Books like 'Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography'
Readers who enjoyed Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical psychological military, war & conflict classics politics university personal-growth literary-fiction high-school revolution
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Spark of Life: A Novel of Resistance by Erich Maria Remarque
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSPARK OF LIFE509 is a political prisoner in a German concentration camp. For ten years, he has persevered in the most hellish conditions. Deathly weak, he still has his wits about him and he senses that the end of the war is near. If he and the other living corpses in his barracks can hold on for liberation--or force their own--then their suffering will not have been in vain... -
![Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Robert Chandler]()
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Robert Chandler
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsLife and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, Edwin O. Reischauer]()
Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, Edwin O. Reischauer
Rated: 4.48 of 5 stars · 37 ratingsThe classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Musashi is a novel in the best tradition of Japanese story telling. It is a living story, subtle and imaginative, teeming with memorable characters, many of them historical... -
![The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura]()
The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura
Rated: 4.45 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsA gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader... -
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![Chess Story by Stefan Zweig]()
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsChess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological... -
![Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes]()
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsA big, powerful saga of men in combat, written over the course of thirty-five years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran.Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![Foundation by Isaac Asimov]()
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 49 ratingsFor twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future -- to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years...Categorized as:
classics high-school literary-fiction politics university 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk]()
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsUpon its original publication in 1951, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was immediately embraced as one of the first serious works of fiction to help readers grapple with the human consequences of World War II...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, Geoff Wilkes]()
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, Geoff Wilkes
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsInspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction politics 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![Sophie's Choice by William Styron]()
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsIn this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There, he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant... -
![Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]()
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 62 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal...Categorized as:
classics high-school historical-fiction humor literary-fiction politics university 20th-century -
![Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]()
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsCancer Ward - a largely autobiographical account of a group of people who pass through the cancer wing of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death - was hailed by Time as 'a literary event of the first magnitude' when it first appeared in 1966...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult book cold-war -
![The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom]()
The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsWhen sixteen-year-old Alfred Rosenberg is called into his headmaster’s office for anti-Semitic remarks he made during a school speech, he is forced, as punishment, to memorize passages about Spinoza from the autobiography of the German poet Goethe. Rosenberg is stunned to discover that Goethe, his idol, was a great admirer of the Jewish seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book drama -
![Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Cindy Sheehan]()
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Cindy Sheehan
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsAn immediate bestseller upon its original publication in 1939, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo is a searing portrayal of war that has stunned and galvanized generations of readers... -
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![Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger]()
Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsInspired by historical events and by personal history, a shattering, exquisite double portrait of a Norwegian family savaged by World War II and of a man devoted to crimes against humanity, conjoined by an actual house of horrors they both call home...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book fiction historical -
![The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro]()
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsAn alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here.The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England... -
![The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]()
The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsNotice: "In the First Circle" and "The First Circle": "In The First Circle" is 200pp longer; "The first circle" is a censored and abridged version.Set in Moscow during a three-day period in December 1949, 'The First Circle' is the story of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy]()
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 45 ratingsIn Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, `a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, `of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and humiliation'...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics university action-adventure adult audiobook -
![HIDDEN by Linda Gillard]()
HIDDEN by Linda Gillard
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA birth. A death. Hidden for a hundred years. The new novel from the author of Kindle bestseller THE MEMORY TREE “Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the war...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction historical 20th-century suspense war family fiction -
![Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz, Naguib Mahfouz]()
Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz, Naguib Mahfouz
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThis is a sweeping and evocative portrait of both a family and a country struggling to move toward independence in a society that has resisted change for centuries. Set against the backdrop of Britain's occupation of Egypt immediately after World War I, Palace Walk introduces us to the Al Jawad family... -
![The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna]()
The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsRecommended reading as part of the Chief of Naval Operation's Professional Reading Program!This now-classic novel by Richard McKenna enjoyed great critical acclaim and commercial success when it was first published in 1962...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult asia book -
![Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, David S. Reynolds]()
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, David S. Reynolds
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 40 ratings"I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass." So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literature...Categorized as:
classics high-school literary-fiction university adult anthologies audiobook civil-war -
![A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, Gary Shteyngart]()
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, Gary Shteyngart
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsIn its adventurous happenings–its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues–A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and ’30s... -
![The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien]()
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 44 ratingsThis depicts the men of Alpha Company. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home... -
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![Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi]()
Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsMahasweta Devi is one of India’s foremost literary figures, a prolific and best-selling author in Bengali of short fiction and novels, and a deeply political social activist who has been working in marginalized communities for decades... -
![Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson]()
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAs two pals wander the streets of Belfast in search of something better--a better pint, a better job, a better woman, a better now--readers are treated to their hilarious misadventures, political intrigues, and outlandish schemes...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction university 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir]()
All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsWhen the beautiful, ambitious actress Regina takes Fosca into her life and learns his amazing truth, she is obsessed with the thought that in his memory her performances will live forever... -
![Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton]()
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsHamilton captures the edgy, obsessive and eventually murderous mindset of a romantically frustrated British man in this WWII-era novel. London 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation with Netta who is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university 20th-century adult audiobook book -
![The Ogre by Michel Tournier]()
The Ogre by Michel Tournier
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAn international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum... -
![The Drinker by Hans Fallada]()
The Drinker by Hans Fallada
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis astonishing, autobiographical tour de force was written by Hans Fallada in an encrypted notebook while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum. Discovered after his death, it tells the tale—often fierce, often poignant, often extremely funny—of a small businessman losing control as he fights valiantly to blot out an increasingly oppressive society...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book fiction historical -
![Mephisto by Klaus Mann]()
Mephisto by Klaus Mann
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsKlaus Mann - Thomas Mann’s son - wrote MEPHISTO while living in exile from the Germany of World War II. In it he captures the Isherwood-like atmosphere of Nazi Germany while telling a satiric story about the rise to power of one man - a thinly veiled caricature of his own brother-in-law...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century audiobook book drama -
![Lies She Never Told Me by John Ellsworth]()
Lies She Never Told Me by John Ellsworth
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsMichael Gresham is the lawyer you’d want to call if you were accused of a crime. Especially if you were guilty... Michael is a successful trial lawyer who’s been placed on medical leave. But he sorely misses the courtroom battles, where he excels. When Michael receives a call from the local jail he comes to life and knows he cannot resist getting involved. For it’s a case of Murder One...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics action-adventure adult book conspiracies crime -
![Fatelessness by Imre Kertész]()
Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAt the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew... -
![The Ghost Road by Pat Barker]()
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAn alternate cover edition can be found here.As World War I winds to a close, two men--Dr. William Rivers, a psychologist whose dedicated healing sends men back to the brutal front, and Billy Prior, a shell-shocked soldier determined to rejoin the final English offensive--are profounded affected by the events of the era. Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university 20th-century adult audiobook book -
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![Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler]()
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsDarkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create... -
![Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford]()
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsIn 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during World War II... -
![Fifth Business by Robertson Davies]()
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsRamsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him... -
![Regeneration by Pat Barker]()
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsRegeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics university 20th-century adult audiobook -
![The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker]()
The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe masterful second novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the GirlsWINNER OF THE 1993 GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE'Spellbinding and startlingly original' Sunday Telegraph'Gripping, moving, profoundly intelligent' Independent on Sunday'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult audiobook book -
![Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu]()
Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsDuring the First World War, just behind the eastern front, there was a forest, where Austrians and Hungarians used to hang deserters. To this place came Apostol Bologa, a young Romanian officer eager to serve his country. Born in a Romanian region of Transylvania which was then under Hungarian rule, he had naturally enough joined the Austro-Hungarian army...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book death -
![The Third Lie by Ágota Kristóf]()
The Third Lie by Ágota Kristóf
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn the third volume in a critically acclaimed trilogy that also includes The Proof and The Notebook, Claus lies dying in a prison in the town of his birth, reminiscing about the past and his missing twin and haunted by three lies that have profoundly affected his life...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook family female-author -
![Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman]()
Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMary Todd Lincoln is one of history’s most misunderstood and enigmatic women. The first president’s wife to be called First Lady, she was a political strategist, a supporter of emancipation, and a mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband. Yet she also ran her family into debt, held seances in the White House, and was committed to an insane asylum...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics adult american-civil-war audiobook book civil-war -
![Famous Last Words by Timothy Findley]()
Famous Last Words by Timothy Findley
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn the final days of the Second World War, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley scrawls his desperate account on the walls and ceilings of his ice-cold prison high in the Austrian Alps. Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament - the sordid truth that he alone possessed...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult alternate-history book -
![The Skin by Curzio Malaparte]()
The Skin by Curzio Malaparte
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThis is the first unexpurgated English edition of Curzio Malaparte’s legendary work The Skin. The book begins in 1943, with Allied forces cementing their grip on the devastated city of Naples. The sometime Fascist and ever-resourceful Curzio Malaparte is working with the Americans as a liaison officer. He looks after Colonel Jack Hamilton, “a Christian gentleman . .Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult book europe -
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![The Fratricides by Nikos Kazantzakis]()
The Fratricides by Nikos Kazantzakis
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe Fratricides by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis recounts the tragic violence that swallowed the Greek countryside in the civil war of the late 1940s. Castello, a village in Epirus is not spared all the death and destruction which culminated during the Holy Week...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book fiction -
![Fives and Twenty-Fives by Michael Pitre]()
Fives and Twenty-Fives by Michael Pitre
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIt's the rule-always watch your fives and twenty-fives. When a convoy halts to investigate a possible roadside bomb, stay in the vehicle and scan five meters in every direction. A bomb inside five meters cuts through the armor, killing everyone in the truck. Once clear, get out and sweep twenty-five meters. A bomb inside twenty-five meters kills the dismounted scouts investigating the road ahead...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction action-adventure adult audiobook book fiction historical -
![Forrest Gump by Winston Groom]()
Forrest Gump by Winston Groom
Rated: 3.98 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsMeet Forrest Gump, the lovable, herculean, and surprisingly savvy hero of this remarkable comic odyssey. After accidentally becoming the star of University of Alabama's football team, Forrest goes on to become a Vietnam War hero, a world-class Ping-Pong player, a villainous wrestler, and a business tycoon -- as he wonders with childlike wisdom at the insanity all around him...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![Portrait of a Marriage by Pearl S. Buck]()
Portrait of a Marriage by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsBuck follows one woman's journey through a long-term marriage; its romanticized beginning, jolts of disillusionments and losses, and peace through acceptance and faith; as a metaphor for life...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction romance fiction historical 20th-century marriage -
![A Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq]()
A Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsIn the Ardennes Forest on the Belgian border the French guns point north-east, awaiting the German onslaught. One reinforced-concrete blockhouse in the heart of the forest is manned, this winter of 1939/40, by Lieutenant Grange with three men, who live in a chalet built over it...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult book epic -
![One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes]()
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIt's a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book female-author fiction
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