100 books like Life and Fate

It always seemed unfair to me that not only do we get just one life, but we only get to live it once. So I fell in love with this novel from the moment I read its premise: Ursula Todd is born and dies and is born again… and again… and again.

I love that she doesn’t remember her previous lives except as vague intuitions that help her avoid making the same mistakes twice–and I also love that avoiding those mistakes often means she makes other (often fatal) mistakes. I found this book funny, moving, and thought-provoking, but what I love most about it is the way its down-to-earth, realistic style allowed me to fully inhabit the impossible conceit at its heart. 

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. 

Merridale uses archival material and interviews with Soviet war veterans to personalize the war on the Eastern Front. This work moves beyond the number of combatants and tanks to focus on real life at the frontlines. She talks about issues that help the reader “feel” the war: what did soldiers eat given the well-known shortages and privations throughout the USSR; how did soldiers get warm clothes and boots; how did they obtain ammunition and artillery shells and new guns despite the long supply lines; was stealing accepted in the army; what behaviors were tolerated and which ones were punished; how did hierarchy allow officers to get first choice of captured enemy equipment. She reveals how officers might not report all the dead in their unit so they would not lose the lost soldier’s food ration. While Alexander Werth’s Russia at War provides a sweeping view of Soviet organization, suffering, and… show more.

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. 

This vivid history of the Soviet Union at war by BBC journalist Alexander Werth is worth picking up for the Stalingrad chapters alone. In January 1943, Werth set out by train from Moscow to Stalingrad with a small group of correspondents. His conversations with Russian soldiers, officers, nurses, and railwaymen about the fighting, the Germans, and the Soviet defense of the city are woven into these chapters and make for extremely engaging reading.

This remarkable book shows how it is possible to encapsulate the history of the mass murder of the Jews in the former Soviet Union in a single object, in this case, a photograph that documents the horrific final moments in the life of a Jewish family, one of the nearly 1.5 million Jews shot by the Germans and their collaborators after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Wendy Lower was able to locate the killing site and find the identities of the mother and her children and of the killers. I was deeply moved by the way it enables one to put a human face on the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust, and, in particular, the women and children who constituted an important part of the victims.

Bloodlands is a story about the dead. Using archives made available after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Mr. Snyder sheds light on both Stalin’s and Hitler’s brutality.

In a confined area that includes just eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries, 14 million civilians died from the 1930s to the end of the war. Most were either starved or shot. Even more startling were the plans to kill millions more.

Stalin said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Mr. Snyder reminds us of the tragedy.

In deeply personal terms, Father Desbois describes how his curiosity about his grandfather’s incarceration in Ukraine led him to study the atrocities committed there against the Jews. The book is written in an almost conversational style, creating a sense of intimacy between Father Desbois and the reader. Desbois is able to persuade those who witnessed atrocities to open up and confess what they have seen and what they remember. Together with a team of ballistic experts, interpreters, historians, and archaeologists, he identified numerous sites of mass graves. Desbois, who popularized the term “The Holocaust by Bullets,” has been instrumental in expanding our understanding of the Holocaust beyond the death camps and the ghettos to the more intimate killings that took place in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

This book is nonfiction, so it’s about real people rather than fictional characters. I love this book because it gives a descriptive perspective on what was happening and what was going on in Nazi-occupied Germany and Poland during World War II, and the horrors of the concentration camps (mainly Auschwitz) that were built and used to kill everyone the nazis hated for whatever insane reasons they had.

I’ve always had an almost alarming interest in World War II. It was my favorite lesson from the history classes I’ve taken, and this book really put some of the evil things that were done during that time into perspective.

I encountered this book backward. As a teenager growing up at the end of the US war in Vietnam, I read the Mad magazine spoof of the movie version long before I saw the movie itself, and then I read the novel. I focused on the antiwar theme and the concern of the bomber crew to get home without getting shot down.

The novel was based on Heller’s wartime experience, but I hardly realized it was about bombing Italy until I discovered the papers one of his crewmates had donated to Cornell University. I learned how many of the episodes were based on real incidents, including the only time the novel focuses on Italian civilians—when the crew objects to destroying an Italian Alpine village of no military significance.