Books like 'The Captive Mind'
Readers who enjoyed The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical psychological 20th century politics classics communism war cold-war dystopia university
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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... -
![Animal Farm / 1984 by George Orwell]()
Animal Farm / 1984 by George Orwell
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 72 ratingsThis edition features George Orwell’s best-known novels—1984 and Animal Farm—with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary organisation called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party...Categorized as:
classics communism dystopia politics university 20th-century alternate-history animals -
![Death Is My Trade by Robert Merle]()
Death Is My Trade by Robert Merle
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe story begins in 1913, when Rudolf Lang is 13 years old. His parents give him a harsh catholic education, which is very badly accepted by Rudolf. His unstable father, with whom the young Lang has an awkward relationship, wants Rudolf to become priest. At the age of fifteen, Lang starts his military career which eventually leads him to the post of commandant of Auschwitz in 1943... -
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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... -
![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... -
![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... -
![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 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... -
![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 Captain by Jan de Hartog]()
The Captain by Jan de Hartog
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe book centers around the specialized Ocean tugboat trade. In 1940 Harinxma, then a young tugboat officer, escapes to Britain. The Kwel company has managed to get away much of its fleet and personnel, one jump ahead of the advancing Germans, and sets up to continue operations from London... -
![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... -
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![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... -
![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:
classics politics fiction 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... -
![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 . . -
![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... -
![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... -
![The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue by W.H. Auden]()
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue by W.H. Auden
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe first critical edition of a poem that named an eraWhen it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named... -
![The Secret Miracle by Jorge Luis Borges]()
The Secret Miracle by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"The Secret Miracle" is a short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It was first published in the magazine Sur in February 1943. The main character of the story is a playwright named Jaromir Hladík, who is living in Prague when it is occupied by the Nazis during World War II... -
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![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... -
![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 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... -
![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... -
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![The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas]()
The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIt is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them... -
![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... -
![The Twilight World by Werner Herzog]()
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War IIIn 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda... -
![Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker]()
Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker
Rated: 3.81 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of the most remarkable novels of the Holocaust ever written, Jakob the Liar is a tale of everyday heroism and the extraordinary power of illusion. Set in an unnamed German-occupied ghetto, the story centers on an unlikely hero, Jakob Heym, who accidentally overhears news of vital importance: the Russians are advancing on a city three hundred miles away... -
![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... -
![The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans]()
The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsDuring the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt is visited by Dorbeck. Dorbeck is Osewoudt's spitting image in reverse. Henri is blond and beardless, with a high voice; Dorbeck is dark-haired, and his voice deep.Dorbeck gives Osewoudt a series of dangerous assignments: helping British agents and eliminating traitors. But the assassinations get out of hand.. -
![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:
classics politics fiction 20th-century historical historical-fiction 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... -
![A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest]()
A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest
Rated: 3.68 of 5 stars · 11 ratingsA Dream of Wessex is a “story about a group of twentieth-century dreamers who create a consensus virtual-reality future. Once they enter their imaginary world they are unable to remember who they are, or where they are from... -
![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:
classics dystopia politics war 20th-century action-adventure alternate-history anthologies -
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![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... -
![A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee]()
A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFranklin Hata, Korean by birth but raised in Japan, is an outsider in American society, but he embodies the values of the town he calls his own - he is polite and keeps himself to himself... -
![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 Assault by Harry Mulisch]()
The Assault by Harry Mulisch
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA novel that probes moral devastation following a Nazi retaliation in a Dutch town. The Assault has been translated and published to great critical acclaim throughout Europe and in the United States.It is the winter of 1945, the last dark days of the ware in occupied Holland. A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides on his bicycle... -
![Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan]()
Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTristessa is the name with which Kerouac baptized Esperanza Villanueva, a Catholic Mexican young woman, a prostitute and addict to certain drugs, whom he fell in love with during one of his stays in Mexico -a country that he frequently visited - by the middle of the fifties... -
![Burning Vision by Marie Clements]()
Burning Vision by Marie Clements
Rated: 3.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsDene miners, radium painters and people of Hiroshima labour under the false sun of uranium which poisons their relationships to the earth and to each other. Cast of 5 women and 12 men...
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