A Few of My Favorite Books

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for a thousand years. To read is to voyage through time.”
— Carl Sagan

Growing up, we did not have a television until I was sixteen. I learned to read at the age of six, and ever since, books have been constant companions in my life.

Some I discovered as a child, when my father read to me in the evenings. Others appeared later during long train rides, student years, or quiet weekends. A few I return to again and again.

Books allowed me to see the world long before I could travel. Through them I experienced times in which I never lived. I became an explorer, a diver, a pilot trying to survive after an engine failure, a submarine captain, a time traveler, a wandering knight, a peasant, a disillusioned soldier, and at one point even a female cat.

This page is not meant to be a formal list of “great literature.” Instead, it is a personal collection of books that shaped my imagination, made me laugh, or helped me think differently about the world.

I have not covered even half of my favorite books yet — this page will continue to grow.

Books I Return To

Some books you read once. Others stay with you for life.

My introduction to literature

Before learning how to read and becoming an avid reader, I was a listener.

We didn’t have a television for a long time, and my parents never followed the latest parenting fads. Instead, every evening before bedtime, they would read to me. Looking back, I realize those quiet moments were probably the beginning of my lifelong love of books.

Together we traveled through enchanted forests with the Brothers Grimm, followed Hans Christian Andersen’s unforgettable characters, laughed with Karlsson on the Roof, flew across Sweden with Nils Holgersson, wandered through Wonderland with Alice, and searched for the Golden Key with Buratino.

Those evenings gave me much more than stories. They sparked a lifelong curiosity about people, places, history, and ideas. Today, research confirms what my parents probably knew instinctively: reading aloud to children strengthens family bonds, enriches language, and nurtures imagination. At the time, however, I simply knew that every night another door to another world was about to open.

Hans Christian Andersen

The first author I clearly remember is Hans Christian Andersen. I have to admit that, as a child, I wasn’t particularly fond of some of his endings. More than once I asked my mother to rewrite the finale of stories such as The Swineherd, making sure that the prince and princess would live happily ever after. Only years later did I come to appreciate the deeper philosophical and moral lessons hidden behind Andersen’s bittersweet endings.

Ansersen Fary Tales in Russian

My favorites remain:

The Tinderbox

This story taught me several lessons, although probably not the ones Andersen intended.

First, I never liked the fact that the soldier kills the old witch who had just given him access to enormous wealth simply because she refuses to explain why she wants the tinderbox. Even as a child, that seemed profoundly unfair.

Then there was the money. Once the soldier becomes rich, he moves up the social ladder and suddenly acquires a great number of friends. He entertains them generously, and everyone seems delighted to know him. But as his money begins to disappear, so do his friends. When he becomes poor, they stop visiting altogether. Apparently, friendship purchased with money lasts approximately as long as the money does.

There was one more lesson that took me much longer to understand. The soldier’s wealth came suddenly and required no effort to acquire, and he spent it just as easily as it came. Many years later, after reading an article about the lives of lottery winners, I remembered The Tinderbox. Sudden wealth does not necessarily make people wealthy for long. Learning how to acquire, manage, and preserve something may be just as important as having it in the first place.

Not bad for a fairy tale about three enormous dogs and a magical tinderbox.

Thumbelina

The story of a tiny girl who values her independence above everything else.

The Steadfast Tin Soldier

The heartbreaking story of a lonely one-legged soldier hopelessly in love with a beautiful ballerina.

The Swineherd

As a child, I disliked the ending so much that I asked my mother to rewrite it, making sure the prince and princess lived happily ever after. Only years later did I realize Andersen wasn’t writing a romance. He was writing about character. The prince discovers that the princess values novelty and luxury over genuine beauty, and simply decides she is not the person he wishes to marry. That lesson stayed with me far longer than any happy ending could have.

The Little Mermaid

A well known to American readers through Disney’s adaptation. However, the Hollywood version reminds me that I wasn’t the only one who decided Andersen’s original ending deserved a happier conclusion.

The Snow Queen

Andersen’s epic tale of Gerda’s determination to rescue her childhood friend Kay after his heart is pierced by a fragment of the devil’s mirror. As a child, I remember it as an exciting adventure. As an adult, I found myself returning to this story more than once. Different stages of life revealed different meanings, reminding me that great fairy tales continue to grow alongside their readers.

Ole Lukøje

Ole Lukøje is a character, invented by Andersen. He stealthily sneaks into children’s bedrooms, gently blows into the back of their heads and, as they fall asleep he opens one of two umbrellas over their heads: one with beautiful pictures, which he opens over children, who have been good, so they will see wonderful dreams, or a simple one, without any pictures, so children, who have been bad don’t see any dreams. Recently I’ve learned, that the name can be translated as Ole-Shut-Eyes. As a child I was fascinated by this mysterious visitor. As an educator, I now have more appreciation, both as a parent and an educator at Andersen’s wonderfully gentle lesson that encouragement, or positive reinforcement, as we call it, often teaches more effectively than punishment.

Grimm Brothers

While Andersen transformed old folk tales into literary fairy tales that were gentler, less violent, and more suitable for children, the Brothers Grimm were collectors. They preserved stories that had been passed down through generations of German oral tradition. Their tales feel almost like the Old Testament of fairy tales—ancient, dark, morally uncompromising, and filled with characters who often meet terrifying fates.

The Twelve Brothers

A surprisingly dark tale of sacrifice, transformation, and redemption.

Hansel and Gretel

Children abandoned in the forest, starvation, cannibalism, and ultimately survival through courage and ingenuity.

Tom Thumb

A tiny hero repeatedly swallowed, kidnapped, and lost, yet always managing to outwit much larger opponents.

However, there were some less violent and more entertaining:

The Bremen Town Musicians

A wonderful tail about four animals: a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster, who had been discarded as useless by their owners. They get together and decided to go to Bremen to become musicians there. They have lots of adventures on a way to Bremen, but never actually get there. Perhaps this is what the retirement is all about.

Sweet Porridge (Der süße Brei)

A very short tale about a girl, who receives a tiny enchanted pot, which can produce delicious porridge. All you have to do is remember the command: “Cook, little pot!”, so it will start cooking when you are hungry and to stop you should say: “Stop, little pot!” All kinds of mischief might happen when one forgets the stopping word, but nobody complains.

Charles Perrault

Although many of his fairy tales overlap with those later collected by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault was unmistakably French. A successful lawyer and civil servant at the court of Louis XIV, he helped establish institutions such as the French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Later in life, he turned his attention to writing stories for children.

His Tales of Mother Goose transformed old folk tales into elegant literary fairy tales that have shaped childhoods for more than three centuries. Compared with the darker world of the Brothers Grimm, Perrault’s stories feel distinctly French—graceful, witty, and filled with memorable details that captivated me as a child.

My favorites are:

Cinderella

Perhaps the best-known rags-to-riches story ever written. Glass slippers, a fairy godmother, and the hope that kindness and perseverance are eventually rewarded.

Little Red Riding Hood

One of the simplest and most enduring cautionary tales. Unlike the Grimm version, Perrault’s original ending is uncompromising—there is no huntsman arriving at the last moment to save the day.

Sleeping Beauty

A story that inspired countless adaptations, yet still retains the elegance and charm of Perrault’s original telling.

Puss in Boots

Probably my first encounter with a trickster character. A clever cat armed with nothing more than wit, confidence, and a good pair of boots manages to transform his poor master into a marquis. Looking back, it may have been my first lesson that intelligence and creativity can sometimes accomplish more than wealth or brute strength.

Fary Tales of People Around The World

This was a book I loved during my childhood and later read to my own children. The book itself is now old and beaten by time and use, but the collection of stories was absolutely marvelous.

There were African tales about lions, a Japanese tale about two frogs traveling toward each other—one from Kyoto and the other from Osaka—and many stories from cultures I knew almost nothing about at the time. Long before I could actually travel, this book gave me little glimpses of the world beyond my own.

And then there was my all-time favorite: The Three Little Pigs.

Why this particular story? Looking back, perhaps I should have known that I would eventually become interested in decision-making. While his brothers take shortcuts, Naf-Naf takes the potential danger seriously and prepares for something that hasn’t happened yet. He builds a house strong enough not only to protect himself, but ultimately to save his brothers as well.

His philosophy could be summarized in one memorable line:

“A piglet’s house should be a fortress!”

Apparently, my fascination with planning for uncertain outcomes started rather early.

Humor & Childhood Favorites

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll is perhaps a wild card in this otherwise reasonably sane collection. Moreover, his particular variety of madness is unmistakably British.

I first encountered Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before I could read it myself, in Boris Zakhoder’s wonderful Russian translation. I absolutely loved the nonsense. It was funny and mystical at the same time, with one absurd event flowing naturally into another. To me, the story felt like a tightrope of beautiful, colorful dreams tied together.

And somehow it all made sense.

That may be one of the remarkable things about Carroll. Wonderland follows rules, but they are not necessarily the rules of our world. Language changes meaning, logic turns itself inside out, animals argue, playing cards become people, and Alice mostly tries to remain sensible while everyone around her behaves as though the insanity is perfectly normal.

There was another Alice in my childhood as well. I loved the Soviet audio adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, with songs written and performed by Vladimir Vysotsky. His unmistakable voice and wonderfully strange songs seemed perfectly at home in Carroll’s Wonderland.

Perhaps that is why Alice never felt to me like ordinary fantasy. It felt more like a dream in which every individual moment is completely absurd, yet while you are dreaming it, everything seems perfectly reasonable.

And then you wake up.

Baron Münchhausen

One of my favorite childhood books is The Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchhausen. I must have been about five or six years old when my father was reading it to me. I remember those evenings very well, because every half a page my father would burst out laughing — sometimes so hard that tears were running down his face.

At the time I simply enjoyed the stories, but later I learned that the famous book by Rudolf Erich Raspe was partly based on tales told by a real person: Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen.

The real Baron served in the Russian Imperial Army, took part in several campaigns, and was stationed in Riga. In Baltic German noble circles, storytelling was a popular pastime. Gentlemen entertained each other with imaginative accounts of hunting trips, military adventures, and improbable exploits. Münchhausen became famous for telling particularly extravagant stories about himself.

Raspe, who first published the stories in the late 18th century, was a fascinating character himself — a librarian, scholar, and (unfortunately) also something of a con artist. It is very likely that he embellished or even invented some of the adventures that later became part of the legend.

The Baron’s exploits are wonderfully absurd. Among them:

  • flying through the air while riding on a cannonball (not recommended by my patients. One star.)
  • visiting the Moon (recent experience suggests this requires more preparation than initially anticipated)
  • suturing his horse back together with a laurel tree after it had been cut in half (current trauma surgery standards do not support this approach)
  • shooting a deer with a cherry pit, only to later find a cherry tree growing from the animal’s head (my gardener found this idea inspirational. I found this concerning)

These stories belong to that delightful category of literature where imagination is allowed to run completely wild.

I strongly recommend reading Baron Münchhausen to children. The stories are unforgettable — and judging from my father’s reaction, they are just as entertaining for adults.

Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Lindgren created some of the most memorable characters of my childhood. Interestingly, I never read her most internationally famous books about Pippi Longstocking. My Lindgren was Karlsson-on-the-Roof and, somewhat later, the adventures of the young detective Kalle Blomkvist.

Karlsson-on-the-Roof

As a child, I saw Karlsson primarily as a troublemaker. He would convince the Boy to do something the Boy would never dare to do on his own, create complete chaos, blame everything on him, and then simply start his little engine and fly away. I found him enormously entertaining, although even then I understood that having Karlsson as a friend was probably not particularly good for one’s disciplinary record.

Only much later did another interpretation occur to me: perhaps there was no Karlsson at all.

Perhaps Karlsson was the Boy’s imaginary friend—a mischievous alter ego who could do everything the quiet, lonely, well-behaved child secretly wanted to do. And whenever something went terribly wrong, there was always a perfectly reasonable explanation:

Karlsson did it.

Whether Lindgren intended this interpretation or not, I still like it. Children have imaginary friends, and sometimes those friends provide a safe place for adventures, emotions, and behaviors that are difficult to express otherwise.

There was also an excellent Soviet animated adaptation, Karlsson-on-the-Roof. I thought it captured the essence of the books remarkably well: Karlsson was charming, selfish, boastful, completely unreliable—and absolutely impossible not to like.

In retrospect, perhaps that was the point. Not every childhood friend has to be a good influence. Some are simply a lot of fun.

Interestingly, when I first read Karlsson-on-the-Roof, I had no idea who Astrid Lindgren was. To me, Karlsson was simply Karlsson: a wonderful troublemaker who would persuade the Boy to do something he would never dare to do himself, get him into trouble, blame everything on him, and fly away.

I discovered Lindgren as an author only later, and quite by accident.

Kalle Blomkvist

When I was in third grade, I developed a craving for detective stories. I had already read and loved Anatoly Rybakov’s The Dagger, but it was so unmistakably Soviet. I wanted something different.

A librarian came to the rescue.

“Do you like Karlsson?” she asked.

“Of course!”

She handed me another book by the same author: Kalle Blomkvist.

And suddenly I found myself in a wonderfully foreign world of young detectives who were roughly my own age. They lived differently, their streets and homes were different, and their everyday lives felt exotic to a Soviet schoolboy. Yet I could immediately relate to them.

Perhaps most importantly, I discovered something that seems ridiculously obvious today: people in foreign countries also had thieves. They also considered stealing an injustice. And children there also believed that injustice was something worth fighting against.

It was a small revelation, but an important one. Long before I could travel and see other countries for myself, books were already teaching me that people living in very different societies were not nearly as different as we were sometimes encouraged to believe.

Mio, My Son

I read Mio, My Son during one of the darkest periods of my childhood, and perhaps that is why the story resonated with me so deeply.

Mio begins as an ordinary, lonely boy, but finds himself in what I would now call an alternative universe, where he discovers that he is actually a prince. There he has a loving father, a best friend, Jum-Jum, and eventually a mission: to confront the ultimate villain, the evil knight Kato.

In many ways, it is a story as old as storytelling itself — good against evil. But Lindgren fills that ancient story with magic, friendship, hope, and the promise that a better world is possible.

One scene stayed with me particularly strongly. Mio and Jum-Jum are captured by Kato and imprisoned in the Hungry Tower. Kato is certain they will die there. They are locked behind seven locks, guards are everywhere, there is no food, and for a while it seems that everything is lost.

And then a magical little spoon appears.

The spoon feeds the two hungry boys, and they survive.

I loved that scene as a child, and I think I understand it better now. Lindgren never pretends that darkness and evil do not exist. Kato is genuinely frightening, and sometimes Mio’s situation seems completely hopeless. But again and again, help appears — through friendship, kindness, courage, or a little bit of magic.

Perhaps that was exactly what I needed from this book at that particular time in my childhood: the idea that when everything seems lost, the story may not be over yet.

There may still be a little magical spoon.

Selma Lagerlöf

I have never been to Sweden. I have never experienced its landscapes, traveled through its forests, or seen its coastline. And yet Sweden was probably one of the first foreign countries through which I ever traveled.

Selma Lagerlöf took me there.

Looking back, I think The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Further Adventures of Nils Holgersson may have been among the books that gave me the travel and exploration bug.

As I understand it now, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was originally conceived as a geography reader for Swedish schoolchildren. Instead of simply asking children to memorize provinces, rivers, cities, and landscapes, Lagerlöf allowed them to discover their country through the eyes of Nils Holgersson.

Nils begins as a rather mischievous boy who is not particularly kind to either people or animals. After capturing and mistreating a tomte, a little household spirit, he is magically reduced to the size of a thumb. Soon afterward, when the family’s gander Mårten tries to join a flock of migrating wild geese, Nils grabs onto him in an attempt to stop him — and accidentally begins the journey of his life.

Along the way, geography becomes an adventure. Nils sees different regions of Sweden, encounters their people, animals, landscapes, legends, and traditions, and gradually changes himself. The journey teaches him not only about his country, but also about responsibility, friendship, courage, and respect for creatures both great and small.

I didn’t realize as a child that I was reading a geography lesson. I simply wanted to fly with Nils and see what was beyond the horizon.

Perhaps that was the lesson that stayed with me most.

A. A. Milne

Winnie-the-Pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh was read to me before I was able to read myself. It was a big book in my childhood — not simply a collection of funny stories about a bear and his friends, but an entire little world populated by remarkably recognizable personalities.

Long before I learned about the classical temperaments — phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine, and choleric — I already knew Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Christopher Robin, and Rabbit. Long before I knew anything about anxiety disorders, I knew Piglet.

Perhaps that is part of Milne’s genius. Children don’t need psychological terminology to recognize personalities. We know the gloomy friend, the anxious friend, the friend who is absolutely certain he knows what he is doing, and the sensible person who eventually arrives and sorts everything out.

And Winnie had a philosophy.

One lesson from the book that stayed with me could be summarized as: it is better to let something else spoil or go to waste than to let it spoil you.

This was surprisingly useful advice for a child growing up in the Soviet Union, where throwing away food was practically a moral offense. Leftovers were expected to be eaten regardless of how long they had been sitting in the refrigerator — and occasionally regardless of how they smelled. Winnie helped convince me that there are circumstances in which the heroic decision is to let the leftovers go.

There was also friendship. Piglet trusts Winnie, perhaps occasionally more than circumstances justify, but remains his loyal friend. Christopher Robin, meanwhile, is the reassuring presence who somehow sorts things out. Always.

I knew the book through Boris Zakhoder’s wonderful Russian translation, Винни-Пух и все-все-все. Much later, when I had children of my own, I bought the original English version as an audiobook, beautifully narrated by Peter Dennis, and played it during our long road trips.

My children loved it too. There was something remarkably calming and comforting about those familiar adventures, and quite often they were sound asleep before we reached the end of a chapter.

I rather like the continuity of that: Winnie-the-Pooh was read aloud to me before I could read, and decades later I was listening to the same stories, now in their original language, with my own children.

I also loved the Soviet animated adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, although Christopher Robin never made it into that version. Without him, the stories became almost entirely a little society of animals trying to solve their own problems.

Looking back, Winnie-the-Pooh may have been my first sitcom: the same familiar cast, each with an unmistakable personality, getting themselves into a new predicament in every episode.

But underneath all the comedy, it was always a story about friendship.

And perhaps that is why it was so comforting.

Gianni Rodari

Gianni Rodari was another author my parents read to me before I could read myself. I remember sitting with the book and studying the illustrations so carefully that I wouldn’t let my parents turn the page until I had absorbed every detail.

The Adventures of Cipollino

Cipollino was a wonderfully entertaining story about a little onion fighting injustice and helping his friends.

He also possessed a particularly appropriate superpower. If someone tried to pull his hair, or his scallions, as I learned to call them much later during my culinary adventures, they would immediately regret the decision. They would start crying.

As a child, I mostly saw the adventures. The political message was secondary, although some of it certainly got through. Wealthy characters were generally portrayed as selfish, uncaring, and unwilling to help, while the poor characters were kind, oppressed, and deserving of sympathy.

Only much later did I recognize how much political and class allegory was built into the story.

That realization also affected how I viewed the book as a parent. Although I remembered Cipollino fondly, I chose not to read it to my own children. I wanted them to enjoy stories about friendship, courage, and standing up to bullies, but I was less enthusiastic about teaching them that someone’s wealth or social position tells you what kind of person they are.

The Blue Arrow

Another Rodari story I remember vividly is The Blue Arrow, about a magnificent toy train and railroad set.

As a Soviet boy, of course I dreamed of having toys like that.

In the fairy tale, the Blue Arrow eventually comes to life and makes its way to a poor boy who could never afford such a wonderful toy.

Unfortunately, that poor boy wasn’t me.

I was just another poor boy in the USSR.

Alexei Tolstoy

The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino

Buratino was another trickster from my childhood, and another character I met before I was able to read. My parents read The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino to me, and the idea that an ordinary piece of wood could suddenly become a little boy was both intriguing and enormously entertaining.

Buratino and I also had something in common: neither of us was particularly enthusiastic about going to school.

Given the choice, Buratino would much rather go to the theater. From there, of course, everything becomes considerably more complicated. He makes friends with the actors, gets involved in their struggle against the cruel theater owner Karabas-Barabas, and eventually helps defeat him. The actors are liberated, get their own theater, and live happily ever after.

Looking back, I can certainly see another helping of communist ideology in the story: the oppressive owner is overthrown and the means of production, in this particular case a puppet theater, are transferred to the workers.

None of that particularly concerned me as a child.

What fascinated me was Buratino himself. He wasn’t a perfect little hero who always knew what to do. He was naive and inexperienced, made terrible decisions, trusted people he shouldn’t have trusted, and repeatedly got himself into trouble.

But he learned.

With every mistake, Buratino became a little less naive and a little more street-smart. Eventually he learned enough about the world to recognize the crooks, outwit them, and turn the tables on people who had originally taken advantage of him.

Only much later did I learn that Alexei Tolstoy’s story originated with Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. Interestingly, I have never actually read the original Pinocchio, so I can’t honestly compare the two books.

Perhaps someday I will.

It sounds like a good book to read to my grandchildren.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

While life is serious and often full of tragedy and drama, I also enjoy books that lift the spirits with simple comedy and humor. One of those books is Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), written by Jerome K. Jerome and published in 1889.

Jerome was originally asked to write a travel guide about the River Thames. I can easily imagine another writer producing a long, boring, and absolutely dull book filled with historical references, descriptions of nature and weather, measurements of the river’s current, and average monthly temperatures.

Instead, Jerome wrote something completely different: a fictional account of four friends (one of whom has four legs) traveling along the Thames.

The story constantly wanders into digressions that seem unrelated to the main plot, yet somehow those distractions become the best parts of the book. Thanks to Jerome’s talent, the novel remains a reliable source of laughter and good mood for me.

Even today I can quote entire passages by memory — the famous Irish stew, the legendary cheese with a two-hundred-horsepower scent, and of course Uncle Podger, a character whose name we still use whenever someone tries to fix something and somehow manages to involve every single person in the household.

Perhaps the reason the book still works more than a century later is that the characters feel completely modern. Their laziness, enthusiasm, misplaced confidence, and endless ability to complicate simple tasks are instantly recognizable. Technology changes, but human nature does not. Jerome understood this perfectly — and that is why the book remains funny long after Victorian England has faded into history.

Adventure & Survival

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is another all-time favorite of mine. Written by Daniel Defoe and first published in 1719, the novel tells the story of a man who survives a shipwreck and lives alone on a deserted island for twenty-eight years.

My first impression of the story came from a children’s adaptation. In the Soviet Union, such adaptations usually excluded references to God or religion, so I was later surprised to discover how prominent they are in the original novel.

What mattered to me then — and still does today — is that the story is fundamentally about survival, ingenuity, and hard work. Crusoe slowly builds a life for himself using patience, creativity, and relentless effort.

While the novel has inspired many film adaptations, the modern work that best captures its spirit for me is Cast Away with Tom Hanks. The film reflects something about our own time: a society that is highly goal-oriented, driven by schedules and deadlines, and prone to wasteful habits. In the process, we sometimes forget how to live simply and appreciate the small pleasures of life.

Treasure Island

I first read Treasure Island in early middle school, and for boys of that age growing up in the USSR it was pure magic.

Treasure hunts, old maps, secret clues, hidden islands, mutiny, and buried gold — this was exactly the kind of world that spilled out of books and into real life. My schoolmates, neighborhood boys, and I played treasure-hunting games all the time, drawing maps, inventing secret signs, and hiding “treasures” in courtyards, garages, and nearby woods.

The fascination was never just the pirates themselves. It was the mystery of clues, the thrill of decoding maps, and the idea that adventure might be hiding just beyond the next corner.

A small life lesson came with this book as well. Our librarian once gave me advice that stayed with me forever:

When you go to the shelves, find the book with the most worn-out cover. That’s the one you want to read.

That was how I found some of my favorite books, including this one.

Captain Blood

I came to Captain Blood a little later, in high school. Perhaps it was slightly late for the full pirate-romantic effect, but I still enjoyed it tremendously.

Peter Blood is one of those rare literary heroes who combines courage with intelligence. He begins as a physician, is swept into injustice and exile, and reinvents himself through skill, discipline, and leadership at sea.

At the time I had not yet chosen medicine as a career, but looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the image of a physician navigating chaos, danger, and impossible circumstances left a deeper mark on me than I realized.

Perhaps it did.

The Geography of Bliss

I first learned about this book while watching The Colbert Report, where the author, Eric Weiner, gave a short interview to Stephen Colbert. It was funny. Then I listened to the book, and it turned out to be not only funny but also deeply resonant with my own philosophy of life.

This is another book I keep recommending to friends and family so often that my wife has forbidden me to mention it again. Thank god for this website. Now I can simply refer people here and recommend a book that teaches us to cherish the little things in life and stop chasing expensive cars, watches, and pens.

Science Fiction

Jules Verne

I don’t remember whether I read Jules Verne first or H. G. Wells. Both are often considered the fathers of science fiction. The main difference between them, at least in my mind, is that Jules Verne tended to write about things that eventually did happen.

He imagined the practical invention of the submarine long before it became reality. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo commands the Nautilus, using it both for exploration and for helping oppressed peoples fight for freedom. Verne also wrote about air travel and even journeys to the Moon long before such things became technologically possible.

Herbert G. Wells

And then there is H. G. Wells, who wrote about things that, thankfully, never happened — at least as far as we know.

He imagined alien invasions of Earth, the invention of a time machine, and even human invisibility long before James Bond received his first invisible car.

As a side note: in 1938 Orson Welles produced a famous radio adaptation of
The War of the Worlds.

It was broadcast in the style of breaking news reports describing a Martian invasion. Because of its realism, some listeners believed the events were actually happening, leading to a brief but memorable wave of public panic.

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was born in a Jewish family in what is now the Russian Federation, and his family immigrated to the U.S. when he was a toddler. A first-generation immigrant and lifelong learner, he originally hoped to become a physician but was not accepted into medical school. Instead, he became a biochemistry professor at Boston University — a fortunate turn for literature, as it allowed him the freedom to write prolifically.

While he is best known for his Foundation series, which earned him a Hugo Award, I’m most drawn to I, Robot. There, Asimov not only imagined artificial intelligence but also anticipated its ethical dilemmas. His famous Three Laws of Robotics are still referenced today in discussions about AI ethics and safety.

What I admire most is how his work extends beyond science fiction: in essays and lectures like The Future of Humanity, Asimov addressed overpopulation, gender equity, sustainable technology, and even early concerns about climate instability (which, in the 1970s, included global cooling). He understood that progress isn’t just technological. It has social and ethical sides, too.

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” – Isaac Asimov

Bonus 1: Isaac Asimov’s Vision Of The Future Letterman
Bonus 2: Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future (1978)

Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Lem, like Asimov, was one of the great 20th-century writers of speculative fiction — and also of Jewish descent. Born in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), he studied medicine at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków under pressure from his father. Though he completed the coursework, he refused to take the final diploma, opting instead for an absolutorium. He briefly worked in an obstetrics ward but ultimately abandoned medicine to write full time. We’re lucky he did.

Lem had a relentless imagination and a sharp wit, and both are fully present in his writing. While Solaris remains his best-known work — and one of my favorites — I first encountered Lem through Tales of Pirx the Pilot. That collection follows a young space cadet evolving into a seasoned professional, subtly exploring human nature, decision-making under uncertainty, and repeated confrontations with artificial intelligence.

In The Invincible, Lem dives into swarm intelligence and AI’s capacity for independent evolution, decades before these ideas became widespread. Meanwhile, The Star Diaries of Ijon Tichy offer comical, satirical tales of a self-important space traveler who finds himself bumbling through alien civilizations, highlighting absurdities of both human and extraterrestrial societies.

“Futurology is much more about us than about the future.” – Stanisław Lem

Robert Sheckley

In my opinion, Robert Sheckley is the most American science fiction writer ever. His short stories felt unmistakably foreign when I first read them in middle and high school in the USSR, yet the humor was completely universal. He combined speculative imagination with irony, absurdity, and a deep understanding of how irrational systems can still feel strangely believable.

His stories often begin with a simple futuristic premise and then spiral into social satire, exposing how human greed, bureaucracy, vanity, or blind adherence to rules can make even advanced civilizations behave ridiculously.

One of my favorites is The Tenth Victim, where violence is transformed into an organized social institution. It is clever, darkly funny, and still feels surprisingly modern in an age of entertainment-driven culture.

Another unforgettable story is A Ticket to Tranai, which begins as a search for a perfect utopian society and gradually reveals that every “ideal” system hides absurd trade-offs and unintended consequences. For someone interested in decision-making and systems design, that one is especially delightful.

Another story that deeply resonates with me is Prospector’s Special. It takes place during a gold rush on Venus, where prospectors keep talking about a mysterious luxury drink supposedly ordered by only the luckiest gold finders, yet no one seems to have actually tried it. Intrigued? Go on — it’s a short read.

I also loved his stories about Gregor and Arnold from the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service. The two partners constantly get into trouble thanks to their adventurous spirit, but usually find a way out using mostly street smarts and improvisation. The stories I especially enjoyed were The Laxian Key, The Lifeboat Mutiny, and The Necessary Thing.

Bad Medicine is another Sheckley story that resonates with me on a very personal level. It reminds me of provider bias — those moments when we approach a patient whose symptoms do not neatly fit our prior beliefs, expectations, or diagnostic habits.

What makes Sheckley memorable for me is that beneath the humor there is always something deeper: a reminder that systems are only as rational as the people who build them, and that it is always worth taking a second look at our own coordinates.

Douglas Adams

A long time ago, almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, I had to write a set of workplace instructions for emergency situations—things like bomb threats, major fires, and other truly unpleasant scenarios.

Every single one of those instructions began with:

#1. PLEASE DO NOT PANIC.

At the time, I thought I was being practical. Roughly ten years later, I discovered Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the fictional Guide itself famously begins with the words:

“DON’T PANIC”

written in large, friendly letters.

That alone made me feel an immediate connection.

Adams created a universe where bureaucracy, absurdity, and cosmic indifference are treated with complete seriousness—which somehow makes them even funnier. His writing is deeply sarcastic, but never bitter. He understands that most systems, whether interstellar governments or hospital administration, are held together by improvisation, misplaced confidence, and people pretending they know what they are doing.

This is one reason I tend to believe Adams when, in response to being accused of borrowing ideas from Robert Sheckley, he said he had not actually read Sheckley before writing his own work. There are similarities—especially the satire of bureaucracy and absurd systems—but Adams remains unmistakably British. His humor is drier, quieter, and delivered with the kind of polite calm that makes catastrophe somehow feel civilized.

I highly recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It is best enjoyed with a proper cup of tea.

Classics

Anton Chekhov

Born in 1860 in the port city of Taganrog near the Azov Sea, Anton Chekhov lived a short but profoundly productive life. Like many authors on this list, Chekhov was drawn to medicine and became a physician — a vocation he practiced even as he built one of the greatest literary legacies in modern literature.

Chekhov began writing out of financial necessity during his medical studies. What started as humor pieces in magazines quickly evolved into a new form of storytelling. He mastered the art of the short story, often writing about the “little man”: someone who does not shape history and will never appear in biographies, but still lives, struggles, hopes, and quietly disappears from the world.

Tragically, Chekhov suffered from tuberculosis for much of his adult life and died in 1904 at the age of 44. He once wrote: “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.” But in truth, he honored them both.

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” – Anton Chekhov

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kyiv in 1891. He graduated with honors from the Kyiv University School of Medicine and began practicing as a zemsky doctor — a rural physician responsible for all aspects of care, from surgery to infectious disease to trauma, often with minimal resources and complete isolation.

I first encountered Bulgakov as a paramedic student in Russia, exhausted after a grueling 24-hour shift. It was then that I found A Young Doctor’s Notebook. In its crude medical settings and emotional honesty, I saw my own experience mirrored. The connection was instant and enduring.

And then, of course, there is The Master and Margarita. A novel like no other — surreal, satirical, metaphysical, political, and strangely tender.

“Manuscripts don’t burn.” – Mikhail Bulgakov

Historical Novels

Alexandre Dumas

When I think of dignity and grace, the name Athos comes to mind. For loyalty, it is Porthos. For bold action — D’Artagnan. For an upper echelon’s intrigue with subtle, chess-like moves — Aramis. And when I think of revenge, I think of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Although, personally, I see Monte Cristo less as a story of revenge and more as a story of a man who refuses to surrender, even under extraordinary misfortune. Edmond Dantès loses everything, yet instead of breaking, he uses time, knowledge, patience, and discipline to reinvent himself.

What makes both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo especially interesting is that both were, as we would say today, “inspired by real events.”

The Three Musketeers was based on a semi-fictional work by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras called Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan, published almost thirty years after the death of the real d’Artagnan.

Courtilz himself was imprisoned in the Bastille several times, where he met Besmaux, a former companion of d’Artagnan. There he heard stories of the famous musketeer’s adventures — some real, some likely invented simply to pass the time in a prison cell.

The memoirs were published with little initial attention, until Alexandre Dumas discovered them and transformed them into literature. He presented them almost as historical accounts, though he certainly “improved” them. How much improvement was truly necessary is hard to say, because d’Artagnan himself was a very real historical figure with a life already full of adventure.

What Dumas unquestionably added was the emotional architecture: tragic romance, unforgettable dialogues, vivid sword fights, and the rhythm of a great adventure novel that made the story irresistible to 19th-century readers.

The real d’Artagnan served not only as a musketeer but also in intelligence work for Cardinal Mazarin. Later, he helped reorganize the restored Musketeers Regiment, eventually serving as captain-lieutenant. He died in battle during the Siege of Maastricht in 1673, struck in the throat by a musket shot.

Interestingly, in March 2026, reports emerged that remains believed to be his may have been found beneath the altar of Saint Peter and Paul Church in Wolder, with DNA testing currently underway.

The Count of Monte Cristo also has roots in historical material — this time from a criminal archive.

The original story came from a case recorded by Jacques Peuchet, a French police archivist, who published it in the early 19th century. It concerned a shoemaker named Pierre Picaud, who was falsely imprisoned after being betrayed by friends motivated by jealousy and greed. After his release, he sought revenge and, yes, even in the original archive, there was a hidden treasure.

But like many archives, it was full of tedious details and lacking literary life.

Once again, Dumas took the raw material, removed the distractions, elevated the social world (because not too many people wanted to read about a shoemaker), added romance, sharpened the dialogue, and constructed the twists and dramatic turns that converted it into a masterpiece.

And here comes the final irony: modern historians suspect that Pierre Picaud himself may also have been fictional.

It seems that working as a police archivist can stimulate the imagination — but it still takes a writer like Dumas to turn records into a legend.

“All for one and one for all.” – The Three Musketeers

Voices of History

Daily life in Pompeii. The ordinary and the mundane are part of history too.

History is usually written from above. We learn about leaders, governments, wars, revolutions, treaties, victories, and defeats.

Some of the books that stayed with me the longest approach history from the other direction. They preserve the voices and experiences of people who lived through enormous historical events and tell us not only what happened, but what it felt like to be there.

I encountered the same idea in a somewhat different form in two Great Courses — Robert Garland’s The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World and Steven L. Tuck’s Pompeii: Daily Life in an Ancient Roman City. Both, incidentally, accompanied me while running on a treadmill. Apparently, this has become one of my preferred environments for continuing education.

Garland deliberately shifts attention away from kings and battles toward the anonymous people who made up most of the ancient world. Tuck does something similar with Pompeii, using the extraordinary preservation of the city to reconstruct the very ordinary business of Roman urban life.

The sources and methods are very different from the books below, but the question is much the same: what did history look like to the people who actually had to live through it?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago

I first encountered Solzhenitsyn almost accidentally.

Sometime in high school, while doing homework and looking through our home library for a reference, I came across a dark-brown book with no title on the handmade cover. It was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The story had originally appeared in a Soviet literary magazine during the Khrushchev Thaw, but by the time I found that little book, Solzhenitsyn was certainly not an author we were studying at school.

I read it over the next couple of days.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The cover uses a photograph of Solzhenitsyn himself in prison clothing.

What frightened me was not gruesome detail. There was remarkably little of that. It was how mundane everything had become. Shukhov was cold. He was hungry. He worked. He tried to get a little more food, avoid unnecessary trouble, preserve small advantages, and make it through the day.

And that was the point. It was a mundane, ordinary, boring day.

It was just one day in his life.

Cancer Ward: who wants to know?

I no longer remember exactly when or where I first read Cancer Ward. Probably during my first year after immigration. By then I was a foreign-trained medical professional, trying to find my footing in the USA. This is one of those cases where I remember the book considerably better than the circumstances in which I read it.

Cancer ward, Tashkent, 1954. Solzhenitsyn was treated for cancer in Tashkent that year; the experience became an important autobiographical foundation for Cancer Ward.

There is a substantial autobiographical component to the novel. While Solzhenitsyn was still a prisoner, a tumor was surgically removed. He was not told whether it was malignant. After his release into exile, his illness returned or progressed, and by the end of 1953 he was seriously ill. He was eventually allowed to travel to an oncology clinic in Tashkent, where he underwent treatment in 1954.

That makes the question of knowing one’s diagnosis in the novel particularly interesting. Solzhenitsyn had experienced that uncertainty himself — not merely as a literary problem, but as a patient.

What stayed with me from Cancer Ward was not so much cancer itself as the different ways people respond when confronted with the possibility of dying.

Some are frightened. Some are in denial. Some want to know everything. Some confront the diagnosis head-on. And some would rather not know.

Dr. Lyudmila Afanasyevna Dontsova makes this particularly interesting. She is the head of the radiology department and has spent her professional life on the physician’s side of the relationship: examining patients, interpreting their disease, deciding what needs to be done. When she herself becomes ill, that relationship suddenly reverses.

She finds herself on the other side of the white coat.

And she discovers that she does not necessarily want to know.

She retreats into what I think of as “patient mode.” Someone else can investigate. Someone else can interpret. Someone else can carry at least some of the frightening knowledge.

Kostoglotov is different. By then life has given him considerable practice meeting misfortune head-on. He wants to know what he is facing.

That dilemma had a particular meaning in the medicine I was taught as a student in Russia. We were taught that not telling a patient about a terminal diagnosis, particularly cancer, could be the humane thing to do. The physician might know. The family might know. But why burden a dying patient with knowledge that could produce despair without changing the outcome?

Looking backward, it would be very easy to describe this simply as Soviet medical paternalism and contrast it with modern ideas of patient autonomy.

I think that would be too easy.

What does it mean to do good?

Medical ethics changes, and even the philosophical meaning of beneficence — doing what is best for the patient — has never been entirely fixed.

The Hippocratic Oath famously contains the promise, in one common English translation:

“I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will leave this to those who practice this work.”

This did not mean that surgery was unknown to ancient Greek and Roman medicine. Ancient physicians treated wounds and fractures and even performed operations on the skull. The passage is usually understood as referring to lithotomy for urinary stones, a particularly dangerous procedure that may have been left to specialists.

The larger point, however, is that what constituted responsible medical care, acceptable risk, and proper professional behavior has changed repeatedly.

The same is true much closer to our own time. Physician paternalism was hardly unique to Soviet medicine. It remained an important current in twentieth-century medicine in many countries. A physician could sincerely regard withholding a devastating diagnosis as an act of compassion rather than a violation of the patient’s rights.

One of my favorite surgical examination textbooks from my student years provides an interesting snapshot of that changing ethical landscape. It was a Russian translation of a German surgical text published in 1991.

Much of its advice sounds surprisingly modern. The physician is told to consider the patient’s occupation, functional needs, family circumstances, social situation, and personal priorities when choosing treatment.

For a manual worker with an injured hand, preservation of physical strength may take precedence even if treatment results in the loss of a finger phalanx, while for another patient the cosmetic result may be more important. The book recognizes that a patient may rationally prefer faster treatment with some residual disability to a prolonged series of operations aimed at the best possible anatomical result.

It even says that, after receiving an explanation, the patient has the right to choose among the available possibilities.

And then, only a few paragraphs away, the ethical vocabulary changes dramatically.

The authors consider a solitary “vagrant” with a difficult but still potentially operable tumor and argue that accepting greater operative risk may be justified because otherwise:

“…he will become an even greater burden on society.”

The discussion then contrasts this with patients whose professional, social, or creative obligations make their continued contribution particularly valuable. In such cases, a risky operation might be divided into two stages, allowing the patient time to complete important work or make a further contribution to culture or society before undergoing the second procedure.

What strikes me now is not simply that some of this sounds disturbing. It is that ideas that now seem ethically very different can coexist on the same pages: attention to the individual patient’s preferences on one hand, and an explicit calculation of the patient’s relationship and usefulness to society on the other.

I don’t remember finding this particularly shocking when I was a student.

That may be the most interesting part.

Ethical change rarely consists of one coherent moral system disappearing one day and another replacing it the next. Ideas overlap. Definitions of humane treatment change. Things that appear obviously benevolent to one generation may look paternalistic to another.

That is why I find Dontsova more interesting now than I probably did when I first read Cancer Ward. The question is not simply whether the physician should tell the patient the truth.

The harder question is: what does beneficence mean when different patients want different relationships with frightening knowledge?

The Gulag Archipelago: inside the machinery

During my first year after immigrating to the United States, I read The Gulag Archipelago in the San Jose Public Library.

There was a lot of catching up to do in those years.

Libraries had always been places where I could find some peace of mind in Leningrad, and the public library in California became the same kind of place in a very different life.

A Spanish edition of The Gulag Archipelago. I rather like seeing Solzhenitsyn in translation: books that were difficult or impossible to obtain openly in the Soviet Union eventually appeared in languages all over the world.

The Gulag Archipelago was much larger than the story of one prisoner. Solzhenitsyn called it an “experiment in literary investigation” — опыт художественного исследования. He would describe a mechanism of the system — arrest, interrogation, sentencing, transportation, camp life — and then populate it with individual human stories. Some were his own; many came from other prisoners.

Oddly, after all these years, what stayed with me most were not descriptions of spectacular cruelty.

Again, it was how mundane the machinery could become — and how ordinary people behaved inside it.

“You are under arrest!”

Solzhenitsyn’s own arrest is almost theatrical.

It was February 1945. He was an artillery officer at the front, with the war only months from ending.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a young artillery officer during the Second World War.

His brigade commander called him to the command post and, for some reason, asked for his pistol. Solzhenitsyn handed it over without suspicion.

Then two counterintelligence officers rushed across the room, grabbing simultaneously for the star on his cap, his epaulettes, his belt, and his field bag:

“Вы — арестованы!!”
“You are under arrest!!”

And the decorated officer, suddenly transformed into a prisoner, could think of nothing more intelligent to say than:

“Я? За что?!..”
“Me? What for?..”

What followed is one of the small scenes I remembered particularly well.

His brigade commander, Zakhar Travkin, called him back. Against the protests of the counterintelligence officers, he asked whether Solzhenitsyn had a friend on the First Ukrainian Front.

That was enough.

Solzhenitsyn immediately understood that his correspondence with his school friend was behind the arrest.

Then Travkin stood up.

Solzhenitsyn makes a point of remembering that his commander had never stood to greet him before. Travkin reached across what Solzhenitsyn called the чумная черта — the “plague line,” the invisible boundary that suddenly separated an arrested man from everyone around him — and offered his hand.

He had never shaken Solzhenitsyn’s hand when he was free.

Now he did.

“Желаю вам — счастья — капитан!”
“I wish you happiness, Captain!”

The word “Captain” mattered. A few moments earlier the symbols of that rank had been torn from Solzhenitsyn’s uniform. In the logic of the system, he had already become an exposed enemy.

Travkin nevertheless addressed him as the officer he had known.

It was a tiny gesture. It changed nothing about the arrest.

Which is perhaps why it mattered so much.

The gold dust from the epaulettes

I remembered another episode for years as something about the gold dust from the epaulettes — how it penetrates deep inside, all the way to the heart and mind, and gradually changes the personality.

Solzhenitsyn himself used a rather different metaphor:

“Нарастает гордость на сердце, как сало на свинье.”
“Pride grows upon the heart like fat on a pig.”

Apparently, the gold dust was my own metaphor. But I still like it.

The day after his arrest, Solzhenitsyn was placed in a column of prisoners. Six were Soviet soldiers who had been German POWs and were now themselves being sent into Soviet custody. The seventh was a German civilian.

A sergeant pointed to Solzhenitsyn’s suitcase and told him to carry it.

His reaction was immediate:

“Я — офицер. Пусть несет немец.”
“I am an officer. Let the German carry it.”

And the German was made to carry it.

Only a day had passed since Solzhenitsyn’s epaulettes had been ripped from his shoulders, yet something of them remained inside him.

Looking backward, Solzhenitsyn is remarkably unsparing about what becoming an officer had done to him. He remembers older enlisted men standing at attention while he sat, his separate officer’s food, the orderly who attended to him, soldiers building him better dugouts, and his growing assumption that he belonged to a higher category of people.

“Вот что с человеком делают погоны.”
“That’s what epaulettes do to a person.”

The epaulettes were gone.

Their gold dust was harder to remove.

Five years — thank you!

Another story that stayed with me was that of Vera Korneeva.

She expected a sentence of fifteen years. Instead, when the paper was read to her, it said five.

She laughed and hurried to sign before somebody could take it away:

“Да, да, большое спасибо! Пять лет исправительно-трудовых лагерей!”
“Yes, yes, thank you very much! Five years in corrective-labor camps!”

Five years in a labor camp had become good news.

For years I remembered the scene with my own explanation: perhaps somebody preparing the document had accidentally written five instead of fifteen, noticed the mistake, and simply decided not to correct it.

Rereading the surrounding pages now, I discovered something I had overlooked.

Earlier, Korneeva had been left in a large office to examine documents concerning the seventeen members of her alleged “religious group.” She began talking to the employees there — typists, stenographers, file clerks — and somehow the conversation turned into an impromptu religious sermon.

People came from other rooms to listen.

When her investigator Goldman returned and tried to stop her, his own colleagues shouted:

“Да заткнись ты!.. Да замолчи!.. Говори, говори, женщина!”
“Oh, shut up!.. Be quiet!.. Speak, speak, woman!”

Did one of those people later have something to do with the unexpectedly short sentence?

Solzhenitsyn does not tell us. Perhaps there was no connection at all.

But now I cannot read the two episodes without wondering.

Even inside the machinery there were still people.

“Kolya is a very good worker”

Sometimes the same mundane quality appeared from the other side.

Solzhenitsyn recalls the wife of an investigator named Nikolai Grabishchenko proudly telling the neighbors:

“Коля — очень хороший работник. Один долго не сознавался — поручили его Коле. Коля с ним ночь поговорил — и тот сознался.”

“Kolya is a very good worker. One man wouldn’t confess for a long time, so they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night — and he confessed.”

“Kolya is a very good worker.”

Nothing gruesome needs to be described.

Someone would not confess. They gave him to Kolya. Kolya “talked with him for one night,” and by morning the problem was solved.

It sounds almost like a wife proudly explaining that her husband is an unusually competent mechanic.

What would I have become?

Perhaps the part of The Gulag Archipelago that interests me most now is Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to divide everyone neatly into good people and monsters.

At one point he asks himself an uncomfortable question:

“а повернись моя жизнь иначе — палачом таким не стал бы и я?”
“If my life had turned out differently — might I not have become an executioner like that myself?”

As a university student he had once been encouraged to enter an NKVD school. He refused, but looking backward he does not congratulate himself too much for that decision.

Instead, he remembers discovering during his military training what he calls:

“РАДОСТЬ ОПРОЩЕНИЯ”
“the joy of simplification”

— the attraction of becoming a military man and no longer having to think about everything for himself.

And then he remembers Lieutenant Ovsyannikov.

During the war there had been almost nobody closer to him. They ate from the same pot, sometimes under artillery fire. Solzhenitsyn remembers him as a young man with an unusually clean soul and an unprejudiced way of looking at the world. As an officer, Ovsyannikov used his authority mainly to preserve the lives and strength of his soldiers.

After Solzhenitsyn was arrested, Ovsyannikov wrote a favorable combat reference for him. Even in 1947, he was still trying through Solzhenitsyn’s family to find some way to help.

After his rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn tried to find his old friend.

Eventually he learned what had happened:

“направлен на работу в органы госбезопасности.”
“Assigned to work in the state security agencies.”

Ovsyannikov had become an investigator.

When Solzhenitsyn finally managed to establish contact, the explanation was almost painfully mundane. After finishing his studies, Ovsyannikov had been offered the job and thought he could be successful there too. Some things bothered him, he said, but he worked без палки — “without the stick,” without coercion — and tried not to let his comrades down.

Solzhenitsyn immediately recognized the new moral vocabulary:

“Вот и оправдание — товарищество!”
“And there is the justification — comradeship!”

Yet even then he could not simply erase the young man he had once known. Remembering that родникового самоотверженного парня — that selfless young man, as clear as spring water — he wondered whether everything inside him could really have disappeared.

That question bothers me too, although for a different reason.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Russia.

There is obviously no answer.

It is tempting to imagine that the person I am now would simply have continued being the same person under different circumstances. But that assumes that decades spent inside different institutions, surrounded by different people, professional norms, information, incentives, compromises, and choices would have changed nothing.

Solzhenitsyn does not allow himself that comforting assumption.

He looks at Ovsyannikov and wonders how a compassionate young officer became an investigator. Then he looks at himself and remembers how quickly military rank had already begun changing him.

The frightening question is therefore not simply how terrible systems find terrible people.

It is what systems — slowly, routinely, sometimes almost imperceptibly — can make of the rest of us.

The Gulag Archipelago is not the book I remember because it provided the most horrifying stories about Soviet repression.

What stayed with me were smaller moments: a commander crossing an invisible line to shake an arrested man’s hand; an arrested officer still expecting someone beneath him to carry his suitcase; a woman delighted to receive only five years in a labor camp; office workers unexpectedly telling an investigator to shut up and let his prisoner speak; a wife proudly describing her husband’s effectiveness at extracting confessions; and a decent young officer who, somewhere along another road, became an investigator himself.

Perhaps that is why Solzhenitsyn belongs here, among the Voices of History.

History in these books is not only what governments and armies did.

It is what happened to people while they were living inside it.

Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich writes history from the opposite direction.

She collects the voices of ordinary people who lived through enormous historical events and allows them to tell us not only what happened, but what it felt like to be there.

The Unwomanly Face of War

Growing up in the Soviet Union gave me a very particular picture of the Great Patriotic War.

It was a world of extraordinary heroism and sacrifice. There was Alexei Maresyev, the fighter pilot who lost both feet but returned to flying. There was Alexander Matrosov, who sacrificed himself attacking a German machine-gun position. There were Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Zina Portnova, Lenya Golikov, and many others.

They fought and died for our Motherland, our freedom, and, as we were constantly reminded, our happy lives.

Then I read The Unwomanly Face of War.

This was still the same war, but it was almost unrecognizable.

Alexievich lets Soviet women who actually fought in the war remember things that rarely fit into heroic narratives. One young woman desperately wanted a wedding dress and collected dressing material from German soldiers’ first-aid kits. A sniper remembered killing a stray horse with a foal because the soldiers needed food, and then feeling immediate remorse. A former machine-gunner could not stand the sight of raw meat after the war.

Many remembered nightmares that continued long after the shooting stopped.

These were not stories about monuments. They were stories about human beings.

I found the book extraordinarily heavy, but also extraordinarily important. It did not necessarily take heroism away from the war. It restored something that the heroic version had largely removed: fear, exhaustion, grief, guilt, ordinary desires, and the psychological price paid by the people who survived.

Voices from Chernobyl

This book was frightening in a different way because I remember Chernobyl.

In April 1986, I was finishing middle school and was also taking a canine-training course through DOSAAF. I had to travel to another part of the city for my final exam, and I remember calling home afterward, quite pleased that I had aced it. My stepmother told me to hurry home because there had been some kind of nuclear incident in Ukraine. We suspected that Soviet radio was unlikely to tell us very much about it.

At school, our teacher of basic military preparation, a retired Army major, walked around the schoolyard carrying a Geiger counter and checking sewer covers for radiation.

At the time, none of us really understood what was happening.

That summer, I went with my father to a children’s summer camp, where he worked as the pediatrician and I was simply taken along. Some of the children there had come from the Chernobyl area. Their heads had been shaved, and other children were afraid to play with them because none of us really understood radiation or whether these children somehow represented a danger.

So they mostly played together, joined by a small group of bolder children who weren’t afraid of them.

I remember that.

Years later, Voices from Chernobyl brought me back to that period, but through the experiences of people who had been much closer to the disaster and paid a far greater price for it. Once again, Alexievich turns an enormous historical event into individual human voices: frightened, confused, grieving, and trying to understand something for which ordinary life had given them no preparation.

When I later watched HBO’s Chernobyl, much of its emotional world felt familiar from Alexievich’s book.

Secondhand Time

Secondhand Time was different from the other two books because this time Alexievich was writing about history that I had actually watched happen.

I don’t need a history book to tell me where I was when the Soviet Union began to fall apart. I was there.

On the morning of August 19, 1991, I woke up at six.

I usually left my radio on overnight because it came back to life at six every morning and served as my alarm clock. It would begin with the news, followed by some music and occasionally a short story.

That morning I drifted in and out of light sleep while a long speech played on the radio. It was something about Soviet citizens being undervalued abroad and how we needed to restore the respect that was rightfully ours.

Eventually the speech ended and classical music began.

I got up, made myself a cup of tea, two eggs sunny-side up, and an open-faced cheese sandwich. I remember thinking that they really should stop broadcasting science fiction and dystopian literature at six in the morning because it messes with people’s heads.

Then, just as I sat down and took my first bite, the radio started broadcasting the same nonsense again.

That was when I realized this was no fiction.

This was the shitstorm I had been afraid of, and it had started, as usual, a little too soon.

I had decided about a year earlier that I was going to leave the Soviet Union. I already had my exit passport, and my interview at the American Embassy in Moscow was scheduled for one week later.

Several thoughts went through my head very quickly.

If this was serious, I was probably screwed.

If it wasn’t quite that serious yet, I might still have time to grab my things and cross the border into Estonia, which had already declared its independence. From there, perhaps I could make my way west and find another American embassy.

I could think about that while I worked.

So I put on my lab coat, grabbed my stethoscope, and went to work.

I was working that day on a pediatric ambulance team on Vasilievsky Island in Leningrad. When I arrived at the station, the mood was somewhere between deeply depressed and angry.

“Did you guys hear what happened?” I asked.

One of my coworkers looked at me.

“Yeah. You can say goodbye to your dreams of immigration, Misha.”

“Not so fast,” I said.

And we went to our ambulances.

For the first four hours, from eight in the morning until noon, there were essentially no emergency calls.

We smoked. We swore. We drank tea. We watched Swan Lake.

The pediatrician I was working with sat writing letters, one after another, licking envelopes and stamps.

I sat over another cup of tea and calmly worked on my own contingency plan.

Rubber boots would be useful. I would need a set of unremarkable clothes suitable for someone supposedly going mushroom picking. I needed to figure out the buses toward Estonia.

Would I need a rubber boat?

We had one at our cabin, but getting it would require a trip there and back. That seemed inconvenient.

Then, around noon, the calls started.

There was suddenly a barrage of “chest pain” calls. Our pediatric team was initially held back because we were a specialty ambulance, but eventually dispatch sent us to something completely different: a fall from height at a light-rail depot.

Apparently, a man had decided to demonstrate his loyalty to the new political leadership by cleaning a portrait of Lenin. He fell and, from the description, probably broke several ribs.

By the time we arrived, however, our new hero had escaped through the back door.

Someone had convinced him that the ambulance might actually be the KGB coming for him.

We had a few more routine calls during the day. Our last patient was a young man who had jumped from a bridge into the Neva River, then swam to shore. The police transferred him to us. Physically he seemed fine, although mentally he was badly shaken, so we took him to the nearest hospital to be evaluated.

That evening we returned to our station, which was located on the grounds of a large hospital.

Normally I listened to music on Europa Plus, a relatively new radio station at the time. That evening nobody wanted music. We wanted news.

The official stations kept repeating the GKChP statements. At the same time, new and unofficial radio stations seemed to appear everywhere, broadcasting information from the opposition.

Around nine or ten that evening, the ЛКС, the Linear Control Service, showed up.

Normally, seeing them was not good news. Their job was to inspect us, and they could almost always find something that would make you regret their visit.

This time they brought Xeroxed opposition leaflets.

They also told us that EMS was preparing for the possibility of mass casualties if there was unrest or an attempt to take control of Leningrad. Ambulances might be reassigned, and crews might be kept at stations or hospitals to sleep between calls so that everyone would be immediately available.

The next morning we returned to our home station and exchanged stories.

One of our ambulances had been called to Palace Square, where a huge spontaneous demonstration against the GKChP had gathered. The stated reason for the call was “chest pain.”

When the ambulance arrived, however, some people in the crowd apparently decided that it contained KGB agents.

They surrounded the ambulance and began rocking it.

Fortunately, nobody had a Molotov cocktail handy.

The following day I was off. I spent much of it intermittently eating, sleeping, and watching television.

Something was changing on television too. Local news increasingly began carrying the opposition’s side of the story.

One channel showed the official GKChP press conference.

Two things stayed with me.

One was Gennady Yanayev’s visibly shaking hands.

The other was a young female journalist who openly laughed at the answers being given by the men who had just announced that they were running the Soviet Union.

Her name was Tatyana Malkina. She was only twenty-four.

Tatiana Malkina at the GKChP press conference, Moscow, August 19, 1991.

She asked them directly whether they understood that what they had just done was a coup d’état.

To me, that question and her defiant laughter changed the tone of the entire press conference. These men were supposed to be frightening. Suddenly they did not look quite so frightening.

There was also the extraordinary image from Moscow of Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank outside the Russian White House.

The next morning I went back to work.

The mood had completely changed. It was elevated, optimistic, almost triumphant.

We won.

Five days later, on August 26, I traveled to Moscow for my interview at the American Embassy.

When I arrived, the embassy was still surrounded by concrete barriers. Inside, however, the staff were pleasant and welcoming, smiling what I would later learn to recognize as that very particular American smile.

My Soviet Union ended that way: not as a chapter in a history book, but with two eggs sunny-side up, an open-faced cheese sandwich, Swan Lake, cigarettes and tea at an ambulance station, Xeroxed opposition leaflets, a man falling while cleaning Lenin’s portrait, an ambulance being mistaken for the KGB, and my own very practical calculations about whether I might need rubber boots and a rubber boat to escape across the Estonian border.

Many years later, Secondhand Time made me realize that this was only my version of the collapse.

My memories of those years in Leningrad and, soon afterward, Saint Petersburg are of fear, uncertainty, absurdity, enormous change, and ultimately escape. Compared with what happened elsewhere in the collapsing Soviet Union, however, my experience was relatively peaceful.

Alexievich gave me other people’s versions.

For many people, the collapse brought not simply political change and economic uncertainty, but the eruption of national, ethnic, and historical conflicts that had been suppressed rather than resolved. There was violence, displacement, loss, and death. Others experienced the disappearance of the Soviet Union as the loss of the country and identity around which they had constructed their entire lives.

Reading Secondhand Time reminded me how dangerous it is to mistake our personal experience of history for history itself.

Artem Drabkin

I read a lot of Artem Drabkin’s books while I was going through graduate school.

Perhaps this was my way of evoking the stoic in myself. Whatever difficulties I was having with classes, research, deadlines, and life in general seemed considerably more manageable after spending an evening reading about people who had survived a war.

But I was also fascinated by Drabkin’s methodology.

His books grew largely out of interviews with veterans, often organized around a particular military specialty or experience: tank crews, reconnaissance troops, penal units, infantrymen, German soldiers on the Eastern Front, prisoners of war, and others.

The approach felt remarkably familiar to me as a researcher. It was essentially a collection of semi-structured interviews. Ask people a similar set of questions, let them tell their stories, follow interesting threads when they appear, and occasionally comment when a particular theme or experience deserves attention.

I liked that enormously.

I read so many of these books that I can no longer reliably tell which particular volume contained which story. In my memory they have merged into what they probably should be: a collection of individual voices.

And those voices rarely produced a clean picture of war.

There was courage and fear, cruelty and kindness, love and laughter, hunger and lice. There were people surviving penal companies, reconnaissance missions, tank battles, captivity, and air attacks on trucks. There were Soviet soldiers and German soldiers, officers and enlisted men, prisoners and guards.

Some stories have stayed with me for years.

One was about a young Soviet lieutenant during a retreat. His platoon was exhausted, and he allowed his men a little extra time to rest and catch their breath. As a result, they arrived a few minutes late at the rendezvous.

A political officer decided to make an example of him.

As I remember the account, the young lieutenant kept saying:

“I am a good man.”

He was shot in the head.

Another story involved a Soviet tank with an engine failure. The tank had been left behind with its crew and commander while they tried to get it running again. A passing officer gave the commander fifteen minutes to move the disabled tank off the road.

The commander couldn’t accomplish the impossible order in time.

The officer shot him.

That story, however, had a rather different ending. One of the surviving crewmen apparently decided to restore justice using the means immediately available to a tank crew. He loaded a fragmentation round and fired it toward the departing officer’s vehicle.

Other stories crossed the front line in unexpected ways.

I remember a German veteran describing how he concealed his identity as a former soldier while in a filtration camp. He was particularly afraid of taking a communal shower because his battle wounds might reveal that he had actually fought.

Eventually he thought nobody was watching and took the chance.

A Soviet soldier saw his scars.

“You’ve been in battle,” he said.

Then he pulled out a bottle of vodka.

“We should drink.”

I loved that story.

The two men had fought on opposite sides of an extraordinarily brutal war, but the scars created a peculiar kind of recognition. Whatever else separated them, one soldier understood what those scars meant on another soldier’s body. Military service, proven quite literally by wounds, was something the former enemy could recognize and respect.

There was another account of a young German who had been enlisted into the Waffen-SS in a supporting role and later found himself in Soviet captivity. He was badly mistreated. Other German prisoners stood up for him, trying to explain that despite the uniform and the organization into which he had been enlisted, he had hardly even been a soldier when he was captured.

That was uncomfortable to read because I had grown up with a very reassuring version of German captivity in the Soviet Union.

We were the humane ones.

We did not shoot prisoners. We did not mistreat them. We fed them properly.

At least that was the story I had been taught.

The individual accounts were considerably less reassuring.

And yet even captivity did not produce a simple story of cruelty.

I remember an account told by a German soldier who had been a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. His Soviet guards offered the prisoners a rather unusual bargain: they could finish work fifteen minutes early if they sang their German military songs, including SS songs, while marching back to the barracks.

Apparently, the guards enjoyed listening to them.

I found this arrangement fascinating. The prisoners gained fifteen minutes of rest, while the guards got an impromptu performance of the very military songs associated with their former enemies. For a little while, the relationship between prisoners and guards became something other than a simple exercise of authority.

That story immediately reminded me of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Even inside a brutal system, prisoners and guards could develop peculiar informal arrangements that made daily life a little more tolerable.

But perhaps one of the stories that affected me most had very little to do with fighting.

A young man was engaged before being sent to war. The war lasted much longer than anyone expected. He was captured and remained away for years, spending altogether about a decade abroad.

Eventually his fiancée gave up waiting and married someone else.

When he finally returned, he married someone else too.

But none of the four were really happy.

Eventually the original couple found their way back to each other. They reunited and lived together for a few years.

Then she died.

There are no tanks or heroic charges in that story. Nobody is killed in battle. Yet the war reaches forward for years and rearranges four people’s lives.

Wars destroy far more lives than those of the soldiers they kill.

Perhaps that was the most important thing I took from all these interviews.

The history I grew up with tended to put people into very clear categories: ours and theirs, heroes and cowards, liberators and occupiers, victims and perpetrators.

The people in these interviews stubbornly refused to stay inside those categories.

A Soviet political officer could execute a Soviet lieutenant for giving exhausted soldiers a few extra minutes of rest. A tank commander could be shot because a broken engine could not be repaired quickly enough. A German prisoner could expect his battle scars to expose him and instead find himself sharing vodka with a Soviet soldier who recognized those same scars as evidence that they had both been through something few other people could understand.

Prisoners could be abused by their guards, protected by fellow prisoners, or strike an unusual bargain with their guards: a shorter workday in exchange for singing their wartime songs on the march back to the barracks.

And people who survived the battlefield could discover that the war had nevertheless taken years of their lives and changed everything waiting for them at home.

I don’t know how accurately I remember every detail of these stories, or even which books contained them. That is one of the limitations of memory and, appropriately enough, one of the limitations of oral history itself.

But I remember what the collection did to my understanding of war.

Some of the Books I Read

  • На войне как на войне (War Is War)
  • Я ходил за линию фронта. Откровения войсковых разведчиков (Behind Enemy Lines: Revelations of Frontline Reconnaissance Soldiers)
  • Я дрался в штрафбате. «Искупить кровью!» (I Fought in a Penal Battalion: “Atone with Blood!”)
  • Я дрался на Т-34 (I Fought in a T-34)
  • Окопная правда Вермахта. Война глазами противника (The Wehrmacht’s Trench-Level Truth: War Through the Enemy’s Eyes)

I suspect part of the reason I kept returning to these books during graduate school was very simple.

They reminded me that human beings can adapt to almost anything.

That was a useful lesson when a dissertation was the worst thing happening to me.

War and Human Civilization

The Alexander Mosaic depicting Alexander the Great confronting Darius III

The Alexander Mosaic, depicting Alexander the Great confronting Darius III, traditionally associated with the Battle of Issus (333 BCE). Discovered in Pompeii and now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

Unfortunately, much of human history is a history of war. We have fought wars repeatedly, in virtually every civilization we have created, and have become remarkably inventive in finding new reasons and increasingly sophisticated ways to fight them.

War has left its mark on almost every form of human expression: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion, and even interior design. We commemorate victories with monuments, name streets after generals, preserve battlefields, and tell stories about soldiers long after the wars themselves have ended.

War has also been a powerful, if extraordinarily costly, driver of technological change. Military demands have accelerated developments in medicine, transportation, aviation, communications, and countless other fields. Antibiotics, for example, existed before the Second World War, but wartime demands helped accelerate the development of methods for producing penicillin on an industrial scale.

Yet I find it difficult to regard these achievements as compensation for the lives lost, the suffering inflicted, and the destruction left behind. Whatever technological or economic benefits a war may produce, I suspect humanity would be considerably better off finding less destructive ways to achieve them.

Nevertheless, war has also stimulated some of our most important literature, philosophy, and thinking about human behavior. It has given us extraordinary accounts of courage, survival, friendship, cruelty, incompetence, and absurdity. It has also contributed to the development of strategy and decision science, forcing people to confront questions about uncertainty, incomplete information, risk, deception, logistics, and the consequences of their decisions.

Perhaps that is why I have read so many books about war, despite having very little enthusiasm for war itself.

This section brings together military history, memoirs, novels, satire, and books about strategy. Some describe how wars were planned and fought. Others examine what happened to the people who fought them, the civilians caught in their path, and the societies that had to live with their consequences.

And since we have been thinking about warfare for several thousand years, I might as well begin with one of the earliest and most influential attempts to understand it: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Sun Tzu — The Art of War

The Art of War written on traditional Chinese bamboo slips

The Art of War, presented in the traditional Chinese bamboo-slip format.

The Art of War is a literary monument approximately 2,500 years old, traditionally attributed to Sun Tzu, a Chinese general who supposedly served King Helü of Wu.

According to legend, the king decided to test Sun Tzu’s military expertise by giving him a seemingly impossible assignment: transform the women of the royal harem into a disciplined military unit.

Sun Tzu divided them into two companies and appointed the king’s two favorite concubines as their commanders. When he issued his first orders, the women burst into laughter. Sun Tzu accepted responsibility for the failure, explaining that when orders are unclear, the fault lies with the general.

He explained the commands again.

When the women continued laughing, he announced that clearly explained orders that were not obeyed were the responsibility of the officers. Despite the king’s objections, he ordered the execution of the two concubines.

The remaining women apparently became remarkably disciplined.

It is a rather brutal story about leadership, responsibility, and the limits of royal authority. There is also an entertaining History Channel documentary about Sun Tzu and his famous treatise.

The Art of War — History Channel documentary. Access may depend on your institution’s subscription.

Open the documentary

The historical reality is probably a little less poetic.

The legend was recorded centuries after Sun Tzu supposedly lived, and historians continue to debate whether he was a historical individual, whether he wrote the original treatise, and how much of the surviving text was contributed or edited by subsequent generations of military thinkers.

I rather like the possibility that The Art of War represents collective wisdom accumulated by military practitioners over generations. Whether its thirteen chapters originated with one extraordinary strategist or developed within a broader tradition, they have survived for an astonishing length of time.

Today, the book is read far beyond military academies. Its ideas appear in business education, philosophy, leadership, and discussions of decision-making. And it remains a remarkably interesting book in its own right.

What particularly appeals to me is that Sun Tzu treats war as something much more complicated than a contest of military strength. Information, deception, preparation, logistics, terrain, leadership, and the ability to understand an opponent all matter. Sometimes the greatest achievement is to accomplish an objective without fighting at all.

Burning the Boats

One of my favorite passages from The Art of War is from Chapter 11, The Nine Situations:

He burns his boats and breaks his cooking-pots; like a shepherd driving a flock of sheep, he drives his men this way and that, and nothing knows whither he is going.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 11, translated by Lionel Giles

I have often shared this passage with people contemplating immigration or another major change in their lives.

At first glance, it might seem to contradict Sun Tzu’s emphasis on careful preparation and calculation. But there is a difference between recklessness and making a deliberate commitment after considering your options.

Some undertakings require more than a good plan. They require accepting that the comfortable option of returning to your old life may no longer be available.

Of course, there is an important distinction between a general burning his soldiers’ boats and an individual voluntarily making that decision for themselves. I have always preferred the latter interpretation.

These ideas provide an interesting framework for many of the other books in this section. Some illustrate Sun Tzu’s principles remarkably well. Others demonstrate what happens when sound strategic ideas collide with human ambition, incompetence, fear, bureaucracy, and sheer bad luck.

Beyond Strategy: Rules of War

Sun Tzu provides a remarkably durable framework for thinking about war. Many of the same principles reappear, illustrated across very different periods and armies, in Professor Gregory S. Aldrete’s Great Courses The Decisive Battles of World History and History’s Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach: the importance of intelligence, terrain, preparation, deception, discipline, and unified command.

Aldrete also pays attention to something somewhat different: the customs and unwritten rules by which warfare was conducted. Even societies engaged in killing one another had expectations about what was permissible, how enemies were supposed to behave, and where certain lines were not to be crossed.

These video courses made my treadmill runs less mundane.

One of Aldrete’s lectures brought me back to a story I remembered from middle school: the Battle of the Kalka River in 1223.

The aftermath of the Battle of the Kalka River (1223). AI-generated illustration based on the traditional account of the Mongol victory feast over the captured Rus’ princes.

At school, we learned about the particularly cruel fate of the captured Russian princes and nobles. After the battle, they were laid beneath a wooden platform while the victorious Mongols held a feast above them. I remember thinking of it simply as an example of the extraordinary cruelty of the Mongol warriors.

Aldrete’s lecture added quite a bit of context to the story.

The Mongol commander was Subotai, one of Genghis Khan’s most trusted generals and military strategists. In 1220, he set out with an army of roughly 25,000 men on an enormous reconnaissance mission around the Caspian Sea. What followed lasted three years, covered more than 5,000 miles, and included five major battles.

By the time Subotai encountered the Russians and their Kipchak allies, his army had already fought its way through the Caucasus and had considerable experience defeating forces larger than itself. Intelligence, deception, mobility, and the manipulation of an opponent were central to the way Subotai fought.

At the Dnieper, Aldrete estimates that the Russian-Kipchak coalition numbered perhaps 80,000 men. Subotai did not simply attack this much larger army. He retreated.

For nine days the Mongols stayed just ahead of their pursuers, occasionally attacking with arrows and then withdrawing again. The Russians increasingly believed that the Mongols were running from them. After more than a hundred miles, however, the allied contingents had become stretched out and separated from one another — exactly what Subotai intended.

At the Kalka River, the Kipchaks advanced first. Different Russian contingents followed at different speeds, while the force from Kiev remained well behind. Subotai finally stopped retreating and attacked. Instead of facing one coordinated army of perhaps 80,000 men, the Mongols could defeat its separated components in succession.

It is difficult not to hear an echo of Sun Tzu in the story: know your enemy, gather intelligence, control the terrain on which the battle is fought, deceive your opponent, and attack where he is weak rather than where he is strong.

But there was another part of the story that I did not remember learning in school.

Before the battle, Subotai sent ambassadors to the Russians saying that the Mongols had no intention of attacking Russian territory. The Russians remained allied with the Kipchaks and executed the Mongol ambassadors. The Mongols then sent a formal declaration of war.

That detail changed the ending of the story for me.

More than 40,000 Russians were killed at Kalka, according to the figures Aldrete presents, including six princes and seventy noblemen. The surviving Kievans held out for three days before surrendering. The captured nobles were then subjected to the bizarre execution I remembered from school: placed beneath a wooden platform on which the Mongols held their victory feast.

Aldrete connects that execution to the earlier killing of the Mongol ambassadors and uses the episode to raise a larger question: are there rules in war?

That does not make the execution less brutal, nor does explaining retaliation make it justified. But it changed my understanding of a story I had carried with me since childhood. The version I learned at school began with Mongol cruelty. Aldrete showed me that there was a preceding chapter.

And perhaps there is an even larger lesson here. Cruelty begets cruelty. One side crosses a line; the other retaliates, often more brutally; that retaliation becomes the justification for what follows. The original grievance does not disappear — it accumulates. What begins as a violation of the customs of war can become an escalating cycle in which each side can point to something the other side did first.

We will encounter that pattern repeatedly in the conflicts and books that follow.

That is one reason I like placing Aldrete’s lectures next to Sun Tzu. The Battle of the Kalka River illustrates several of Sun Tzu’s classic strategic principles almost perfectly: intelligence, deception, mobility, terrain, and the enormous importance of coordinated command. But Aldrete also takes the discussion beyond strategy. War is not only about how people fight and win. It is also about the rules they create to restrain violence — and what happens when those restraints begin to break down.

Julius Caesar — Commentaries on the Gallic War

Vercingetorix surrendering to Julius Caesar

Vercingetorix Throws Down His Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar, Lionel Royer, 1899. A nineteenth-century interpretation of the surrender following the siege of Alesia.

Reading Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War alongside Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is a fascinating experience. Although the two works emerged from very different civilizations, Caesar’s campaigns repeatedly illustrate many of the principles described by Sun Tzu.

Perhaps the most striking example is the importance of knowing your enemy.

Caesar’s notes about the Gauls and Britons are remarkably detailed. He describes not only their political alliances and military tactics but also what we would now call their anthropological background: family structures, occupations, religious beliefs, customs, and practices involving divination and prophecy.

He seems to understand that knowing an enemy requires considerably more than estimating the size of his army. You need to understand the society that produces that army, its internal divisions, its leadership, its alliances, and what motivates its people.

But Caesar’s understanding of human behavior was not limited to his enemies. He also knew his own soldiers remarkably well.

Throughout the Commentaries, he repeatedly singles out his beloved Tenth Legion, praising its courage, discipline, loyalty, and sense of duty.

One episode I particularly enjoyed occurs when his army becomes frightened by reports about the German forces commanded by Ariovistus. Caesar addresses his soldiers and declares that, if the other legions refuse to follow him, he will march against the enemy with the Tenth alone. He knows he can depend on them.

The Tenth is understandably delighted by this extraordinary expression of confidence. Meanwhile, the other legions suddenly become very eager to demonstrate that they are every bit as brave and dependable.

It is a wonderful example of leadership through an understanding of human psychology. Caesar doesn’t simply order his frightened soldiers to be brave. He appeals to their pride, loyalty, professional identity, and sense of competition.

When There Is No Time for a Speech

Another episode that stayed with me appears in Book II, during Caesar’s confrontation with the Nervii.

The enemy launches a sudden attack while the Romans are still constructing their camp. Caesar has almost no time to organize his troops, issue orders, assemble his formations, or deliver one of those inspirational speeches that military commanders seem to enjoy so much.

He reaches the Tenth Legion and gives them only the briefest encouragement: remember your courage, do not panic, and withstand the enemy’s attack.

Then he signals the beginning of the battle.

What makes this episode particularly interesting is that Caesar’s officers and experienced soldiers do not wait for detailed instructions. They understand what needs to be done and act on their own initiative.

This reminds me of Sun Tzu’s insistence that military commands must be clear and readily understood. When the enemy is already within throwing distance, there is no time to explain an elaborate plan.

But there is another lesson here. Concise orders are effective only when the soldiers receiving them have already been trained to understand what is expected of them. The ability to act independently in a crisis is the result of preparation long before the crisis begins.

When Things Go Wrong

Caesar writes mostly about victories, but fortunately he also describes occasions when things go wrong.

The failed assault on Gergovia is a particularly interesting example. An initially promising Roman advance ends in a serious defeat. Caesar attributes much of the failure to soldiers advancing beyond their instructions and failing to respond to the recall.

Reading this episode after Sun Tzu raises uncomfortable questions about overconfidence, intelligence, preparation, discipline, and the temptation to exploit an apparent opportunity without adequately considering the risks.

It also raises another question: how much responsibility belongs to the soldiers, and how much to the commander who initiated the operation?

After all, Caesar is not merely describing these events. He is also explaining his own decisions to his readers.

Caesar, the Author

One thing I find rather amusing is that Caesar consistently refers to himself in the third person.

Is this an ancient Roman code of modesty, or is he trying to create the impression that the Commentaries were written by an independent professional historian?

Whatever his intentions, we should remember that Caesar is simultaneously the commander, the narrator, and a politician with a reputation to protect.

His account provides remarkable insights into Roman warfare, but it is hardly an impartial history of his own campaigns.

Another thing I particularly enjoyed was his writing style.

The English translation I originally read was wonderfully concise. Caesar could describe complicated military operations, rapidly changing circumstances, and difficult decisions in remarkably economical language.

I recently listened to the Commentaries again, this time in Russian. The laconic style was still there, although I missed a few passages I particularly liked in English, including the episode of Caesar’s remarkably abbreviated speech to the Tenth Legion.

I don’t know how much of the difference comes from the translators and how much from my own memory, but the experience reminded me how much a translation can influence our appreciation of an ancient author.

And speaking of the Tenth Legion, Caesar’s repeated expressions of confidence in these soldiers made me curious about their history beyond his own account.

That brings me to the next book.

Stephen Dando-Collins — Caesar’s Legion

Caesar’s Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar’s Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome

After reading Caesar’s repeated expressions of confidence in his beloved Tenth Legion, I was naturally interested in learning more about the soldiers who had earned such extraordinary praise.

Stephen Dando-Collins’s Caesar’s Legion follows the history of the Tenth, which, according to the author’s reconstruction, Caesar personally raised while serving in Spain. He selected its officers, oversaw its training, and took it with him through his campaigns in Gaul and the Roman Civil War.

The legion became known as the Spanish Tenth, and Caesar’s confidence in its soldiers was extraordinary. He praised their courage, discipline, loyalty, and sense of duty. When the rest of his army became frightened by reports about the German forces commanded by Ariovistus, Caesar declared that, if nobody else would follow him, he would march against the enemy with the Tenth alone.

The Tenth was delighted by this expression of confidence. The other legions, understandably, suddenly became very eager to demonstrate that they were equally dependable.

What I particularly enjoyed about Dando-Collins’s book was the opportunity to follow a military unit rather than a single commander. Generals come and go, political alliances change, and empires rise and fall, but military organizations can develop traditions, identities, and reputations that survive for generations.

Dando-Collins traces the Tenth’s history beyond Caesar’s assassination and identifies it with the later Legio X Fretensis. This continuity is debated by historians, but it forms the basis of the author’s account of a legion whose history extends from Caesar’s campaigns to the Roman wars in Judaea.

One of the final episodes takes us to the siege of Masada.

Masada: Admiring Both Sides

The Roman siege ramp and the western approach to Masada

The Roman siege ramp at Masada. My photograph, 2023.

The siege of Masada was one of the final episodes of the First Jewish–Roman War. Roman forces, including Legio X Fretensis, surrounded the fortress, established siege camps, and constructed an enormous ramp to bring their siege equipment up to its walls.

The remains of those engineering works are still visible almost two thousand years later.

I first read Caesar’s Legion sometime around 2006–2008. In 2023, during my second visit to Israel, a year after my nephew had immigrated there, I finally had the opportunity to visit Masada.

Standing on top of the fortress, looking down at the remains of the Roman siege camps and the enormous ramp built to reach its walls, I found myself remembering Dando-Collins’s account of the Tenth Legion.

Remains of a Roman siege camp viewed from the fortress of Masada

The remains of a Roman siege camp, viewed from Masada. My photograph, 2023.

The scale of the operation is still astonishing. The Roman army had to maintain its forces in an extraordinarily inhospitable environment, secure its supplies, construct fortifications, and undertake a massive engineering project to reach a fortress perched high above the surrounding desert.

From a military perspective, it is difficult not to admire the determination, organization, and engineering skills involved.

But here I found myself in a rather uncomfortable position.

After spending an entire book following the Tenth, I had developed considerable affection for these soldiers. I admired their discipline, their military professionalism, their endurance, and the traditions that had sustained the legion through so many campaigns.

Yet standing on those walls, looking at the Roman positions below, I couldn’t help sympathizing with the defenders as well.

View through an opening in the stonework at Masada toward the Dead Sea

Looking out from Masada toward the Dead Sea. My photograph, 2023.

It is one thing to admire a military unit for its achievements. It is quite another to find yourself standing where its opponents made their final stand.

Perhaps that is what I appreciate most about reading military history: the opportunity to understand people on both sides of a conflict without necessarily agreeing with either side’s cause.

Dando-Collins concludes his book by remembering the Tenth as Caesar’s favorite legion and Rome’s finest.

And so they were remembered.

But I finished the book thinking about both the soldiers outside Masada and the people trapped within its walls.

Jaroslav Hašek — The Good Soldier Švejk

Josef Lada's illustration of Švejk being taken to the recruitment board in a wheelchair

Švejk enthusiastically answers the call to arms. Illustration by Josef Lada.

According to an often-repeated anecdote, one morning in May 1911, Jaroslav Hašek woke up with a terrible hangover and the vague recollection that he had come up with a brilliant literary idea the previous night. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember what it was. After rummaging through the rubbish bin, he triumphantly presented his wife, Jarmila, with a scrap of paper bearing the words “The Idiot in the Company.”

Thus, according to the story, the Good Soldier Švejk was conceived several years before the First World War.

Hašek published early stories about Švejk in the magazine Karikatury, but the character had yet to acquire the extraordinary world of the later novel. It took Hašek’s own experience of the Austro-Hungarian military system to give him the material for something much more ambitious: an institution in which discipline could replace thinking, common sense, and sometimes even basic competence.

Hašek had already accumulated considerable experience with the absurdities of civilian life. While working for the magazine Animal World, he reportedly invented exotic creatures and even advertised nonexistent animals. Knowing this, the various dubious commercial enterprises in Švejk, including the business of selling dogs, acquire a distinctly autobiographical flavor.

Simple-minded by choice

I’ve always thought that Švejk is simple-minded largely by choice.

He receives orders, however absurd, and carries them out exactly as instructed. But his obedience frequently turns out to be remarkably advantageous to Švejk himself.

Consider the episode in which Lieutenant Lukáš orders Švejk to look after his girlfriend and fulfill her wishes. The lady eventually summons Švejk into her bedroom and gives him some rather unambiguous instructions of her own.

When Lukáš returns, Švejk reports with a perfectly clear conscience that he has fulfilled all the lady’s wishes, working diligently and conscientiously, exactly as ordered.

“Did she have many wishes?” asks the lieutenant.

“Approximately six,” reports Švejk, adding that she is now sleeping soundly and that he fulfilled every wish he could read in her eyes.

I have always loved this episode. Here is a man supposedly incapable of independent thought who suddenly demonstrates remarkable initiative, excellent observational skills, and an almost heroic commitment to carrying out his superior’s orders. Švejk demonstrated not only an impressive ability to interpret his orders creatively but also considerable physical stamina. Six wishes, after all, constitute a rather demanding assignment—even for a good soldier. And he reports the results with the same solemn professionalism he might have used to account for six completed military assignments.

The medical student who refused to graduate

One of my favorite minor characters is Friedrich Welfer, a perpetually enrolled medical student who knows medicine inside out but has absolutely no intention of graduating.

His late uncle left him an annual scholarship that would continue until he received his medical diploma. Unfortunately, the scholarship was approximately four times larger than the salary he could expect as an assistant physician.

Consequently, Welfer pursued his medical education with extraordinary dedication. He attended universities throughout Austria-Hungary, gained experience in numerous clinics, and carefully avoided the one thing that would end his comfortable arrangement: graduation.

Then the First World War intervened.

The army decided that Welfer’s extensive medical experience made him an excellent candidate for qualification as a wartime physician. One of his relatives apparently helped ensure that the necessary arrangements were made.

Welfer was required to pass an examination. He responded to every written question with exactly the same answer:

Lecken Sie mir Arsch!

Three days later, a colonel solemnly announced that Welfer had passed and was being appointed to a military hospital.

As a schoolboy, I found this passage enormously educational. Lecken Sie mir Arsch! substantially expanded my vocabulary of profanity and became the first German phrase I ever learned. I used it extensively at school and continued to find occasions for it long afterward. I cannot say whether Hašek intended his novel to serve as an introduction to foreign languages, but in my case it was remarkably effective.

I also appreciate Welfer’s predicament more now that I have spent a considerable part of my own life in medicine and academia. Here was a man who had mastered his subject, accumulated extensive clinical experience, and discovered that actually obtaining a medical diploma would be a financially disastrous decision.

The war finally accomplished what years of medical education could not: it made Friedrich Welfer a doctor. And all he had done was tell his examiners precisely what he thought of them.

The military romantic

Another unforgettable character is Cadet Biegler, an enthusiastic military romantic who dreams of battlefield glory and a distinguished career.

Biegler has absorbed the mythology of military service completely. He imagines campaigns, heroic engagements, promotions, and perhaps even his future place in military history. Unlike Švejk, he takes the institution and all its pretensions entirely seriously.

Hašek brings those ambitions to an abrupt and thoroughly unheroic conclusion:

«Так, полный энтузиазма воин, кадет Биглер стал носителем холерных бацилл».

Thus the enthusiastic warrior, Cadet Biegler, became a carrier of cholera bacilli.

There is something magnificent about the economy of that sentence. Biegler dreams of becoming a great commander; instead, he becomes an epidemiological concern.

Years later, I knew someone who had chosen Cadet Biegler as his pen name. His subsequent political evolution, which I came to regard as Russian fascism, gave that choice an irony I doubt he originally intended. Apparently, readers don’t always recognize themselves in a satire in quite the way its author might have hoped.

An army in which everything makes sense—until you think about it

Švejk, Welfer, and Biegler represent three wonderfully different responses to the same institution.

Švejk appears to be an idiot, obeys orders literally, and somehow manages to benefit from the resulting chaos. Welfer is an accomplished physician who has made an entire career out of not becoming one, until the army grants him a diploma for insulting the examination board. Biegler genuinely believes in the romance of military service and ends up contributing to the war effort as a carrier of cholera.

What makes Hašek’s novel so memorable is that these characters are not simply surrounded by stupidity. They inhabit a system in which perfectly understandable individual behavior produces collective absurdity—and in which following the rules can be every bit as ridiculous as breaking them.

Švejk understands this world, or at least navigates it, considerably better than the people who are supposedly in charge of him.

Further reading: - Read The Good Soldier Švejk in Russian — full text - Reflecting on Jaroslav Hašek & Švejk — Expats.cz - Genius or Idiot? — Respekt

Vladimir Voinovich — The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin

If Švejk shows the absurdity of the Austro-Hungarian military machine, Ivan Chonkin seems almost like his Soviet cousin.

Vladimir Voinovich’s trilogy consists of:

  • The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
  • Pretender to the Throne
  • A Displaced Person

Chonkin is not a great warrior. He is an ordinary, not particularly bright Red Army soldier who, shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, is sent to a village to guard a damaged military airplane. Then his unit essentially forgets about him.

Chonkin, however, does not forget his orders.

What follows is a wonderful mixture of war novel, political satire, bureaucratic nightmare, and absurd comedy. Chonkin tries to perform the simple task he was given while the enormous machinery of the Soviet state around him produces misunderstandings, investigations, denunciations, arrests, and increasingly ridiculous consequences.

That is what makes placing Voinovich immediately after Hašek irresistible to me. Švejk and Chonkin survive institutions that take themselves enormously seriously largely by being ordinary human beings inside systems that have lost contact with ordinary reality.

Voinovich’s satire can be wonderfully dry. The collective farm, for example, is not doing badly at all:

But unfortunately, the business side of the collective farm was performing poorly. Well, not too bad, to be exact. In fact, one might even say it was doing reasonably well. The only problem was that every year it did worse than the year before.

Then there is perhaps the perfect definition of a bureaucratic meeting:

A meeting is an arrangement whereby a large number of people gather together, some to say what they really do not think, some not to say what they really do.

And ideology has penetrated even the safest question one can ask a child:

“Little girl, whom do you love more: your mom, or your dad?”
“I love Stalin!” said the little girl and ran away.

The jokes are funny because the world underneath them is not. People are still being sent to war, arrested, interrogated, and sometimes destroyed by this machinery. Like Hašek, Voinovich uses absurdity not to make war harmless, but to expose how absurd institutions can exercise very real power over human lives.

Joseph Heller — Catch-22

I knew the expression Catch-22 long before I knew Joseph Heller existed. It had simply become part of American language: a situation in which the rules trap you whichever way you turn. Eventually I discovered that the expression came from a book, so naturally I had to read it.

I loved it.

Part of the attraction was Heller’s language. The book is full of sentences that are funny because they follow perfectly logical paths to completely absurd destinations:

“Yossarian decided to live forever, or die in the attempt.”

And:

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

But underneath the wordplay is Yossarian’s stubborn insistence on the value of his own life. He is surrounded by institutions and people explaining why larger causes are worth dying for. His response is wonderfully inconvenient:

“Anything worth dying for … is certainly worth living for.”

And his definition of the enemy is even less patriotic:

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

Perhaps because I had grown up hearing a great deal about the virtue of sacrifice for a better future—usually from people who seemed in no particular hurry to make the ultimate sacrifice themselves—Yossarian’s insistence on the virtues of remaining alive resonated with me.

At one point he begins questioning the idea of dying for a country itself. If Englishmen are dying for England, Americans for America, Germans for Germany, and Russians for Russia, surely they cannot all be right that their particular country is worth dying for. Like so much of Heller’s humor, the argument sounds ridiculous until you try to explain exactly why it is wrong.

The same logic extends far beyond war. Heller has an extraordinary ability to puncture pomposity, bureaucracy, ideology, and expertise with a single sentence. I particularly like:

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.”

I have found this observation useful well beyond literature. Occasionally I meet someone who knows everything there is to know about music except how to enjoy music, or everything about wine except how to enjoy wine.

Then there is the wonderfully concise character description:

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”

Or a description that could almost have escaped from Voinovich:

“He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.”

And occasionally Heller sounds remarkably like Hašek. Asked what he does when it rains, a captain answers with complete frankness:

“I get wet.”

Švejk would have understood him perfectly.

There is also Yossarian’s encounter with the psychiatrist, who explains that Yossarian has deep-seated survival anxieties and subconsciously hates bigots, bullies, snobs, and hypocrites.

“Consciously, sir, consciously,” Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. “I hate them consciously.”

By the time I discovered Catch-22, I was already working as a nurse practitioner, which gave Heller’s medical satire an additional layer of entertainment.

Doc Daneeka, for example, is a physician whose struggling medical practice is unexpectedly rescued by the outbreak of war:

“Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.”

With other physicians being drafted, his business improves enormously. Unfortunately, the military eventually notices him as well. Daneeka has examined himself and found himself completely unfit for military service, but the draft board inexplicably refuses to accept his professional opinion without independent verification. He is outraged by this lack of trust in a licensed physician.

He is drafted anyway and sent to Pianosa as a flight surgeon.

He is terrified of flying.

That story always reminds me a little of Welfer in The Good Soldier Švejk: another physician discovering that professional expertise does not necessarily protect one from the peculiar logic of a military bureaucracy.

But Heller’s hospital scenes may be even better.

A patient suddenly sits up and announces that he sees everything twice. Specialists descend upon him from every direction with lights, needles, tubes, mallets, and increasingly elaborate equipment. Soon there is barely enough patient to go around.

One physician confidently announces that the diagnosis is meningitis. Another asks why, since there is no particular reason to suspect meningitis.

The answer is magnificent:

“Because I’m a meningitis man, that’s why…”

I think of that scene surprisingly often during multidisciplinary conferences.

Expertise is indispensable, but it also influences what we see. Normal-pressure hydrocephalus is a real condition; that does not mean every unusual neurological symptom needs an unusual neurological explanation merely because today’s visiting expert happens to be a neurologist.

Heller pushes this tendency into absurdity with another patient who becomes surrounded by a vortex of specialists: a urologist for his urine, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a dermatologist for his derma, and eventually even a “pathologist for his pathos.”

The specialists know an enormous amount. The only minor problem is that nobody knows what is wrong with the patient.

That may be one reason Catch-22 works so well after The Good Soldier Švejk and Chonkin. All three books use absurdity to examine military institutions, but their protagonists respond differently. Švejk follows orders with such literal enthusiasm that obedience itself begins to look subversive. Chonkin is an ordinary soldier faithfully carrying out an assignment that practically everyone else has forgotten. Yossarian understands perfectly well that the system is absurd and wants out.

And the system has an answer for that too.

Wanting to avoid combat proves that he is sane. Being sane means that he must continue flying combat missions. If he were insane, he could be grounded—but asking to be grounded demonstrates the rational concern for his own survival that proves he isn’t insane.

That is Catch-22.

At first, Yossarian’s determination to “live forever, or die in the attempt” is a very funny joke.

As the novel goes on, it becomes progressively less funny.

Books That Simply Make Me Feel Good

Not every book needs to expand my intellectual horizons, challenge my worldview, or teach me something about the human condition. Sometimes I just want to enjoy myself.

Apparently, my definition of feel-good literature differs somewhat from my wife’s.

Yana enjoys Agatha Christie, where everyone’s life matters and the detectives, whether Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, identify the murderer and hand the case over to the proper authorities, to be processed with all the appropriate British etiquette and ceremony.

I, on the other hand, enjoy Jack Reacher.

Lee Child — Jack Reacher

Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels

I’ve listened to approximately eight to ten Jack Reacher audiobooks, and they have provided me with many hours of thoroughly enjoyable entertainment.

Reacher shares something important with the heroes of traditional detective fiction: a genuine desire to help victims and protect people who cannot protect themselves.

But while Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are generally satisfied with identifying the criminal and restoring law and order, Reacher has a somewhat different objective.

He wants to restore justice.

Preferably personally.

Holmes meticulously reconstructs his deductions for Watson and, eventually, for everybody else. Poirot gathers the suspects in the drawing room, explains the significance of every overlooked clue, and reveals the murderer with all the ceremony the occasion deserves.

Reacher says nothing.

He observes, listens, calculates, and waits. He has usually figured out what the villains are doing, but sees remarkably little value in sharing his conclusions with them.

Until it’s time to serve justice.

On a sizzling platter.

An Extraordinary Badass

Reacher is, of course, an extraordinary badass.

He knows practically everything about weapons, military tactics, and the various ways villains might try to kill people. He has razor-sharp senses, lightning-fast reflexes, and a remarkable ability to prevail in physical confrontations.

All of which is particularly impressive for a man who appears to have spent years avoiding the gym.

But perhaps his most remarkable characteristic is his freedom.

Reacher has no permanent address, no car, and practically no possessions. He goes wherever he pleases, stays as long as he likes, and leaves whenever he feels like it.

Even Rambo carried more stuff in his duffel bag. Not to mention that enormous, iconic knife.

Reacher has a toothbrush.

Which, on occasion, some unfortunate villain decides to break.

Big mistake.

Huge.

There is, of course, a delightful contradiction in Reacher’s lifestyle. He has deliberately freed himself from almost every material possession and personal obligation, yet he seems constitutionally incapable of walking away when somebody needs his help.

He can leave whenever he wants.

He just usually decides not to.

Just a Little Bit Bloody

At some point, I recommended Killing Floor to Yana, reassuring her that the Reacher books weren’t particularly bloody.

Just a little bit.

She accused me of professional deformation.

She never even made it to the third chapter of Killing Floor.

Perhaps my years working in trauma have influenced my definition of a little bit.

Reacher on Screen

Naturally, I also watched both films starring Tom Cruise.

I have nothing against Cruise as an actor, but casting him as Jack Reacher was such an extraordinary mismatch that I suspect almost any other actor would have had his career buried by it.

The second movie was even worse.

The television series, on the other hand, was a thoroughly enjoyable adaptation. Its portrayal of Reacher felt much closer to the character I had imagined while listening to the books.

And it introduced me to something I hadn’t anticipated: an excellent collection of music.

In fact, I’m listening to a Spotify playlist featuring music from all seasons of Reacher as I write this.

Which seems an entirely appropriate way to begin a section devoted to books that make me happy.

Harry Harrison — The Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld

My affection for resourceful troublemakers began long before I discovered Jack Reacher.

Back in high school, I read Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld. Both featured heroes who were essentially tricksters. Their greatest advantage wasn’t physical strength, superior firepower, or particularly good luck. It was their ability to think their way through obstacles that seemed insurmountable to everybody else.

Yet the two heroes applied their ingenuity to very different problems.

The Stainless Steel Rat

Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat

Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is a professional criminal who treats laws, security systems, and technological limitations as interesting intellectual challenges.

If a system is supposedly foolproof, he will find the loophole. If a piece of technology is designed to prevent him from doing something, he will discover an entirely unintended use for it.

One particular episode from A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born stayed with me for years.

Jim’s criminal mentor, the Bishop, describes a wonderfully ingenious banking scheme. A computer program diverts the insignificant fractions of a cent left over when calculating interest into a special account. Individual customers see their expected balances, while the accumulated fractions quietly make the enterprising programmer a wealthy man.

Years later, I heard about a real programmer who had attempted something remarkably similar and ended up getting arrested.

It turns out that this technique even has a name: salami slicing. Tiny amounts are diverted from a large number of transactions until they accumulate into something substantial.

I was delighted to discover that one of the technological tricks I remembered from a science-fiction novel I read in high school had a counterpart in the real world.

Although the real world is apparently somewhat less accommodating toward enterprising tricksters than Harry Harrison’s universe.

Many years later, I bought the English audiobook of The Stainless Steel Rat, thinking it might be fun to revisit a favorite from my high-school years in its original language.

To my surprise, I remembered the story remarkably well. A few terms sounded different in English, but the characters, their adventures, and Jim’s ingenious tricks were all wonderfully familiar.

I finished the audiobook but decided there was no particular reason to listen to the entire series again. Apparently, some books leave such a lasting impression that even decades later, they feel like old friends whose stories you still remember.

Deathworld

Harry Harrison's Deathworld

Jason dinAlt, the protagonist of Deathworld, faces a rather different challenge.

The planet Pyrrus is so hostile that practically every living organism seems determined to kill its human inhabitants. Its colonists have responded by developing an entire society organized around permanent warfare against their environment.

When I first read the book, I imagined Pyrrus as a science-fiction version of Australia, where, according to the geography textbooks of my childhood, almost every plant and animal seemed capable of poisoning, biting, or otherwise disposing of an unsuspecting visitor.

Add the Roaring Forties and the formidable Southern Ocean, and the picture was practically complete.

But Jason’s real achievement isn’t simply surviving this extraordinarily dangerous world. It’s recognizing that the colonists may have fundamentally misunderstood the problem they’re trying to solve.

Where Jim diGriz looks for loopholes in laws and technology, Jason looks for the hidden logic of an entire ecosystem.

Both are tricksters in the most enjoyable sense of the word: they refuse to accept the rules of a game until they’ve figured out why those rules exist and whether there’s a way around them.

Perhaps that’s what made Harrison’s books so enjoyable to me in high school. His heroes demonstrated that even in a universe full of sophisticated technology, deadly weapons, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, a functioning brain could still be the most valuable piece of equipment.

Mysteries & Thrillers

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

You can’t talk about mysteries and thrillers without including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He didn’t just create Sherlock Holmes — he created the modern detective story.

In 1876, while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Conan Doyle met Dr. Joseph Bell, a professor of surgery whose remarkable diagnostic skills came from his keen observation of tiny details. Bell could deduce a patient’s background, occupation, and illness from a few simple clues — and this fascinated Doyle. The idea of applying that kind of logic to crime solving eventually germinated into the character of Sherlock Holmes.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes

John le Carré

John le Carré was one of my later literary discoveries. His insider knowledge of British intelligence shaped a body of fiction unlike anything else in the genre. His writing is subtle — much of the meaning is implied, becoming fully clear only at the culmination of the plot. His spy world runs on a cruel but consistent moral code.

“The secret world is the real world.” – John le Carré

Robert Littell

We know surprisingly little about Robert Littell — which somehow feels fitting. Born in 1935 in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family of Russian descent, he served in the U.S. Navy, worked as a journalist, and then began writing fiction about the CIA and the Soviet Union with such precision and intimacy that it’s hard to believe he wasn’t part of the cloak-and-dagger world himself.

My first encounter with his work was The Company: A Novel of the CIA. The book is such a gripping read — or listen — that I nearly got into an accident driving to work.

Spies, Resistance, and Intelligence

History is often told through the actions of generals and politicians, but some of its most remarkable stories belong to people who worked in the shadows.

What fascinates me about memoirs written by real intelligence officers is not gadgets, car chases, or shootouts. Real intelligence work seems to depend much more on extraordinary planning, attention to detail, discipline, improvisation, and the psychological resilience required to live a double life. More often than not, survival depends not on luck, but on having thought through what might go wrong before it does.

Argo — Tony Mendez

Tony Mendez’s memoir reads almost like a Hollywood script, which is fitting, since Hollywood eventually turned the story into an Academy Award-winning film.

The premise alone sounds ridiculous: rescue six American diplomats hiding in revolutionary Iran by pretending that they are members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a nonexistent science-fiction movie.

And yet the basic plan was entirely real.

What impressed me most was not simply the audacity of the idea, but the enormous amount of preparation required to make an absurd story believable. A fake movie needed a name, a script, a production company, advertisements, business cards, documentation, and people who could convincingly explain who they were if questioned.

It is a wonderful example of creativity under pressure, but also of something less glamorous and perhaps more important: meticulous preparation.

The Great Game (Red Orchestra) — Leopold Trepper

Leopold Trepper. Photographs reproduced in British Security Service files (KV 2 series), The National Archives.

Leopold Trepper’s memoir takes us into a much darker world.

Trepper organized one of the most important Soviet intelligence networks operating in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War, a network the Gestapo came to call the Red Orchestra.

There is very little James Bond in his account. Espionage meant creating identities and businesses, recruiting people, establishing communications, constantly improvising, and living with the knowledge that one careless mistake could expose not only you, but an entire network.

What stayed with me was the psychological side of the story. These people had to behave normally while knowing that discovery could mean interrogation, torture, and death. They had to decide whom to trust, when to take risks, when to disappear, and sometimes how to continue operating after everything had already begun to collapse.

It is one of the most compelling firsthand accounts of intelligence and resistance work that I have read.

Mendez and Trepper operated in completely different worlds, decades apart, but both stories left me with essentially the same lesson:

The most successful improvisation is usually built on very careful preparation.

Report from #24 — Gunnar Sønsteby

I discovered Gunnar Sønsteby through the Norwegian film Number 24, which portrays his work in the Norwegian resistance during the German occupation.

What impressed me most in the film was not simply Sønsteby’s courage, but his extraordinary ability to plan ahead and make decisions under extreme stress. His operations required him to constantly evaluate risks, anticipate what could go wrong, and remain capable of changing the plan when circumstances changed.

That was what made me want to read his memoir, Report from #24.

I am reading it now, and so far I am enjoying it tremendously. The book reinforces what attracted me to Sønsteby’s story in the first place. Resistance work was not simply a matter of bravery. Courage without planning could get you and everyone around you killed. Survival required preparation, discipline, judgment, and the ability to remain functional when a decision had to be made under enormous pressure.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that aspect of the book particularly appeals to me.

I’ll have more to say when I finish it.

Drama

William Shakespeare

What’s in a name? asks Juliet in Act II, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet… Well, everything, and nothing. William Shakespeare is the greatest name in world drama, but his true identity remains a mystery.

What matters is the work. I’ve enjoyed Shakespeare both in masterful Russian translations and in the original English — often with commentary or performance, thanks to modern technology.

My favorites include

  • Sonnets
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • King Lear
  • Othello
  • Hamlet

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose 🌹
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
– Romeo and Juliet

Magical Realism

In my early youth I was something of a literary purist. I divided literature into realistic fiction, science fiction, and “magic.” But the world of literature turned out to be more complicated — and more beautiful for it.

There exists a special category where reality intertwines with magic, where everyday life is pierced by dreams, spirits, parallel dimensions, or inexplicable truths, and where the characters accept these strangenesses as part of life. This genre is known as magical realism.

That’s where I discovered three extraordinary authors:

Gabriel García Márquez

My first encounter with Gabriel García Márquez was through One Hundred Years of Solitude — the novel that brought him international acclaim and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

To put it bluntly: this was not an easy read.

In hindsight, I’d recommend starting with Living to Tell the Tale, a memoir that gently introduces you into his world.

Haruki Murakami

If Latin American magical realism feels like a flamboyant carnival, then the Japanese take, as written by Haruki Murakami, is more like a carefully inked scroll. Every word is placed with the accuracy and silence of traditional calligraphy.

What excites me most in Murakami’s writing are his quotes — moments when the prose lifts off the page and delivers a truth so precise, it stops you in your tracks.

“It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness is a story.”
― Kafka on the Shore

“I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.”
― Sputnik Sweetheart

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Norwegian Wood

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”
― 1Q84

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”
― The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Books by Explorers and Scientists

These books have always occupied a special place on my bookshelf — virtual now, though no less treasured. I often return to them because the glimpses they offer into the authors’ perceptions of the world, and of themselves, are both humbling and deeply inspirational.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Most people know Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as the author of The Little Prince. While that masterpiece certainly deserves its reputation, it was only one part of an extraordinary life and literary legacy.

Saint-Exupéry lived during the dangerous early years of aviation, when aircraft were fragile, unreliable, and often lethal. He participated directly in the development of long-distance flight routes and survived multiple crashes and near-fatal incidents.

His books are not merely about airplanes. They are about people willing to risk their lives daily to deliver mail across deserts, mountains, and oceans. They are about duty, loneliness, friendship, courage, and the fragile beauty of our planet when seen from above.

His writing style is unmistakably French: philosophical, elegant, and reflective.

During World War II he served as a reconnaissance pilot for Free France and disappeared during a mission on July 31, 1944. Decades later, a silver bracelet bearing his name and debris from his aircraft were discovered off the coast of Marseille.

Jacques Cousteau

Seventy-one percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water, yet for most of human history it remained almost completely inaccessible.

Jacques Cousteau originally hoped to become a pilot, but injuries sustained in a car accident changed the course of his life. While serving in the French Navy, he began experimenting with underwater breathing systems and eventually co-developed the SCUBA apparatus — or Aqua-Lung — which opened the underwater world to exploration on an unprecedented scale.

Given command of the research vessel Calypso, Cousteau became one of the great explorers of the twentieth century. His work helped popularize oceanography, marine biology, underwater archaeology, and environmental conservation. He was also an early public voice warning about ocean pollution and radioactive waste.

What I love about his books is their spirit of practical curiosity. The underwater world is presented not as fantasy, but as a living system waiting to be understood. Problems are approached matter-of-factly: we encountered this obstacle, discussed it, improvised, and solved it. I deeply enjoy that style of troubleshooting.

The books are also filled with remarkable underwater photography that, at the time, revealed a world most people had never seen.

Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman is often remembered as one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, but he was also a brilliant storyteller.

Raised in a family that valued curiosity and education, he studied at MIT and Princeton before joining the Manhattan Project during World War II.

What stayed with me most from his writings are two recurring themes.

First: always ask why. Never accept “that’s just how things are done” as a sufficient explanation.

Second: social conventions, politeness, and institutional habits often interfere with our ability to understand reality clearly.

Feynman writes about science, naturally, but also about people: the strange personalities around him, the absurdities of bureaucracy, practical problem-solving, safecracking at Los Alamos, music, teaching, and the joy of figuring things out.

His books remind me that intelligence and curiosity are not the same thing — and that curiosity is often more important.

Gerald Durrell

The Durrell family was wonderfully eccentric, but Gerald Durrell himself deserves special attention.

Although largely homeschooled and lacking formal academic training, his passion for zoology was so profound that he became one of the great naturalists and conservationists of his era.

Durrell founded his own zoo and traveled extensively collecting animals, often under chaotic and hilarious circumstances. His books combine natural history, travel writing, comedy, and autobiography in a way that feels completely unique.

What makes his writing especially memorable is the warmth with which he describes both animals and people. Even the most absurd characters are treated with affection.

At the same time, it is important to remember that Durrell struggled with alcohol use disorder, and some aspects of his lifestyle are perhaps better admired from a safe literary distance.

During his childhood the family lived on Corfu, an experience immortalized in My Family and Other Animals. If you prefer television adaptations, The Durrells in Corfu captures much of the same charm.

Dystopian Literature

As someone who spent part of his life in the Soviet Union, I have always been drawn to dystopian literature.

What fascinates me is that the best dystopian novels are rarely about the future. They are usually about the present. The future merely provides a safe distance from which to examine uncomfortable truths about power, conformity, censorship, ideology, and human nature.

Many of these books became especially meaningful to me after immigrating to the United States. Some helped me understand the society I had left behind. Others helped me appreciate the freedoms I had previously taken for granted.

Ray Bradbury

My introduction to dystopian literature was Fahrenheit 451.

The novel was written in 1953. The location is somewhere in USA, the time is in a near future. Maybe late 20th, maybe 21st century. The premise is that books became forbidden in the society because they make people ask not “how” but “why” questions. And the “why” question is the most dangerous question, because it makes people question everything, including authority.

The main character is a fireman, but he is not extinguishing fires but rather starts them by burning the books. The book catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit (or so Ray Bradbury was told), hence the name of the novel. The irony is that this book was highly popular in the Soviet Union, although there were very strict and omnipotent censorship and many other authors and many books were prohibited, but this one escaped through the gaps in the system and made me think about the “why” questions.

I loved this one and enjoyed it in middle school, as well as recently, when I listened it in its’ original language, as intended by the author.

Bradbury is one of my favorite american authors and there are more stories I recommend:

  • The Martian Chronicles
  • The Illustrated Man
  • The October Country
  • The Halloween Tree
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes
  • Dandelion Wine

George Orwell

The next two books come from the same author: George Orwell.

Naturally he was prohibited in USSR, however his books leaked in through the censorship and quotes, such as “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”, and the famous “Ministry of Love”, “Ministry of Truth” …

The Animal Farm was the first book I’ve read in English outside of classroom required reading. If only I could read it back in high school, the myth of the Great October Revolution which brought equality and destroyed exploiting humans by other humans was immediately shattered because this was such a vivid and truthful account that I can easily understand why this was banned in USSR. The premise of the book is what animals make a revolution and pigs take over the management of the animal farm. And then the story of deceit and power struggle unfolds.

The second book by George Orwell is famous 1984.

The setting is in near future in Great Britain, when it falls and becomes a totalitarian regime in a perpetual war with another country. The government controls everything: the food rations, the living conditions, the language, the stories published in the newspapers, the historical accounts, which The Ministry of Truth meticulously cleans up to match the existing present time, the sexual relationships between citizens, and their thoughts. The surveillance is omnipresent and citizens should always have TV on, because this is how the government is able to see them. The government also imposes “doublethink”: this is to know two opposing facts, which cancel each out, but believing in both simultaneously. This is a powerful read, I highly recommend it.

Orwell himself participated in Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), served in the International Brigades, was wounded in the neck and had first-hand account of serving in pro-soviet communists organized military unit, where he quickly realized there is not much difference between the two ideologies and their methods as well. This experience made his dystopian books so spot on accurate.

As an author, Orwell is cherished by me not only by his political stand, but also by his writing style. Every sentence has a purpose. Every word has its place.

Other works I recommend:

  • Down and Out in Paris and London
  • Homage to Catalonia

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley has got to be included in my list. Did you ever dream of the world, where educated people are promoted in the social hierarchy and that improves the political and economical decisions of the government? Then the genetically engineered, grown in the hatcheries, and psychologically conditioned humans can pursue happiness through consumerism and personal pleasures? Well, this novel is right for you, then!

This is mostly how the Soviet propaganda pictured the future for the Soviet people: the world is sterile, the people are grown by special educators, they are promoted by intellectual achievements, the machines are doing all the dirty work… Well, follow the main characters Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne as they visit the “Salvage Reservation” and get an unexpected outsider’s views by a person, who wasn’t indoctrinated with the same social values.

Many readers compare Orwell and Huxley. Orwell feared a society controlled by fear. Huxley feared a society controlled by comfort.

Aldos Huxley is one of my newer discoveries, I don’t have any other books to recommend yet, but on my to read list I have:

  • Brave New World Revisited

Robert A. Heinlein

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein is also a book about a person, who was grown up and whose views were formed by another civilization, in this case Martian, that was before we knew Mars is not habitable) and he brings new customs and new ideas to Earth. The novel seems to reflect a lot of hippie’s culture, which is not surprising for it was published in 1961.

Other books by Robert A. Heinlein I recommend:

  • Have Space Suit, Will Travel

Vladimir Voinovich

I decided to keep Russian authors to a minimum on this page, partly due to Russia’s use of literature in pursuit of their political propaganda and expansive wars. For some reason they believe the literary achievement of Russian-speaking authors give them special rights. However, my review of the dystopian literature will not be complete without mentioning Vladimir Voinovich and his novel Moscow, 2042.

In this novel author time-travels to dystopian future Moscow ruled by a merged KGB-Communist Party conglomerate. The leader of the new Russia strongly resembles current Russian self-proclaimed president Vladimir Putin supported by Pope Zvezdoniy, who is an atheist, yet a religious leader, who also resembles current clerical leadership. They are living in a strange an economically stagnant totalitarian Russia… The book so closely depicts today’s conditions of Russian Federation that it was prophetic. It is darkly satirical and genuinely funny, unfortunately most Russians didn’t read it.

Recommended works:

  • Moscow 2042
  • The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
  • Pretender to the Throne
  • A Displaced Person

Authors, Backgrounds, and Their Dystopias

One of the things I find fascinating about dystopian literature is how strongly each author’s background shaped the world they imagined.

Aldous Huxley was educated at Oxford and came from one of Britain’s most distinguished intellectual families. His dystopia is philosophical and social. He worried less about police and prisons than about a society that willingly trades freedom for comfort, pleasure, and convenience.

Robert Heinlein graduated from the United States Naval Academy with what would today be roughly considered a degree in engineering. His writing reflects the perspective of a military officer and engineer: practical, structured, and interested in how societies organize themselves and maintain order. Even when I disagree with his conclusions, I find his thought experiments fascinating.

Ray Bradbury never attended college. Instead, he famously said that he graduated from the library, spending three days a week for ten years reading voraciously and educating himself. His dystopias are deeply humanistic. In Fahrenheit 451, books are dangerous not because they contain specific ideas, but because they teach people to ask questions and think independently.

George Orwell worked as a colonial police officer in Burma, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and later worked as a teacher and journalist. He understood both the machinery of power and the vulnerabilities of ordinary people. That experience gave Animal Farm and 1984 an authenticity that still feels unsettling today.

Vladimir Voinovich was trained as a history teacher and lived much of his life inside the Soviet system he later satirized. His dystopias are rooted not in abstract political theory but in everyday absurdities: bureaucracy, corruption, incompetence, and the strange ways people adapt to authoritarianism.

Each of these authors looked at the same question through a different lens: what happens when a society loses its way? The answers they arrived at were very different, and perhaps that is why these books remain so valuable. They remind us that there is more than one path to a dystopia.

Future reading

A few readers have asked why We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is not included on this list. The answer is simple: I have not read it yet. The same goes for White Noise by Don DeLillo. Both remain on my ever-growing “to be read” virtual shelf.

One of the pleasures of maintaining this page is being reminded that there are always more books waiting to be discovered.

Books About Decision-Making

Decision-making has fascinated me for many years. I’ll skip the textbooks here, but there are a few accessible books you might consider.

How We Decide

This is a well-written and easy-to-read book. However, the author, Jonah Lehrer, was later criticized for misrepresenting several sources. Knowing this, please make an informed decision about whether you’d like to read it.

A few points I still found valuable:

  1. Emotions play an important role in decision-making
  2. Some decisions should be logical and analytical, but others depend on emotional wisdom
  3. If intuition (based on experience) turns on an alarm, it’s worth taking a second look

Thinking, Fast and Slow

A classic exploration of “System 1” (fast, intuitive) and “System 2” (slow, deliberate) thinking — and why both matter.

Dan Ariely

  • Predictably Irrational
  • The Upside of Irrationality
  • The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty