Optimism of the intellect: A year in books—Part 3

The Leaflet presents to you a curated list of books from 2023, perhaps for 2024. Happy reading!

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A review of books read and enjoyed in the previous year is a nod to what books can do. Broaden the imagination, help one cope with difficult circumstances with humour, provide a new lens to view an old problem and give one a sense of continuity with a distant past.

Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.

They can also reverse a Gramscian dictum and be about cultivating the 'optimism of the intellect'.

Here is a list of 2023, perhaps for 2024.

Resistance of the Heart, Nathan Stoltzfus

The protest at Rosenstrasse by the German partners of Jews who were arrested was one of the few successful anti-Nazi protests at the peak of Nazi rule. When Jews in mixed marriages were taken away to the police quarters at Rosenstrasse to be ultimately deported to concentration camps, protesters comprising mainly German women who were married to Jewish men kept vigil outside the police headquarters, shouting slogans demanding that their husbands be released.