European History

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz is a bestselling 2020 work of narrative nonfiction by Erik Larson recounting Winston Churchill’s first year as prime minister of Great Britain—a year marked by the Blitz, or Nazi bombing of England. Britain’s top naval official, Churchill is chosen prime minister on May 10, 1940 amid widespread discontent with the current leader, Neville Chamberlain. Parliament revolts against Chamberlain because of... Read The Splendid and the Vile Summary

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The Three Musketeers (1844), by French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas, is a novel that borrows tropes from the swashbuckling genre, historical fiction, and romance to recount the adventures of a group of king’s guard who face off against the machinations of nefarious political factions set on destabilizing the monarchy. It was first published through serialization in 1844 to great popularity. Though set in the mid-1600s, the novel connected with the philosophical underpinnings of the... Read The Three Musketeers Summary

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was an Australian novelist and United Nations worker who settled in the United States. The Transit of Venus (1980) is Hazzard’s third novel and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It draws upon Hazzard’s own experiences of an Australian childhood, emigrating abroad, and being part of the first generation of working women. Critics responded to the juxtaposition of intimate, personal narratives with a broader examination of what... Read The Transit of Venus Summary

Written in the 13th century, The Travels of Marco Polo details Italian explorer Marco Polo’s movements through Asia between 1271 and 1295. The book was co-written by Rustichello da Pisa, an Italian writer who met Polo while the two were in prison in Genoa, Italy. The text is comprised of a prologue and four subsequent books. Book 1 covers Polo’s travels on his way to China, with stops in the Middle East and Central Asia... Read The Travels of Marco Polo Summary

Recorded in Homer’s epic poems, which are widely considered seminal in the canon of western literature, the Trojan War continues to enjoy mythic status within contemporary culture over two millennia later. In the light of new archaeological evidence, Barry Strauss re-examines the most fabled war in history in his 2006 text The Trojan War: A New History. Strauss returns to the era when the war actually took place, some 500 years before Homer, and examines... Read The Trojan War: A New History Summary

The Twelve Caesars, often titled Lives of the Caesars in English, is a collection of 12 biographies covering Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors of the Roman Empire in historical order. It was written in 121 CE by Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars is, along with Tacitus’s Histories and the Annals and Cassius Dio’s History of Rome, one of the earliest sources that has a narrative covering political events in the Roman Empire from about... Read The Twelve Caesars Summary

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The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is a nonfiction book by Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher. Together with such texts as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), The Wretched of the Earth is a founding text of modern postcolonial studies. It is also Frantz Fanon’s most internationally acclaimed book, translated into more than 25 languages, though he is... Read The Wretched of the Earth Summary

The Zookeeper’s Wife, by Diane AckermanThe Zookeeper’s Wife is a non-fiction narrative recounting the heroic efforts of Antonina Żabińska and her husband, Jan Żabiński, during World War II. When soldiers of the Third Reich invade Poland on September 1, 1939, Jan is the ambitious director of the Warsaw Zoo. Antonina is an amazingly gifted woman who connects emotionally with all the animals in the zoo and the multitudes of human visitors and officials drawn to... Read The Zookeeper's Wife Summary

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Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck is a 2006 work of narrative nonfiction that braids two seemingly unrelated historical events that captured public attention in the pre-World War I years. The first involves the emerging and transformative technology of wireless communication designed by Marconi, the second a gruesome murder in London perpetrated by a seemingly docile and genial doctor named Crippen. Thunderstruck follows the success of Larson’s 2003 Devil in the White City, which coupled America’s first major... Read Thunderstruck Summary

Content Warning: This study guide and the memoir contain references to antisemitism and violence, as well as descriptions of conditions in a concentration camp during the Nazi holocaust. Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, a memoir by Heda Margolius Kovály, was first published under this title in 1986. The memoir was originally published in Czech as Na vlastní kůži (On your own skin) in 1973, by 68 Publishers, an independent press operated... Read Under a Cruel Star Summary

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Vermeer’s Hat (2007) is a work of nonfiction by Canadian historian Timothy Brook. The full title of the book, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, indicates Brook’s comprehensive outlook—positioning Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch painter from the city of Delft in the Netherlands known for his use of light and the textual clues that abound in his artwork within the context of his contemporaries and the larger world. Brook uses... Read Vermeer's Hat Summary

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich is a collection of 35 first-person oral accounts of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union. Originally published in Russian in 1997, the book was translated into English by Keith Gessen in 2005; it has been translated into almost every European language. Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Voices from Chernobyl in... Read Voices from Chernobyl Summary