Here are 100 books that Interesting Times fans have personally recommended if you like
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Having grown up under a repressive dictatorship in Iran, I always wondered about how humans could come together to bring about change. Years of living in different countries have only prolonged that quest. I had identified as a socialist since my teen years in the 2000s (when this political identity wasn’t so popular) and have continuously studied the history of the Left and the pathways it offers to make a better world. I don’t believe in exhaustive favorite lists, so these are just five books that, I think, will help us better appreciate this long history of a quest for progress.
I still vividly remember the first time I read this book in my teenage years in Tehran. Its powerful rhythm, its vivid political imagery, and its sweeping vision shook me. It caught me right then and has never quite let go.
Not only has it remained relevant throughout the years, but it still reads like the literary masterpiece that it is.
'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.'
Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes - one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated.
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate;…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
When in the summer of 1991, I stood with the crowds at Moscow’s White House during the attempted coup against Gorbachev, I had the sense that I was living through and in a small, but not unimportant way, making history. I left Moscow fascinated by the questions of how big historical events shape individuals’ lives and how personal circumstances influence public action and commitments. My books explore how children experienced and made sense of the Russian Revolution; how survivors of the World War II blockade of Leningrad interacted with official state commemorations of the war; and how international communists explained and remembered their participation in the Spanish Civil War.
Rae Yang offers a moving and sometimes harrowing account of how a privileged child of Chinese Communist Party elites became during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s a member of the Red Guards, and, in the aftermath of the revolution, a pig tender on a farm in the remote northern wilderness. Ultimately, she emigrated to the United States and became a professor of East Asian studies. In this beautifully written memoir, Yang recovers her youthful idealism and offers an unsparing assessment of the consequences for China, her family, and herself of the desire for revolutionary heroism.
"Spider Eaters" is at once a moving personal story, a fascinating family history, and a unique chronicle of political upheaval told by a Chinese woman who came of age during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. With stunning honesty and a lively, sly humor, Rae Yang records her life from her early years as the daughter of Chinese diplomats in Switzerland, to her girlhood at an elite middle school in Beijing, to her adolescent experience as a Red Guard and later as a laborer on a pig farm in the remote northern wilderness. She tells of her eventual disillusionment…
When in the summer of 1991, I stood with the crowds at Moscow’s White House during the attempted coup against Gorbachev, I had the sense that I was living through and in a small, but not unimportant way, making history. I left Moscow fascinated by the questions of how big historical events shape individuals’ lives and how personal circumstances influence public action and commitments. My books explore how children experienced and made sense of the Russian Revolution; how survivors of the World War II blockade of Leningrad interacted with official state commemorations of the war; and how international communists explained and remembered their participation in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1968, Margaret Randall, an American radical fleeing political repression in Mexico, moved to Cuba with her children. She remained there until 1980. Her memoir of her years in Cuba provides insight into the lived experience of revolutionary change. She charts her everyday life and struggles and offers a compelling picture of the broader political and economic context. A pioneering feminist, oral historian, and photographer, Randall, with the permission of the Cuban government, interviewed women throughout the country about how the revolution shaped their lives. Acknowledging the revolution’s failures, blind spots, and shortcomings, she remains committed to changing the world.
In To Change the World, the legendary writer and poet Margaret Randall chronicles her decade in Cuba from 1969 to 1980. Both a highly personal memoir and an examination of the revolution's great achievements and painful mistakes, the book paints a portrait of the island during a difficult, dramatic, and exciting time.
Randall gives readers an inside look at her children's education, the process through which new law was enacted, the ins and outs of healthcare, employment, internationalism, culture, and ordinary people's lives. She explores issues of censorship and repression, describing how Cuban writers and artists faced them. She recounts…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
When in the summer of 1991, I stood with the crowds at Moscow’s White House during the attempted coup against Gorbachev, I had the sense that I was living through and in a small, but not unimportant way, making history. I left Moscow fascinated by the questions of how big historical events shape individuals’ lives and how personal circumstances influence public action and commitments. My books explore how children experienced and made sense of the Russian Revolution; how survivors of the World War II blockade of Leningrad interacted with official state commemorations of the war; and how international communists explained and remembered their participation in the Spanish Civil War.
The Communist Experience is a vast and kaleidoscopic collection of primary sources that range from a fragment of the memoir of a Russian worker who became a Bolshevik before the 1917 revolution to letters from Spanish children evacuated to the USSR during the Spanish Civil War to the manifesto of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Cuba. Young organizes the collection around themes that cross-national and temporal borders, such as “children of the revolution” “state violence and repression,” and “leisure, entertainment sports, and travel.” The book can be read from cover to cover, but also rewards readers who dip into sections or personal stories according to their interests.
Using a source-based approach, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century is the first text designed to help students, general readers, and scholars understand how people constructed Communist ways of life around the world. Taking a global approach, it extends beyond Russia and Eastern Europe to examine the lives of people in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Algeria, Peru, Cuba, and elsewhere. The book provides an inside look at the Communist experience, where people were-sometimes simultaneously so-enthusiasts, reshapers, resisters, and victims of an ideological project that was (and, for some, still is) both humanity's darkest nightmare and brightest hope. Since…
I first went to Berlin after college, determined to write a novel about the German Resistance; I stayed a quarter of a century. Initially, the Berlin Airlift, something remembered with pride and affection, helped create common ground between me as an American and the Berliners. Later, I was commissioned to write a book about the Airlift and studied the topic in depth. My research included interviews with many participants including Gail Halvorsen. These encounters with eyewitnesses inspired me to write my current three-part fiction project, Bridge to Tomorrow. With Russian aggression again threatening Europe, the story of the airlift that defeated Soviet state terrorism has never been more topical.
Parris’ book provides a “peek behind the curtains” to look at the decision-making process, particularly in Washington.
He uses eye-witness reports to highlight the differences between the various actors, and underlines disagreements within governments. Truman, for example, was not only often at odds with his generals and diplomats, he was also considered a “lame duck” president, destined for electoral defeat during the critical early months of the blockade and airlift.
Understanding his relationships with his cabinet officials is thus extremely illuminating and well handled by Parrish.The weakness of the book is that its focus on American politics and issues results in a comparative neglect of British, German, and Soviet perspectives.
In June 1948, Soviet authorities in Germany announced a land blockade of the American, British, and French sectors of Berlin. Isolated more than one hundred miles within Soviet-occupied territory, western Berlin was in danger of running out of coal, food, and the courage to stand up to Joseph Stalin.As Berlin in the Balance recounts, this crisis was a turning-point for U.S. policy. Just three years earlier, the Soviet Union had been an ally and Berlin the target of American bombers. In 1946 Winston Churchill had ignited protests by calling for an Anglo-American alliance against the USSR. The Berlin blockade made…
I have always been fascinated by the human ability to overcome and persevere. How can individuals who seem so ordinary, so small surmount incredible odds? From where do they derive the physical strength and mental fortitude? I think that is what drew me to become a historian of the Soviet Union. I have devoted myself to studying the letters, diaries, and other writings by ordinary individuals who lived through extraordinary times and recorded that ordeal in intimate detail. One of my missions is to share these writings, never intended for publication, with the public.
If there is one war book that gives me chills, this is it. What do people think on the eve of their execution? How do they confront their own deaths, and what final words do they want to leave behind? I feel overcome every time I read this collection of letters, mostly from civilians who knew they were about to die at the hands of the Nazis.
Some letters are from young girls who had been enslaved, drew pictures, and recalled their birthday parties in their final letters to their parents. Others are from fathers and prisoners of war giving advice to the children they would never meet. Some of the “letters” are long and detailed, while others were simply slogans etched in the walls of prisons by those staring down the abyss of death.
All of them are saturated with pain and grief, yet the messages of love they…
From these pages speak out the dead, those who died fighting the Nazi invaders between 1941 and 1945. This is a collection of their letters and documents written in the last minutes of their lives - in a Gestapo cell, a concentration camp or in the heat of battle. Here is a passionate call for triumph over fascism and world reaction, an appeal to those who survived to carry on the fight for mankind's future happiness, for eternal peace among all men. These words of farewell written by Soviet partisans, underground fighters, soldiers, girls and boys driven into captivity, give…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I've found the creep of authoritarianism to be very disquieting. One would have to be willfully blind to not see its manifestations both here and abroad. I wanted to better understand how this phenomenon cast its shadow over the world and I found the '33 Chicago World's Fair an ideal lens to view this through. I've been fascinated by world's fairs since I was a child and the '33 Fair was the first to consciously feature the future. I'm also strangely drawn to this period – if I believed in reincarnation it might provide answers, but I don't. The Zeitgeist just before the full, brutal ugliness of fascism broke over the world, fascinates me.
Brendon’s Magnus opus on the 1930s is both comprehensive and full of the telling anecdote. I found this to be one of the most informative, and best written, works of history that I have ever read. I can’t recommend it strongly enough, whether you’re researching this period or just looking for a very good book to read.
The 1930s were perhaps the seminal decade in twentieth-century history, a dark time of global depression that displaced millions, paralyzed the liberal democracies, gave rise to totalitarian regimes, and, ultimately, led to the Second World War. In this sweeping history, Piers Brendon brings the tragic, dismal days of the 1930s to life.
From Stalinist pogroms to New Deal programs, Brendon re-creates the full scope of a slow international descent towards war. Offering perfect sketches of the players, riveting descriptions of major events and crises, and telling details from everyday life, he offers both a grand, rousing narrative and an intimate…
I am a Canadian-Ukrainian children’s author and former librarian. My great-aunt was a sniper with the Ukrainian underground, fighting both Hitler and Stalin. She was executed after the war by the Soviets and buried in a mass grave. Her mother was sent to a gulag in Siberia and never heard from again. I will never know all that happened to my ancestors, but I can give voice to others whose culture, life, and history were erased in the same way. Every novel I’ve written has delved into a piece of the past that has been shoved under the carpet for political reasons.
This is a page-turning novel set near the end of WWII about a topic rarely touched in fiction: The death battles between Poles and Ukrainians, who both feared losing their country to the Nazis, the Soviets, and then each other. A ton of research went into this eye-opening novel about Tolya, the half-Polish, half Ukrainian soldier who will be deemed a traitor no matter what he does.
Poland, 1944. After the Soviet liberation of Lwow from Germany, the city is a battleground, its loyalties torn between Poland and Ukraine. Tolya is half-Ukrainian, half-Polish, and he joined the Soviet Red Army just to stay alive. When he shoots his political officer in the street, he's taken in by a squad of insurgent Ukrainians. Tolya doesn't trust them and especially doesn't trust Solovey, the squad's young war-scarred leader. He doesn't know just how well Solovey understands the cost of looking out for life over loyalty. Then a betrayal sends both on the run.
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in western Sonoma County, California, surrounded by forests, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet this idyllic setting was shaken by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; civil rights riots; Nixon and Watergate; the Pentagon Papers; Weather Underground bombings; Patti Hearst with a machine gun; and four students killed at Kent State. These events led me to major in Politics at UC Santa Cruz and become an investigative journalist. I soon realized the U.S. is built not only on equal rights and freedom but also on systemic disparity, injustice, and violence.
Dwight D. Eisenhower served two terms as United States president, from 1952-1960. His administration is widely remembered for rapid economic growth and adept international diplomacy. Yet the pubic face of much of that growth and diplomacy masked Ike’s vehement prosecution of a brutal cold war—acts of attrition and deceit overseas that vastly expanded the US empire around the globe.
The brothers John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and Allen Dulles, who was head of the Central Intelligence Agency, led the American rise to international preeminence. The Devil’s Chessboard focuses largely on Allen Dulles, who waged secret wars across the planet in service of American imperial objectives. Prior to World War Two, Dulles worked for an investment firm that had direct ties to Hitler’s Third Reich—Allen Dulles met with Hitler in 1933. During the war, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and was…
An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful-and secretive-colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America's greatest untold story: the United States' rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials-including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles's wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials-Talbot reveals the underside of one of…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I’ve always been fascinated by different cultures. I started to learn Russian in 1998, and intrigued by the language, I began to study Russia more—delving into history and politics and then doing a PhD in Russian foreign policy. Ever since, trying to learn about and understand Russia has been my professional focus. Alongside books in Russian, these books are all to hand on my reference shelf, well-thumbed and marked up, as I try to write my own work. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!
The strength and resilience—or not—of the Russian economy is one of the most important questions in international affairs since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: policymakers and observers alike are asking what effects the wide-ranging sanctions are having, and whether the Russian economy will implode, thwarting Moscow’s aggression. I’m not an economist so I need help understanding this, and I found this book to be the best introduction to this complex and difficult subject. Connolly also wrote a fine book on the impact of sanctions on Russia since 2014, but I think this one gives a concise and accessible assessment of the Russian economy as a whole, the role of the state, and Moscow’s attempted diversification of economic partners and integration into the global economy.
Russia today is as prominent in international affairs as it was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the role that the economy plays in supporting Russia's position as a 'great power' on the international stage is poorly understood. For many, Russia's political influence far exceeds its weight in the global economy. However, Russia is one of the largest economies in the world; it is not only one of the world's most important exporters of oil and gas, but also of other natural resources, such as diamonds and gold. Its status as one of the largest wheat and grain…
