Best books… chosen by Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby is the author of the current best-seller The Age of American Unreason. Her previous seven books include Moscow Conversations and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Max Hayward (Modern Library, $23). This memoir of genius was written by the widow of Russia’s greatest 20th-century poet, Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag. Madame Mandelstam re-creates a lost world of cultural and literary values that defined the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia and were brutally suppressed under Stalinism. But I find this book just as pertinent in today’s America—suffocated by and suffocating itself in 24/7 infotainment—as I did when I first read it as a young journalist in Russia.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Washington Square, $6). “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” There is no greater meditation on time and love.

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