Fans pick 100 books like Time's Echo

Burns brilliantly tells the story of those first potent American journalists, the pamphleteers, who brought to their craft lively, probing, acerbic, and often angry commentary and reporting. Some ripped into George Washington and the Federalists, thus establishing a tradition of journalism that extends to our own time. Others went after Jefferson and the fledgling Democratic-Republicans. And one, James Callender, broke the story of the now-famous Jefferson dalliance with his slave Sally Hemmings. 

One of the great historians of our time just published the best overview of this period we have yet and it places the Red Scare and Red Summer (widespread attacks on Black communities on an unprecedented scale) of 1919 at the center of its 1917-1921 sweep. We get a great picture of how the World War I home front escalated repression and the U.S. connections to an explosive international situation during and after the war, including the Russian Revolution.

How do movements begin? Beckerman looks to history, drawing lessons from a dozen social movements.

In particular, he explores the communications tools (petitions, zines, private chat rooms) that movements have used over the centuries to organize their thinking and plan their actions. Traveling from Manchester to Moscow to Minneapolis, the reader is reminded that our work now is part of a chain of history.

We are not the first, nor will we be the last. But we can learn from the past even as we confront an uncertain future. 

Concentration and termination camps may have been one of the topics least talked about by those who saw them. This catalog of text and photos was created for the 2003 documentary exhibition at the Dachau Concentration Memorial Site, created by survivors of the camp and an International Committee. Dachau developed and tested the appalling procedures that became standard for the whole network of camps in Europe. I recommend the book for its concise history, chronologies, maps, biographical sketches of prisoners and officers, and hundreds of photos. They are invaluable as a case study of how the Holocaust was designed and implemented.

As a nonfiction storyteller who often explores the Holocaust and as the director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State, I’m sometimes asked to recommend books about the Third Reich’s murder of 6 million Jews and millions of Romany, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and others. A New History is the tome I often suggest. In a deceivingly simple linear approach, Laurence Rees, who conducted 25 years of primary research to construct this historical account, methodically walks us through the Holocaust’s origins and unfolding, from Hitler’s novice-Nazi days to the Allies’ death-camp liberations. But Rees avoids neat narratives, peeling away complex layers of madness. For instance, he demonstrates that boiled-over antisemitism extended far beyond Germany’s borders in the 1930s and that the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was messier than we may imagine. Only a lucid voice like Rees’ can clue us into and… show more.

The collective memory of Mennonites during the Holocaust has long been mythologized or has remained unexamined. A recent renewal of interest from both the Mennonite community itself and scholars of the Holocaust has led to a number of conferences and publications. This collection of essays showcases the latest scholarship and paints a complex portrait of Mennonites in both western and eastern Europe during the Holocaust. The book highlights the many roles that Mennonites played, largely due to their proximity to the events of the Holocaust, including as neighbors, killers, enablers, witnesses, and rescuers. The contributors discuss Mennonite identity, theology, agency, and collective memory, all situating their stories in local, national, and European geopolitical contexts. 

This book is a must-read for all people, to never forget what occurred.

Although the topic is serious and sad, Dr. Reitlinger managed to write a concise work on ha Shoah, which is itself a huge undertaking. What I loved about the book is that, here in one volume, one has a complete and thorough coverage of the Holocaust. It is long, but it can be digested given a few weeks of reading.

Again, with all of Reitlinger’s work, the reader is thoroughly immersed in the subject, while not getting tied down by minutia that some authors have a habit of doing. The book taught me that the Holocaust could have possibly been avoided, if men of goodwill had simply acted before Hitler became powerful enough to unleash World War Two.

Edmund Burke, the Irish-born British statesman was right when he said “All Tyranny needs to gain a foothold, is… 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.

James Young pioneered the study of Holocaust memorials, whether in the form of public monuments like the Warsaw Ghetto monument or museums like Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  This was his first book on the subject, and it is still a must-read for anyone interested in how memorials shape our way of looking at the past.

What motivated “ordinary people” to risk their lives and their families’ lives to save Jews? I was especially interested to know because my father and his labor battalion of 140 Hungarian Jews were saved by their Commanding Officer. As a therapist, I wondered what personal and family characteristics made a difference. As a mother, I wanted to raise children who care about others and take action in the face of injustice.

Based on interviews with 700 rescuers and survivors, central was the rescuers’ sense of personal obligation to others which began with close family relationships and seeing their parents model caring behavior and ethical values. I remember hearing a rescuer sum it up, “I had to do it to be able to live with myself.”