Best Books of 2013

Ever so timely.  I found this draft that I thought went out.  Here it is now.

From the book section of this blog, my choices for best books of 2013.  The only criteria I use are that I read the book in 2013--most were published in previous years--and that I remember it without looking back at my notes.

Of the fiction  I read in 2013 two novels stand out: Stalin's Barber by Paul Levin and The Taliban Cricket Club by Timeri N. Marari.  Both are tales of cleverness and chance in perilous times and places told with reasonable accuracy and imagination.  Stalin's Barber is set in the 1930's Soviet Union I know from studying Russian history in college.  Paul Levin recreates the paranoia and tension that underlay Stalin's Kremlin, a dark tale that is not at all improbable.  The Taliban Cricket Club is from more recent history and, while the dire conditions under Taliban rule that are the the setting are all too real, the plot is a real stretch.  The plot is clever, though and to Marari's credit, he makes it seem possible with a well-crafted conclusion.  Both books were published in 2012.

Sherman Alexie's short story collection, Blasphemy, is also worth noting.  The stories are fiction but the voice always sounds autobiographical.  Alexie writes with the mordant humor of a Native American who lives in two cultures and sees the fallacies and foibles of both.  At times laugh-out-loud funny, other times teeth-gritting real, Blasphemy demonstrates Alexie's mastery of the short story form.

For non-fiction:  The Man Called Brown Condor: the Forgotten History of an African American Fighter Pilot by Thomas E. Simmons (2013), A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II by Anne Noggle, and At the Dark End of the Street:  Black Women, Rape and Resistance--a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McClure (2010).  The first two were notable for me because I was entirely unaware of the history.   A Dance With Death is an oral history told by the women who served as fighter and bomber pilots, navigators, armorers and mechanics in Soviet Air Forces.  If you ever need proof that Russians are tough, these histories will serve well.  The Man Called Brown Condor tells the story of one of the first African American aviators, John Robinson, a man who in the face of 1920'sracism and exclusion. learned how to build, fly and maintain airplanes.  He became an advocate for African-Americans in aviation and ended up in flying for Ethiopia in the face of the 1935 Italian Invasion for which he became a celebrity in the US.  He returned to Ethiopia to create that nation's air force in 1944 and later Ethiopia's national airline.  He died in a plane crash flying medicine in an emergency.

At the Dark End of the Street broadens my understanding of history that I know.  Well before African-Americans began to demand economic and civil rights, their women demanded the right to be safe from assault and rape.  Beginning in the 1940's, those efforts established the organizing strategies and legal arguments that became the groundwork the broader movement that emerged in the following decades.  Along with a 2008 work, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, At the Dark End of the Street adds new dimensions to an important history that is usually told only superficially.