What is Marci Shore reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Marci Shore, author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 and the translator of Michal Glowinski‘s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University where she teaches European cultural and intellectual history.

One book from her entry:

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father

Especially impressive is the author’s honesty and humility—and his appreciation for the situations in which no ideal resolution seems possible, and for the complex personalities (his father’s above all) which reveal how the same person can do both good and bad. This is not a “conversion” story, not a narrative of “from darkness into light” or “from falsity to authenticity.” The author resists both ideological certainty and essentialized identity. This is the story of a young man who comes to appreciate more and more that people—human identity, human motivations—are complicated. He neither idealizes those whom he loves nor demonizes those who work against him. This is a coming-of-age story that offers no absolute answers to the problems of race, class, the third World, poverty, crime, or hate—but rather reveals a penetrating sensitivity to the complexity of the problems.[read on]

Visit Marci Shore's faculty webpage and read more about Caviar and Ashes at the publisher's website.

Writers Read: Marci Shore.

--Marshal Zeringue