The most recommended books about political prisoners

April 1865 was one of the most consequential months in American history. After the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender to effectively end the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was tragically assassinated while Jefferson Davis attempted to escape to keep the war effort alive.

I was riveted by the dual history of the American and Confederate presidents, as Swanson’s storytelling matches the drama, tension, and uncertainty of the moment.

I found this book to be a raw act of bravery. Desmond Shum describes his and his ex-wife Whitney Duan’s economic ascendancy in China as they climbed to become part of a billionaire class. Shum describes all of the ways they had to play in the gray in order to successfully execute massive real estate and airport projects. On a personal level, he takes you inside his life as an elite, purchasing expensive homes, vehicles, and art. But just as quickly as they rose, his wife vanished as part of the party’s use of extralegal kidnappings to facilitate investigations into corruption.

This book is one man’s act of bravery in risking everything to tell his story while also implicating himself in corrupt activity. He shows us that charges of corruption must be understood through a political lens with the objective of consolidating power and preserving the legitimacy of the Communist… show more.

Those interested in the never-ending drama of US-Iranian relations since 1979 probably remember the affair of the mountain climbers. Three Americans, hiking the mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, mistakenly crossed the border into Iran. They were taken to Evin prison in Tehran, where they were imprisoned for two years, a good part of which they spent in solitary confinement as Iran and the US used them as pawns in their complicated dance of diplomacy. After their release, the hikers wrote a memoir together. This is one of the best accounts of solitary confinement in Evin available in English.

This is an extraordinary story of a brave German woman whose diplomat father and Italian aristocrat husband decide to resist the Nazis.

When German troops enter Italy, Fey von Hassell finds herself trapped with her young children in a 12th-century villa in northern Italy while her husband joins the anti-fascist underground in Rome and her father decides to join the group that plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Nazi stormtroopers take over the villa and later arrest Fey.

Using archival materials and family letters, Caroline Bailey reconstructs Fey’s harrowing journey—moved from prison to prison and concentration camp to concentration camp. Her two young boys are taken away from her, and sent to a Nazi orphanage. Fey’s single-minded mission to find her children reads like a good thriller.

This book took me into the abysses of Soviet society, but in a very different way than the books on terror: Dobson does an incomparable job of describing what it meant for Soviet people to take in millions of Gulag returnees after 1953, and to do so in a society that was far from leaving the ravages of war behind, that itself had barely any housing and enough to eat, that on the one hand was severely traumatized by Stalin's terror, but on the other hand was in large part unwilling to accept the Gulag returnees as innocent victims. They were perceived as troublemakers and competitors for the few resources, their language as vulgar and outrageous, their culture as an attack on Stalinist "culturedness." Anyone who wants to understand what Stalinism did not only to the victims, but to society as a whole, must read this book. But be aware:… show more.

Omar Khadr is a personal friend of mine, the gentlest soul I have met since setting foot on Canadian soil. This collection has been essential to my understanding of Canada’s unwillingness to stand up for one of its own citizens. It highlights how belonging in the nation is not necessarily a right all citizens enjoy, and invites a serious reflection on what citizenship means in this country.  

I will start by admitting that I had ambivalent feelings about this book for some time simply because it takes a different view on certain historical events and people than I do. Still, I cannot not recommend it, because it stunned me over and over with its vivid characters and the slowly unravelling mystery that is at the heart of the story. Above all, I was delighted to find that this novel centres around two young women who have been overshadowed by more prolific historical figures, bringing lesser-told stories to the forefront.

In this book, Amelia Pang examines all aspects of China’s system of forced labor, which she explains has recently been deployed as a tool in the Uyghur genocide but has existed long before the genocide began. Importantly, she explains how Western consumers are complicit in Chinese forced labor through their choices to purchase the cheap goods that this system produces.

This is an amazing book!

Ben Jelloun was a political prisoner in Morocco for several years and was imprisoned in a dark cell in the ground in unimaginably horrific conditions. This book demonstrates politics gone wrong and the extent of the brutality that can be ravaged on other human beings in a system lacking justice or any sense of human rights and dignity.

Despite the intensely inhumane conditions of imprisonment, Ben Jelloun carries us along his journey and offers his readers an inspiring account of endurance and courage.

This book needs to be read by people in an era of democratic backsliding because it helps to demonstrate some of the things that are at stake when electorates become tempted by authoritarian leaders.

It is difficult for a man or woman who has in the past dedicated themselves to a movement to offer an account which departs from or goes beyond the organization’s line: too big a slice of the heart and soul has been given away.

In his account of Irish Republican imprisonment–a great deal of it first hand–sometime hunger striker Laurence McKeown does not quite break out of the gravitational field of his politics. Continuing attachment to a cause is however sufficiently balanced by an instinctive independence to distinguish this memoir from the run of the mill party-liners.

Certainly well worth a read.