpsestic Memory fans have personally recommended if you like Palimpsestic Memory. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of History and Memory

Michael Pickering Author Of Memory and the Management of Change: Repossessing the Past

From my list on memory, time, and history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. I have written widely in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. Recent projects have involved books on song and music in the workplace, popular culture, cultural studies, advertising and racism, and blackface minstrelsy. I co-wrote Media and the Management of Change with Emily Keightley, the last volume in a trilogy on media and memory and the interaction of memory and imagination.

Michael's book list on memory, time, and history

Michael Pickering Why did Michael love this book?

This is one of the best critical surveys of the relationship between memory and history I have encountered. Geoffrey Cubitt is concerned with memory as both personal and social, along with the various dynamics between them. The book is interdisciplinary in conception and operation, exploring how history and memory inform one another in complementary and contradictory ways, and how both cross and re-cross varying scales of past/present relations. Regardless of whether readers approach this book from the perspective of memory or history, they will find it a comprehensive assessment of their complex interaction.

By Geoffrey Cubitt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked History and Memory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In recent years, 'memory' has become a central, though also a controversial, concept in historical studies - a term that denotes both a new and distinctive field of study and a fresh way of conceptualizing history as a field of inquiry more generally.

This book, which is aimed both at specialists and at students, provides historians with an accessible and stimulating introduction to debates and theories about memory, and to the range of approaches that have been taken to the study of it in history and other disciplines

Contributing in a wide-ranging way to debate on some of the central…


Book cover of Marking the Mind: A History of Memory

Michael Pickering Author Of Memory and the Management of Change: Repossessing the Past

From my list on memory, time, and history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. I have written widely in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. Recent projects have involved books on song and music in the workplace, popular culture, cultural studies, advertising and racism, and blackface minstrelsy. I co-wrote Media and the Management of Change with Emily Keightley, the last volume in a trilogy on media and memory and the interaction of memory and imagination.

Michael's book list on memory, time, and history

Michael Pickering Why did Michael love this book?

Focusing in the main on the psychology of memory, in this excellent book Kurt Danziger argues that conceptually memory has changed considerably over time, not least because of the shifting historical contexts in which it has been applied. The book covers such critical issues as different kinds of memory, memory and metaphor, the cultivation of memory, and memory and truth. Danziger’s contention throughout the book is that memory and remembering are ineluctably social, and any sound understanding of them needs to account for how various historical factors and cultural practices have shaped and helped constitute them. 

By Kurt Danziger,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marking the Mind as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Memory is one of the few psychological concepts with a truly ancient lineage. Presenting a history of the interrelated changes in memory tasks, memory technology and ideas about memory from antiquity to the late twentieth century, this book confronts psychology's 'short present' with its 'long past'. Kurt Danziger, one of the most influential historians of psychology of recent times, traces long-term continuities from ancient mnemonics and tools of inscription to modern memory experiments and computer storage. He explores historical discontinuities, showing how different kinds of memory became prominent at different times, and examines these changes in the context of specific…


Book cover of Peripheral Memories: Public and Private Forms of Experiencing and Narrating the Past

Michael Pickering Author Of Memory and the Management of Change: Repossessing the Past

From my list on memory, time, and history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. I have written widely in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. Recent projects have involved books on song and music in the workplace, popular culture, cultural studies, advertising and racism, and blackface minstrelsy. I co-wrote Media and the Management of Change with Emily Keightley, the last volume in a trilogy on media and memory and the interaction of memory and imagination.

Michael's book list on memory, time, and history

Michael Pickering Why did Michael love this book?

A predominant amount of work in memory studies has focused on national memory cultures. The shift in this anthology is towards small, local or regional memories and towards vernacular sites of remembering. Its contributors attend in the main to personal and familial forms of memory, and thus on the narrative modes and media associated with them. The chapters cover a fascinating range of topics, making for a diverse volume united by a key preoccupation with the locatedness of memory, rather than referring broadly across a whole national context or to a huge sweeping range of memory and remembering. This is a very welcome shift, bringing to the fore everyday objects of memory that have tended to be less predominant—hence ‘peripheral’, in the sense of being swept aside or overshadowed. Redressing this allows for a more complex understanding of relations between public and private memory and remembering practices, across varying temporal…

By Elisabeth Boesen (editor), Fabienne Lentz (editor), Michel Margue (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Peripheral Memories as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

After a period of intense work on national memory cultures, we are observing a growing interest in memory both as a social and an individual practice. Memory studies tend to focus on a particular field of memory processes, namely those connected with war, persecution and expulsion. In this sense, the memory - or rather the trauma - of the Holocaust is paradigmatic for the entire research field. The Holocaust is furthermore increasingly understood as constitutive of a global memory community which transcends national memories and mediates universal values. The present volume diverges from this perspective by dealing also with everyday…


Book cover of On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age

Michael Pickering Author Of Memory and the Management of Change: Repossessing the Past

From my list on memory, time, and history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. I have written widely in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. Recent projects have involved books on song and music in the workplace, popular culture, cultural studies, advertising and racism, and blackface minstrelsy. I co-wrote Media and the Management of Change with Emily Keightley, the last volume in a trilogy on media and memory and the interaction of memory and imagination.

Michael's book list on memory, time, and history

Michael Pickering Why did Michael love this book?

All the books being recommended on this topic see memory and remembering as being structured and directed by the views and perspectives of the social groups to which people belong. Ever since Bartlett and Halbwachs, we have come to see memory as in many ways moulded by particular mental schemata and configurations associated with the various groups that exist within a social whole, yet the notion of collective memory is beset with problems: problems of exaggeration, reification, functionalism, and more. It is therefore fitting that in this edited collection the work of Halbwach in particular is regarded critically, and extended historically, while also being recognised as providing the necessary starting point: "social groups construct their own images of the world by constantly shaping and reshaping versions of the past" (p. 3).

As we saw with Danziger, the social frameworks of memory as well as the kinds of memory being actively…

By Motti Neiger (editor), Oren Meyers (editor), Eyal Zandberg (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked On Media Memory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of Media Memory and brings Media and Mediation to the forefront of Collective Memory research. The essays explore a diversity of media technologies (television, radio, film and new media), genres (news, fiction, documentaries) and contexts (US, UK, Spain, Nigeria, Germany and the Middle East).


Book cover of Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust

Marlene Targ Brill Author Of Allen Jay and the Underground Railroad

From my list on showing children making a difference.

Why am I passionate about this?

I chose this focus because it fulfills one of my main goals of writing—to empower young readers by showing how what they do matters. Even the simplest actions can have huge consequences, no matter what someone’s age is. Whether someone saves another person’s life, like Allen Jay did, or stand up to a bully, doing what’s right makes a difference. Also, I like to right children into history so they understand that they’ve always played a key role in bettering this world.

Marlene's book list on showing children making a difference

Marlene Targ Brill Why did Marlene love this book?

This classic is about the need to speak up when someone sees something wrong. The story mirrors what many seemingly good people did not do during the WWII Holocaust. This story is told about different groups of animals, which is easier for young readers to understand. When the Terrible Things come to take away one group, the others feel relief. But one by one the Terrible Things take away another group. During this time no one speaks against what’s happening. They are just happy their time hasn’t come. By the time the Terrible Things come for the last group, there is no group left to protest and save them. The author wrote this book to “encourage young children to stand up for what they think is right, without waiting for others to join them.” That’s exactly what children in my books do and what I want to encourage in readers.

By Eve Bunting, Eve Bunting,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Terrible Things as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The animals in the clearing were content until the Terrible Things came, capturing all creatures with feathers.

Little Rabbit wondered what was wrong with feathers, but his fellow animals silenced him. "Just mind your own business, Little Rabbit. We don't want them to get mad at us."

A recommended text in Holocaust education programs across the United States, this unique introduction to the Holocaust encourages young children to stand up for what they think is right, without waiting for others to join them.

Ages 6 and up


Book cover of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

Susan Rubin Suleiman Author Of Crises of Memory and the Second World War

From my list on collective memory of WWII and the Holocaust.

Why am I passionate about this?

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Susan Rubin Suleiman emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She has had a distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, publishing more than a dozen books and over 100 scholarly articles. Her acclaimed memoir about returning to Budapest, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, appeared in 1996; in 2023, she published Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, a memoir of immigration which was a finalist for a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. She has been awarded many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1990 and France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur, in 2018. 

Susan's book list on collective memory of WWII and the Holocaust

Susan Rubin Suleiman Why did Susan love this book?

Andreas Huyssen is the author of many distinguished books, but this one is especially important because it expanded the study of public memory to South America, which has had its own share of traumatic pasts to memorialize. Huyssen argues that World War II and the Holocaust have provided  “templates” for memorialization that have been adapted by the Memory Park in Buenos Aires, among other examples. 

By Andreas Huyssen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Present Pasts as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York-three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city's reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public…


Book cover of Reading the Holocaust

Monica Black Author Of A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany

From my list on for historians who wish they were anthropologists.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.

Monica's book list on for historians who wish they were anthropologists

Monica Black Why did Monica love this book?

A lot of Inga Clendinnen’s work dealt with what happens when two very different cultures and ways of making sense of things come into contact. In the subtitle of her book Aztecs: An Interpretation, she boldly asserted her method for approaching history. It is not merely a recitation of facts, it is an elucidation of those facts by an expert steeped in the knowledge of a particular past. Having written about the Maya and the Aztecs, Reading the Holocaust was a departure, topically, geographically, historically. What I found so extraordinary about the book was precisely Clendinnen’s decision to look anthropologically at staggering events historians had often written about in “functional” terms (who did what, when, and where). In so doing, she tried to offer insight into something unthinkable (what the perpetrators thought they were doing) and something unimaginable (what the victims experienced).

By Inga Clendinnen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Reading the Holocaust as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

More than fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated students as morally and intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at their first rumouring. Reading the Holocaust, first published in 2002, challenges that bafflement, and the demoralization that attends it. Exploring the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view, as it appears in histories and memoirs, films and poems, Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the 'Gorgon effect': the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that…


Book cover of The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation

Ellen Cassedy Author Of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust

From my list on hope and understanding after the Holocaust.

Why am I passionate about this?

Ellen Cassedy explores the ways that people, and countries, can engage with the difficult truths of the Holocaust in order to build a better future. She researched Lithuania’s encounter with its Jewish heritage, including the Holocaust, for ten years. Her book breaks new ground by shining a spotlight on how brave people – Jews and non-Jews – are facing the past and building mutual understanding. Cassedy is the winner of numerous awards and a frequent speaker about the Holocaust, Lithuania, and Yiddish language and literature.  

Ellen's book list on hope and understanding after the Holocaust

Ellen Cassedy Why did Ellen love this book?

Steinman reaches out across a cultural divide to seek out Poles who are pursuing the truth about the past, however painful, and recovering the history of their lost Jewish neighbors. She brings to life the ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation. Her journey changed her, and it will change you.

By Louise Steinman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Crooked Mirror as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A lyrical literary memoir that explores the exhilarating, discomforting, and ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation taking place in Poland today
 
“I’d grown up with the phrase ‘Never forget’ imprinted on my psyche. Its corollary was more elusive. Was it possible to remember—at least to recall—a world that existed before the calamity?”
 
In the winter of 2000, Louise Steinman set out to attend an international Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the invitation of her Zen rabbi, who felt the Poles had gotten a “bum rap.” A bum rap? Her own mother could not bear to utter the word “Poland,”…


Book cover of The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust

Nathan Abrams Author Of Kubrick: An Odyssey

From my list on fiction and nonfiction books about movie directors.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was old (or young) enough to have only seen two Kubrick films in the cinema: Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. I began teaching film studies and Hollywood in 1998, and I have been teaching and researching Kubrick intensively since 2007, visiting his archive in London on numerous occasions. At one point, I held the record for the researcher who had spent the most hours in the Archive. I also met Christiane and Jan and spoke to many others who knew and worked with Kubrick. Having been familiar with Robert Kolker’s work, it became clear that collaborating with an international authority on film was a necessity as well as a pleasure.

Nathan's book list on fiction and nonfiction books about movie directors

Nathan Abrams Why did Nathan love this book?

I like this book because it is controversial – it suggests that Stanley Kubrick always wanted to make a film about the Holocaust but never did, so the film he made that ended up being about the Holocaust was The Shining.

While I don’t always agree with its conclusions, the research and analysis are first-rate, in-depth, detailed, and penetrating. It also uses a lot of archival research, which still tends to be rare in academic writing about film. I would love to see more books about film and Hollywood like this. 

By Geoffrey Cocks,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Wolf at the Door as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Wolf at the Door explores the remarkable formal and substantive patterns of cinematic discourse on Germany and the Holocaust in Stanley Kubrick’s films. It is the first book on Kubrick to place his cinema into the full context of his life and times – his Jewish past, early years spent under the shadows of fascism and war, and his 1957 marriage into a German family of artists and filmmakers – all provoked his deeply ambivalent preoccupation with the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. While personal and artistic reservations caused Kubrick to abandon several plans for a film…


Book cover of Primo Levi's Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy

Gemma Liviero Author Of The Road Beyond Ruin

From my list on WW2 occupation, resistance, and the aftermath.

Why am I passionate about this?

Gemma is the bestselling author of historical fiction novels, translated into several languages. Set against the backdrop of war in Europe, her fifth book in this genre will be released later this year. She has combined the war experiences of family members in WWI and WWII, information collected during her research and travels, and her academic studies in writing and history, to create the authentic scenes and characters for her books.

Gemma's book list on WW2 occupation, resistance, and the aftermath

Gemma Liviero Why did Gemma love this book?

The partisan experiences of Primo Levi—chemist, Auschwitz survivor, and writer—are researched and offered in gritty, thorough detail by Luzzatto. Levi, in his writings, alluded to incidents that occurred during his time as a partisan, and Luzzatto delves deeper into the motivations behind these events and the personalities involved. The Resistance in its early days, while being hunted by Nazis and their Italian allies, became a small force of its own making, using collective, military-style decisions and tactics, and meting out its own forms of justice. An important book to gain insight into the complexities of purpose within the Resistance, learn about the crimes and subsequent justice of members of Salò—the puppet government installed in northern Italy—and understand the influences on political alignments and fascism in the period beyond the war.

By Sergio Luzzatto,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Primo Levi's Resistance as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

No other Auschwitz survivor has been as literarily powerful and historically influential as Primo Levi. Yet Levi was not only a victim or a witness. In the fall of 1943, at the very start of the Italian Resistance, he was a fighter, participating in the first attempts to launch guerrilla warfare against occupying Nazi forces. Those three months have been largely overlooked by Levi's biographers; indeed, they went strikingly unmentioned by Levi himself. For the rest of his life he barely acknowledged that autumn in the Alps. But an obscure passage in Levi's The Periodic Table hints that his deportation…


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