I'm drawn to WWII stories, both historic and purely fictional, and Orringer's novel is the best of both. I learned a real-life story I did not know--about the great efforts of Varian Fry to extricate Jewish artists and intellectuals from Nazi Europe through southern France (among them, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and many more).
But I was also completely engrossed by the story of forbidden love at its core, between Fry, the married New Yorker who spearheads the effort against the Nazis and their Vichy henchmen, and his former secret lover, Elliott Grant, while they were students at Harvard. Grant, who disappeared one day at college, turns up just as unexpectedly, with the son of his Jewish mentor. Their love is rekindled in the midst of wartime drama; it is also impeded by Grant's secret, which drove him from Harvard and which Fry now uncovers.
1940, France. In the middle of a devastating war, how many lives can you save?
Varian Fry, a young American journalist, arrives in Marseille armed only with three thousand dollars and a list of writers, thinkers and artists he hopes to rescue - so long as the Nazis don't get to them first.
With borders closing around him, Varian tries to track down those on his list; renowned artists like Marc Chagall, who cannot believe that he will ever be unsafe in the country he loves. He smuggles them over the Pyrenees mountains and across…
In The Barn (a narrative history/memoir, not a novel), Mississippi journalist Wright Thompson (who is renown as a sports journalist) dredges up the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmitt Till in a barn nearby where Thompson, who is white, was born and raised, but which he had been taught, by the social forces surrounding him, NOT to see.
Thompson—echoing Faulkner’s “The past is never dead; it isn’t even past”—states as his intention to “interrogate the present to see what of the past remains,” because, as he puts it, “our present-day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.”
It’s an important book, especially right now. And Thompson makes the difficult, tragic history immediate and imminently readable.
The instant New York Times bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Slate, Vanity Fair, TIME, Buzzfeed, Smithsonian, BookPage, KCUR, Kirkus, and Boston Globe • Nominated for a PEN America Literary Award
“It literally changed my outlook on the world...incredible.” —Shonda Rhimes
"The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel... The Barn describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth.” — The Washington Post
“The most brutal, layered, and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi,…
Big novels, wherein we learn lots of backstory for a feature-film’s cast of characters, both major and minor, are in vogue, and this is a sweeping, big story—the story of modern Venezuela and of its struggles to create a just and egalitarian society. But Freedom Is a Feast moves quickly—not because it’s some sort of action-packed adventure story (though it is full of incident and there are nail-biting moments), but because of the pace of the prose. From the very start, the story drives compellingly forward.
It's such a good read!
And I learned a lot without realizing that I was being instructed modern history, which always makes me love a book.
In the tradition of Isabel Allende's career-launching debut, The House of the Spirits, a multigenerational, Latin American saga of love and revolution in which a young man abandons his family for the cause-and receives a late-life chance at redemption: "a tour de force" from "the new master" (Luis Alberto Urrea, New York Times bestselling author of Good Night, Irene).
In 1964, Stanislavo, a zealous young man devoted to his ideals, turns his back on his privilege to join the leftist movement in the jungles of Venezuela. There, as he trains, he meets Emiliana, a nurse and fellow revolutionary. Though their…
Paris, 1947. Alongside the war-weary population, American GIs and young people from France’s colonies also pack the city. Cecile Rosenbaum, from a bourgeois Jewish family that has lost everything, meets Minette Traoré, a feisty, French-born girl of Senegalese descent, on the bus to a Communist Youth Conference. There, she also meets Sebastien Danxomè, an aspiring architecture student from West Africa, and romance blooms.
Back in Paris, as these young internationals haunt the cafés and jazz clubs of the Latin Quarter, Cecile and Sebastien find their budding love muddied by confused loyalties and unyielding cultural traditions. When Mack Gray, a charming African-American GI, sets his sights on Cecile, her complicated relationship with Sebastien, as well as her fierce dedication to her newfound political ideologies, are pushed to the brink.
