54 Books Like Under a Cruel Star

First remarkable fact: This was written by a philosopher. Second remarkable fact: the study was published at a time when film studies had a strong political orientation, and therefore Cavell’s book was an odd one out, for it had a ‘light-hearted’ subject: seven screwball comedies, made between 1934 and 1949. Its relevance has only been acknowledged in retrospect.

Cavell’s style is colloquial and his aim was to set up a ‘dialogue’ with the films. Even though I am less enamored with his philosophical interventions, this work helped me to truly appreciate all seven ‘comedies of remarriage’ he had selected, and The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) in particular has remained one of my all-time favorites ever since. Any analysis that encourages us to love a movie under discussion is worth recommending.

A photograph gives me the form of the bird, but it remains up to me to see the bird as a bird. And that can be difficult. What do we see when we see a bird? 

The Peregrine, J. A. Baker’s masterpiece of descriptive prose, provides an answer, an answer that is as much about how we see as it is about what we see when we see birds. Sometimes we pull ourselves into the sight of others and the world emerges as more than its light. We see by being seen.

Baker achieves this kind of seeing both in his efforts to see a pair of peregrines and in his description of this achievement. 

T.J. Clark’s diary explorations of two Poussin paintings in The Sight of Death integrates an acuity of seeing with a searching intelligence that is simultaneously content, historical, personal, and linguistic.

He puzzles through a visceral sense of revelatory permanence in Poussin, a discovery of form in the details of painting: “Aren’t there plenty of moments in life that, whether they last or not, have enough of permanence about them to stand for things as they are, things as the mind conceives them –and not just to stand for them notionally, but have them be visible on their face?” He reveals this face.

An everyday poem is this kind of face.

I could suggest any number of poems and poets of our everyday fate of being lost and found. But for me the modern poet who best integrates the eye seeing with the mind questioning is the great A.R. Ammons.

I have listed just Volume 1 of his collected poems, but I also recommend Volume 2. He writes out of a consciousness that poems are found and shaped out of a life of observation, effort, and passion.

The Night of Wenceslas was the first thriller I read. I was in my teens, and into reading poetry at the time. My parents knew the author—we had even spent Boxing Day together—so Lionel Davidson was the first real novelist I met in person and I remember being excited to read this book.

The protagonist, Nicholas Whistler is young, half English and half Czechoslovakian. He hates working in his father’s business and is in debt because of his dissolute lifestyle. As a way out of his problems, he is lured into carrying out a mission in Prague and finds he has been duped into becoming an unwitting spy.

This book did not stop me from reading poetry—but spurred me to read much more widely.

1980s Czechoslovakia and Australia—worlds apart—are the backdrops for two simultaneous stories I came to enjoy. Both stories incorporate young children being raised primarily by grandparents, the reasons for which are eventually explained, as are the connections between the two.

I liked the characters in this book, where the plot plays second fiddle to the characters and setting in many ways. I especially enjoyed the relationships. The sense of home and the strong love seeping from the actions of the guardian figures in this novel seem to welcome the reader, as well.

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.

Most of us know Martha Gellhorn as a war correspondent and Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, but she was a brilliant novelist as well. A Stricken Field is the story of an American woman in Prague in 1938 as the Nazis move in and hunt down opponents of the regime. If you are looking for models of resistance to brutality (I am), this is your book.

I first met Peter here in Chapel Hill, and we became fast friends. A Holocaust survivor from Prague, Peter often spoke to my classes about his experiences. What made his talks so powerful was his ability to remember what it was like to be an eight-year-old boy living in a city under Nazi occupation, and to tell a story that is humbling, moving, and real. Never have I seen a speaker connect better with young people. Peter first became inspired to begin telling his story to students and others after confronting a Holocaust denier, and his many presentations laid the foundation for this book. Part history, part memoir, A Boy’s Journey is also a story about family and the need for tolerance and empathy in our world today. 

Women rarely feature as central figures in most works about Prague. In this book, Iggers introduces us to an array of fascinating female writers, activists, powerful ladies of society, and survivors who have lived in Prague and its environs over the past two hundred years. Each chapter includes a brief introduction and excerpts from these women’s writings, such as diaries, letters, and newspaper articles. The reader can thus hear these women’s voices and feel transported to a different moment in history. Some entries are hard to read, such as Milada Horáková’s farewell letter to her teenage daughter, written on June 23, 1950. The lead defendant in Communist Czechoslovakia’s first public show trial, Horáková was executed three days later. Wilma Iggers is a Czechoslovak native who escaped to Canada after the Nazis invaded her country in 1938, which only enhances the perspectives that she brings to these women’s lives.