Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A
History of 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2013).
Dasa Drndic, Trieste: A Novel, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler's clandestine Lebensborn project." Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences, dealing unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies form the Nuremberg trials and interviews with send-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy." "Written in immensely powerful language and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Dasa Drndic has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of the twentieth-century history." Also see Craig Seligman, "In the Grip of Madness," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/2/2014.).
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (New York: Knopf, 2010.
Jill Lepore, The Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York Knopf, 2013).
