Historical books from Poland
Recommended historical books (8)
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you are into historical here are some historical books from Poland for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.
1.
Dancing Bears : True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny by Witold Szablowski EN
Description:
*As heard on NPR’s All Things Considered* “Utterly original.” —The New York Times Book Review “Mixing bold journalism with bolder allegories, Mr. Szabłowski teaches us with witty persistence that we must desire freedom rather than simply expect it.” —Timothy Snyder, New York Times bestselling author of On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom An incisive, humorous, and heartbreaking account of people in formerly Communist countries holding fast to their former lives, by the acclaimed author of How to Feed a Dictator and What’s Cooking in the Kremlin For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained... continue
3.
How to Feed a Dictator : Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks by Witold Szablowski EN
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“Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday Anthony Bourdain meets Kapuściński in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the appetites of five of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, by the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears and What’s Cooking in the Kremlin What was Pol Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one particular cow? Traveling across four continents, ... continue
4.
Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman EN
Description:
"Intellectually rich and provocative.... This is a text which belongs in our classrooms as well as on our shelves. Exceptionally well written."?Contemporary Sociology A new afterword to this edition, "The Duty to Remember--But What?" tackles difficult issues of guilt and innocence on the individual and societal levels. Zygmunt Bauman explores the silences found in debates about the Holocaust, and asks what the historical facts of the Holocaust tell us about the hidden capacities of present-day life. He finds great danger in such phenomena as the seductiveness of martyrdom; going to extremes in... continue
5.
The Art of Resistance by Justus Rosenberg EN
Description:
An unforgettable World War II memoir set in Nazi-occupied France and filled with romance and adventure: a former Eastern European Jew remembers his flight from the Holocaust and his extraordinary four years in the French underground. Justus Rosenberg, now 98, has taught literature at Bard College for the past fifty years. In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and ... continue
6.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk EN
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AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER! “A folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.” –The New York Times Book Review The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great iss... continue
7.
The Last Jew of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman EN
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Quickly becoming a cornerstone of Holocaust historiography--a devastatingly stark memoir from one of the lone survivors of Treblinka.
8.
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz EN
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'I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves' Slavomir Rawicz Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag. After a three-month journey in the dead of winter to Siberia, life in a Soviet labour camp meant enduring hunger, extreme cold, untreated wounds and illnesses and facing the daily risk of arbitrary execution. Realising that to remain mea... continue