“What does it mean to teach literature to a soldier?

How does it prepare a young man or woman for combat?  At West Point, Elizabeth Samet reads classic and modern works of literature with America’s future military elite, and in this stirring memoir she chronicles the ways in which war has transformed her relationship to the books she and her students read together.  While fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Samet’s former students share their thoughts on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, and the films of Bogart and Cagney.  And their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom.  Soldier’s Heart is an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.”

After typing out five different summaries of this week’s Recommended Reading selection, I realized none of them compared to the back jacket description.

Soldier’s Heart touched me and made me think about a world I’d never considered, and the true relevance of literature and the liberal arts to people who risk their lives daily.

On a bit of a military academy kick,

Megan

What would you do, if one day your father shows up at your door and reveals a terrible secret, and holes in his memory?  If you’re anything like Mark Kurzem, you’d do everything you could to help him find out the truth about his past.  Slogging through dim childhood recollections, Mark and his father spend hours sitting at the kitchen table, as his dad slowly opens up about what he remembers from being a kid.

The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood is the kind of book you can’t put down, though at certain parts you certainly want to.  Kurzem hides no detail of his investigation – from the scholars who don’t believe his father’s story to the strange actions of the man who just might be his father’s half-brother.

The Mascot is both an intriguing mystery and a touching view into a family and the way people deal with secrets.  It gives deeper insight into how World War II played out in the Soviet States, Latvia and Belarus particularly.

The questions the book raises – to what extent is a child culpable? who are the book’s heroes? what would you have done? – resonate long after The Mascot ends.

Promise next week’s Recommended Reading will be happier

(I seem to be on a weird Nazi kick),

Megan

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a story of family, war, and the Holocaust.

Vladek Spiegelman and his wife survived first Nazi-controlled Poland and then Auschwitz.  Half a century later, their son Art Spiegelman immortalized their lives in two graphic novels: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began.  Switching back and forth from the 1930s and ’40s to the 1970s and ’80s, Art interweaves his parents’ lives in Europe with his experiences and interviews with his father.

The persecuted Jews are drawn as mice, with Nazi officers portrayed as cats, yet there is nothing childish about the telling.  Nadja, Art’s mother, committed suicide when he was young, and the modern story includes his father’s troubled relationship with his second wife and Art’s troubled relationship with his father.

Heart wrenching details, like the author’s childhood belief that all adults moaned in their sleep, are briefly conveyed then pushed aside.

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale gives a touching glimpse into WWII-era Poland because of the humanity it gives its subjects.

Give graphic novels a try,

Megan