Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

"MASTERFUL." --The Washington Post Book World "RIVETING . . . UNFOLDS LIKE A DETECTIVE STORY." --Los Angeles Times Book Review In July 1991, nine skeletons were exhumed from a shallow mass grave near Ekaterinburg, Siberia, a few miles from the infamous cellar room where the last tsar and his family had been murdered seventy-three years before. But were these the bones of the Romanovs? And if these were their... (more)

To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics)

To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics)

by Edmund Wilson

To the Finald Station is one of the greatest works by 20th-century America’s heralded man of letters. This magisterial study of the revolutionary dream reaches from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to Russia in 1917, and features brilliant portraits of such figures as Jules Michelet, the great historian of the French people; the utopians Robert Owen and Charles Fourier; the anarchist Mikhail... (more)

Nicholas and Alexandra

by Robert K. Massie

Massie offers a moving, tragic, and unforgettable account of the extraordinary Imperial dynasty of Tsar Nicholas II, his doomed empire, and a revolution that would inexorably change the world forever. "A larger than life drama."--Saturday Review. Photo insert.

Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left

Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left

by Helen C. Camp

Camp has written an informative study of one of the most important radicals to emerge out of the American labor movement. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) first made her mark as an organizer and speaker for the Industrial Workers of the World. She joined the Communist Party in the mid-1930s and was a leading member for many years. Also active in the area of free speech, Flynn was a founding member of the... (more)

I speak my own piece: Autobiography of "The Rebel Girl"Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

I speak my own piece: Autobiography of "The Rebel Girl"

by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

House of Meetings

by Martin Amis

An extraordinary novel that ratifies Martin Amis’s standing as “a force unto himself,” as The Washington Post has attested: “There is, quite simply, no one else like him.” House of Meetings is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the... (more)

The Spanish Civil War: Revised Edition (Modern Library Paperbacks)

The Spanish Civil War: Revised Edition (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Hugh Thomas

A masterpiece of the historian’s art, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War remains the best, most engrossing narrative of one of the most emblematic and misunderstood wars of the twentieth century. Revised and updated with significant new material, including new revelations about atrocities perpetrated against civilians by both sides in this epic conflict, this "definitive work on the subject" (Richard Bernstein,... (more)

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)

by Robin D. G. Kelley

Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama—the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative,... (more)

The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

In 1967, Daniel, the son of two convicted spys executed by their own country, ponders his life, his sister's radicalism, his appreciation for his wife and son, and the hypocrisy of the moralistic ideals upon which this country was based. Reprint.

Russia & the West Under Lenin & StalinGeorge F. Kennan

Russia & the West Under Lenin & Stalin

by George F. Kennan

Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)

Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)

by Richard Pipes

With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime’s scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice. At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. This is the story of how the agitation of Karl Marx and Friedrich... (more)

Cuba : A Short History (Cambridge History of Latin America)

Cuba : A Short History (Cambridge History of Latin America)

Cuba: A Short History brings together four chapters from Volumes 3, 5, and 7 of The Cambridge History of Latin America to provide for scholars, students and general readers a concise history of this important island nation. Contributors, top scholars in the field, trace the political, economic, and social development of Cuba from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present day. The concluding chapter,... (more)

W. E. B. Du Bois

The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963

by David Levering Lewis

The second volume of the Pulitzer Prize--winning biography that The Washington Post hailed as "an engrossing masterpiece" Charismatic, singularly determined, and controversial, W.E.B. Du Bois was a historian, novelist, editor, sociologist, founder of the NAACP, advocate of women's rights, and the premier architect of the Civil Rights movement. His hypnotic voice thunders out of David Levering Lewis's monumental... (more)

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana

by Isadora Tattlin

Isadora Tattlin was accustomed to relocating often for her husband’s work. But when he accepted a post in Cuba in the early 1990s, she resolved to keep a detailed diary of her time there, recording her daily experiences as a wife, mother, and foreigner in a land of contraband. The result is a striking, rare glimpse into a tiny country of enormous splendor and squalor. Though the Tattlins are provided with a... (more)

Angel in the forest

by Marguerite Young

A Fine Old ConflictJessica Mitford

A Fine Old Conflict

by Jessica Mitford

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

by June Jordan

A posthumous collection of the essays of June Jordan, noted for its "love of language" and "expression of social identity" (Reamy Jansen, San Francisco Chronicle ) Some of Us Did Not Die brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive... (more)