Deborah Feldman is the author of the best-selling memoir Unorthodox, about her escape from the strict Orthodox Jewish community she'd grown up in. Exodus, Revisited, an expanded version of her followup memoir, has just been published.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975).
Levi had a gift for approaching interactions between people much in the same way that he studied interactions between chemicals in his official vocation. The stories in this wide-ranging collection serve as a compendium on humanity in all its states, both devastating and uplifting in scope. Buy it here.
Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz (1959).
In this dense yet gripping work, Milosz combines the literary elements of the personal memoir with rich ribbons of historical and philosophical exposition. The result is not just the story of a remarkable life, but also a treatise with sweeping geographical and chronological reach. Buy it here.
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