On Freedom: 20 Books Worth Reading, and Worth Remembering

It's a lot — take your time.

Every summer, celebrities like Bill Gates and Barack Obama head off on vacation to escape the heat, and publish their summer reading lists along the way. This year Gates put it this way: “Summer is the perfect time to escape the chaos of daily life — head to the beach, into the mountains, or into a good book, and immerse yourself.”

It's the summer holiday, you have time on your hands, and this is a good season for both travel and reading. If you don't have time off and can't go out and see the world, reading can at least help you step outside your own experience and think about the larger world — and about ourselves.

So we have picked 20 books about countries around the world, in the hope that their experience will help you think, hold on to the values that are fundamental and good in human life, and work toward them.

Africa

1. Long Walk to Freedom

In 1990, Nelson Mandela walked free after 27 years in prison. When Wong Ka Kui of the Hong Kong rock band Beyond heard the news, he wrote the lyrics to “Glorious Years” as a blessing for Mandela after his release.

“I remember when Ka Kui wrote this song, he'd seen a lot of international commentary about how Mandela was fighting for his country, for human rights, freedom and equality in South Africa. Ka Kui felt that freedom and equality were things everyone needed. He felt Mandela didn't just stand for Black Africans — he stood for the whole world, because everyone needs freedom, equality and human rights. When he wrote the song, he didn't yet know that Mandela would succeed in the end. It was a blessing for him — a wish that, however long it took, he would succeed,” Wong Ka Keung (Wong Ka Kui's younger brother) told the BBC.

Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, records more than 70 years of his fight for freedom — from a carefree childhood to his election in 1994 as South Africa's first Black president. It covers his joining the African National Congress, founding the secret armed organization Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), and leading the South African people against white minority rule, apartheid and racial discrimination, among other things.

In 1993, Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2010, in recognition of his contribution to peace and freedom, the United Nations named his birthday, July 18, Nelson Mandela International Day.

Europe

2. The Spirit of Prague

Ivan Klíma began writing in the Terezín concentration camp, where he spent more than three years. In 1945, Soviet troops liberated the camp, and Klíma and his family survived. But his luck did not hold. In 1968, Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia; Klíma was invited to the University of Michigan as a visiting scholar. A year later he decided to go home, and immediately lost his job. His work was then banned in Czechoslovakia for 20 years. To make a living he had to work as a hospital orderly, a street sweeper and whatever else he could get, but he kept writing.

The Spirit of Prague collects his essays — pieces he wrote for Granta that could not be published at home, along with talks he gave at international literary conferences in the 1990s. The book has five parts, covering Klíma's childhood in the camp, several turning points in Czech history, and the changes in social conditions and ideas around 1968 and 1989.

In the title essay, Klíma describes this spiritual home built by Kafka, Hašek, Havel and others as full of “paradox.” “The ‘November Revolution,’ which earned the name ‘Velvet,’ differed from other revolutions not only in its peaceful methods but also in the main weapon used in the struggle. Almost every usable surface in Prague — the walls of buildings, metro stations, the windows of buses and trams, shop windows… — was for a time covered by an unbelievable number of slogans and signs. Though they had a single goal — overthrowing the totalitarian system — their tone was light and ironic. The people of Prague delivered the final blow to the rulers they despised not with a knife but with a joke. Yet at the heart of that elegant, straight-faced struggle an intense passion still lived,” Klíma wrote.

3. Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968

Heda Margolius Kovály, also a Czech writer, was 12 years older than Klíma. Born in 1919, she met the 20th century's greatest catastrophe in the best years of her youth. In 1941 she, her parents and her husband were deported to Poland; in 1944 they were moved on to Auschwitz, where her parents died in the gas chambers. She was then sent to Christianstadt and forced into hard labor in a munitions factory and a brickworks. In early 1945 she was lucky enough to escape while being marched to Bergen-Belsen.

The book is her memoir of the years 1941 to 1968, a faithful record of the German and then the Soviet invasions of Prague, and of her own marriage and daily life.

4. The Reawakening

Born the same year as Heda Margolius Kovály, and with a somewhat similar life, was a famous Italian: Primo Levi.

Levi was a chemist by training, but he was arrested for taking part in the anti-fascist resistance and deported to Auschwitz. His number was 174517.

Too many people have suffered, and too few have left a record of it. However famous or important they once were, each generation seems to forget the one before. That forgetting can be forced, or it can be willed. One way to refuse it, to fight the loss of memory, is to read and to write. Without survivors like Levi brave enough to put their experience down on paper, how would we understand the Nazi Holocaust and Auschwitz at all?

“I do not believe that a human life necessarily has a definite purpose; but if I think about my life, and the goals I have set for myself only now, I find that only one of them is clear and conscious. It is this: to bear witness, to make my voice heard by the German people, to ‘answer’ the Kapo who wiped his hand on my shoulder, Dr. Pannwitz, those who hanged Ultimo, and their descendants,” Levi wrote.

Having written this history down, Levi took his own life in 1987.

5. Men in Dark Times

If you were born into a dark age, how should you choose to live? Hannah Arendt gives one answer, through “sketches” of her contemporaries and friends.

They include “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing” (Arendt's 1959 speech accepting the Lessing Prize in Hamburg), “Rosa Luxemburg 1871–1919,” “Karl Jaspers,” “Isak Dinesen 1885–1963,” “Walter Benjamin 1892–1940,” “Randall Jarrell 1914–1965,” “Hermann Broch 1886–1951” and “Waldemar Gurian,” among others.

6. The Captive Mind

In 1980, the 69-year-old Polish poet Czesław Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation praised the writer “who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.”

In her introduction to this book, the scholar Cui Weiping argues that in one sense Miłosz's The Captive Mind is greater and more meaningful than George Orwell's 1984 — because all of it comes from what Miłosz lived through himself, rather than from an Orwellian act of imagination.

In that essay Cui Weiping also mentions that the Polish historian Adam Michnik turned to Miłosz's lines at his own worst moments. In 1982 Michnik wrote: “When you stand alone, your eyes stinging from tear gas, a policeman waving a pistol in front of you — on this pitch-black, starless night, thanks to your favorite poet you can see clearly: ‘an avalanche changes its course depending on the stones over which it rolls’ (Czesław Miłosz). And so you want to be the stone that turns the course of events.”

7. Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America

In 1948, Orwell finished writing 1984. In that political allegory — or prophecy — Orwell's “Big Brother is watching you” chilled readers to the bone. Could things really get that bad? Yes. During the Cold War, in Hungary, part of the Soviet bloc, the secret police used a vast network of informers to try to penetrate and control the country's entire political life.

The author's parents were well-known Hungarian journalists, and their reporting was an important source of information about Hungary for the West. That made them “enemies of the people”: they were kept under secret-police surveillance for years and eventually jailed, one after the other, on charges of treason and espionage. After the family moved to the United States, the Hungarian government came up with the strange idea of recruiting them as spies — and the Americans then watched them for several years of their own.

In the same vein, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash's The File recounts his own dealings with the terrifying East German secret police, the Stasi. Even John le Carré, famous for his spy novels, called it “a chilling, bone-deep account of betrayal and compromise.”

8. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

In 1991 the vast Soviet Union fell. But what came next?

Through interviews, the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich lets ordinary Russians describe their own lives during the painful social transition of the two decades from 1991 to 2012.

Alexievich mostly does not summarize or judge what her subjects say; she simply lets them talk. Their accounts may be fragmentary, but they are real enough, and suggestive enough, to hit very hard.

9. The Lair

This is an autobiographical novel about Eastern European exile intellectuals living in the United States. The author, Norman Manea, is no exception. He was, first of all, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. In 1986 he left Romania for West Berlin, and later settled in New York.

Besides The Lair, he has written The Hooligan's Return and The Black Envelope, among other books, all of them concerned with himself and with the Romanian intellectuals around him.

10. The European Spirit: On Czesław Miłosz, Jan Patočka and István Bibó (《欧洲精神》)

This is a book about the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka and the Hungarian thinker István Bibó. In the author's view they stand for a certain European spirit — one concerned with human freedom, resistance, morality, conscience and dignity, among other things.

11. From “Eastern Europe” to “New Europe”: Twenty Years of Transition Revisited (《从“东欧”到“新欧洲”》)

If Alexievich's Secondhand Time is about post-Soviet Russia, then Jin Yan's From “Eastern Europe” to “New Europe” is one of the best general-audience overviews of post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

The book has three parts — “Looking Back at Eastern Europe After the Financial Crisis,” “Poland's Road to Independence and the Question of Yugoslav National Independence,” and “The Spiritual Pursuits of Eastern European Intellectuals” — all revised and edited from columns the author wrote for the Economic Observer.

Asia

12. Freedom from Fear

This is a collection of essays by Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1990 she led the National League for Democracy to victory in the general election, only for the result to be annulled by Myanmar's military government. Over the following 21 years she was held under house arrest in her home, on and off, for a total of 15 years. In 1991 she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the book, Aung San Suu Kyi writes that many people in Myanmar at the time lived in fear. Many worried that something they said or did would cost them their job, their money, their freedom, the person they loved, their family — everything. Because of fear, you no longer dare to stand by what you know is right. You may not even admit that you are afraid, that fear is eating away at you. Instead you come to believe that what you once held to be true is worthless, not even worth discussing.

This, Aung San Suu Kyi says, is why we need freedom from fear. In her view any revolution must first be a revolution of the spirit, and what that revolution has to cultivate is fearlessness. Fearlessness may look like a gift you are born with; in fact it is worked for. It should be grown into a habit, so that fear does not sway you when you make a decision. Because once fear sways your decisions you are no longer the person you were — you have, of course, been corrupted.

“To me she is currently the most beautiful person in the world, and her beauty isn't that she's good-looking, born lovely — it's her inner bearing. As I just said, she has a kind of firmness, humility and gentleness that belongs to a spiritual leader. Why does gentleness matter so much? Only when you have seen it for yourself do you understand how much,” the media commentator Leung Man-tao said on a program.

13. Finding George Orwell in Burma

The American journalist Emma Larkin revisited the places where Orwell worked and lived in Burma: Mandalay, Myaungmya, Rangoon, Moulmein, Katha…

She was looking for answers to a few questions. What experiences pushed Orwell to give up colonial life and turn to writing? And what made Burma such a poor and wretched place? Larkin reconstructs this stretch of Orwell's life, which nearly every scholar has passed over, and writes about Orwell's hold on Burma today.

At the same time, with Orwell's own clear eye for detail, she draws the contradictions and absurdities of everyday Burmese life under the tangle of colonial ghosts and dictatorship, and the fears and hopes of the people living it.

14. Conscience in Action: The Autobiography of Kim Dae-jung

This book is not only Kim Dae-jung's own memoir but one of the best sources for understanding modern Korean history. In his 85 years Kim lived through Japanese colonial rule, the division of Korea, the Korean War and South Korea's authoritarian era, and he opened the country's era of democratization with his own hands, carefully raising a constitutional democracy that was then still in its infancy and setting it on the right track.

To push South Korea's democratization forward he escaped death five times, spent six years in prison and ten years under house arrest and in exile, and was persecuted again and again by the South Korean authorities — jailed, banished, targeted in a staged car-crash assassination attempt, sentenced to death. He came through all of it, became president of South Korea in the end, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

15. Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

Gandhi was born in a remote Indian town to a devoutly religious family. Churchill was born into the British aristocracy. The two met in person only once, yet spent their whole lives contending with each other over the interests of their own peoples. Their struggle and their compromises shaped the history of the 20th century.

The book's author, Arthur Herman, is a well-known American historian and best-selling writer. His other books include Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II and How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

16. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

In the autumn of 1995 the Iranian scholar Azar Nafisi resigned her teaching post. She picked seven female students and invited them to keep up a secret reading group with her. Once a week they read Nabokov, they read Fitzgerald, they read Henry James, they read Jane Austen.

Talking about the characters and fates in those books brought her and her students to a deeper sense of what freedom and selfhood mean. They resisted in secret, and firmly: at a time when the government required women to wear the veil and the black robe, they quietly put on makeup and painted their nails in private. Reading became the last thing they could not give up, their final way, as individuals, of holding out and pursuing freedom.

“I was deeply moved by this book, which records how Nafisi resisted, and helped others resist, the war Islamic rule waged on women. Her memoir holds important and profound reflections: on the wounds a theocracy inflicts, on the meditation on freedom and the painful pursuit of it — and, most stirring of all, on the pleasure and self-awareness that come from meeting fine teachers and great books,” the celebrated American writer Susan Sontag wrote.

The Americas

17. The Story of American Freedom

In this book Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, takes “freedom” — a complicated idea — as his subject, examines the many forms it has taken in American history, and traces how the idea itself has changed over time. It deepens our understanding of both freedom and American history.

18. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

If last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad told the story of Black Americans' fight for freedom in fiction, Eric Foner's Gateway to Freedom bears witness to it as history.

On the eve of the American Civil War, relations between North and South had reached a deadlock. Free states and slave states were locked over slavery, and at the same time thousands upon thousands of enslaved people slipped across the line dividing them — the Mason-Dixon Line — in search of freedom. Along the way, countless unknown men and women helped them hide their tracks, escape their pursuers and reach safety. This was the legendary “Underground Railroad.”

Other

19. Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times

This is a book about how four ordinary people spoke up for “justice”: a Swiss immigration police officer who sheltered Jewish refugees before World War II, and a Serb who saved refugees of another ethnic group during the Balkan genocide; an Israeli soldier who disobeyed orders to help suffering Palestinians, and a Wall Street analyst who exposed what was really happening to his clients' deposits.

Even if you are an ordinary person, you can still make your own choice, rather than settle into “the banality of evil.”

20. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe

The last book is the most theoretical, and the one covering the widest range of cases: Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Greece), South America (Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina and Chile) and post-Communist Europe (Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Russia).

In it the authors restate the main types of contemporary non-democratic regime, and work through the workable paths from each type to democracy and the tasks that consolidating a democracy requires. In their view, consolidation needs five arenas: civil society, political society, the rule of law, the state bureaucracy and economic society.

“A democratic transition is complete when sufficient agreement has been reached about political procedures to produce an elected government, when a government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote, when this government de facto has the authority to generate new policies, and when the executive, legislative and judicial power generated by the new democracy does not have to share power with other bodies de jure,” Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan write in the book.

Cover image: Douban