Here are 100 books that Letters from the Dead fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always been fascinated by the human ability to overcome and persevere. How can individuals who seem so ordinary, so small surmount incredible odds? From where do they derive the physical strength and mental fortitude? I think that is what drew me to become a historian of the Soviet Union. I have devoted myself to studying the letters, diaries, and other writings by ordinary individuals who lived through extraordinary times and recorded that ordeal in intimate detail. One of my missions is to share these writings, never intended for publication, with the public.
I was utterly engrossed by this amazing collection of Red Army women’s recollections, awed by the way they fought against enemy troops as well as misogynists and rapists in their own ranks.
These women were some of the toughest on the planet. They were not given proper uniforms until late in the war; they had the least training and often flew or fought in the most dangerous missions. I breathlessly read about their daring and bravery and became consumed with rage when I read about how their war service became tainted after the war.
Smeared as promiscuous because of their life at the front, many decorated heroines hid their medals in shame. This is a unique look at PTSD and the trauma of reintegration from the perspective of women warriors.
'It would be hard to find a book that feels more important or original' - Viv Groskop, Observer
Extraordinary stories from Soviet women who fought in the Second World War - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
"Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown... I want to write the history of that war. A women's history."
I have always been fascinated by the human ability to overcome and persevere. How can individuals who seem so ordinary, so small surmount incredible odds? From where do they derive the physical strength and mental fortitude? I think that is what drew me to become a historian of the Soviet Union. I have devoted myself to studying the letters, diaries, and other writings by ordinary individuals who lived through extraordinary times and recorded that ordeal in intimate detail. One of my missions is to share these writings, never intended for publication, with the public.
No book has given me a clearer, more visceral sense of what it was like to be in the Red Army than this book. It reminds me of my favorite war story—Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried—Schechter dives into the objects (spoons, weapons, letters, trinkets, tools) that Red Army soldiers carried to give you a sense of their gritty, everyday reality—how they ate, slept, fought, joked, and what it felt like to be in their bodies as they moved through the killing fields of eastern Europe.
The Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon Schechter attends to a diverse array of things-from spoons to tanks-to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians.
Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and from the front, diaries, and interviews, The Stuff of Soldiers reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front,…
I have always been fascinated by the human ability to overcome and persevere. How can individuals who seem so ordinary, so small surmount incredible odds? From where do they derive the physical strength and mental fortitude? I think that is what drew me to become a historian of the Soviet Union. I have devoted myself to studying the letters, diaries, and other writings by ordinary individuals who lived through extraordinary times and recorded that ordeal in intimate detail. One of my missions is to share these writings, never intended for publication, with the public.
I could not put down this account of the world’s first major refugee crisis, as millions of families were ripped apart during WWII. Focusing on the Soviet Union, this book traces the itineraries of children separated from their mothers, prisoners and refugees torn asunder from their homes. Moreover, it also follows them as they forge new lives, often in the most transient and inhospitable conditions.
I felt I never truly understood what happens to the family during wartime until I read this book.
In summer and fall 1941, as German armies advanced with shocking speed across the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership embarked on a desperate attempt to safeguard the country's industrial and human resources. Their success helped determine the outcome of the war in Europe. To the Tashkent Station brilliantly reconstructs the evacuation of over sixteen million Soviet civilians in one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II. Rebecca Manley paints a vivid picture of this epic wartime saga: the chaos that erupted in towns large and small as German troops approached, the overcrowded trains that trundled eastward, and the…
I have always been fascinated by the human ability to overcome and persevere. How can individuals who seem so ordinary, so small surmount incredible odds? From where do they derive the physical strength and mental fortitude? I think that is what drew me to become a historian of the Soviet Union. I have devoted myself to studying the letters, diaries, and other writings by ordinary individuals who lived through extraordinary times and recorded that ordeal in intimate detail. One of my missions is to share these writings, never intended for publication, with the public.
I was consumed by this harrowing account of Kaliningrad, a city caught between Hitler and Stalin, and how the people there fought, collaborated with, and suffered from both armies.
Without reviving the tired “who was worse” debates about Hitler and Stalin, this book shows readers the unique horrors that each regime visited upon the local population during the war and for decades afterward, as Stalin tried to denazify its German residents. Huge questions of purity, morality, and humanness undergird this searing story about surviving two of the most violent regimes in history.
German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes.
Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Koenigsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant,…
When in the summer of 1991, I stood with the crowds at Moscow’s White House during the attempted coup against Gorbachev, I had the sense that I was living through and in a small, but not unimportant way, making history. I left Moscow fascinated by the questions of how big historical events shape individuals’ lives and how personal circumstances influence public action and commitments. My books explore how children experienced and made sense of the Russian Revolution; how survivors of the World War II blockade of Leningrad interacted with official state commemorations of the war; and how international communists explained and remembered their participation in the Spanish Civil War.
Hobsbawm was both one of the most influential professional historians of the twentieth century and a lifelong communist. As a historian, Hobsbawm had no illusions about the failures of twentieth-century communist regimes. His life story illustrates how a commitment to communism entailed far more than an endorsement of Stalin or the Soviet Union. A schoolboy in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, Hobsbawm, associated communism with antifascism. In his autobiography, he offers not a confession or a justification for his membership in the communist party, but an effort to explain what he calls the “wars of secular religion” that devastated so much of the twentieth century.
Eric Hobsbawm has been widely acclaimed as one of the greatest living historians. Called "a lyrical, pungent, and provocative memoir" by Publishers Weekly, Interesting Times offers a personal tour through what Hobsbawm terms "the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history." The book takes us from his birth in Alexandria, Egypt, and early schooling in Weimar Berlin to his student days as a Cambridge Red and Apostle at King's College. Hobsbawm took E.M. Forster to hear Lenny Bruce, demonstrated with Bertrand Russell against nuclear arms, translated for Che Guevara in Havana, and inaugurated the modern history of banditry. With…
I've found the creep of authoritarianism to be very disquieting. One would have to be willfully blind to not see its manifestations both here and abroad. I wanted to better understand how this phenomenon cast its shadow over the world and I found the '33 Chicago World's Fair an ideal lens to view this through. I've been fascinated by world's fairs since I was a child and the '33 Fair was the first to consciously feature the future. I'm also strangely drawn to this period – if I believed in reincarnation it might provide answers, but I don't. The Zeitgeist just before the full, brutal ugliness of fascism broke over the world, fascinates me.
Brendon’s Magnus opus on the 1930s is both comprehensive and full of the telling anecdote. I found this to be one of the most informative, and best written, works of history that I have ever read. I can’t recommend it strongly enough, whether you’re researching this period or just looking for a very good book to read.
The 1930s were perhaps the seminal decade in twentieth-century history, a dark time of global depression that displaced millions, paralyzed the liberal democracies, gave rise to totalitarian regimes, and, ultimately, led to the Second World War. In this sweeping history, Piers Brendon brings the tragic, dismal days of the 1930s to life.
From Stalinist pogroms to New Deal programs, Brendon re-creates the full scope of a slow international descent towards war. Offering perfect sketches of the players, riveting descriptions of major events and crises, and telling details from everyday life, he offers both a grand, rousing narrative and an intimate…
I am a Canadian-Ukrainian children’s author and former librarian. My great-aunt was a sniper with the Ukrainian underground, fighting both Hitler and Stalin. She was executed after the war by the Soviets and buried in a mass grave. Her mother was sent to a gulag in Siberia and never heard from again. I will never know all that happened to my ancestors, but I can give voice to others whose culture, life, and history were erased in the same way. Every novel I’ve written has delved into a piece of the past that has been shoved under the carpet for political reasons.
This is a page-turning novel set near the end of WWII about a topic rarely touched in fiction: The death battles between Poles and Ukrainians, who both feared losing their country to the Nazis, the Soviets, and then each other. A ton of research went into this eye-opening novel about Tolya, the half-Polish, half Ukrainian soldier who will be deemed a traitor no matter what he does.
Poland, 1944. After the Soviet liberation of Lwow from Germany, the city is a battleground, its loyalties torn between Poland and Ukraine. Tolya is half-Ukrainian, half-Polish, and he joined the Soviet Red Army just to stay alive. When he shoots his political officer in the street, he's taken in by a squad of insurgent Ukrainians. Tolya doesn't trust them and especially doesn't trust Solovey, the squad's young war-scarred leader. He doesn't know just how well Solovey understands the cost of looking out for life over loyalty. Then a betrayal sends both on the run.
I read modern history as an undergraduate and then trained as a primary school teacher. Unsurprisingly, our classroom topics were often historical. My interest in the experiences of people, especially children, in Europe during WWII stems from the fact that my own father grew up in Germany and had numerous tales to tell. My first book was a recount of his wartime childhood. My father gave a copy of his book to his friend and neighbor who happened to be a Polish wartime veteran with his own remarkable stories to tell and this led to three years’ intensive historical research for his book.
Having read The Long Walk, like so many others, I wondered about the identity of the character known as Mr. Smith, so I was intrigued to discover that Linda Willis had spent some ten years researching this character.
As I had myself spent three years trying to locate evidence to authenticate the story in my own book, I could empathize with all Linda’s frustration in following dead ends and scrabbling down rabbit warrens.
Learn the facts behind the blockbuster film The Way Back. Since 1956, The Long Walk has been, for many, the symbol of an immense love of freedom and has become one of the greatest true-life adventure stories of all time. The harrowing story about a group of POWs who escaped a labor camp in Siberia and walked to freedom in India during WWII deeply affected thousands of its readers, and Linda Willis was one of those moved by the story. But she had questions about its authenticity:
Was it all true? What happened after their arrival in India? Were there…
I have studied WW2 and prisoners of war during that period for more than 20 years. They're very much the forgotten soldiers of war in my opinion. Few spoke of their treatment and brutality at the hands of the enemy, starvation, and the psychological effects that they lived with for many years afterward. Marriages fell apart, alcoholism was commonplace and many committed suicide, during a time where the term PTSD hadn't been invented. I've selected books that tell the story from several different perspectives. There were good and bad on all sides and for every ten stories of brutality and murder, there were another ten stories of good men and women who did their best to help the POWs survive.
One of the most heartwrenching stories of POW books you will ever read. This time the author gives an honest yet horrific account of German POWs at the hands of their Russian captors after WWII.
Not a book for the faint-hearted and has no happy endings. A story about how cruel mankind can be.
Originally published in 1960, this compact book tells the true story of a German soldier: from his early childhood during the First World War, through to his harrowing experiences on the frontline during the Word War II, culminating in his capture by the Red Army on 20 December 1942…
I first read Swann’s Way when I was seventeen. Throughout the following five decades, In Search of Lost Time has always remained within reach, a parallel universe more enriching than words can express. As a painter, I’m drawn to Proust’s subtle use of paintings to reveal and mystify the relationship between what we see and what we know. I’ve spoken on Proust at Berkeley, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston, and was invited to give the annual Proust lecture at the Center for Fiction in New York as well as the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.
It was because of Proust that I came to learn of the existence of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski. While a prisoner of war in the dark heart of Soviet Russia during the Second World War, this singular, cosmopolitan spirit devised a series of lectures on Proust and In Search of Lost Time as a vital counterpoint to the grim surroundings he and his fellow prisoners were forced to endure, offering them a context for addressing their lives and their bleak fates. Freezing, nearly starving, lice-ridden, Czapski mapped out Proust’s cosmology in several pages of his journal that served to fuel his talks. Scheherazade-like, night after night, he slowly revealed the already-legendary French novelist’s complex world of ideas and characters, giving voice to the life-enhancing magic great art bestows.
The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.
During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality,…
