Red Love: The Story of an East German Family

I don't know about you, but I always feel like history happens to other people, in other places. And Red Love makes the case that one German family experienced more than its fair share of 20th-century history: over three generations, the Leos lived under democracy, fascism, socialism, and democracy again. In telling his grandparents', parents', and his own stories, Maxim Leo investigates how their different backgrounds and temperaments—as well as simple serendipity—shaped their experience of these ideologies. His clear, casual, immediate writing brings you in so close that you realize you, like the Leos, are embedded in a history that feels, as it did to them, a lot like life. This thrilling and thought-provoking book is the best nonfiction I've read all year.