Why am I passionate about this?
All good books change the way we see the world, whether that’s in big, earth-shaking ways (The Origin of Species, The Communist Manifesto), or because they start a necessary conversation (The Jungle, Silent Spring), or simply because they give us a new language and framework with which to view our lives. As a journalist and author I’ve always loved stories and subjects that challenge the status quo. It’s why I wrote one book exploring the unique, deep-rooted flaws in America’s electoral democracy and another offering an eye-opening fresh account of the Oklahoma City bombing. The list that follows is of books that had a particular impact on me.
Andrew's book list on overturning received wisdom
Why did Andrew love this book?
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.
1 author picked The Holocaust in American Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions…