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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorGulag
Anne Applebaum · 672 pages
A fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, ho
Long Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela · 638 pages
The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly recreates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader
Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler · 254 pages
"The newly discovered lost text of Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness at Noon--the haunting portrait of a revolutionary, imprisoned and tortured under totalitarian rule--is now restored and in a completely new translation. Editor Michael Scammell and translator Philip Boehm bring us a brilliant novel, a remarkable discovery, and a new translation of an international classic"--
Schindler's List
Thomas Keneally · 429 pages
In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mer
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 188 pages
A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Na
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag
Janusz Bardach, Kathleen Gleeson · 392 pages
It is a true story of an idealistic Jewish man who who gets caught up in and believes the political ideologies of communism and a progressive, social justice political system until he actually experiences living under that system which sends him and countless other political prisoners to cruel prison camps and a gulag in Siberia. This is one of those kinds of books that you don’t want to put
For the Term of His Natural Life
Marcus Clarke · 492 pages
First published in 1874, a powerful tale of an Australian penal settlement, which originally appeared in serial form in a Melbourne paper.The story of Rufus Dawes, a young man transported for a murder which he did not commit. The harsh and inhumane treatment handed out to the convicts, some of whom were transported for minor crimes, is vividly conveyed. The novel was based on research by the autho
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
Jasper Becker · 352 pages
In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is the unforgettable
Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
Blaine Harden · 256 pages
The heartwrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk. In Escape From C
Guantánamo Diary
Mohamedou Ould Slahi · 448 pages
"This is the first and only diary written by a still-imprisoned Guantánamo detainee. Since 2002, Mohamedou Slahi has been imprisoned at the detainee camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In all these years, the United States has never charged him with a crime. Although he was ordered released by a federal judge, the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is no sign that the United States plans to
The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison
Warren Fellows · 192 pages
Mao's Great Famine
Frank Dikotter · 448 pages
""Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikotter's astonishing, riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle o
Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup · 228 pages
Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Laura Hillenbrand · 514 pages
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Se
The House of the Dead
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 308 pages
The House of the Dead (Russian: Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvovo doma) is a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1860–2 in the journal Vremya by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp. The novel has also been published under the titles Memoirs from the House of The Dead, Notes from the Dead House (or Notes from a Dead House
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault · 333 pages
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang · 544 pages
"Jung Chang vividly evokes China's sights, sounds, and smells to create what must be one of the grimmest, yet most perceptive accounts of growing up middle-class in the maelstrom that has swept China since the 1920s." - Back cover.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
A great modern classic of Negative Utopia, with chilling implications for our own time.