Books like A Sportsman's Sketches

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.

It combines an interesting geopolitical situation and a fascinating setting (Central America) and is beautifully written and paced.

I love Stone’s take on the world. He delves into the place where religion and politics meet and he describes each of those worlds in complex ways that transcend the expected and cliché’.

Structurally, the book was very helpful to me because Stone uses multiple and quite varied narrators, each of whom has their own chapter. This is a technique I used in my third novel and it’s a fascinating way to get into the minds of more than one or two characters. 

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. 

Chris Miller has written a well-argued account of Russia’s various attempts to gain great power status in the Asia-Pacific over the five centuries – and its repeated setbacks. Russia’s imperial expansion to Alaska, Hawaii, and California reminds us that Russia’s expansionist dreams often amounted to little. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is another example that Putin’s ambitions in the East are restrained by the country’s firm rooting in Europe.

Russia has historically connected to Europe as its significant other. This book describes the nature of the country’s identity development through the love-hate relations with European nations and search for recognition by Western other. Sometimes, Russia has sought to borrow Europe’s institutions and values. Other times, it has positioned itself as a great power and a superior system of internal values relative to “corrupt” Europe. 

The strength and resilience—or not—of the Russian economy is one of the most important questions in international affairs since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: policymakers and observers alike are asking what effects the wide-ranging sanctions are having, and whether the Russian economy will implode, thwarting Moscow’s aggression. I’m not an economist so I need help understanding this, and I found this book to be the best introduction to this complex and difficult subject. Connolly also wrote a fine book on the impact of sanctions on Russia since 2014, but I think this one gives a concise and accessible assessment of the Russian economy as a whole, the role of the state, and Moscow’s attempted diversification of economic partners and integration into the global economy.

This vivid history of the Soviet Union at war by BBC journalist Alexander Werth is worth picking up for the Stalingrad chapters alone. In January 1943, Werth set out by train from Moscow to Stalingrad with a small group of correspondents. His conversations with Russian soldiers, officers, nurses, and railwaymen about the fighting, the Germans, and the Soviet defense of the city are woven into these chapters and make for extremely engaging reading.

There are many excellent histories of the Russian Revolution that chronicle the main events, but none convey the complexity of experiences in Tsarist Russia during its final years and the Soviet regime in its initial phase as Mark Steinberg’s short but powerful and original work. This book gives us the bird’s-eye view of developments as they unfold, but also places them under the microscope to give us personal stories and experiences from different wakes of life. Using contemporary journalism and diaries, Steinberg recovers the voices of a range of ethnic groups in various regions of the empire—Jews, Ukrainians, and Central Asians--as well as workers, peasants, women, and members of the intelligentsia. As we witness their lives being thrown into upheaval by rapid political and economic transformation in the first years of the 20th century, followed by World War I, the two revolutions of 1917, and civil war, we gain… show more.

Vladimir Voinovich was probably the greatest Russian satirical writer since Gogol. After the fall of the U.S.S.R., he was asked if it was still possible to write satire in Russia. He insisted that it was. “The Soviet Union was a giant mental hospital but it was organized,” he explained. “Now, the inmates have been told that they can do whatever they want. So Russia is funnier than ever.”

In this novel, published in 1986, Voinovich demonstrated his stunning ability to divine the future. He described a new Russian regime dominated by state security and based not on Marxism-Leninism but on the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Like Russia today, the regime of his novel tells its citizens that they are surrounded by “three rings of hostility.” The first is the former Soviet republics; the second, the former Soviet satellites, the third, the West – the former “capitalist enemy.” This makes… show more.