100 books like The Sixth Lamentation

This is one of my favorite books ever. I’ve read it many times, and it’s 500 pages long. The voice of the first-person narrator is so delightful I get hooked on the first page. Set in South Africa, Peekay is the ultimate underdog.

Emotionally deserted by his mom at boarding school, he doesn’t even know his own name and calls himself P.K. He’s a white English kid bullied by the dominant Dutch-descendant Boers as Apartheid (Governmental violent, oppressive racism) becomes law.

Peekay grows to become a champion boxer and champions the oppressed. I became obsessed with South Africa and could not look away from this story. It’s a wonderful example of a novel about an athlete, and even when I don’t like the sport, I adore the character and story.

This is a 750+ page book and a tour de force. I have profound sympathy for the Jewish people, and the horrors they endured under Nazi rule. None of the things I have suffered in my life, including living with a violent alcoholic father, came even close to the fears and degradation experienced by the people in this book. My own survival techniques included hiding and avoidance of anything that would trigger my father’s anger. As the eldest, I also tried to shield my younger siblings. Thus, I was as unobtrusive as possible, a survival technique minorities have used for centuries.

This story begins in 1937 with a young Hungarian Jewish man who goes to Paris to study architecture. Asked to deliver a letter to a woman’s nephew, he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient and eventually, despite her own dark secrets, they fall in love. As… show more.

This story appealed to me at the outset because of my interest in people whose property was confiscated due to the turmoil of war. I have a grandfather who was a famous artist. Because he was painting in the 1930s, his original artworks were sold in their entirety to the major magazines of the day. Nowadays, artists sell the rights to their work, but retain the original paintings. I have spent much of my adult life tracking down his paintings that were lost to the family.

Susan Wiggs’ character, Tess Delaney, makes a living returning stolen or lost objects to their rightful owners. At the beginning of the book, she returns a valuable lavalier necklace to an elderly woman. Somewhat later, she is shocked to learn she has a grandfather she never knew about and that she has been named in his will to inherit half of Bella Vista, a… show more.

This book is powerful to me because of the intense mother/daughter conflict she relates. My mother was lovely, well-read, and held an important position at our state university. However, she was also extremely critical of her children. Because I never rebelled against my mother, I was entranced with Joanne Harris’ young character, Framboise, who plans and carries out a rebellion against her mother that is worthy of the French resistance. Many years later, when Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation.

The past and present are inextricably entwined in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise inherited from her now-deceased mother. The journal contains the key to the tragedy that indelibly marked that summer of her ninth year. The mother… show more.

Like everyone else with a pulse, I love Stephen King. So here’s a slightly underrated pull so I don’t lose my horror fan street cred. Apt Pupil is the first King book I’ve read that made me feel legitimately dirty. The creeping menace, the way he subverts your expectations, this excruciating dance of mutually assured destruction between Todd and Denker... just fabulous. Nothing supernatural, no murderous trucks or universe-vomiting turtles, just humans being mundane and evil. And you won’t have to spend the whole book wondering if King is gonna biff the ending, as he is often wont to do—he sticks the landing and it’s absolutely killer. Love it. Read it.

How could so many Nazi perpetrators escape to South America? Most relied on the help of a bishop of the Catholic Church in the Vatican, Alois Hudal.

Sands describes the structure of this support system (the so-called ratline) through the story of former SS-Obergruppenführer Otto Gustav Wächter, the governor of Galicia (1942–1944), who was responsible for the deportation of nearly 500,000 Jews to the Nazi death camps.

Wächter's post-war escape to Argentina actually ended in Rome, where he died of an infection in July 1949. Sands offers a riveting analysis of how this man found his way into the Nazi party, rose to a position that implicated him in mass murder, and how, with the support of his wife, he managed to hide in the Austrian mountains for years after the war. Sands also reflects on how difficult it is for the next generation to face up to the… show more.

Pressburger is better known as half of the film duo Powell and Pressburger, but The Glass Pearls shows he missed a career when he went into film. 

Karl Braun, the protagonist of this book, is an escaped Nazi living in London some years after the end of World War II. He attempts to have a life, but lives in constant fear of being found and rounded up (yes, the book is aware of this irony). 

The “quiet cruelty” comes from the fact that, like it or not, Pressburger’s wonderful ability at portraying Braun’s interior and his fear make the reader invest in him. 

You end the novel troubled to discover that you have sympathized with – even wished for the escape of – a Nazi.

While the author and I came from different sides of the same fence, I found myself empathizing with her deathbed promise, her fears, her worries, her self-doubt, and her commitment to finding, and eventually exposing, the truth. Setting out to write what should have been a fairly ‘easy’ biographical tribute to her late grandfather – hailed as a Lithuanian hero- she discovered - and uncovered - details and documents which shattered her world and confirmed “the gossip.” She began to doubt the stories she was told as a child and the people who told them- both in her Lithuanian-American neighborhood and back in the old country. What a page-turner…what agony and pain…until she finally made her courageous decision. Bravo, Silvia.

I am passionate about the book because both my parents were survivors of the Lithuanian version of the Holocaust. There were very few survivors from Lithuania, and Foti’s book helps… show more.

Set in the years immediately following Japan’s surrender in WWII, this less well-known novel offers insight into how some Japanese soldiers saw their behavior: not as war criminals, but as acting in retaliation for American bombing raids. The story should not be read as an exoneration of Japanese atrocities, but rather as a window into the much larger problem of understanding an enemy’s perspective. Warning: this perspective shift is sure to make you uncomfortable, forcing you to revisit some assumptions about the “Good War.” 

According to Hannah Arendt's famous description of Gestapo agent Adolf Eichmann, he was merely a cog in the larger machinery of murder–someone who could not think for himself.

In his detailed account of Eichmann's activities, historian David Cesarani argues instead that Eichmann's inner commitment to Nazi ideology led him to identify with his task of organizing the transport of Jews to the extermination camps—a fanatical dedication that continued through January 1945.