In Book Swap, a Reader staffer recommends two to five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or publishing-adjacent professional to do the same. In this week’s edition, Reader culture editor Aimee Levitt trades recommendations with Northwestern professor, Algren scholar, and fellow Rogers Parker Bill Savage.
Both The Battle of Lincoln Park and Hardly Children have been on my to-be-read pile for months. (My copy of The Battle of Lincoln Park is literally six inches from me as I type this.) But books I actually own get superseded by library books, which have built-in deadlines. So instead I read American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson by Peter Kurth. Thompson was an American foreign correspondent and journalist during the first half of the 20th century and an all-around badass. She was especially prescient about the dangers of Nazism, so much so that Hitler expelled her from Germany in 1934. “Who Goes Nazi?,” an essay she wrote in 1941, is just as applicable today; as Thompson wrote, “Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.” And that certain type of mind hasn’t gone away, even if Hitler has.
