Books like The Sunflower — picked by fans

I was immediately hooked by this brilliant novel because of its unusual omniscient narrator, the Grim Reaper. Death, stressed out by the surfeit of “clients” he must deal with during World War II, reveals himself to be a sensitive narrator who sees everything. He especially keeps his eye on a young German girl, her loving foster parents, and the Jewish man they hide and protect.

I fell in love with these characters as they struggled with moral decisions, wartime hardship, danger, and tragedy. Despite the realistic portrayal of German life during WWII, I found this book to be an uplifting read. 

Some years ago, my father fell ill and I barely made it to his bedside in time to say goodbye.

Written after her husband’s sudden death, Didion’s book has not only helped me come to terms with losing my father, but has also shed light on our all-too-human response to endings. Didion is committed to analysis yet acknowledges our irrationality in the face of loss—like when she keeps her husband’s shoes, believing he’ll need them if he returns.

I can relate to this: when my father died, I kept one of his favorite shirts and his birding binoculars, thinking he might want them later. Didion doesn’t offer closure, just a portrait of the grieving mind and heart that I find consoling and, in the end, life-affirming.

Point blank, this book changed the way I see the world. While on its surface, it might not seem like a mental health book, it is a powerful testament that story is the bedrock of consciousness. In reading it, I was asked to reevaluate many of my ideas and truths.

It illustrated how much of what I think makes us different is a shared story and a place where I can connect to others if I’m willing to rattle the cage of the stories I “know” to be “immutable.” This translates into every story I tell about myself and my world. I’ve read it repeatedly, and every time, I pull something new from it.

It has helped me grow by expanding my worldview and has led me to a more comprehensive understanding of the mind, humanity, and the stories we share.

I was given this book at an early point in my grieving and found within it just the right words to help me accept how slow and hard grief is and to believe that better days would come.

When my spirit is at loose ends, and I’m not even sure what I’m feeling or needing, I pick up this book, turn to the table of contents, and look for the topic that leaps out at me. Turning to that entry, I find reassuring words about dealing with that emotion or issue. This book soothes my soul, bolsters my courage, and encourages me to keep going.

A compelling story of the way one man in our callous times truly assumed the role of his brothers' keeper, in spite of obstructions from Nazi supporters, unsympathetic governments, time, and fading memories. The Murderers Among Us is an inspiring book -- the stirring life of a man who pursued justice in the heyday of expediency. Simon Wiesenthal was lying in a ward full of corpses when Allied troops reached Mauthausen Concentration Camp. His wife was lost in the vast confusion of postwar Europe, the rest of his family victims of the gas chambers. His own loss and the horrors he had witnessed made Wiesenthal vow to spend the rest of his life bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. 

Reading these messages in a bottle discovered buried under a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, I am staggered and amazed at the indomitable human capacity for resilience and creativity.

I read these harrowing literary masterworks, which report on the most hellish degradations, and I am stunned that Zalmen Gradowski, from deep within his suffering, could wrest from the horrors before him and from his own despair, a literary art that is beautiful and solacing. I am reminded of the human capacity, which we all must certainly share, to snatch shreds of beauty from the darkest of circumstances and of the human hope that somewhere beyond one’s own hell lives a sympathetic ear.

Concentration and termination camps may have been one of the topics least talked about by those who saw them. This catalog of text and photos was created for the 2003 documentary exhibition at the Dachau Concentration Memorial Site, created by survivors of the camp and an International Committee. Dachau developed and tested the appalling procedures that became standard for the whole network of camps in Europe. I recommend the book for its concise history, chronologies, maps, biographical sketches of prisoners and officers, and hundreds of photos. They are invaluable as a case study of how the Holocaust was designed and implemented.

I love this book because its author presents the story of the protagonist in such a flip, offhand way that it reminds me a bit of JD Saliger’s Catcher in the Rye. There is dark humor, sarcasm, and total disregard of any possible opposing perspective—yet the main character struggles as a sort of Everyman.

This book also reminds me of Kennedy’s Confederacy of Dunces, parts are laugh aloud funny. I couldn’t help but go along with the joke. Underneath it all, however, is a lot of deep thought (and knowledge) about Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians.

Lots of history, or should I say anti-history. As I plowed through this short novel, I kept wondering how Motyl would top each chapter, only to find that his rampant ingenuity has no bounds. This one stuck with me!

I found this book decades ago symbolically languishing on a remainders table in the back of Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley. I nearly fainted when I read the title. Could this book be about me and others like me, members of a generation that wasn’t supposed to be born? This groundbreaking book, considered the Bible of children of Holocaust survivors, gives voice to the multigenerational impact of the Holocaust which we, the second generation, inherited directly from our parents who were the lucky few to survive while two-thirds of European Jewry was wiped out. As a psychotherapist, I have recommended this book to clients and their partners to better understand family dynamics, grief, trauma, resiliency, and determination to create a better world.

What I appreciate about Hunter's novel is that it takes a new approach to the subject of the Holocaust. With the outbreak of WWII, the Kurcs, a Polish-Jewish family, find themselves driven into another diaspora, with their family members cast to the four corners of the globe. Hunter touches on the plight of Poland during the early years of the war when the country was torn asunder by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. The plot follows the various family members as they struggle to survive the Holocaust in Poland, in Stalin's Gulag, and as one member tries to flee to South America. A big, sprawling, family epic filled with tragedy and humanity, brutality and heroism.