[lbo-talk] Reading suggestions needed

(Chuck Grimes) cgrimes at rawbw.COM
Mon Apr 21 08:57:25 PDT 2008


My daughter, age 14, is interested in reading about

1. The British in India 2. The Holocaust

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Somebody else has suggested most of these.

Conrad. Any of his Asia. Just the vocabulary will dazzle her. She doesn't have to get it, she just has to emerce herself in it. I just re-read Typhoon this week end. It has nothing to do with India of course. Niether do any of Conrad's asia short stories. They all deal with the far East and the South China Sea. But they do deal with the British and their colonial mentality.

Orwell. Burmese Days. You wish Orwell had Conrad's imagination

The World of Apu (all three). Most of the English language classics were turned into great movies, Passage to India, etc. Also, Attenborough's Gandi.

Diary of Anne Frank

Oddly I never been able to get into anything I came across on the holocast, except the first thing I read which was Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalm. I am not sure that is a good suggestion. But it does one thing that nothing else seems to, which is get into the mentality and mind set that created the government machinery. Arendt's book was originally published in a shorter form as a series of magazine articles (Harper's or Atlantic?) she composed during the trial. So the opening sections are journalistic and impressionistic reflections on the whole process. This makes a great lead into reflections on justice, politics, then governments, nationalism, the role of anti-semiticism, etc.

So, I might take up some of the list suggestions myself...

CG



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