100 books like Midnight in Europe

A young Australian, Anna Funder, places an advertisement in the newspaper to find resistors and enforcers of the brutal East German regime, the Stasi. This naïve, but bold act leads her on a path to discover tales that reverberate through time.

Similarly, I felt ill equipped to face vestiges of censored war crimes, historical documents, and fragments of memory, but, inspired by Funder’s curiosity and dedication, I pressed on.  

Marthe Cohn played a major role in the final year of World War II, spying for the French troops in Germany. She grew up in Metz, France speaking flawless French and German, and became a spy when members of her family and friends were tortured and killed. Faced with death many times, she survived to be decorated by the French government and finally told the story to her children. She lived for many years in Palos Verdes, California, where I live. When I heard her speak, I couldn’t believe that a woman who never reached five feet could have done all the things she did.

Published in 1976, this book has aged well. We are still spying on Russia, and Russia is still spying on us. Spy stories are often travelogues. This book starts in New York and Washington but then goes to France, not far from Monaco and Nice. That interested me since I've been to all of those places. The plot involves the theft of sensitive documents engineered by a Russian spy who is the agent in place of the title. People get killed, but most of the violence is off-screen. One of the interesting facets of the book is descriptions of tradecraft--showing how spies preserve their covers and prevent their enemies from unmasking them. There is also a detailed description of planning and executing a caper designed to fool the enemy.  

Dusko Popov may or may not have been a model for James Bond, but he did know Ian Fleming. He was also one of the most effective double agents in World War II. His greatest accomplishment was helping to fool the Germans about the location of the D-Day landing. Popov had conclusive evidence that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor months before it happened. He told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, because the US didn't have an effective spy system yet, but Hoover wasn’t interested. After the war ended, Popov searched for his best friend who had been captured by the Germans, with surprising results. Good for history junkies like me, it contains facts not present in other histories of the War.

When I first read this book, I was somewhat mystified by what the fuss was all about. All I could see was a story of a group of dissolute and disillusioned expats living a pointless life of pettiness and drinking. However, as I separately learned more about Hemingway and his writing style, I was drawn back to the book, and on subsequent readings, I was able to discern more in the characters and the plot than was apparent in my first reading.

The protagonist Jake Barnes, impotent because his penis appears to have been shot off as a result of a wound in World War I, is further emotionally damaged, possibly with PTSD from his war experiences and with a cynicism and sadness that engage the reader’s attention. 

This was easily the most useful item we took with us on our own Camino. The maps in Brierley’s guidebook were easy to follow, the descriptions were comprehensive, the recommendations were up to date.

In writing this guidebook, Brierley has balanced philosophical questions about pilgrimage with a host of practical details. Breaking up the journey from St Jean Pied de Port (which is where the majority of pilgrims start their journey) to Santiago de Compostela into thirty-three stages, he has meticulously researched each stage providing a map and contour guide for each - so the walker knows what kind of route, distance and elevation to expect each day. In addition, he provides helpful listings of accommodation and eating places along the journey.

Americans think of the Revolutionary War as a struggle for national liberation. But by 1778 it had become a broader conflict involving the three empires of western Europe. In this Pulitzer Prize Finalist book, Ferreiro restores the international dimensions of the conflict, deftly explaining how a conflict that began as a constitutional struggle within the British Empire escalated into a global war whose last battles would be fought in India.

This compelling history goes “beyond the legend that Napoleon himself helped create, to form a new, genuinely international context for his military career.”

History is most often written by the victors, and real life is never so one-sided. Esdaile writes as though he lived Napoleon’s life, and shows that many times his decisions were made (or changed) because of acts, or provocation, by British diplomats or agents. The quote by Napoleon’s stepdaughter Hortense says it all: “Any man who becomes the sole head of a great country by means other than heredity can only maintain himself in power if he gives the nation either liberty or military glory – if he makes himself, in short, either a Washington or a conqueror...it was impossible for him to establish...an absolute power except by bemusing reason [and] by every three months presenting the French people with some new spectacle.” Esdaile brings this unspoken… show more.

Another story that's impossible to forget – actually this is a novella in a collection of stories with this name. Again, about a lost house in a forest in France, an artist, a young man in love, and the two young women who bewitch him in turns. John Fowles is an English writer from the 1960s, whose work I loved when young and still do. He was much influenced by Alain-Fournier.

The Way of Saint James: In Three Volumes is three volumes of adventure and rich history, art history, folklore, and intrepid exploration along the Camino trails in France and northern Spain through the eyes of this Bryn Mawr College art historian in the early 1900s. She is broad in her understanding of the lands, monuments, and peoples through which she travels and a maverick at a time when few men, let alone women, made this journey. Her insights into history and culture remain important today.