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Gulag

Anne Applebaum · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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PrisonWar AtrocitiesHistoryBleak
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Night

Elie Wiesel · 126 pages

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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

PrisonWar AtrocitiesHistoryNonfiction
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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

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Kolyma Tales

Varlam Shalamov · 222 pages

PrisonWar AtrocitiesBleakCold War History
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Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath

Michael Norman, Elizabeth M. Norman · 463 pages

Following the U.S. surrender to the Japanese on the peninsula of Bataan in 1942, 76,000 American and Filipino POWs began the infamous Death March. This gripping narrative, told in unsparing but sympathetic detail, focuses intermittently on American POW Ben Steele, whose sketches adorn the book, and the hell of Japanese prison and labor camps that introduced these captives to the starvation, dehydr

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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

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Andersonville

MacKinlay Kantor · 767 pages

"The greatest of our Civil War novels." - The New York Times The 1955 Pulitzer Prize winning story of the Andersonville Fortress and its use as a concentration camp-like prison by the South during the Civil War.

PrisonWar AtrocitiesBleakDense Prose
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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

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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

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Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

Art Spiegelman · 135 pages

"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out o

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The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad

Harrison E. Salisbury · 754 pages

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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

PrisonHistoryNonfictionTorture
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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

War AtrocitiesHistoryBleakNonfiction
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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

War AtrocitiesHistoryBleakNonfiction
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House of Meetings

Martin Amis · 248 pages

An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel from a literary master. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the so

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The Orphan Master's Son

Adam Johnson · 456 pages

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is giv

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Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Miklos Nyiszli · 160 pages

See work: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15671648W

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Between Shades of Gray

Ruta Sepetys · 348 pages

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they’ve known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circ

War AtrocitiesBleakPrisonTorture
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Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

Pierre Berg, Brian Brock · 304 pages

"From Pierre Berg's opening words, to his decidedly un-lucky detention by Gestapo officers, all the way through his internment in Drancy, Auschwitz, Dora, and Ravensbrueck, Scheisshaus Luck is a harrowing, clear-eyed testament of one young man's experience of the Holocaust. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, this autobiographical account of a Gentile French tee

War AtrocitiesBleakNonfictionTorture

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