50 book challenge: #28, #29, #30, #31

#28: Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica. Memoir of growing up as Jewish boy in Salonica, the Greek city a.k.a. Thessaloniki. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many migrated to Salonica, making it the city with the largest population of Jews in the world for a couple of centuries. The Jewish community remained strong until the end of the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a story of the end of that era.

#29: David Crystal, How Language Works. Now I know! Thanks! (Reading a book with this title is a little like Candide's finding out, to his amazement, that he had been speaking prose all his life.) Some interesting insights here for parents of a small baby just now trying out his first phonemes.

#30: Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt. Another memoir of the end of an ancient Jewish community, this time in Alexandria. The author's family was partly from Constantinople, partly from Syria. Eventually, they were forced to leave Egypt in the mid-1960s, one of the last left. The techniques here were heavily fictional in style, I would say (as in, extensive precise quotations from conversations the author was not a party to), so I'm not sure how much of this is experience and how much imagination.

#31: Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower. A story of European civilization in the days before World War One. One especially interesting chapter was on the rise and virus-like spread of a violent, dogmatic, and socially destabilizing ideology that resulted in numerous terrorist attacks and assassinations (including an American president): anarchy. I also like the chapter on Richard Strauss and his milieu. Oh, and also the one on the Dreyfus Affair. Overall, her prose was superb.