Here are 100 books that How Russia Shaped the Modern World fans have personally recommended if you like
How Russia Shaped the Modern World.
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I started a serious study of world history in the early 2000s when the United States-led wave of globalization reshaped the world order. The topic of Russia in world history became especially important under the Vladimir Putin Presidency. Since the 2010s, Russia has made a concerted attempt to revitalize Soviet-era links with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which are former colonies of Europe. Putin's administration is promoting the geopolitics of a "New World Order," a paradigm they believe will challenge global Western dominance. If we are to craft a coherent Western response and a strong foreign policy, we must understand Russian outreach and relationships in the world.
I love this book because John Darwin takes the history of empires very seriously.
He argues that the present world is the legacy of the great empires that came into existence after the fall of Tamerlane in 1405. He was the last powerful Eurasian ruler who followed in the footsteps of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. This allowed Asian and European empires such as the Romanovs, Ottomans, the Mughals, the Manchus, the British, the French, the Nazis, and the Soviets to build their empires in space that yoked together Asia and Europe in shared imperial ambitions.
This is an accessible and beautifully written introduction to world history that is well worth your time and effort. It is a great book for a serious book club.
Tamerlane, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Manchus, the British, the Soviets, the Japanese and the Nazis.
All built empires they hoped would last forever: all were destined to fail. But, as John Darwin shows in his magnificent book, their empire building created the world we know today.
From the death of Tamerlane in 1405, last of the 'world conquerors', to the rise and fall of European empires, and from America's growing colonial presence to the resurgence of India and China as global economic powers, After Tamerlane provides a wonderfully intriguing perspective on the past, present and future of empires.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I started a serious study of world history in the early 2000s when the United States-led wave of globalization reshaped the world order. The topic of Russia in world history became especially important under the Vladimir Putin Presidency. Since the 2010s, Russia has made a concerted attempt to revitalize Soviet-era links with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which are former colonies of Europe. Putin's administration is promoting the geopolitics of a "New World Order," a paradigm they believe will challenge global Western dominance. If we are to craft a coherent Western response and a strong foreign policy, we must understand Russian outreach and relationships in the world.
Reading Kate Brown’s book scared me silly, but it was so gripping and so well-written that I couldn’t put it down no matter how hard I tried.
Who knew that the executives and the scientists in the nuclear power industry in the United States and the Soviet Union were so similarly ruthless in their approach to the environment and so careless about the lives of workers? And, who knew that in our quest for the good life or plutopia, we could be so indifferent to the looming ecological dangers that surround us?
Kate Brown’s’ vivid descriptions, details of travels to inaccessible and exotic locales, first-person interviews, and emotional analysis of survivor stories make an enormously complicated subject come alive.
While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union.
In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society, while…
I started a serious study of world history in the early 2000s when the United States-led wave of globalization reshaped the world order. The topic of Russia in world history became especially important under the Vladimir Putin Presidency. Since the 2010s, Russia has made a concerted attempt to revitalize Soviet-era links with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which are former colonies of Europe. Putin's administration is promoting the geopolitics of a "New World Order," a paradigm they believe will challenge global Western dominance. If we are to craft a coherent Western response and a strong foreign policy, we must understand Russian outreach and relationships in the world.
Ilf and Petrov were Soviet-era funny men, comedians, and satirists who dared to tell a few truths about the horrors of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. They also wrote a delightful travel book (One Storied America) about the United States in the 1930s.
Lisa Kirschenbaum takes us behind Ilf and Petrov’s 10,000-mile American road trip. Kirschenbaum introduces us to the many people that Ilf and Petrov met in Depression-era America: immigrant workers, famous filmmakers, poets, and revolutionaries, and analyzes their experiences in the country of their dreams.
Kirschenbaum’s insightful observations about the Soviet Union and the United States during this seminal decade are worth considering today.
In 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilia Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000 mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back accompanied only by their guide and chauffeur, a gregarious Russian Jewish immigrant and his American-born, Russian-speaking wife. They immortalized their journey in a popular travelogue that condemned American inequality and racism even as it marvelled at American modernity and efficiency. Lisa Kirschenbaum reconstructs the epic journey of the two Soviet funnymen and their encounters with a vast cast of characters, ranging from famous authors, artists, poets and filmmakers to unemployed hitchhikers and revolutionaries. Using the authors'…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I started a serious study of world history in the early 2000s when the United States-led wave of globalization reshaped the world order. The topic of Russia in world history became especially important under the Vladimir Putin Presidency. Since the 2010s, Russia has made a concerted attempt to revitalize Soviet-era links with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which are former colonies of Europe. Putin's administration is promoting the geopolitics of a "New World Order," a paradigm they believe will challenge global Western dominance. If we are to craft a coherent Western response and a strong foreign policy, we must understand Russian outreach and relationships in the world.
Did young communists fall in love, conduct passionate affairs under the noses of disapproving commissars, and break every revolutionary rule in the book?
The topic seemed so fascinating that I read Elizabeth McGuire’s book in one sitting. She took me on an exciting journey with a generation of young Chinese revolutionaries who were swept up in the maelstrom of the Russian revolution. I learned how they were seduced by the Russian language, how they devoured great works of Russian literature, and the writings of revolutionaries, terrorists, and anarchists.
The stories of Chinese students as translators, educators, and aspiring revolutionaries, as well as their experiences, love affairs, and adventures in the Soviet Union, really gripped my imagination. This was a novel way of understanding Russia's special friendship and enmity with China.
Beginning in the 1920s thousands of Chinese revolutionaries set out for Soviet Russia. Once there, they studied Russian language and experienced Soviet communism, but many also fell in love, got married, or had children. In this they were similar to other people from all over the world who were enchanted by the Russian Revolution and lured to Moscow by it.
The Chinese who traveled to live and study in Moscow in a steady stream over the course of decades were a key human interface between the two revolutions, and their stories show the emotional investment backing ideological, economic, and political…
My passion for the topic of migration was kind of overdetermined, given that my grandparents were refugees, my father is an immigrant, and I have been on the move quite a bit myself. It might not have been a conscious choice to study something so close to home, but the more I think about it, the less likely it seems that this was all a coincidence. This personal dimension might also explain my choice of books, which all combine scholarly-analytics with deeply human perspectives on the topic of migration.
Yuri Slezkine’s classic book on the history of Russian Jewry is not a work of migration history strictly speaking. But there is no Jewish history without migration, and Slezkine shows us, among many other things, how Russian Jews ended up in the US, Israel, and the Soviet Union, representing three ideological choices—liberalism, nationalism, and communism.
I read this book back in university, and few works, if any, have had such a profound impact on my historical thinking.
This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: "The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century." The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it drives home Yuri Slezkine's provocative thesis: Jews have adapted to the modern world so well that they have become models of what it means to be modern. While focusing on the drama of the Russian Jews, including emigres and their offspring, The Jewish Century is also an incredibly original account of the many faces of modernity-nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism. Rich in its insight, sweeping…
I was a law school graduate heading for my first job when, unable to think of anything better to do with my last afternoon in London, I wandered through the First World War galleries of the Imperial War Museum. I was hypnotized by a slide show of Great War propaganda posters, stunned by their clever viciousness in getting men to volunteer and wives and girlfriends to pressure them. Increasingly fascinated, I started reading about the war and its aftermath. After several years of this, I quit my job at a law firm and went back to school to become a professor. And here I am.
David Reynolds is simply one of the smartest and most original historians operating today. Do we imagine that no one thought much about the poems of Wilfred Owen until the 1960s? Do we think about how important the fiftieth anniversary of the Somme was for the politics of Ireland? This book is packed full of perceptive and original insights about the Great War’s very long legacy.
One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century. He shows how events in that turbulent century-particularly World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism-shaped and reshaped attitudes to 1914-18.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
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Future generations might be very much impacted by the actions we take today: with climate change, nuclear war, or the changes in global values. But we often don’t take their interests into account.
In this book, Will argues that positively influencing the fate of future generations is a key moral priority of our time and that there are things we can do today to make them better off. This may be one of the most important books of our time.
“This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that.” —Ezra Klein
An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more — or it could…
I’m the grandson of a coal miner from a multi-generational, Ohio family. What matters most to me is having some integrity and being morally okay with folks. I never thought of myself as an environmentalist, just as someone trying to figure out what we should be learning to be decent people in this sometimes messed-up world. From there, I was taken into our environmental situation, its planetary injustice, and then onto studying the history of colonialism. This adventure cracked open my midwestern common sense and made me rethink things. Happily, it has only reinforced my commitment to, and faith in, moral relations, giving our word, being accountable, and caring.
I love how Dipesh’s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe “provincial”. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider-from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.
Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty's work-the…
I started my career in neuroscience. I wanted to understand brains. That is still proving difficult, and somewhere along the way, I realized my real motivation was to build things, and I wound up working in AI. I love the elegance of mathematical models of the world. Even the simplest machine learning model has complex implications, and exploring them is a joy.
This is a popular science book, so a little different from the others on this list. It is a beautifully written book that is accessible to people who don’t know much about AI but is simultaneously thought-provoking for experts.
It contains probably the best discussion of "intelligence" that I've read, interesting insights into how Google and other tech giants came to develop their machine learning strategy, and a fascinating chapter that views recommendation engines and their users as parts of a single intelligent organism. It's concise and easy to read.
I've read many popular AI books, which are highly variable in quality, and this criminally underappreciated work is the best by miles.
- The author is one of the most influential AI reseachers of recent decades.
- Written in an accessible language, the book provides a probing account of AI today and proposes a new narrative to connect and make sense of events that happened in the recent tumultuous past and enable us to think soberly about the road ahead.
- The book is divided into ten carefully crafted and easily-digestible chapters, each grapples with an important question for AI, ranging from the scientific concepts that underpin the technology to wider implications for society, using real examples wherever possible.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I have always been concerned about the happiness and well-being of other people, whether they are friends or strangers, rich or poor, young or old. To me, they are all members of one human family. I became engaged in community actions at an early age, and in addition to my work as a teacher, teacher trainer, and international educational consultant, I have been involved in many efforts to reconcile conflicts, ensure justice, and foster collaboration. My interest in civil rights, as well as my concern for the environment, led me to dedicate much of my time to developing global education and education for sustainable development.
I have always doubted the claim that people are predominantly violent and egotistical and can never change. Jeremy Rifkin, in this well-researched book, shows that despite humanity’s history of conflicts and misery, human beings have the potential, and have already begun, to create an empathic, global society.
A book such as this is needed to help us understand history as a process of humanity’s gradual maturing.
In this sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization, bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin looks at the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development-and is likely to determine our fate as a species.
Today we face unparalleled challenges in an energy-intensive and interconnected world that will demand an unprecedented level of mutual understanding among diverse peoples and nations. Do we have the capacity and collective will to come together in a way that will enable us to cope with the great challenges of our time?
