The
Singing Tree
Kate Seredy
New York, Puffin Books, 1990, ©1939
This is a children's
book set in Hungary before and during World War I. It is about
war and tolerance and the common humanity of everyone, regardless
of national origin. It's also a coming-of-age novel, with a
spirited, independent girl as the main character, and lots of
detail about daily farm life in Hungary. The story of the "singing
tree" which the father recounts when he returns from the
war is truly memorable. If you have children, read this to them.
If you've never read it, or read it as a child, read it again
now.
Aija
Kanbergs
Teaching Library Program Coordinator
The Library |
Late
Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making
of the Third World
Mike Davis
New York, Verso, 2001
In the world at the
moment, it is hard to think of war and peace in terms of anything
but military violence. Nonetheless, it is hard to think of the
six million civilian deaths between 1876-1878 in India resulting
from British colonial free market policies as anything other
than war. People died not from food shortages due to an El Niño
drought but from food shortages resulting from the export of
food to England and the concentration of resources on celebrating
Queen Victoria as Empress of India. This is a searing book.
Read it and you will never again think in the same way about
famine, population, trade in food, the British Empire, or Queen
Victoria.
Louise
Fortmann
Professor
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management |
The
Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1990
This book does what
all good books do-transports the reader. In this case, I was
transported back to times I did not want to revisit: May 11,
1969, Mother's Day, my uncle was killed on Hamburger Hill in
one of the last major battles of the Vietnam War. April, 1975,
the fall of Saigon, another uncle, with the Department of State,
and my aunt, a supply pilot, were evacuated. They returned to
the U.S., guarding treasures from their Vietnamese friends,
brought back for safekeeping as the South fell. My aunt and
uncle's stateside home looked like a Vietnamese secondhand store.
Over the years, some families came to reclaim their possessions,
and the house was slowly emptied out of the memories stored
there.
The Things They Carried feels like my aunt and uncle's
home: a collection of memories brought back from the war, slowly
emptied out. Some of them horrify in familiar ways that war
stories do; others deal more with the pre-war and post-war interior
conflicts.
Although characterized as fiction, this book rings very, very
true. And, as O'Brien himself writes, "A true war story,
if truly told, makes the stomach believe."
Maggie
Sokolik
Lecturer, College Writing Programs
Assistant Director, GSI Teaching and Resource Center |
Wide
Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
New York, Norton, 1999, ©1966
It tells the "other
half" of Jane Eyre-the story of Rochester's "madwoman
in the attic." It is a violent, lyrical novel that challenges
colonialism, race, gender, and power. It is also written by
a woman of color about a woman of color-i.e., nonwest. There
are all kinds of wars going on-from slave/indigenous revolts
against the colonizing British, to more oblique attacks on the
nature of hierarchical systems in general-power/gender/race.
Jeff
Reimer
Professor and Associate Dean
Chemical Engineering/Graduate Division |
War
Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam
Tad Bartimus, Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas, Edith Lederer,
Ann Bryan Mariano, Anne Morrissy Merick, Laura Palmer, Kate
Webb, Tracy Wood.
New York, Random House, 2002
Watching C-Span's
Book TV one night, I came across a panel of journalists who
were discussing their experiences in Vietnam as the first women
allowed to report from the combat field. Though this experience
took place more than a quarter of a century ago, it was very
present in their animated expressions and emotional voices.
Listening to them, I could not decide whether to watch the program
or rush out to the bookstore and buy a copy. I put in a videotape
and went to the bookstore. These nine essays are as different
as the experiences of the women who wrote them. The book contains
vivid accounts of what it took for a woman to get a press pass
to cover the war; hop a chopper into the combat field; survive
being held as a prisoner of war; undergo reconstructive plastic
surgery after coming out of the field with a face full of shrapnel.
The book reads like an adventure story on one level, and on
the other it is a graphic, lucid illustration of the commitment
these women had to finding and reporting the truth of the war
in Vietnam.
Jane
Hammons
Lecturer
College Writing Programs |
Starship
Troopers
Robert Heinlein
New York, Putnam, 1959
Perhaps best known
because of the recent film, this provocative book links citizenship
to military service in a deep-space epic war against enemy aliens
whose culture resembles those of colony insects such as ants.
It follows the adventures of young Johnny Rico from high school
to command as an officer of starship troopers. Incidentally,
while the troopers are men, all of the astronauts who command
the starships are women, because they are better equipped mentally
and physically to handle the job.
Charles
Faulhaber
Director, The Bancroft Library
Professor, Spanish |
The
Assault
Harry Mulisch
New York, Pantheon Books, 1985
Mulisch turned 75
last year and was highly celebrated in the Netherlands. He is
a writer whose family was enmeshed in the history of World War
II. His family on his mother's side almost entirely perished
in the concentration camps; his father was imprisoned for being
a Nazi sympathizer. His novel, made into a movie in 1986 (De
Aanslag in Dutch), tells the story of Anton Steenwijk in
episodes during and after the war. He gets caught up in the
pain and contradictions of the war, a reflection of Mulisch's
life. This is a morality play, where right and wrong are often
hard to distinguish from each other. I think it reflects on
our time as well, a time where we have to look at all sides
of the situation and see that everything is not so black and
white.
Steve
Mendoza
Research, Reference, and Collections Specialist
The Library |
Regeneration
Pat Barker
London, Viking, 1991
This is the first
of a trilogy set in World War I Britain (Volume III goes on
to the Front), describing what happens when an officer, who
believes the war is insane, is himself declared insane by psychiatrists
and other officers to avoid having to execute him for treasonous
convictions. Richly written, based in part on the life of gay
poet Siegfried Sassoon and the psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers
whose work pioneered new insights into modern psychology. The
other volumes in the trilogy are also excellent: The Eye
in the Door and The Ghost Road.
Joe
Barker
Teaching Library Program Coordinator
The Library |
The
Language War
Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000
Fortunately, the
Berkeley campus provides no refuge from the contentiousness
of the world outside. Incoming students will be bombarded with
arguments about matters like "nation building," "color
blindness," and "unintended consequences." Given
the curiosity of Berkeley undergraduates and the mission of
the university, they will work to sift through the rhetoric
and draw some conclusions. Their intellectual struggle would
be aided by digesting The Language War by Robin Tolmach
Lakoff. Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at Berkeley, provides
a thoughtful examination of how and why language is mobilized
as a weapon in contests for power and authority in society.
She analyzes the interests and ideologies at play when powerful
and less powerful groups brawled over issues like political
correctness and hate speech, the "cult of victimology,"
and the O.J. Simpson trial. Lakoff's thesis, that the control
of language has an effect on economic and civil rights, is worthy
of critical reflection. During 2003-2004 phrases like "diversity,"
"collateral damage," "nation building,"
and even "The American People" may come to be understood
differently by those who read Lakoff and rise to her important
challenge.
Bil Banks
Professor
African American Studies |
The
Company of Strangers
Robert Wilson
New York, Harcourt, 2001
Covering a fifty-year
sweep, World War II-Cold War-European localities-East Berlin,
Lisbon, London, featuring a fully realized female protagonist
in a "manly" milieu. Simultaneously romantic and unsentimental,
this superb, filmic, willfully honest novel is for lovers of
the espionage genre who are game to re-imagine the roles and
relationships of mothers and daughters. War, peace, reconciliation-among
nations, among ourselves-Wilson both captures the period and
illuminates the motivations and consequences in an oh-so-human
enterprise.
Imani
Abalos
Research, Reference, and Collections Specialist,
The Library |
This
Earth of Mankind
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
New York, Penguin Books, 1981
Toer wrote This
Earth of Mankind, the first of four novels known as the
Buru Quartet, while a political prisoner on Buru Island from
1965-1979, a time when he was often forced to do hard labor.
Because of writing Indonesia's history truly, with understanding
portrayals of the Chinese and of the Communists, his government
banned his works. Although many of his writings were destroyed,
these lyrical novels, formed as he told stories of his people's
history to lift the spirits of fellow prisoners, survived. Written
on scraps of paper, this novel was then smuggled out of prison.
Toer's works, long banned in Indonesia, have been published
in over twenty languages. His depictions of Indonesia's anti-colonialist
struggles resonate profoundly with other such struggles worldwide.
When Toer read on the Berkeley campus in May 1999, he was heard
in pin-drop silence; many believe he ought long since to have
received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Phyllis
Bischof
African and African American Studies Librarian,
The Library |
The
Face of Battle
John Keegan
New York, Viking Press, 1995, ©1976
The author's focus
is upon the soldier's experience in this military history.
Keegan tries to answer the question, "What was it like?"
His descriptions of the French knights' experience at the
battle of Agincourt, or the Tommies' on the Somme are both
utterly convincing and surprising. This sort of history tells
us not only what we didn't know but what we should know. If
we're going to send armies off to war, we ought to know what
it will be like for them and those they will encounter. This
book is a beginning.
Diane
Fortner
Physics Librarian
The Library
|
Survival
in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity
Primo Levi
New York, Collier Books, 1961, ©1959
This isn't exactly
a book about a war; it's a book about making war against humanity
and therefore its original Italian title, "If this is a
man?" is more apt. This autobiographical account of Auschwitz
by the great Italian writer is a miracle of writing. It is so
meticulous, so precise, and so detailed. It raises the largest
possible questions as it depicts the most specific material
details. And while it rigorously avoids sentimentalism and moralizing,
the great beauty of its writing offers the reader an encounter
with the very humanity that the concentration camp sought to
exterminate.
Susan
Maslan
Assistant Professor
French |
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