100 Books Like The Long Walk

Though this book was first published in 1971, its message of courage in the face of tyranny and forgiveness in response to evil remains stunning to this day.

I have read this book twice, twenty years apart, and both times I came away with a sense of awe that because of their strong faith, Corrie ten Boom and her family were willing to risk their own lives to protect those who were being hunted down by the Nazis.

Even when caught and sent to a concentration camp where they endured unspeakable cruelty, Corrie ten Boom and her sister, Betsie, did not lose their faith but instead ministered to the women around them.

I can only hope that I would have the same courage if I were in Corrie’s shoes.   

Maybe the best way to feel the road is through the eyes of someone deprived of his/her freedom. I’ve never been in a foreign prison, but I have sat in a few jails, and the prospects of long-term confinement always terrified me.

In the early 1930s, Henri Charriere was sentenced to life imprisonment in the brutal penal colony of French Guiana for a crime he didn’t commit.

In this memoir, I yearned for blue skies and open roads as I followed Henri’s desperate escape attempts and refusal to accept confinement. I’ve never wanted someone to get away so badly.

This book attempts to uncover the mystery of what happened to British explorer Percy Fawcett, who in 1925 set off into the Amazon jungle to find the lost “City of Z,” but never returned.

In retracing Fawcett’s steps, author David Grann finds something far more intriguing under the Amazonian jungle canopy: the hidden remains of a complex Indigenous civilization that has much to teach us about who we are today.

What leads people to join a movement? What causes a group to sacrifice freedom for power, victory, and equality? How does oppression begin?

When Ben is unable to answer a student’s question, “Why did the German people not stop the Nazis?” he devises an experiment. Would American students surrender their individuality and follow his leadership blindly? What follows quickly spirals out of control. The students and their teacher are forced to confront how a movement transforms those who become caught in its current. And some students are forced to learn the cost of daring to speak against the majority.

In this short, but incredibly powerful book, Andrews asks questions every citizen should consider. The reader is confronted with questions about truth, freedom, and the price of apathy. This book transformed my understanding of oppression and why people allow it. It is a call to think, to seek truth, and to hold government leaders accountable. It can be read in about twenty minutes.

In this society where people are matched with their jobs, but also with their future mates, arts and culture are carefully selected and limited by leadership. People take mandatory medications.

The most horrifying part, for me, is that they can no longer write without a keypad. Whatever they write on a computer is censured. Can you imagine better ways to control the population? Does it sound familiar?

When I was researching my grandfather’s actions fighting for Czechoslovakia in World War Two, for my own book, including his time of the front line in France in 1940, I grew tired of academic history books and sought out a firsthand account of the realities of combat. Guy Sajer’s story of his experiences as a German soldier on the Eastern Front provided exactly what I was looking for: As I read it, I could feel the mud caked on my fingers, the shrapnel wound stinging my arm, and the trench foot creeping up my leg. The fact that Sajer was fighting, somewhat unwillingly, with the Nazis gives a whole extra layer of interest too.

Frantisek Moravec was the Head of Czechoslovak Military Intelligence before and during the Second World War, when he was also my grandfather’s boss. When I found out that Morovec had written a memoir, after escaping from Czechoslovakia in 1948, I scoured the internet to find it. I really didn’t expect the book to be the masterpiece that it is. Moravec recounts with fine detail, how he and his team continually used their wits and guile to stay ahead of both the Nazis and the Communists and maintain Czechoslovakia’s existence, right up until the Iron Curtain eventually descended. In particular he recounts how he oversaw Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of the infamous Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, who had been the architect of the Final Solution. This is a book that really demands fresh attention.  

Having read The Long Walk, like so many others, I wondered about the identity of the character known as Mr. Smith, so I was intrigued to discover that Linda Willis had spent some ten years researching this character.

As I had myself spent three years trying to locate evidence to authenticate the story in my own book, I could empathize with all Linda’s frustration in following dead ends and scrabbling down rabbit warrens. 

This account covers pretty much the same period of history as in my own protagonist’s tale, beginning with revolution in Russia and its impact on the lives of privileged Polish families.

She describes her life in the family home between the wars and then the exile to Siberia. As a woman, her experiences were different from much of what I had read before and filled with the useful details of everyday life that help to create a vivid picture of a world that was in reality in colour, but we only ever see in the sepia of old photographs.

The book also contains original letters and depositions and is supplemented with valuable historical notes on the context.