Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela : With Connections (HRW library)

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela : With Connections (HRW library)

by Nelson Mandela

The best-selling memoirs, begun during the South African president's years in prison, traces the Nobel Prize-winner's historic life from his traditional tribal childhood to his triumphant rise to power. Reprint. NYT.

Modern Times Revised Edition: World from the Twenties to the Nineties, The (Perennial Classics)

Modern Times Revised Edition: World from the Twenties to the Nineties, The (Perennial Classics)

by Paul Johnson

Originally published in 1983 and named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times , this bestselling history is now revised and updated and includes a new final chapter.

The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis

The "dean of Cold War historians" ( The New York Times ) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why —from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the... (more)

The War of the World

Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

by Niall Ferguson

Niall Fergusson's most important book to date-a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era that resolves its central paradox: why unprecedented progress coincided with unprecedented violence and why the seeming triumph of the West bore the seeds of its undoing. From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the cold war, the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in all of... (more)

Hitler's Pope

by John Cornwell

Backed by a wealth of new research, John Cornwell tells for the first time the story of the World War II career of Eugenio Pacelli, the man who was Pope Pius XII, arguably the most dangerous churchman in modern history. In the first decade of the century, as a brilliant young Vatican lawyer, Pacelli helped shape a new ideology of unprecedented papal power in Germany. In 1933 Hitler became his negotiating partner,... (more)

Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945

Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945

by R. J. B. Bosworth

In his extraordinary new book, Richard Bosworth brings to life the period in which Italians participated in one of the twentieth century's largest, most notorious, and ultimately most ruinous political experiments-Fascism-under their dictator, Benito Mussolini, and his henchmen. The Fascists were the first totalitarians, and they provided a model for many other twentieth-century dictatorships, Hitler's first among... (more)

Holocaust: A History

by Deborah Dwork

A magisterial, dramatic account that reshapes the way we think and talk about the greatest crime in history. Unrivaled in reach and scope, Holocaust illuminates the long march of events, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, which led to this great atrocity. It is a story of all Europe, of Nazis and their allies, the experience of wartime occupation, the suffering and strategies of marked victims, the... (more)

The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Comprehensive History of the Holocaust Series)

The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Comprehensive History of the Holocaust Series)

by Christopher R. Browning

In 1939, the Nazi regime’s plans for redrawing the demographic map of Eastern Europe entailed the expulsion of millions of Jews. By the fall of 1941, these plans had shifted from expulsion to systematic and total mass murder of all Jews within the Nazi grasp. The Origins of the Final Solution is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis ever written of what took place during this crucial period—of how,... (more)

Twister on Tuesday

by Mary Pope Osborne

In the third book of the American history cluster, Jack and Annie are whisked to a midwestern prairie in the 1870s. They visit a one-room schoolhouse and learn about the hard life of the pioneers. When they return to the magic tree house, Jack and Annie spot a twister on the horizon. Is there time to warn the teacher and the children back at the schoolhouse? Or should Jack and Annie just save themselves?

In Retrospect

by Roberts. McNamara, Robert S. McNamara

The Secretary of Defense for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations provides an account of how and why America became involved in Vietnam and discusses the long-term ramifications of decisions made during the 1960s. Reprint. 125,000 first printing.

Sadako and the thousand paper cranes

by Eleanor Coerr, Ronald Himler

Hiroshima-born Sadako is lively and athletic--the star of her school's running team. And then the dizzy spells start. Soon gravely ill with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease," Sadako faces her future with spirit and bravery. Recalling a Japanese legend, Sadako sets to work folding paper cranes. For the legend holds that if a sick person folds one thousand cranes, the gods will grant her wish and make her healthy... (more)

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

by Robert Anthony Pape

Includes a new Afterword Finalist for the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award One of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject of suicide terrorism, the esteemed political scientist Robert Pape has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. In Dying to Win , Pape provides a groundbreaking demographic profile of modern... (more)

The Elizabethan world picture

by E. M. W. Tillyard

This brief and illuminating account of the ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Professor Tillyard in the process of its various... (more)

Freud: A Life for Our Time

by Peter Gay

A New York Times bestseller in hardcover, this is the most highly regarded biography of Freud ever written. To read this book is to enter the world of Sigmund Freud as never before: his family, his city, his professional struggles, his long fruitful and embattled life. Drawing on a vast store of unpublished documents, including hundreds of hitherto unknown or inaccessible letters, Peter Gay deals frankly... (more)

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

by Mark Kramer, Stephane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.... (more)

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage)

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage)

by Richard Hofstadter

"The most comprehensive, succinct, and well-written one-volume treatment of the subject now available." -- Walter Laqueur

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage)

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage)

by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary... (more)

The Coming of the Third Reich

by Richard J. Evans

There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and... (more)

Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment

Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment

by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, James D. Houston

During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a... (more)

Laura: America's First Lady, First Mother

Laura: America's First Lady, First Mother

by Antonia Felix

Laura Bush has made an indelible impact on Americans—and the world—since she became First Lady. Not only did she win the hearts of the nation with her maternal advice ("Hug your children"), but her poise, warmth, and down-to-earth wisdom has kept her at the forefront of the nation. Laura, a hardcover bestseller, is the first book that tells the complete story of our beloved First Lady. Author Antonia... (more)

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Tags: modern history