Author: Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader

Books I Loved Before I Blogged #2

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 6 Comments

Books I Loved Before I Blogged
(A semi-regular feature in which I share books that I loved before I was a blogger)

Today I’m sharing 2 nonfiction works. They are both heavy books with difficult subject matter.

I’ve realized that I tend to gravitate towards these kind of books. Why? I don’t know! I’m a glutton for punishing reads? What I do know is that I learned a lot from both of these books:

A remarkable piece of forgotten history— the never-before-told story of Americans lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives, only to meet tragic ends


In 1934, a photograph was taken of a baseball team. These two rows of young men look like any group of American ballplayers, except perhaps for the Russian lettering on their jerseys. The players have left their homeland and the Great Depression in search of a better life in Stalinist Russia, but instead they will meet tragic and, until now, forgotten fates. Within four years, most of them will be arrested alongside untold numbers of other Americans. Some will be executed. Others will be sent to “corrective labor” camps where they will be worked to death. This book is the story of lives—the forsaken who died and those who survived.

Based on groundbreaking research, The Forsaken is the story of Americans whose dreams were shattered and lives lost in Stalinist Russia.

Hunting Eichmann is the first complete narrative of a relentless 
and harrowing international manhunt.

When the Allies stormed Berlin in the last days of the Third Reich, Adolf Eichmann shed his SS uniform and vanished. Following his escape from two American POW camps, his retreat into the mountains and out of Europe, and his path to an anonymous life in Buenos Aires, his pursuers are a bulldog West German prosecutor, a blind Argentinean Jew and his beautiful daughter, and a budding, ragtag spy agency called the Mossad, whose operatives have their own scores to settle (and whose rare surveillance photographs are published here for the first time). The capture of Eichmann and the efforts by Israeli agents to secret him out of Argentina to stand trial is the stunning conclusion to this thrilling historical account, told with the kind of pulse-pounding detail that rivals anything you’d find in great spy fiction. 


Super Sad True Love Story & In The Garden of Beasts

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 7 Comments
This witty and HILARIOUS book was published in May of 2011. I only got around to reading it this week! I was laughing out loud by page 3. I need to find everything else Shteyngart has written because he is a freaking genius.  
Description: 
In the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?

…and then to nearly weeping as I read Erik Larson’s narrative nonfiction book about the American ambassador to Germany during the lead up to WWII. This was a powerful read, especially knowing what we know now. There were people, like Ambassador Dodd, who knew what was coming. Sadly, there were many more people around the world who thought Hitler’s reign would be short and uneventful. This book isn’t to be missed by anyone who enjoys history.

Description:
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
 
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.
 
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming–yet wholly sinister–Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

Have you read either of these? Do you plan on it? As always, I’d love to hear what you think!