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The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe 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
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
Gulag
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
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"--
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
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.
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
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
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.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
A great modern classic of Negative Utopia, with chilling implications for our own time.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
William L. Shirer · 1,264 pages
Beneath the Lion's Gaze
Maaza Mengiste · 308 pages
An epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopias revolution.
The Aquariums of Pyongyang
Kang Chol-Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot · 264 pages
The Complete Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi · 352 pages
From inside front cover: The story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a ... loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a coutnry plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming -- both sweet and terrible; and, fina
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
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.
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
Flyboys: A True Story of Courage
James D. Bradley · 416 pages
This acclaimed bestseller brilliantly illuminates a hidden piece of World War II history as it tells the harrowing true story of nine American airmen shot down in the Pacific. One of them, George H. W. Bush, was miraculously rescued. What happened to the other eight remained a secret for almost 60 years. After the war, the American and Japanese governments conspired to cover up the shocking tr
Child 44
Tom Rob Smith · 480 pages
A propulsive, relentless page-turner.A terrifying evocation of a paranoid world where no one can be trusted.A surprising, unexpected story of love and family, of hope and resilience.CHILD 44 is a thriller unlike any you have ever read."There is no crime."Stalin's Soviet Union strives to be a paradise for its workers, providing for all of their needs. One of its fundamental pillars is that its cit
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
Survival in Auschwitz
Primo Levi · 157 pages
In 1943, Primo Levi, a 25-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. This is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remain