Books like Putin country by Anne Garrels

Peter Pomerantsev’s nonfiction portrait of post‑Soviet Russia exposes how wealth, power and a new brand of authoritarianism reshape society, culture and identity in the 21st century.

David Greene chronicles a 6,000‑mile rail journey from Moscow to Vladivostok, meeting ordinary Russians and uncovering how post‑Soviet life has transformed across the vast nation.

Journalist Masha Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state.

"As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs--an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book. We meet the Guyanese immigrant who grows beautiful flowers outside his modest Queens residence in order to always remember the homeland he left behind, the Brooklyn-raised grandchild of Italian immigrants who illuminates a window of his brownstone with the family's old neon grocery-store sign, and many, many others. Helmreich draws on firsthand insights to examine essential aspects of urban social life such as ethnicity, gentrification, and the use of space. He finds that to be a New Yorker is to struggle to understand the place and to make a life that is as highly local as it is dynamically cosmopolitan." -- Publisher's description.

Giles Tremlett traces the hidden scars of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, exploring how the nation’s long‑held "pact of forgetting" has finally been ruptured by the discovery of mass graves and the stories of ordinary Spaniards.

In remote Afghan villages, women weave carpets that mirror their lives—hand‑knotted threads, enduring war and tradition, and the complex social fabric of a people whose art preserves history.