100 Books Like How Russia Shaped the Modern 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is an anthology of all of the written sources on the Taj Mahal from the period of its construction in the 17th century. It brings together translations of every description or mention of the building in Mughal court histories, or accounts by foreign travellers, and explains all of the historical and religious inscriptions that are written on the building itself. The book is meant for the serious student and lacks narrative flow; but the focus exclusively on written sources dating from the same time as the Taj really helps you understand it in its own time. 

While The Swerve is not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Things by Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity. 

If you want to learn about the history of the concept of authenticity and how it is understood in the western world, this is probably the best book to read (after my book, of course!). Charles Taylor is one of the most prominent living philosophers of selfhood, and this book (topping out at only a little over 100 pages) is an easy-to-read digestion of the ideas that he elaborated in his much-longer book Sources of the Self. Taylor is ambivalent about whether personal authenticity is a good or a bad thing in our era. He recognizes the harms imposed by some of the debased forms that it takes in modern society, but Taylor also tries to articulate an ethics that could rehabilitate authenticity in a way that affirms the dignity of and respect for each individual. I don’t like the fence-sitting, but this remains required reading.

I love experiments in the novel form, and this book by the Czech Ourednik startled me from the first words of its opening, a deadpan sentence telling us that the Americans who died at Normandy in 1944 were unusually tall. What follows is an accounting of important and trivial happenings of a hundred years of war-riddled world history in roughly the same number of pages.

Throughout, we read random details, skipping from how often people bathed to psychologists’ recommendations about venting aggression through competitive sports to the changes in human lives occasioned by contraceptives and tear-off toilet paper. Every page is always the tongue-in-cheek narration of absurdities I couldn’t help reading aloud to whoever was nearby. No book is like this one, and maybe no other so profound.