Books like A Flag for Sunrise

I love anything having to do with Italy, particularly in the awful Mussolini era. I think our present era has echoes of that time.

The book has nothing to do with Christ (not a great title) but is gorgeously written and so poignant. I’m fascinated by the take of a Jewish intellectual living in one of the poorest parts of Italy just before WWII.

Because of his opposition to Mussolini, Levi was sentenced to a year in exile in a part of Italy, Basilicata, that was suffering from extreme poverty. His ability to find beauty in such a grim situation served as a lesson for me and reminded me of the 29 months I worked in the former USSR, another bleak place. 

More Italy here, Sicily this time, and set in the middle of the 19th century.

Again, I love reading about other important political eras, and really enjoy the beautiful prose and light ironic sense of humor. One of my favorite books, all-time. Gorgeous writing and the lightness of the scenes betray the seriousness of the era.

This was the point when Italy was unifying, and the main character of the novel is about to lose his exalted status as one of the great princes of Sicily. You feel for the man, even with his many flaws, and I love books where I’m engaged in the story but also learning a lot about history at the same time.

This is the story of a highly educated writer living with the poorest of the poor in the U.S. Agee was sent to live with Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression. His assignment was to write about them for a magazine, but he ended up making it into a magnificent memoir (Jimmy Carter’s favorite memoir) that is often paired with Walker Evans’ photos. They lived and worked as a team.

Agee is a well-educated, well-off writer, but manages to describe the lives of the poorest of the poor with great respect, artistic originality, and sincerity, and to give us a full, if painful, understanding of the lives of people who could not afford shoes and were worked to the bone by the landowners.

It’s a deeply spiritual work, artistically original in structure and language, a long, slow, magnificent read that has touched me deeply each time I’ve read it.

I love this novel because of its ravishingly beautiful prose and deep insights into sexual selfhood. Set one day in June 1923, this book takes us into the mind of its middle-aged heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares to host a party and reminisces about her life three decades ago.

As a teenager, she loved a daring, aristocratic woman (Sally), a passionate but troubled man (Peter), and a comparatively boring but dependable man (Richard, to whom she has long been married). What did love mean to her thirty years ago, and what does it mean now? Did she make the right romantic choice, given the constraints of her society? Virginia Woolf leaves her readers space to ponder these questions for themselves.

I speak Russian and spent several years working in the former USSR on cultural exchange exhibitions. I majored in Russian Language and Literature at Brown and have a Master’s in those subjects, also from Brown, and I love Turgenev even more than I love his great contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

In this short novel, Turgenev speaks to political differences across generations, something pertinent to the American political scene now and to the tension between activism and domestic life. 

As a novelist, I’m also blown away by his ability to put so much into a very short piece of fiction. It’s helpful, but not essential, to have a bit of knowledge about pre-Revolutionary Russia, but like his masterful Sportsman’s Sketches, he is a genius at bringing characters, both real and imagined, to life.

I majored in Russian Language and Literature and have a Master’s in that area, and I spent 29 months in the former USSR, working on cultural exchange exhibitions across the country, from one end to the other.

Turgenev gives a great sense of ordinary life in Tsarist Russia and I love his prose style, even in translation.

This novella is also set in Italy and I love the empathy, the surprises in the story, the setting and the clean prose.

We don’t read enough about people who have mental/intellectual challenges, and Spencer handles this delicate territory with grace. There’s no other love story like this, or at least not one I’ve ever encountered.

I don’t want to give away the plot, but suffice it to say it’s about a mother’s dilemma as her child becomes involved in a love relationship that has some truly unusual aspects. Can be read in a very short time, but then you’ll want to re-read it. 

Like President Biden, whenever I want an eloquent, historically grounded analysis of the liberal American project, I turn to Jon Meacham.

In the midst of an ever-growing culture war between extremists who claim the United States was founded as a Christian Nation and those claiming an impermeable wall of separation between all religion and the state, Meacham offers a calmly argued defense of the much more nuanced American approach to religious freedom.

I love the way he teases out the religious influences that helped shape the thinking of American leaders and how they are melded with the guiding principles of liberty, justice, and respect for individual freedom as set forth in the Declaration of Independence.  

It can be hard to see how religion impacts the world, but this book opened a world of perspectives for me. Written by some of the biggest names in the academic world—and including recorded conversations between them—I found this book to be essential for understanding religion’s interactions with gender, race, power, and the shifting nature of secular societies.

I always like reading the most important modern thinkers, and what I appreciate about this book is it is manageable and digestible, so it serves as a great introduction to topics that fill numerous library shelves. It caps off with a brilliant discussion by Craig Calhoun, who rounds out an eye-opening set of discussions.

When I arrived in the USA, I particularly appreciated the great freedom granted to religions. Then I was invited by Sahar Aziz to a conference at Rutgers University. Her talk moderated my point of view. The book she published three years later changed my outlook.

In this book, Sahar Aziz chooses an original angle of analysis. She examines the paradox between an official commitment to religious freedom and repeated attacks on it when it comes to Muslims. Dr. Aziz shows that this is possible when Muslims go from being a religious minority to a racial group through the process of racialization that associates them with stereotypes and intangible cultural traits.

Religious discrimination then becomes possible under the guise of security and terrorism prevention measures, as long as the threat is strictly associated with religious faith and practice and not with political or geopolitical motivations. Moreover, according to Sahar Aziz, this… show more.