Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

Mao: The Unknown Story

Jung Chang, Jon Halliday · 832 pages

Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family

Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold · 252 pages

For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refuge

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe

Robert Gellately · 720 pages

A bold new accounting of the great social and political upheavals that enveloped Europe between 1914 and 1945--from the Russian Revolution through the Second World War.In Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, acclaimed historian Robert Gellately focuses on the dominant powers of the time, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but also analyzes the catastrophe of those years in an effort to uncover its political

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

William L. Shirer · 1,264 pages

Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

Ian Kershaw · 1,162 pages

The climax and conclusion of one of the best-selling biographies of our time. In this volume, Ian Kershaw introduces Adolf Hitler at the apex of his power, idolized by millions of Germans for bringing the nation out of economic catastrophe. The Nazi party, the armed forces, the industrial cartels, and the civil servants are all "working towards the Führer." Meanwhile, Hitler is poised to realize h

Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling

Mark S. Smith · 256 pages

More than 800,000 people entered Treblinka, and fewer than seventy came out. Hershl Sperling was one of them. He escaped. Why then, fifty years later, did he jump to his death from a bridge in Scotland? The answer lies in a long-forgotten, published account of the Treblinka death camp, written by Hershl Sperling himself in the months after liberation and discovered in his briefcase after his suici

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Philip Gourevitch · 355 pages

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shoc

Remember Us: From My Shtetl Through the Holocaust

Vic Shayne · 324 pages

Follows the life story of Martin Small from the work camp to the concentration camp of Mauthausen, to being a partisan of the Nowogrodek forests, and to life as a displaced person in Italy, and from fighting the Egyptian army in a tiny Israeli kibbutz in 1948 to starting a new life in a new world in New York. This account is based on talks Martin Small gave to audiences across the country and to c

Treblinka

Jean-Francois Steiner · 415 pages

"Nearly a million Jews were consumed by the ovens of Treblinka before August 2, 1943. On that day 600 prisoners armed with stolen guns and grenades attacked the Nazi guards, burned the camp, and fled into the nearby Polish forests. Of these, forty survived to bear witness to man's courage in the face of the greatest evil human history has produced."

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz · 320 pages

The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders

Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess · 320 pages

The title refers to a caption in the scrapbook of Kurt Franz, the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp. Underneath the heading "Those Were the Days," and reproduced here, are pictures of smiling officers at a site where some 700,000 people were exterminated in the gas chambers. To refute revisionist historians who negate the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and to disprove those Germans

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Jason Stearns · 416 pages

Auschwitz

Laurence Rees · 327 pages

Published for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- a devastating and surprising account of the most infamous death camp the world has ever known. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perp

Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak

Jean Hatzfeld · 256 pages

"In the late 1990s, French author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld made several journeys into the hilly, marshy region of the Bugesera, one of the areas most devastated by the Rwandan genocide of April 1994, where an average of five out of six Tutsis were hacked to death with machete and spear by their Hutu neighbors and militiamen. In the villages of Nyamata and N'tarama, Hatzfeld interviewed fourtee

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

Richard Rhodes · 343 pages

In Masters of Death, Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces," organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by sho

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey

Fergal Keane · 198 pages

When President Habyarimana's jet was shot down in April 1994, Rwanda erupted into a hundred-day orgy of killing - which left up to a million dead. Fergal Keane travelled through the country as the genocide was continuing, and his powerful analysis reveals the terrible truth behind the headlines. "A tender, angry account ... As well as being a scathing indictment - Keane says the genocide inflicted

Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945

Saul Friedlander · 896 pages

Examines the anti-Semitism that led to Nazi Germany's attempts to exterminate Europe's Jewish population, focusing on the people and events from the Nazi accession to power in 1933 to the onset of World War II.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown · 512 pages

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza · 215 pages

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee's family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other

The Romanovs: 1613-1918

Simon Sebag Montefiore · 744 pages

From the Introduction... In some ways, this book is a study of character and the distorting effect of absolute power on personality. It is partly a family story of love, marriage, adultery and children, but it is not like other such stories—royal families are always extraordinary because power both sweetens and contaminates the traditional familial chemistry: the allure and corruption of power

The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities

Matthew White · 669 pages

Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White's epic examination of history's one hundred most violent events, or, in White's piquant phrasing, "the numbers that people want to argue about." Reaching back to 480 BCE's second Persian War, White moves chronologically through history to this century's war in the Congo and devotes chapters to each event, where he surrounds hard fa

The Complete Maus

Art Spiegelman · 296 pages

The definitive edition of the graphic novel acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker) • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of Variety’s “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever writte

The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang · 304 pages

In December 1937, in what was then the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (Nanjing) and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured, and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. Amazingly, the story of this atrocity - on

They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague

Slavenka Drakulic