At our April Open Book Hour, we asked readers to share books that celebrate our roots, whether they're about ancestors, the immigrant experience, New York City history, or literature from another language. We wanted to hear about books that connected readers to their own roots or helped them understand someone else’s. Below are the books our patrons selected, and why. 

We'd love to read your recommendations, too, so please feel free to add them in the comments section below.

If you enjoy swapping book recommendations with other readers, we hope you'll check out an Open Book Hour at Mid-Manhattan Library at 42nd Street! We meet on the second Friday of every month at 2 PM, and here's information on upcoming meetings and themes. You can also find links to our past reading lists here. 
 

When she heard our April theme, Helen immediately knew thge book she wanted to share: Kate Simon’s 1983 memoir of growing up in a Jewish immigrant family in the East Bronx in the late 1910s and 1920’s. Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood resonated strongly with Helen's own later experience growing up in the same area.

She has read Bronx Primitive multiple times and highly recommends it.

 

 

Barbara, a fan of well-researched historical fiction, recommended The Lilac Girls, Martha Hall Kelly’s 2016 novel which recounts the experiences of three women during and after World War II, and offers a vivid picture of life at the Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Barbara felt she learned a lot reading this engaging and accessible story of a German doctor, a Polish teenager, and an American socialite turned activist.

 

 

Inspired by the last part of our theme, Carolyn recommended several books that helped her understand the lives of people whose experiences were very different from her own.

Nickel and Dimed: On not Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic "undercover" investigation into how minimum wage workers live in the United States, originally published in 2001, has been a moving revelation for many readers fortunate enough to be getting by in America today.

Carolyn was struck by the grit and resilience shown by the people Ehrenreich worked with and describes in the book.

 

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder (2017) could be a good follow-up read for Nickel and Dimed. Bruder describes the “workamper” community of transient older adult workers finding ways to survive after the financial crisis. Nomadland is one of this year's five finalists for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Carolyn was also struck by the resilience shown by Junior, the protagonist in Sherman Alexie’s 2007 novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, as he grows up in poverty on the Spokane Indian Reservation and later confronts racism in his new school.

She also felt a personal connection to the characters living through the bombing of London during World War II in Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave (2016), because they recalled her mother’s stories of her experiences of the blitz.

 

 

 

 

Joan’s selection took us back to our pioneer roots. She enjoyed the novel Lady of No Man’s Land, by Jeanne Williams, an engrossing story of an orphaned Swedish immigrant making her way through a lawless territory in the Old West (No Man's Land) as an itinerant seamstress in the late 19th century. Joan appreciated the descriptions of frontier life and the strong heroine. 

The strong, independent, and resourceful pioneer heroine that Joan described reminded me of the Newberry Award winner Hattie Big Sky, by Kirby Larson, a lovely novel with crossover appeal for teens and adults, about an orphaned teenager working to inherit her uncle's claim in Montana .

Emily used poetry to connect to the experiences of her grandparents, who emigrated from Poland after World War II. She shared two poems from Postwar Polish Poetry: An Anthology, selected and edited by Czesław Miłosz: "It Smashes Barricades" by Anna Swirszczynska and "Beyond Time" by Mieczyslaw Jastrun, which helped her picture what her grandparents might have seen when they were young.

 

 

Louisa was engrossed in The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves. While the novel might not have connected exactly to our theme, it is a wonderfully atmospheric biblio-mystery set in Barcelona just after World War II, and sure to appeal to the book lover rooted in us all.

 

 

 

 

I connected to my New York City roots with the riotous photos in CBGB and OMFUG by Hilly Kristal, with an afterword by David Byrne. Part of me has always regretted not being born a little earlier, so that I could have experienced CBGB in its heyday and seen The Talking Heads, Ramones, Blondie, and so many other seminal bands at the beginning.

After going through the book, I had a strong desire to reread Patti Smith's essential memoir, Just Kids, a beautiful way to experience the sprit of that creative New York of the 1970s.

 

And leading us us into our May Open Book Hour theme, Picture This - Comics and Graphic Novels, Antonio shared his love of Batman, which began when he was three years old.

His current favorite is Batman Volume 2: I Am Suicide by Tom King and Mikel Janin. "This book is what got me to really invest in the Tom King run on the character and got me back to reading Batman in a huge way. It also leads to a great moment in Vol. 3: I am Bane."

 

See information on upcoming Open Book Hour events at the Mid-Manhattan Library at 42nd Street