72 Books Like A Hall of Mirrors

Set in Mexico in the 1930s when the revolutionary government engaged in an active campaign against the Catholic Church, Greene’s hero, the so-called Whiskey Priest, is a drunk who has also failed to adhere to his vow of chastity, but his kindness and commitment to worshippers make him an intensely sympathetic figure, as he is hunted by the local police chief determined to put him behind bars.

The book was a revelation to me when I first read it in college. I did not realize that the Mexican government had engaged in this war against the Church so recently. Nor did I realize that a novel so gripping could be told with such literary grace. 

Whether trying to finish an email or a book, I feel Dorothy Parker’s words deeply: “I hate writing,” she is purported to have said, but “I love having written.” 

In this book, protagonist Jacob Finch Bonner does Parker one better. Stuck after his well-received first novel, he takes someone else’s story and passes it off as his own. Korelitz unravels the dire consequences, though with fizzy, suspenseful glee rather than scared-straight preachiness.

Bonner may not be, as he tells himself, “a great writer,” but Korelitz certainly is. It made me want to try to write again: hate, love, and all other feelings welcome. 

George Smiley is a most unlikely hero for a spy thriller. He’s old, tired, and just wants to be left with his books and his research. He wears big, comical glasses, and his wife, the lovely Lady Anne, refers to him as her “Toad.” He doesn’t look like a spy at all.

George is old-school—careful, meticulous, and precise. In this book, we are gifted with an insider's view of a gimlet mind as he sifts through the traces of all that’s been buried, in pursuit, not only of the truth but of the foul trick that has turned the British Secret Service inside out. I came to deeply respect George’s integrity, his ability to self-evaluate, and see clearly not only the strategies and ploys of his enemy but also his own flaws and weaknesses.

Sheldon Horowitz, an aging widower suffering from dementia, has been removed from New York to Oslo, so he can live with his granddaughter, his only relative, and her new husband.

Confused but wily, Horowitz is soon on the run in a country he does not know, hiding the neighbor boy being pursued by the thug who murdered the boy’s mother.  This book was a total surprise to me, and seemed an unlikely amalgam of elements that could never work together—but did.

I bought Kalyvas’s book back in 2009 as a doctoral student looking to understand the social science literature on civil war violence and finished reading it only in 2023 as an associate professor interested in studying target choice for a class I was teaching.

Though singularly focused on civil wars, the book goes deep in constructing theoretical arguments to support the premise of the book and travels broad in applying the models across various civil wars. It teaches readers to look beneath the surface to understand what we observe on the outside.

It is a great resource for those looking for good examples of how to develop a theoretical model. Finally, I also highly recommend this book to graduate students looking for research ideas.

Prior to this book, most works on the long history of terrorism applied contemporary definitions of the term to various incidents throughout world history. Wilson turned the page on this framework. Killing Strangers analyzes the gamut of political violence in Western Europe and North America since the late eighteenth century to explain how we’ve arrived at a contemporary reality characterized, in part, by recurring fear of impersonal atrocities carried out in public gathering spaces. Wilson shows how, on one hand, the rise of the modern bureaucratic state’s “monopoly” on legitimate force pushed most violent challengers to the fringes of society. On the other hand, various technological innovations—from dynamite and automobiles to commercial airlines and satellite television—offered new possibilities for those intent on violent havoc. 

The Shining Path war was the bloodiest episode in modern-Peruvian history, claiming the lives of nearly 70,000 people. While there are a number of excellent books on the Shining Path, I have never read an account of the war as captivating as this—and I doubt I ever will. Gavilán, an Indigenous peasant from the Andean region at the heart of the conflict, recounts his harrowing journey from child soldier in the guerrilla ranks to teenaged soldier in the Peruvian military. Along the way, the author invites readers to share the innermost struggles of a young man driven to survive against incredible odds. The writing is notable for its quick pace and brutal honesty. A must-read for anyone wishing to understand Peru’s political backdrop and contemporary history.

This was the first book I read when researching Argentina’s military dictatorship over twenty years ago. It was gifted to me by the head of the graduate program in international affairs at The New School. It explores the use of language in the context of the human rights atrocities that occurred during this dark period of Argentina’s history.

Marguerite Feitlowitz's marrying of investigative narrative with human storytelling makes the work accessible and richly informative.

The word “visceral” comes to mind when I attempt to distill what this book is about. A not-so-fictional auto-biography opens in the slum called Paradise, where Chipo, Bastard, Sbho, Stina, and “I” are headed to the–relatively–more affluent area of Budapest to steal fruit. These dirt-poor kids don’t know it, but they are victims of the far-off, murderous regime of President Robert Mugabe–but that always remains hidden in the background. They are brutalized and never know it or know why.

Courtesy of an invite from an Aunt in the United States, the protagonist eventually escapes Zimbabwe. But once there, while things get materially much better, in reality, it is no less bewildering and bereft of meaning: she and her friends spend their afternoons watching hard-core porn while eating popcorn and discussing inane stuff, like “what the hell are they doing?!” It’s funny in parts, but it also hurts in parts. The… show more.

What would we do in a world lacking police, prisons, surveillance, borders, wars, nuclear weapons, and capitalism? Well, we might survive. We might sustain life on this little blue dot a little longer. That—in contrast to the status quo—ought to be sufficient. We might, in addition, do a lot more than sustain life. We might transform the lives of billions of people, including each person reading these words. We might have lives with less fear and worry, more joy and accomplishment, more control and cooperation.

But, of course, the question might be asked in the sense of “Wouldn’t the criminals get us, and the forces of law and order be imperiled, and evildoers take away our freedoms, and sloth and laziness deprive us of updated phone models every few months?” As a way to begin answering those concerns, I recommend this tremendous resource of a book which surveys seven candidates… show more.