On My Bookshelf

By Dan Koretz

Despite a full calendar that includes teaching, research, and the publication of his new book, Measuring Up — an examination of educational testing and the issues that affect students’ scores — Professor Dan Koretz still manages to fit in pleasure reading, historical fiction his genre of choice.

I find my professional work very interesting, but nonetheless, it is hard to confuse professional reading with reading for pleasure, and I doubt that anyone reaches old age lamenting that they should have found time to read more journal articles. No matter how busy I get, I try always to set aside at least a little time to read solely for pleasure.

Some of my reading for pleasure, however, taps interests that also led to my academic career. I have always been fascinated by the ways in which different societies function and what life has been like in different cultures and eras. This led me to get degrees in anthropology and psychology before I turned to education and testing. What I look for are books that are historically or anthropologically accurate, but also evocative and well enough written to be truly absorbing.

Dave Eggers’ What Is the What would be more accurately dubbed “fictionalized history” than “historical fiction.” It is the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, who was forced with thousands of other children to flee Sudan because of the ongoing wars there. Although Eggers consulted extensively with Deng to be as accurate as possible, he had to resort to fiction to recreate events and dialogue that Deng could not entirely recall. Deng experienced extraordinary hardships as a refugee and endured further privations and indignities as an immigrant to the United States, but he endured it all and persevered, obtaining a college education and setting up his own foundation to provide schooling for other refugee children. The story is emotionally wrenching — it makes all too concrete the human suffering behind the dry headlines about the genocide in Sudan — but you’ll be glad you read it.

Another of my recent favorites is Mary Doria Russell’s A Thread of Grace, which uses the story of Jewish refugees fleeing into Italy in 1943 as a vehicle for describing the complex social world of northern Italy during the latter part of World War II. This is archetypal, good historical fiction: The characters and many of the events are fictional, but the story is written with the goal of recreating the social and political circumstances of the era. (Another I recently stumbled across is Colum McCann’s Zoli, loosely based on a true story, which describes the life of a 20th century singer and poet who was raised in the nomadic Romani “Gypsy” tradition, but who struggled to adapt to mainstream culture in central Europe from the 1930s to the present day while maintaining her Romani identity.)

Reaching back years, one of my favorites in this genre is Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, an extraordinary work of art. Ghosh grew up in India and studied at Oxford, where he became captivated by the story of a 12th century Jewish Egyptian trader whose business entailed trading goods between Egypt and India. He studied Arabic, moved to Egypt to do more research, and ended up living in a remote Nile village. The book goes back and forth between Ghosh’s anthropological study of his village and the reconstructed tale of the 12th century trader and his Indian slave. Ghosh’s ability to understand such different cultures and eras is inspirational.

photo by Martha Stewart

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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