Books like David Golder

This book is really a call to action, and even today, it is hard to read this novel and not feel anger on behalf of Jurgis and Ona. Perhaps that is why I like this book so much. It is visceral. I get angry at money-grubbing management who care nothing about their employees.

I swore off meat for a while, disgusted with the factory conditions of the time. I mourn Jurgis and Ona's inability to achieve the American dream. In this book, I am brought into the Chicago immigrant experience at the turn of the 20th Century.

A scientist discovers that his invention, a defoliant, has contributed to exterminating an entire native reserve in British Columbia, causing the birds and turtles to leave. The battle is on between nature and science to restore the balance. But all is not well in the corporation, for the scientist’s boss has become a shopaholic to compensate for his lonely life and wonders why his wife wants to divorce him. The characters are enjoyable, the action circular, and our current political considerations are tackled in a non-didactic fashion. And the human spirit triumphs despite the chemical overload! Throughout the novel, King makes searing one-liners about unbridled capitalism: “capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”

Although a fictionalized autobiography of Sir Roger Casement, martyr of the Irish Revolution, two periods of his life, embedded in this tale, shed light on the evils of capitalism in colonial empires: King Leopold of Belgium’s abuse of the locals in the Congo to profit from their rubber crops, and a similar one in the Peruvian Amazon with a rubber company incorporated in Britain. Casement’s investigations and revelations on these cases lead to his knighthood. However, his belief that colonial nations can only be free if they resist their occupiers with violence, leads him to align with Germany in Ireland’s bid for independence in 1916, following 800 years of colonization. Unfortunately, his secret sexual past is exploited by enemies, and Ireland is liberated in 1922 without its beloved knight. 

The battle for Mauritius (Isle de France) is the central conflict in this history, pitting Nelson’s navy against Napoleon’s. At stake is the trade route between Britain and India via the Cape of Good Hope, and the spoils will accrue to whoever gains control of this conduit. A good primer on the behavior of different social classes crammed in proximity over 9-month voyages; on the sea battles involving giant East Indiamen sailing ships and smaller man o’ war frigates: their tactics, the damages suffered, and the fates of the poor sailors whether for insubordination or bravery. Today’s corporate battles do not shed blood, but the imperatives of first mover advantage, competitive might, and greed are still there—colonial business legacies—even if demonstrated now only in a boardroom. 

I first read Auschwitz and After in a university course focused on the Holocaust. Toward the course’s end, in a section focusing on memoirs, this book followed Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. While Weisel and Levi’s works are both undeniably masterpieces, Delbo’s work stood out to me because of its form and its feminist perspective. Delbo, a French partisan who was captured and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, lays bare in her work the ways in which gender affected the camp experience. It illuminated to me the different and similar ways in which men and women responded to the horrors of the extermination camps. Furthermore, Delbo’s work is not a linear narrative. Instead, it combines poetry and other non-traditional forms to create a memoir of an experience that Delbo readily admitted language was not equipped to capture. I recommend the work for the ways in which it… show more.

No work of fiction has had such a profound effect on historians of Occupied France as this staggeringly beautiful book. I had never read fiction like this before, a novel written contemporaneously yet showing such a depth of knowledge of the world around by a novelist who saw beauty beyond the chaos that had engulfed her world.

The young French novelist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin had planned five books yet only completed two before being killed in Auschwitz in 1942. This book contains the first two complete novels which are very different stories, but equally dramatic and written in prose that flows poetically. I loved the first novel, about the exodus from Paris in May 1940, just as much as the second, a love story that was used for the film of this heart-wrenching book. 

I love weaving history into my mysteries so I was drawn to this dark tale of Paris in the Belle Époque. An English girl goes to Paris to study art but, desperately poor, throws her fate into the hands of some shady characters. The atmosphere and scene-setting of Paris during a terrible rainy winter are unforgettable. 

This splendid biography traces the life and times of the Marquise Du Châtelet, born in Paris in December 1706, who became one of the most erudite women of her époque. For fifteen years she was the companion to Voltaire, the best-known of the French philosophes. She mastered calculus and translated Newton’s Principia, in addition to carrying on an active social life and raising several children. She died at the age of 42, following the birth of a daughter conceived with another lover. The author explains her subject’s life course as “from a life of frivolity to a life of the mind.” It’s a great read.

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

Have you been to Paris? If so, you’ll love this book as I did for the great photography, which is the whole point.

Photographs of the places still surviving where Hemingway himself and the characters in his novels visit. A long time ago in Paris, I tried something of the sort myself, finding and visiting the sites named in The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, with only moderate success.

Friends of mine last year took this book along on a private tour of Hemingway’s Paris and found the guide followed this book closely. Each powerful photograph (mostly what the book contains) is accompanied by a paragraph or so of the site and its connection to the Hem.

I’d call this a photographic biography of Hemingway in Paris. If you place it in front of you while reading the Paris books, you’ll have a whole new experience, as… show more.