Books like 'The Wizard and the Prophet'
Readers who enjoyed The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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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... -
![A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean]()
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsFrom its first magnificent sentence, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing," to the last, "I am haunted by waters," "A River Runs Through It" is an American classic...Categorized as:
culinary outdoors 20th-century action-adventure adult anthologies audiobook classics -
![Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb]()
Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsOriginally written and slated for publication in 1939, this long-forgotten masterpiece was shelved by Random House when The Grapes of Wrath met with wide acclaim... -
![The Seven That Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev]()
The Seven That Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSergey did not know that the colonel, having locked himself all the previous night in his little study, had deliberated upon this ritual with all his power. "We must not aggravate, but ease the last moments of our son," resolved the colonel firmly, and he carefully weighed every possible phase of the conversation, every act and movement that might take place on the following day... -
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![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 -
![On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin]()
On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsLewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm--sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors--farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers--are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress... -
![The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Engdahl]()
The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Engdahl
Rated: 3.99 of 5 stars · 11 ratingsOn completion of her training as an agent of the interstellar federation's Anthropological Service, Elana is sent to a world whose people may soon destroy their civilization... -
![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... -
![An Imaginative Experience: A Novel by Mary Wesley]()
An Imaginative Experience: A Novel by Mary Wesley
Rated: 3.80 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsFrom the author of A Sensible Life comes a tale of unforgettable strength--of grief, release, comic fatalism, and love. A woman leaps from a London train to save a sheep stranded near the tracks. As the other passengers look on in horror and embarrassment, a fellow-traveler sees in her face the anguish for the husband and child she has just lost... -
![The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani]()
The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA tour de force: an utterly singular modern Moroccan classic“When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…” So begins Ahmed Bouanani’s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation... -
![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 -
![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... -
![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... -
![The Tenants by Bernard Malamud]()
The Tenants by Bernard Malamud
Rated: 3.58 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsIn The Tenants (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building... -
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![The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee]()
The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life... -
![Utz by Bruce Chatwin]()
Utz by Bruce Chatwin
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsUtz collects Meissen porcelain with a passion. His collection, which he has protected and enlarged through both World War II and Czechoslovakia's years of Stalinism, numbers more than 1,000 pieces, all crammed into his two-room Prague flat. Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and although he has considered defection, he always returns... -
![The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy]()
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 20 ratings'The Orchard Keeper' tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father...Categorized as:
outdoors politics 20th-century action-adventure audiobook book classics coming-of-age -
![Walden Two by B.F. Skinner]()
Walden Two by B.F. Skinner
Rated: 3.51 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsThis fictional outline of a modern utopia has been a center of controversy since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct... -
![Cosmos by Carl Sagan, LeVar Burton]()
Cosmos by Carl Sagan, LeVar Burton
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsCosmos has 13 heavily illustrated chapters, corresponding to the 13 episodes of the Cosmos television series. In the book, Sagan explores 15 billion years of cosmic evolution and the development of science and civilization. Cosmos traces the origins of knowledge and the scientific method, mixing science and philosophy, and speculates to the future of science... -
![The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown, Edward Herrmann]()
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown, Edward Herrmann
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsFor readers of Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit and Unbroken, the dramatic story of the American rowing team that stunned the world at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics.Daniel James Brown's robust book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans... -
![Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, Keith Gessen]()
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, Keith Gessen
Rated: 4.41 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsWritten by the winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureOn April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy... -
![The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro]()
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsOne of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the... -
![The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson]()
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
Rated: 4.45 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAn Unabridged Edition to include a Foreword by the Author and all Eighteen Chapters with Appendix: The Seat of the Trouble - How We Missed the Mark - How We Drifted Away from the Truth - Education under Outside Control - The Failure to Learn to Make a Living - The Educated Negro Leaves the Masses - Dissension and Weakness - Professional Educated Discouraged - Political Education Neglected - The... -
![Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro]()
Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe most riveting political biography of our time, Robert A. Caro’s life of Lyndon B. Johnson, continues. Master of the Senate takes Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 through 1960, in the United States Senate... -
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![And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts]()
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsBy the time Rock Hudson's death in 1985 alerted all America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century... -
![Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter]()
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsDouglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it... -
![From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew, Henry Kissinger]()
From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew, Henry Kissinger
Rated: 4.44 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFew gave tiny Singapore much chance of survival when it was granted independence in 1965... -
!["Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman]()
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
Rated: 4.26 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsWinner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, but he was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure. An artist, safecracker, practical joker and storyteller, Feynman's life was a series of combustoble combinations made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unquenchable curiosity and eternal scepticism... -
![The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi]()
The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe author tries to understand the rationale behind Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Dismissing stereotyped images of brutal Nazi torturers and helpless victims, Levi draws extensively on his own experiences to delve into the minds and motives of oppressors and oppressed alike... -
![The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro]()
The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThis is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy & ambition that set LBJ apart...
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