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Sanshiro: A Novel (Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies)

Natsume Soseki and Jay Rubin, Soseki Natsume

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I rate this irony laden story on par with Soseki’s most important novel, ‘Kokoro.’ Joseph Conrad’s novels had to travel to Africa and the East Indies to establish the parameters within which the Japanese lived their daily lives as they grappled with the effects of Western Rationalism upon a nonindustrial society. Fortunately for world literature, Soseki Natsume was up to the task of documenting this transitional period with grace, wit, [...]

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Gender and American Culture)

Barbara Ransby

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Ella Baker must be the most underrated figure in U.S. history. There are plenty of Presidents who have done less to shape their own times than Ella Baker. She decisively shaped two of the most important national civil rights organizations–the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference–and was the single most decisive figure in a third–the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Only Martin Luther [...]

No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War (Bluejacket Books)

Hiroo Onoda

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I remember this as a news story in 1974; a Japanese soldier emerging from the jungles of the Philippines after finally realizing that WWII was over. I recall thinking ‘he must be crazy’. NO SURRENDER shows it’s not so. This is the true story of 2nd Lt Hiroo Onoda, who, on orders from his commanding officer retreated with a small band of men into the jungle to carry out guerilla [...]

The Rabbi’s Daughter

Reva Mann

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I finished this book in a day and found it very hard to put down. It reads as the memoir of a woman who grew up in a religious Jewish household, left the fray to lead a lifestyle of sex and “liberation” and returned to join the ultra-religious Hasidic community. The book promised to highlight the struggles a woman faced in choosing between a religious lifestyle and a non-religious one. [...]

Whereabouts of Eneas Mcnulty

Sebastian Barry

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A beautiful, sad book. Eneas McNulty is an innocent set loose in a world treacherous and unforgiving but he remains gentle, kind and amazingly generous through all that befalls him. A fascinating look at 20th century Ireland through the eyes of a wonderfully realized character.

Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America

Leon Dash

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In recent years, welfare and the underclass have become a prominent part of the national conversation. But pundits’ portrayals of the urban poor are often distressingly simplistic, usually presenting the underclass as a mass of indistinguishable brown and black people inhabiting a murky, foreign land. In 1988, Washington Post reporter Leon Dash began a seven-year project that he hoped might dispel reductionist thinking, trying to make this unfamiliar world complex [...]

Lipman Pike: America’s First Home Run King

Richard Michelson and Zachary Pullen

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This review may seem a bit long to you. I wanted to consider the text and illustrations for a more complete sense of the book. (I left plenty out for you to discover when you buy your own copy.) Thanks for taking the time to read this! If you count yourself as being one who finds it impossible to think of spring without thinking of baseball, then you’ll enjoy reading [...]

One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life–A Story of Race and Family Secrets

Bliss Broyard

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When her mother exposed her father’s secret while he was dying in 1990, Bliss Broyard accepted it but was not ready to deal with the complexities of learning her father was of Black heritage. She was not ready when an essay, “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”, appeared in Henry Louis Gates’ collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man in 1997. When she was finally ready, Broyard wrote a [...]

Not Without Laughter

Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou

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Despite his considerable output of poetry, short stories and autobiographical work, this is Langston Hughes’ only novel. It is the tremendously crafted story of Sandy, a black child of the 1920s in rural Kansas. In poignant tightly written chapters, Hughes’ depicts various events in Sandy’s life often slipping into the perspective of those closest to him. Sandy lives most his life with his strong-willed and deeply religious grandmother Aunt Hager. [...]

From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival (Jewish Lives)

Thomas Toivi Blatt and Christopher R. Browning

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Among the most common questions asked of Holocaust survivors are why the Jews didn’t fight back: Why, it is wondered, did they let their families go to their death so easily? The recollections of Blatt, a survivor of the extermination camp Sobibor, in Poland, where Jews staged a successful revolt, addresses these questions in a frank and gripping narrative. Blatt’s account demonstrates how the Germans kept Jews in Poland subjugated [...]