Books like 'Khrushchev'
Readers who enjoyed Khrushchev by William Taubman also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century psychological politics cold-war communism war
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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... -
![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...Categorized as:
cold-war communism politics 20th-century 21st-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, Фредерик Форсайт]()
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, Фредерик Форсайт
Rated: 4.26 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsLibrarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man.One man with a rifle who can change the course of history... -
![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... -
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![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... -
![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... -
![The Company by Robert Littell]()
The Company by Robert Littell
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Barnes & Noble ReviewSince the publication of his 1973 debut thriller, The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, Robert Littell has evolved into one of the most credible, consistently interesting espionage novelists of the modern era... -
![Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick, Harvey Wheeler]()
Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick, Harvey Wheeler
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSomething has gone wrong. A group of American bombers armed with nuclear weapons is streaking past the fail-safe point, beyond recall, and no one knows why. Their destination—Moscow.In a bomb shelter beneath the White House, the calm young president turns to his Russian translator and says, "I think we are ready to talk to Premier Kruschchev... -
![The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré]()
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsIn this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction... -
![The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, Rajendra A. Chitnis]()
The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, Rajendra A. Chitnis
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratings“The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.”—Giovanni Papini It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and pervades this tragicomic novel of anxiety and evil set amid the horrors of World War II... -
![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... -
![Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith]()
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsA triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it... -
![The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon]()
The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsAs compelling and disturbing as when it was first published in the midst of the Cold War, The Manchurian Candidate continues to enthrall readers with its electrifying action and shocking climax....Sgt. Raymond Shaw is a hero of the first order. He's an ex-prisoner of war who saved the life of his entire outfit, a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the stepson of an influential senator.. -
![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... -
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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... -
![Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 by Vladimir Nabokov]()
Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis Library of America volume is the second of three volumes that contain the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time...Categorized as:
politics fiction classics literary-fiction humor 20th-century psychological historical -
![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... -
![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... -
![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... -
![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 . . -
![One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, จักรแก้ว ตนุนาถ]()
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, จักรแก้ว ตนุนาถ
Rated: 3.97 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsThe only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression... -
![The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre]()
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSet in France during the days immediately before World War II, this is the story of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy obsessed with the idea of freedom. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton... -
![Europe Central by William T. Vollmann]()
Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn this magnificent work of fiction, William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century... -
![Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll]()
Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHeinrich Böll's well-known, vehement opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of Robert Faehmel. After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at the end of the war. He adheres to a rigorous schedule, including a daily game of billiards... -
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![All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski]()
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family’s manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish twelve-year-old son, Peter... -
![The Conformist by Alberto Moravia]()
The Conformist by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSecrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years... -
![The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry]()
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the finest book to come out of Europe this year," The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is acclaimed Irish playwright Sebastian Barry's lyrical tale of a fugitive everyman. For Eneas McNulty, a happy, innocent childhood in County Sligo in the early 1900s gives way to an Ireland wracked by violence and conflict... -
![The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir]()
The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsJean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his lover, Helene, to die. He is the one who sent her on the mission that led to her death, and before morning, he must ultimately decide how many others to send to a similar fate... -
![A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa]()
A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa
Rated: 3.89 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAs the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the world outside seeps into Ludo's life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of someone peeing on a balcony, or a man fleeing his pursuers... -
![Exposure by Helen Dunmore]()
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Rated: 3.89 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsLondon, November, 1960: the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets.When a highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused of passing information to the Soviets, and arrested... -
![Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll]()
Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll, an inventive & sardonic portrayal of the effects of the Nazi period on a group of ordinary people. Weaving together the stories of a diverse array of characters, Boll explores the often bizarre & always very human courses chosen by people attempting to survive in a world marked by political madness, absurdity & destruction... -
![Animal Farm by George Orwell]()
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 96 ratingsLibrarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality... -
![Block 11 by Piero Degli Antoni]()
Block 11 by Piero Degli Antoni
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsFrom an award-winning author comes an audacious, high-concept noir set in Auschwitz that straddles past and present New York, the An old woman and her husband sit down for a breakfast of black bread and coffee at a table set for ten. Eight chairs remain empty. Auschwitz, Spring 1944: Following a successful escape from the camp, a group of ten prisoners are rounded up for execution... -
![The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow]()
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted... -
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![Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott]()
Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsApartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who are forced to share their quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages a drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion. Apartment in Athens depicts a great and terrible war through the lens of everyday existence... -
![When We Meet Again by Caroline Beecham]()
When We Meet Again by Caroline Beecham
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsAn emotionally compelling tale of love and mystery set in the publishing world of World War II London, When We Meet Again tells the story of a mother searching for her stolen child, and illustrates the unbreakable bonds among families, lovers, and readers under the shadow of war... -
![Stasi Child by David Young]()
Stasi Child by David Young
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDavid Young's chillingly intricate Stasi Child was A London Times “Crime Book of the Month” and a Telegraph Pick of the Week.1975: When Oberleutnant Karin Muller is called to investigate a teenage girl's body at the foot of the Berlin Wall, she imagines she's seen it all before... -
![1934: A Novel by Alberto Moravia]()
1934: A Novel by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsMoravia's political fable about an Italian anti-Fascist and the frightened, suicide-seeking German girl he encounters on a boat to Capri--the setting of Moravia's Il disprezzo from 1954--was welcomed as one of his finest novels...Categorized as:
politics fiction 20th-century historical historical-fiction classics psychological book -
![Transit by Anna Seghers]()
Transit by Anna Seghers
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAnna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight... -
![Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein]()
Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein
Rated: 3.74 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsIt wasn't the communists who got us after all...You can read about its beginnings in Heinlein's immortal STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: At the height of America's secular decadence came Nehemiah Scudder, bearing the rod and the wrath of the Lord for those who opposed him, and the promise of earthly happiness and heavenly bliss for those who followed him..Categorized as:
politics war 20th-century action-adventure alternate-history anthologies audiobook classics -
![Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) by André Malraux]()
Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) by André Malraux
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAs explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to life the profound meaning of the revolutionary impulse for the individuals involved... -
![Wild Ginger by Anchee Min]()
Wild Ginger by Anchee Min
Rated: 3.64 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe beautiful, iron-willed Wild Ginger is only in elementary school when we first meet her, but already she has been singled out by the Red Guards for her "foreign-colored eyes." Her classmate Maple is also a target of persecution... -
![The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes]()
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
Rated: 3.73 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: Julian Barnes’s first novel since his best-selling, Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending. In 1936, Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera... -
![The Innocent by Ian McEwan]()
The Innocent by Ian McEwan
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsPsychological thriller set in Berlin during the Cold War, based on an actual (but little known) incident which tells of the secret tunnel under the Soviet sector which the British and Americans built in 1954 to gain access to the Russians' communication system... -
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![Blood of the Reich by William Dietrich]()
Blood of the Reich by William Dietrich
Rated: 3.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAt the height of WWII, a quartet of daring American adventurers pits their cunning against a cadre of Nazi S.S. agents seeking to acquire a powerful weapon for the Fuhrer’s arsenal; today, as the Nazi specter begins to rear its head once again, the descendants of those long-ago adventurers must unlock the secrets of their forebears’ mission in order to save the world from Hitler’s resurgent Reich... -
![You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt]()
You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt
Rated: 3.44 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war. Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents... -
![The Appointment by Herta Müller]()
The Appointment by Herta Müller
Rated: 3.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse...
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