Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Berlin: City of Stones: Book One

Berlin: City of Stones presents the first part of Jason Lutes' captivating trilogy, set in the twilight years of Germany's Weimar Republic. Kurt Severing, a journalist, and Marthe Muller, an art student, are the central figures in a broad cast of characters intertwined with the historical events unfolding around them. City of Stones covers eight months in Berlin, from September 1928 to May Day, 1929,... (more)

Citizen Soldiers : The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany - June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945 (abridged: audio)

Citizen Soldiers : The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany - June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945 (abridged: audio)

by Stephen Ambrose

In this riveting account, historian Stephen Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war, from the high command down to the ordinary soldier, drawing on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany,... (more)

Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

The most powerful account of Hitler's domination of the German people through fanaticism, divisiveness, and luck. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he... (more)

A Trace of Smoke (Hannah Vogel)

by Rebecca Cantrell

Even though hardened crime reporter Hannah Vogel knows all too well how tough it is to survive in 1931 Berlin, she is devastated when she sees a photograph of her brother’s body posted in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead. Ernst, a cross-dressing lounge singer at a seedy nightclub, had many secrets, a never-ending list of lovers, and plenty of opportunities to get into trouble. Hannah delves into the city’s dark... (more)

Black Obelisk

by Erich M. Remarqu

Life in a small German town during the great inflation in 1923. A continuation of "The Road back." Entertaining, philosophical and funny: Remarque at his best.

Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink, Michael Henry Heim

The first novel by Bernhard Schlink since his international best seller The Reader, Homecoming is the story of one man's odyssey and another man's pursuit. A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grew up with his mother and scant memories of his father, a victim of war. Now an adult, Peter embarks upon a search for the truth surrounding his mother's unwavering--but shaky--history and the possibility of finding... (more)

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

by Rick Atkinson

In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy In An Army at Dawn —winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle , he follows the strengthening American and British... (more)

S.A.S.S.

The Sound of Munich

by Suzanne Marie Nelson

Siena Bernstein is leaving her yoga mat behind for a semester of study abroad in Munich. She’s thrilled with the prospect of a German adventure (her horoscope is encouraging as well), but she hopes to make more than just her dreams come true while she’s there. Siena’s dad, who passed away when she was a baby, kept a "Carpe Diem" list—sort of his top-ten adventurous things to do. He completed all but one of... (more)

Sarah's Key

by Tatiana de Rosnay

A New York Times bestseller. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this... (more)

If Not Now, When? (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

If Not Now, When? (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

by Primo Levi, Primo Tregua Levi

Primo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he reveals the extraordinary lives of the Russian, Polish and Jewish partisans trapped behind enemy lines during the Second World War. Wracked by fear, hunger and fierce rivalries, they link up, fall apart, struggle to stay alive and to sabotage the efforts of the all-powerful German army. A... (more)

The Baroque Cycle: Book 3

The System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

'Tis done. The world is a most confused and unsteady place -- especially London, center of finance, innovation, and conspiracy -- in the year 1714, when Daniel Waterhouse makes his less-than-triumphant return to England's shores. Aging Puritan and Natural Philosopher, confidant of the high and mighty and contemporary of the most brilliant minds of the age, he has braved the merciless sea and an assault by the... (more)

Clockwork (After Words)

by Philip Pullman

The apprentice's friends think hearing the latest story by Fritz, the writer, will cheer poor Karl up. At least it will distract Karl from the fact that he hasn't produced a new moving figure for the great timepiece at the center of town, as he was supposed to. But to Fritz's horror the story he tells Karl begins to come true, and one of the main characters -- the evil Dr. Kalmenius -- shows up with a terrifying... (more)

Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

In 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. Assembling a composite portrait of these two warring leviathans and the terrible age they defined, the narrative intertwines experiences both real and fictional—a young German who joins the SS to expose its crimes, two generals who collaborate with... (more)

Doctor Faustus (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

Doctor Faustus (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

by H. Lowe-Porter, H.T. Lowe-Porter, Thomas Mann

Introduction by T. J. Reed; Translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter

Buddenbrooks

The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

Introduction by T. J. Reed; Translation by John E. Woods

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A Book for None and All

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. With blazing intensity... (more)

The Vision of Emma Blau : A Novel

by Ursula Hegi

The Vision of Emma Blau is the luminous epic of a bicultural family filled with passion and aspirations, tragedy and redemption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Stefan Blau, whom readers will remember from Stones from the River, flees Burgdorf, a small town in Germany, and comes to America in search of the vision he has dreamed of every night. The novel closes nearly a century later with Stefan's... (more)

The Fairy Tales of Herman Hesse

by Hermann Hesse, Jack David Zipes

A collection of twenty-two fairy tales by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, most translated into English for the first time, show the influence of German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, and Eastern religion on his development as an author.

Group Portrait With Lady (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Group Portrait With Lady (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

by Heinrich Boll, Leila Vennewitz

Novel by Heinrich Boll, published in German in 1971 as Gruppenbild mit Dame. A sweeping portrayal of German life from World War I until the early 1970s, the novel was cited by the Nobel Prize committee when it awarded Boll the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. The story's anonymous narrator gradually reveals the life--past and present--of Leni Pfeiffer, a war widow who, with her neighbors, is fighting the... (more)

A Bridge Too Far: The Classic History of the Greatest Battle of World War II

A Bridge Too Far: The Classic History of the Greatest Battle of World War II

by Cornelius Ryan

Here is Cornelius Ryan's masterly chronicle of the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled for a single battle -- culminating in the most grandiose and devastatingly tragic struggle of World War II. Now in a new edition for the 50th anniversary of VE Day, A Bridge Too Far tells the classic story of the battle of Arnhem, one of the most dramatic battles of World War II, which cost the Allies... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Browse Subjects: germany

Top Books