68 Books Like A Flag for Sunrise

This was the first book I read about Basilicata, and it is essential for anyone interested in Southern Italian roots. Written in staggeringly poetic language, it offers a sad but beautiful introduction to the culture and history of the region, which is hardly ever written about and barely even visited, even by Italians.

During WWII, Levi was sent as a prisoner to Basilicata as punishment, to work as a doctor among the peasants there. The book taught me about the feudal farm system still in place there well into the 20th century, about its inhospitable landscape, and its isolated, poverty-stricken population – my ancestors.

It set the bar high for me to write my own memoir and continues to inspire me. The title refers to the fact that the train line only went as far as Eboli – that Christianity and civilization stopped short of Basilicata.

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 always tell my students that one thing that I love about being a social scientist is that it’s as much art as it is science. Oliver and Wood exemplify the creative side of social psychology as they study how people are intuitionists or rationalists.

My favorite part is the questions that they designed to measure whether people are “magical thinkers,” that is, are they more concerned about symbolic harm than actual harm: “Would you rather stick your hands in a bowl of cockroaches or stab a photo of your family six times?”

I like to think of myself as rational, but there’s no way you could make me stab a photo of my family! I’ll take the cockroaches, thank you…

Anna Della Subin’s quiet triumph of a history expands our focus beyond the United States, but we feel the impact and meaning to and in America. In Accidental Gods, she masterfully explores—opposite of self-appointed messiahs—what happens when deification is thrust upon someone. In doing so, she uncovers the bizarre characters and absurd events that lead to banal and sometimes cruel outcomes. The book transcends the facts of history and becomes a meditation on the many ways to be human.

Drawing on a vast array of primary archival sources and secondary writings, Ussama Makdisi provides an original analytical historical account of the origins of sectarianism in Lebanon. He traces the roots of the atavistic sectarian violence that gripped Ottoman Mount Lebanon in 1860. His narrative refutes widespread arguments making a case for the primordial nature of sectarian identities in Lebanon. Instead, he argues that sectarianism in Lebanon is a byproduct of modernity and modernization. Makdisi shows that sectarianism in Lebanon is a modern nineteenth-century phenomenon linked to the confluence of various historical developments, including the introduction of Ottoman reforms known as Tanzimat, diffusion of European ideas of nationalism, the Ottoman Empire’s integration into the world capitalist market, and colonial meddling in the internal affairs of the Sick Man of Europe.

This wide-ranging collection of authoritative chapters provides an outstanding general account of Canadian religion at the start of the twenty-first century. Coverage extends across the nation (New Brunswick, Quebec, Toronto, Alberta); the book includes perceptive articles on Catholics, mainline Protestants, and newer evangelical Protestant movements; there is revealing treatment of Jews and Sikhs, residential schools for Natives, and church-guided social reform, efforts of missionary outreach and more. The diverse ways that Canada’s religious organizations have engaged with national public life provide a strongly unifying theme.

Why read a book on the early modern frontier?

You may think that all you need to know about Russia in the 1500s is Ivan the Terrible, but this gripping book will teach you otherwise.

It’ll ring familiar bells for those fascinated by the American West: it’s about an expanding state struggling to secure an unruly frontier. It features plenty of competition, even conflict, between local governors and distant lawmakers, between secular and church figures.

It also shows the suppression, but also systematic cooptation (nearly absent in the American case!), of an indigenous population.

As the title suggests, though, the Russian colonial system remained “elusive” – more rhetorical than real – as accommodation became the key form of interaction across many frontier regions.

This is bold, but argued pretty convincingly.          

For a theoretical and psychological understanding of the workings of cults, I would strongly recommend the work of Robert Jay Lifton, in particular, his most recent book Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealoutry, which brings together many of his writings over the years on the subject of cults and what he called “totalizing” groups, ones which demand absolute commitment.

Lifton, who wrote about “Nazi Doctors," the Chinese cultural revolution, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which carried out a deadly sarin attack on a Tokyo subway in 1987, grasped that the mechanism of belief and allegiance that bind both political and religious movements are essentially the same.

Lifton worked out eight criteria for thought control that groups commonly used that went from “Milieu Control,” (isolating members and control the information they are exposed to) and “Demand for Purity” (in which the good… show more.