100 books like Violeta

I’m not normally a thriller reader, but I’ve loved Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc mystery series, so I tried this. Oh, my goodness. You will hold your breath from page one until the climax.

A young woman suffers unbearable loss and then trains as a sharpshooter, sent to Paris with the goal of assassinating Hitler.

Based on the knowledge that Hitler only came to Paris for three hours and left abruptly, Cara fills in the why for us.

I personally enjoyed this book for the courage found by the Heroine in a world where women were considered 2nd class citizens, but she, through strength of character and love of a sister she loses due to illness and no monies to save her, gives her that impetus to forge ahead through unconventional, but effective ways and new friends of wealth in America. It could be called a Cinderella story with illegal immigrants as heroines.

A book of 1902, about a young woman who had been abused by her father to the point that a nun suggested she find refuge elsewhere. From Italy, she proceeds to save enough money to book passage with a ship for both herself and her younger sister who is already ill from similar abuse. She looks forward to Ellis Island, knowing she then will be on the safe harbor of America, until she learns that… show more.

I love and recommend this accounting of Jimmy Stewart as what seems to be an honest and first person from his wife. She does not gloss over the tawdry but smiles at the sexual appetite of a man bigger than life to many. Whether best known for Rear Window, Vertigo, How the West Was Won, or Anatomy of a Murder, he was an actor I always admired for being able to act without seeming pompous even when getting the accolades from fans and press.

Michael Munn, using Jimmy’s widow for referencing much of his assertions of Jimmy’s character, gave me the feeling that at least in this appraisal of an artist, Munn had gone the extra yardage to actualize his impressions of Jimmy. Munn has been cast as a fraud, but I don’t think so in this instance. Jimmy admitted himself that acting was not so… show more.

I recommend Lost Memoirs for finally giving us a love story from an author we all have enjoyed since 5th grade. A true artist in “putting us in her life,” Syrie James accomplishes this while giving us readers the feeling of friendship with Jane Austen within these pages of her lost memoirs...

This book is of the recently found letters and diaries of Jane Austen of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility fame in not only books, but movies made over the years. It begins with the Austen Family Tree, which revealed that Jane had not only her sister, Cassandra, but six brothers, all either clergymen or military men with titles and at least a modicum of wealth. This was quite enlightening to me, who has read her forever, but somehow I’d missed this important aspect of her life, which gives her insights into the minds of men, better… show more.

Neither novel nor travel book, this classic journey defies category.

Purportedly a quest for a scrap of giant slothskin, which the author finds in a cave in southern Chile, it zig-zags through time and space, alighting on travellers from Magellan to Butch Cassidy, while trampling down conventional boundaries.

“Everyone says: ‘Are you writing a novel?’ No, I’m writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. That seems to me to be what they are. I don’t quite know the meaning of the word novel.” 

As an undergraduate student I was lucky enough to take Professor Earle’s class on the history of food in Latin America and this book encapsulates the expansive outlook and conceptual complexity that made that class so mind-bogglingly brilliant and enjoyable. By examining the systems of thought through which European colonizers and Indigenous peoples of the Americas understood different foods, ways of cooking and eating, and the influence of diet on people’s bodies, The Body of the Conquistador helped me to think about the axiom “you are what you eat” in a whole new way. 

In this methodologically creative approach, Rossana Barragán narrates the history of colonial Andean silver through images. The slim, 90-page book is organized around 12 images and their global movements. Barragán expertly analyzes scenes of underground mining that other European empires used to justify their own violence, depictions of the Cerro Rico that appealed to Ottoman sensibilities, and the architecture of the mint of Antwerp, the city responsible for coining much of Potosí’s silver and printing many of the books and images that shaped early modern understandings of the Andes. Readers looking for an accessible history of the global consequences of Potosí will be well-served by Barragán’s work.

This updated edition of Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book charts the long history of the United States’ imperial domination of Latin America through gunboat diplomacy, invasion, hard and soft coups, mercenary wars, and covert actions.

Often considered its ‘backyard,’ Latin America is where the United States “learned how to project its power, worked out effective and flexible tactics of extraterritorial administration, established legal precedents, and acquired its conception of itself as an empire like no other before it.” Grandin illustrates this history with numerous historical and contemporary examples, including the 1973 US-supported coup in Chile, which brought to power Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship.

With the help of University of Chicago economists Frederic Von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the dictatorship pioneered the first neoliberal imperial “workshop.” Chile would become the template for other attempts at regime change in the region, from the 1980s wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to… show more.

The Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano was by his own admission "a wretched history student," who set out "to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America, and especially of Latin America," from a "History [that] had stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about in classrooms, drowned in dates, they had imprisoned her in museums and buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental marble."

In his Memory of Fire trilogy, Galeano resurrects the continent's real history in more than 1200 staccato images, built around quotations from colonial documents, contemporary press reports, and the like. These "fragments" come together in a "huge mosaic" to form a "voice of voices." This is exactly what I try to achieve in my own trilogy of books on the history of Prague.

Two of Sarduy’s most extraordinary writings from the 1970s, these twin works chart a territory of radical transformation. In the first part of the book, Cobra makes their gender transition with the support of a slew of unusual characters who also shape-shift via the mysterious and violent rites of a motorcycle gang and a group of Tantric Buddhist lamas. Metamorphosis continues in the second half of the book, wherein a Cuban-Chinese cook reincarnates as the Buddha, in the midst of the Cuban revolution. The wild tales create a distinctive space for being otherwise.