There Are Little Kingdoms: Stories by Kevin Barry
A collection of gem-like short stories, many of them focusing on life in rural Ireland.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
A book I last read in late high school, this is a bracing depiction of a Soviet Russia of vodka-swilling black cats, dissolute intellectuals, inquisitive secret police and severed heads flying through the air, One of the more original novels I’ve ever read, informed by a high level of satire and black comedy.
The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela by Fernando Coronil
An essential work to understand Venezuela’s fraught decades before the 1990s that helped pave the way for the nation's current collapse and tyranny, this book provides an authoritative analysis of the strengths and failures of the country’s body politic during the era of Venezuela saudita with an especially illuminating examination of the controversial, contradictory figure of the late president Carlos Andrés Pérez.
Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard French
A panoramic work examining the epochal impact that early European contact with Africans produced from the 13th century onward and provides a deep and unflinching look at how the infernal machinery of slavery spread throughout the Americas, fueling a startlingly rapid industrialization in Europe and North America.
The Factory of Light: Tales from My Andalucian Village by Michael Jacobs
An optimistic and upbeat book of love for the author’s adopted home, it reminds one of some of the sublime, simple pleasures that make Spain so seductive and how some of life's greatest pleasures can be among the most simple.
Bitter Canaan : The Story of the Negro Republic by Charles S. Johnson
A well-crafted history of the West African nation of Liberia, this book is particularly useful in its highly-detailed account of the political convulsions that accompanied the first years of Africa-American arrival in this patch of Africa, from which the modern state would later emerge. A valuable primer.
Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King
An interesting book looking at the French serial killer Dr. Marcel Petiot, there are nevertheless hints at what might have been a greater book within it, one that would focus less on police and court procedures and more on the demimonde of culture and conspiracy that existed in Paris during and after the German occupation.
Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans by Jasmin Mujanovic
An important work that clearly lays out the failure of the post-war pax europa in the Balkans as the United States and the European Union, rather than supporting the structural and systemic changes needed in the former Yugoslavia, instead opted to deal with habitually criminal and abusive local elites to buttress a predatory system as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin waits, sinister, in the wings. I learned a lot from this book.
A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
This memoir by one of Israel’s greatest writers (who passed away in 2018) is an often-wrenching depiction of both the birth of a nation and a family’s disintegration. A deep and thoughtful book.
It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo
A haunting book about a desperate flight from the hellscape that 20 years of chavismo has created in Venezuela, this book exquisitely elides the personal and political struggles of people forced to live under a creaking authoritarianism and trying against all odds to hold onto hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment