100 books like The Reader

I found this book uniquely moving, gripping, and enlightening.

With his diary, Klemperer, a German Jew, captures the increasingly brutal atmosphere of Nazi Germany and what persecution felt like in everyday life. I admire the sharpness with which he describes the various Germans he encountered–and the range of their reactions–as the deportations and mass murder got under way.

It is a remarkable testimony to the good and evil in humanity.

What I admire about this book is the courage to break with the standard narrative of West Germany from 1949 to 1989 as a success story. West Germans did not just settle down in prosperity and comfort but had plenty of angst and fear.

The book does a great job of showing how we can write a history of emotions.

As a historian, I constantly try to get into the hearts and minds of people in the past.

For socialist East Germany, these diaries by the writer Brigitte Reimann let us see what it meant to be a woman in the GDR, to live and love, to build socialism, and then, in 1961, to see the Berlin Wall close off one’s world suddenly.

This historical novel is about a young Romanian German who is deported to a Soviet labour camp by Stalin after the Second World War. Herta Müller herself grew up as a member of the Romanian German minority, and the novel is inspired by her conversations with survivors of the camps.

What made this book truly spellbinding for me–in addition to the story–was the playful melody of the language. It is a reminder of how rich and diverse the German language and culture were with the various communities in Central and Eastern Europe until the Second World War and the deportations and expulsions.

If you’ve read any of my novels, you know I like my protagonists to be flawed. The more morally complex the main character, the better, in my opinion. And how can you get more morally questionable than an American who becomes a propagandist for the Nazi party during WWII? But wait. Is he a Nazi? Or is he just playing a part?

Another thing I love is when genre fiction has a larger moral theme that runs through it. What can I say? I don’t like to be preached at, but I do prefer stories with a strong point of view (whether I believe in it or not). And what bigger question can a book tackle than the one Vonnegut plays with in this book? Are we what we pretend to be? If you’re a WWII buff, or even if you just enjoy peeking into the darkest reaches of human… show more.

An easily accessible overview of development and internal workings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) up to the first stages of the Milosevic trial. Hagan satisfied my interest in what happens behind the scenes: the struggles, losses, and triumphs of creating the first international war crimes court since Nuremberg and Tokyo. I found particularly illuminating his discussion of how an ICTY prosecution team developed the legal theory, supported by substantial evidence, of rape as an intentional strategy to further the goal of ethnic cleansing, for the first time making it a war crime in its own right. His explication of the tension between diplomacy (which often utilizes amnesty in seeking an end to conflict) and accountability (which seeks justice for victims and humanity) was thought-provoking.

How could ordinary policemen be implicated in the Holocaust by participating in mass shootings of Jews? After SS leader Heinrich Himmler took over the police forces in 1936, he was able to call up regular (i.e., non Nazified) police battalions and order them into Nazi-occupied Poland.

The historian Browning's book is based on the post-war interrogations of some of these policemen for trial. Browning delves into the reasons they went along with the mass shootings, even though they could have opted out and requested a different assignment.

His gripping analysis shows how peer pressure shapes individuals, and how participation in unspeakable, genocidal crimes becomes possible in an order-based hierarchy.

When I was secretly working as an escort, living and working ‘underground’, and came upon this book, I was immediately drawn in because here, too, despite and thankfully many different circumstances, was a woman witnessing and taking notes not only to keep herself sane but also to bear witness to the real events as they affected women in this terrible and extraordinary moment in history.

Instead of events and general washes of the main players, as is so often what we get when studying a period of history, here was a true, authentic voice of the actual effects and aftermath of the war on the people living through it. And she wrote it as it was being lived! …” with nothing but a pencil stub, writing by candlelight since Berlin had no electricity…”

As the author, she chose to remain anonymous to protect herself. This choice resonated with me until… show more.

In 2019 I published a review of Mary Fulbrook’s Reckonings in the journal History. The review may have been the most laudatory I’ve written. Fulbrook’s study of the Holocaust and its noxious aftereffects lingers with me today. I’ve come to think of Reckonings as the War and Peace of Holocaust histories. Like Tolstoy’s epic, it paints on a sprawling canvas, exhausting the writer’s palette to portray the Holocaust as a searing multi-generational phenomenon. Reckonings does not approach the Shoah as most writers of the Holocaust do, namely, as a monumental but time-limited event. Fulbrook conceives of the Holocaust as a cancer that blights the victims and their families into the second and third generations. The radioactive fallout of the Shoah continues to the present day, poisoning people’s lives so deeply that no human response is adequate to deal with it. She upholds the tragedy of the Holocaust by refusing… show more.

The grandmama of human rights-related trial accounts, and for good reason. Arendt covered the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the 1960s. Eichmann had been living in Argentina, and was kidnapped and taken to Israel, where he was tried and condemned for his role in the Holocaust. Arendt raises profound questions about the value of trials in the face of overwhelming evil, about how trials structure narratives, and about memory. Still issues we grapple with today.