93 Books Like Torch

The book resonates with me on many levels. Firstly, of course, I’m a combat veteran, so the military and living through the hell of war are part of my identity. The author and I share an innate connection there.

But on a different level, it delves into the intangible burdens that resonate for years after the experience – the grief, the guilt, the terror, even the longing to return because it’s what you know.

The title is explicit, and I share the load with all my fellow veterans.

Cathy Wilkerson was one of The Weather Underground. She became notorious because The Weather Underground was using her father’s townhouse in Greenwich Village when a bomb was accidentally detonated, killing three people and destroyed the building.

What I love about this book is that it is by a woman in the movement. Most of the people who have written about The Weatherman and the various radical movements of the sixties are men and they are writing from a very different perspective. The women in the movement were dealing not only with their desire to end the war and overturn the government, but with pushing for a feminist revolution amongside their male comrades.

Wilkerson reflects on her radicalization as a teenager, on joining the movement, and on her struggles within the movement. The book makes dynamic reading for anyone interested in social change.

Thai Jones is the son of Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein, members of the Weather Underground. He was a toddler in 1981 when his parents were arrested at gunpoint by team of FBI agents.

I have always wondered about the second generation, the children of radicals. As it turns out, Eleanor Stein was also a child of radicals – her mother Annie Stein was a member of the Communist Party during the 1930s and through into the 50s, when she, too, had to go underground. 

I love the intergenerational stories in this book. Jones, in trying to discover his own roots, explores the background of his maternal and paternal grandparents and finds people who were all committed to making the world a better place whether it was through Quakerism or Communism, farming or bombing. It’s a snapshot of another America—one filled with ideals that start in teenage years.

Black Helicopters is a terrifying book.

A fast-paced thriller, it takes you inside a radical survivalist cult from the perspective of the children who are growing up there. We’re immediately in a world that has its own rules. We’re reminded that children and young people know only what we tell them, and they do not question their parent’s choices easily. 

When a family is attacked, children will do anything to defend their world. Black Helicopters turns everything upside down in terms of your expectations and understanding, and makes you live inside a world under siege. It challenges all of your preconceptions and beliefs.

This is a painful and deeply personal memoir.

I had the same fate as Hyeonseo Lee. I was one of the millions of Iranians who were trapped in a world ruled by a totalitarian regime. Our house was located near the Caspian Sea, adjacent to the Soviet Union, which made me think about the world beyond the borders of my isolated country.

I started to think about it during the student movement in 1999, and eventually I concluded that the government had deceived and brainwashed us during our entire lives. Looking at the oppression, poverty, and hunger of my people, I realized that my country certainly could not be the best country on earth, as the government claims, so I decided to emigrate from Iran in any way possible.

She told the story of her immigration honestly, with all the hardships and challenges of its path, and she got tired… show more.

I have a special attachment to this book—I first read it as a child, and come back to it repeatedly because I love the way Cunxin describes his life. Every time I read it, I ache for him as he says goodbye to his tiny Chinese village (and beloved mother) and goes over to the harsh world of ballet.

This book might not be a plot-driven thriller, nor a meditation on identity, but it tells a vibrant and uplifting journey. Readers get to see Cunxin grow from a terrified boy who desperately misses home, to an ambitious ballet star. We get to root for him through traveling, falling in love, and eventually having to reconfigure his relationship with China as home. Cunxin tells the story of his life in an honest and endearing voice, and I root for him from beginning to end.

This is a captivating, personalized memoir that simultaneously explores the current ascent of socialism in the United States. The author escaped Eastern European communism in 1988, during its decaying stage, and moved to the United States in hope that she would enjoy freedom of speech and individual liberty in this country. Yet, to her surprise, she had to deal with the escalating rise of the left in the United States that has been recently seeking to curtail the freedom of speech and impose a greater regulation, trying to replace equality of opportunity with the equality of outcomes. Designed as a warning for Western audiences, Kandlove’s book samples the miseries of her daily life under socialism in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and the 1980s. She also provides revealing anecdotes of her encounters with various Western “useful idiots” who peddle socialism and do not want to learn from history.

Under Communism, two hundred thousand spectators gathered every five years to fill the largest concrete stadium in the world, Strahov Stadium, on a hill not far from Prague Castle. Why? To watch tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen perform synchronized gymnastics movements. Why? They were all taking part in a ritual, called the Spartakiad, which tells us much about Communist ideology as it evolved over time. For many participants and spectators, the Spartakiad was also an opportunity to visit their capital city and return with memories that were not part of the Communists’ ideological script. In Roubal’s telling, the Spartakiad also shows that Czechoslovak citizens were not simply cogs in a totalitarian machine. In 1960, for example, performers staying in Prague dormitories forced organizers to remove high-calorie butter cakes with cheese curd. They got beef goulash instead.

Troll told me that he read this book in preparation for his own deployment to Afghanistan. Winston Churchill said about campaigns in Afghanistan, “Financially it is ruinous. Morally it is wicked. Militarily it is an open question, and politically it is a blunder.”

It doesn’t feel like much has changed. 

This was one of my favourite books of 2018. This one deals with the impact of suicide on a tight-knit community, while quietly following Shane as he discovers his sexual identity and love for his best friend, David. The author, Adam Garnet Jones, is an Indigiqueer screenwriter, director, bead-worker, and novelist from Edmonton Alberta. While his Indigenous identity includes Cree, Métis, and Kahnawake

Mohawk, his traditional ancestry is complicated by the fact that his home reserve no longer exists. The land and community were forcibly enfranchised by the Canadian government in 1958.