Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

by Orlando Figes

From the award-winning author of A People’s Tragedy and Natasha’s Dance , a landmark account of what private life was like for Russians in the worst years of Soviet repression There have been many accounts of the public aspects of Stalin’s dictatorship: the arrests and trials, the enslavement and killing in the gulags. No previous book, however, has explored the regime’s effect on people’s personal lives,... (more)

The Children's Story

by James Clavell

James Clavell, the author of Nobel House and Shogun presents a chilling tale of how patriotism can be reshaped in a person's mind with a few simple and resonable explanations. Both disturbing and enthralling, this short and stunning story asks many questions, yet leaves the answers up to the reader. Reissue.

The Color Purple

by Alice Walker

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she... (more)

Beijing Coma

by Jian Ma, Flora Drew

Dai Wei has been unconscious for almost a decade. A medical student and a pro-democracy protestor in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he was struck by a soldier’s bullet and fell into a deep coma. As soon as the hospital authorities discovered that he had been an activist, his mother was forced to take him home. She allowed pharmacists access to his body and sold his urine and his left kidney to fund special... (more)

Four Spirits: A Novel (P.S.)

by Sena Jeter Naslund

Weaving together the lives of blacks and whites, racists and civil rights advocates, and the events of peaceful protest and violent repression, Sena Jeter Naslund creates a tapestry of American social transformation at once intimate and epic. In Birmingham, Alabama, twenty-year-old Stella Silver, an idealistic white college student, is sent reeling off her measured path by events of 1963. Combining political... (more)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Anita J. Aboulafia, Malcolm X, Alex Haley

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims. As their spokesman he became identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of race hatred; but to his direct audience, the oppressed American blacks, he brought hope and self-respect. This autobiography (written with Alex Haley)... (more)

Wild Grass: China's Revolution from Below

Wild Grass: China's Revolution from Below

by Ian Johnson

In "Wild Grass" Pulitzer Prize-winning Ian Johnson describes a China caught between the desire for change percolating up from below and the ossified political structure above. He recounts the stories of three ordinary people who find themselves finding oppression and government corruption, risking imprisonment and even death. A young architecture student, a bereaved daughter, and a peasant legal clerk are the... (more)

Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl," Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction’s finest and most intense narratives, Edith... (more)

Captain Swing (Phoenix Press)

by E. J. Hobsbawm

Two of the world's great Marxist historians present a classic social history of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830. For generation upon generation, the English farm laborer lived in poverty and degradation. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, however, new forces came into play--and when capitalism swept from the cities into the countryside, tensions reached the breaking point. From 1830 on, a... (more)

The Art of Mending

by Elizabeth Berg

It begins with the sudden revelation of astonishing secrets—secrets that have shaped the personalities and fates of three siblings, and now threaten to tear them apart. In renowned author Elizabeth Berg’s moving new novel, unearthed truths force one seemingly ordinary family to reexamine their disparate lives and to ask themselves: Is it too late to mend the hurts of the past? Laura Bartone anticipates her annual... (more)

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Although his theories remain controversial until this day, Freud made a lasting impact on Western culture.

Speak

by Laurie Halse Anderson

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to... (more)

Songs of Innocence and Experience

by William Blake

Superb full-color facsimiles of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, based on Blake’s hand-written, hand-colored originals. 57 full-color plates.

Strike!: Revised and Updated Edition (South End Press Classics Series)

Strike!: Revised and Updated Edition (South End Press Classics Series)

by Jeremy Brecher

Originally published in 1972, "Strike!" describes the story of repeated, massive and often violent revolts by ordinary working people in America. In this edition Brecher brings the story up to date, with new chapters introducing the labour dimension of the Vietnam-era revolt, and interpreting the rank and file labour struggles of the last 25 years.

Ambergate

by Patricia Elliott

I am the girl with no name. I have a number branded on my left arm, but no name. . . .I have a secret. A secret I must never tell. . . .I committed a crime. I did something so wicked I must never speak of it. If I did, they would come after me. They call her Scuff. An orphan girl turned kitchen maid at Murkmere Hall, she is haunted by her dark past. With only her amulet to protect her, she ... (more)

Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Governments, 1964-1979, Secretly Prepared by the Archiodese of SPaulo (ILAS Special Publication)

Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Governments, 1964-1979, Secretly Prepared by the Archiodese of SPaulo (ILAS Special Publication)

by Brazil Archdiocese of São Paulo

From 1964 until 1985, Brazil was ruled by a military regime that sanctioned the systematic use of torture in dealing with its political opponents. The catalog of what went on during that grim period was originally published in Portuguese as Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again) in 1985. The volume was based on the official documentation kept by the very military that perpetrated the horrific acts. These... (more)

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