Best books… chosen by Susan Jacoby

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.

Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast (Grove, $14). I must have read this book when I was 11 or 12, and what inspired me was its portrait of Paine’s commitment to absolute freedom of speech and thought. Paine is my hero.

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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Dover, $5). Who can resist this tour of human passion and folly—including the folly of Anna throwing herself under a train out of love for a trivial man?

The King James Bible. It turned me into an atheist while exposing me to the greatest glories of the English language. The pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church was quite right, from its own perspective, to discourage individual Bible reading—and the vernacular—as a threat to faith.

The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence S. Ritter (Southern Illinois Univ., $18). This oral history of early baseball, when baseball was a game—garnered from the men who played in the first three decades of the 20th century—brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. It speaks of an America in an era when baseball parks were named for people and not for corporations. And what talkers these men were! Listen to their voices and weep for the bland, standardized speech that television has perpetrated. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to love this book, but it helps.