Here are 100 books that Regeneration fans have personally recommended if you like
Regeneration.
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I am passionate about exploring trauma, resilience, and healing because they are deeply intertwined with my personal and professional life. As a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, I have dedicated my career to understanding and alleviating trauma's impact on the mind. My journey through profound trauma and loss has given me a unique perspective on finding strength and meaning in the darkest moments. The books I recommend resonate with my belief in the resilience of the human spirit and the brain's incredible capacity to heal. These personal stories of courage and recovery inspire and empower others to find hope and growth even in their most challenging times.
This book is an enduring classic that delves into the depths of human suffering and the remarkable capacity for finding meaning amidst despair. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, draws upon his harrowing experiences in Nazi concentration camps to explore the psychological and spiritual resilience of the human spirit.
His profound insights into the pursuit of purpose, even in the darkest of times, offer timeless wisdom for anyone facing adversity. Frankl's logotherapy, the therapeutic approach he developed, emphasizes the importance of finding meaning as a cornerstone of mental health and well-being.
I first encountered Frankl’s book as a young teenager. The title drew me in because I was searching for meaning amidst my own pain and dark thoughts. This early encounter provided the reassurance I needed that I was not alone, profoundly influencing my formative years.
This memoir is not only a gripping narrative of survival but also a powerful philosophical treatise…
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
I discovered my passion for the First World War when researching my great-grandfather’s service history in the cavalry. I also write historical fiction with several of my books being set during the First World War and have spent thousands of hours over the past twenty years researching different aspects of this period, both from the point of view of the V.A.D.s, wounded soldiers, medical staff treating them, as well as grieving families. The stories I’ve come across never fail to haunt me and I can’t imagine I’ll ever tire of wanting to discover more about the people who survived these experiences, or stop needing to write books about them.
I first read this book about twenty years ago and still find it heartbreaking to think it was written by someone who experienced first-hand the horror of the First World War and with it so much pain and grief brought about not only from her experiences as a V.A.D. but also from her own personal losses.
It is a book that helped me understand as much as anything possibly could living in the twenty-first century, how much of a struggle it must have been for ordinary people to keep going and survive that dark time in history.
I’ve always been curious and passionate about how people overcame significant suffering in their lives. True stories of how people emerged stronger from traumatic events not only became an inspiration in my personal life but also my professional life as a therapist, where I became an agent of change. The ‘secret’ of these storytellers and their transformation became my focus. I only hope you find these stories as enjoyable as I did and also a challenge and an inspiration that makes a difference in your own life.
The author held me spellbound as she skilfully unpacked the remarkable story of Louis Zamperini, who survived a plane crash at sea only to be taken prisoner by the Japanese.
Zamperini’s life leapt from the page and swept me along a chilling pathway that bore witness to his physical and inner strength. Hillenbrand held me riveted to the last page of this remarkable true story.
From the author of the bestselling and much-loved Seabiscuit, an unforgettable story of one man's journey into extremity. 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 Second World War. The lieutenant's name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood,…
I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Virginia, so I am very familiar with America’s southern lands and culture. The South—also known as the Deep South—is a unique part of America’s tapestry of identities, and I love books set in this locale. Southern literature tends to focus on themes such as racial politics, one’s personal identity, and rebellion. When I wrote my book, I knew the story would have to take place in the southern states.
Here’s another book-to-movie entrant on the list. This book follows the exploits of a Confederate soldier who makes his way home to the mountains of North Carolina. It’s like the Odyssey—he has a series of memorable encounters and run-ins along his journey, and things are not as they seem when he eventually returns home. I love the novel's tension and the artfully crafted characters.
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves.…
I’ve always loved stories that rearrange reality in some simple, allusive way, including movies like Groundhog Day or The Truman Show. They remind me of a quote about Italo Calvino that I first read when I was a teenager and have loved ever since: ‘He holds a mirror up to life, then writes about the mirror.’ I tend not to be attracted to stories that simply depict reality and even less so to stories that completely abandon reality for an invented fantasy world. All my favorite fictions take place somewhere in between, in the blending of the real and the impossible.
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.
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Adam Hochschild is the author of ten books. The era of the First World War figures in his latest, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, and is the major subject of his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. To End All Wars has been translated into seven languages, won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is at work now on a book about the First World War era and its aftermath in the United States.
A striking look at the devastating impact the war had on one English town, hundreds of whose young men died in the disastrously bungled Gallipoli campaign.
There is no shortage of books on the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of 1915 but this one stands out. In it Geoffrey Moorhouse moves the focus from the more familar aspects to concentrate on one small mill town, Bury, in Lancashire, and to anatomize the long-lasting effect the Dardanelles had on it.
Bury was the regimental home of the Lancashire Fusiliers. In the Gallipoli landings of 25 April 1915 it lost a large proportion of its youth. By May 1915, some 7,000 Bury men had already gone to war, to be followed by many others before Armistice Day. More than 1,600,from…
Adam Hochschild is the author of ten books. The era of the First World War figures in his latest, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, and is the major subject of his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. To End All Wars has been translated into seven languages, won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is at work now on a book about the First World War era and its aftermath in the United States.
This book brings to life a part of the war Western readers know far too little about: the vast battles that ranged back and forth across Eastern Europe and Russia. Two of the three armies involved, those of Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, were spectacularly incompetent, and saw their soldiers needlessly slaughtered by the millions before these two empires dissolved under the war’s impact.
On the outbreak of war in 1914, the armies of the western front soon became bogged down in the mud at Flanders. But on the wide plains and forests of Eastern Europe the three great Empires - Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary - grappled in a series of battles involving millions of men and hundreds of miles of front. Shortly after the outbreak of war the Russian "steamroller" had lurched into Prussia only to be hurled back amind the marshes of Tannenberg. For the next three years the fighting swung indeterminately back and forth. This work describes the campaigns which provoked…
I was raised in a family of seven girls—no boys—with a tough but loving mother. I’ve been around strong women all my life. As a teenager I got tired of reading about smart, capable heroines who, by the end of the story, are oppressed and defeated. I get it: women have been stomped on. And I appreciate authors in past centuries who acknowledge that fact. But now I want to see women win; it’s as simple as that. This is what I like to read about and what I like to write about. The battles are never easy, but hey, that’s half the fun.
Unable to walk since childhood, Mathilde Donnay never lets her limitations get in her way. She is on the search for her fiancé who was reported killed in the Great War, but whom she believes might still be alive. Mathilde is feisty, caring, strategic, and driven—all things I’d like to be.
In 1919, Mathilde Donnay, a young wheelchair-bound woman in France, begins a quest to find out if her fianc , supposedly killed in the line of duty two years earlier, might still be alive. Reprint. 50,000 first printing. (A Warner Bros. Independent Pictures film, releasing Fall 2004, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, starring Audrey Tautou & Jodie Fo
Who hasn’t seen the classic American movies on the Vietnam War–Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, or Platoon? They are fine films, but have you ever asked yourself where the Vietnamese are? Save for a few stereotyped cameo appearances, they are remarkably absent. I teach the history of the wars in Vietnam at the Université du Québec à Montréal. My students and I explore the French and the American sides in the wars for Vietnam, but one of the things that I’ve tried to do with them is weave the Vietnamese and their voices into our course; this list provides a window into those Vietnamese voices.
This is an autobiographical novel that will change your perspective on the Vietnam War. The protagonist of the story, Kien, leaves Hanoi to join the ranks of those going south to liberate the country from the Americans and their South Vietnam allies.
It’s 1965. The Americans are invading. Scores of young men and women like Kien march off in a great patriotic wave from the North to save the South. The patriotic groundswell doesn’t last long though, as Bao Ninh plunges us into the brutality of the Vietnam War.
Through Kien, we discover for the first time what the experience of war was for the other side without the patriotic glitz. It’s not pretty, and yet Bao Ninh succeeds in humanizing the North Vietnamese soldier before our eyes.
It makes for a very powerful read. And like so many other soldiers making it home alive, the return to civilian life…
This is the semi-autobiographical account of a soldier's experiences. The hero of the story, Kien, is a captain. After 10 years of war and months as a MIA body-collector, Kien suffers a nervous breakdown in Hanoi as he tries to re-establish a relationship with his former sweetheart.
I am a total sucker for people who are so complicated I can’t get a read
on them. This love comes from growing up without any extended family. When I heard little bits of my parents’ pasts, it felt like the world got more interesting, and I wanted to dig in to know everything there was to know about what shaped them and, by proxy, what shaped me. I’m drawn to
shady characters who don’t want to give up the goods, as they present a
joyful challenge by withholding mystery, and those types of characters
are the ones I love to read and write about.
I’ve never encountered such a duplicitous and complicated character as the Captain. Having to survive life in Vietnam before and during America’s entry into the war, and after as an immigrant in America, I kept thinking I understood why the character behaved the way he did. His actions made sense. Then I’d get what I thought was a glimpse at his heart and intentions and know I had him all wrong, only to turn the page and see a completely different facet of him again.
Over and over his past and present and desires for the future kept morphing him. The stunning thing about this story is I totally understood why he would be this complex as each section doled out enough clues how someone like him could be so strange and malleable and twisted up in the most odd and fascinating ways.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain:…
