48 Good Books by University of Buffalo
Recommended literature by the Undergraduate Academies and Libraries of the University of Buffalo.
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The Civil War by Shelby Foote
The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974) is a three volume, 2,968-page, 1.2 million-word history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote. Although previously known as a novelist, Foote is most famo...
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The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
The Killer Angels (1974) is a historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The book tells the story of four days of the Battle of Gettysburg in the Am...
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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is a murder story, told from a murder;s point of view, that implicates even the most innocent reader in its enormities. It is a cat-and-mouse game between a tormented young killer and a cheerful...
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Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag
The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America.
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Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
Set in a village in southern India shortly after India gained Independence, Nectar in a Sieve portrays, through the lives of its characters ̶̶ Rukmani, Nathan and their children ̶̶ the hopes and as...
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The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
The moving story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-lan, in which the author presents a graphic view of a China when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social u...
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A novel of great power that turns the world upside down. The Nigerian novelist Achebe reached back to the early days of his people's encounter with colonialism, the 1890's, though the white man and...
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Confessions by Augustine
Confessions is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written between AD 397 and AD 398. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published ...
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Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin in September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. When Silent Spri...
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Waiting for the Barbarians by J M Coetzee
For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts a...
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The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid...
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Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
Psychosocial developmentConsciousPreconsciousUnconsciousPsychic apparatusId, ego, and super-egoLibidoDriveTransferenceCountertransferenceEgo defensesResistanceProjection
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The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Il Principe (The Prince) is a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Originally called De Principatibus (About Principalities), it was origi...
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Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Essays is the title given to a collection of 107 essays written by Michel de Montaigne that was first published in 1580. Montaigne essentially invented the literary form of essay, a short subjectiv...
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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things is a politically charged novel by Indian author Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of a pair of fraternal twins who become victims of circumstance....
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The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, estimated to have been written in 1610–11, (although some researchers have argued for an earlier dating). The play's protagonist is the banished sorcer...
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Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is an American book written by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings.
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Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
De la démocratie en Amérique (published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville on the United States in the 1830s and its strengt...
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The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the...
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Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Zeitoun is a nonfiction book written by Dave Eggers and published by McSweeney's in 2009. It tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the Syrian-American owner of a painting and contracting company ...
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The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological change...
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine...
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Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (pronounced /ˈɡɒdoʊ/) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for someone named Godot. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects...
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The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
The Affluent Society is a 1958 book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post-World War II America was becoming wealthy in the pri...
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The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard is a 1978 book by Peter Matthiessen, which is an account of his two month journey along with naturalist George Schaller in 1973 to Crystal Mountain, in the Dolpo region on the Tibe...
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The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
In a haunting psychological tale of despair and freedom, Macabea is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved yet she fascinates Rodrigo because she is unaware of how unhappy she should be
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Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man?s search for the answer to his life?s ce...
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Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times by Paul Rogat Loeb
Soul of a Citizen awakens within us the desire and the ability to make our voices heard and our actions count. We can lead lives worthy of our convictions. A book of inspiration and integrity, Soul...
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He, She and It by Marge Piercy
"A triumph of the imagination. Rich, complex, impossible to put down." Alice Hoffman In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage...
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The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era by Michael Mandelbaum
Which of America's essential international commitments can we afford to keep in this time of diminished financial resources?
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Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 years of history, archeology, and the methods of social scienc...
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Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied...
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Bread Givers: A Novel : a Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New by Anzia Yezierska
A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.
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The Physician by Noah Gordon
Read by millions in thirty-two countries, soon to be a major motion picture, and voted “one of the ten most-beloved books of all time,” here is the first English-language digital edition of Noah Go...
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The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
It is 1937 and Amabelle Désir, a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, has built herself a life as the servant and companion of the wife of a wealthy colonel. She and Sebastien, a c...
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Farm Hands: Hard Work and Hard Lessons from Western New York Fields by Tom Rivers
Tom Rivers introduces readers to the rigors of farm labor and some of the people who do the grueling work. Rivers, a reporter for The Daily News of Batavia, N.Y., spent a year working a dozen diffe...
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Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
A novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of today, set in an ecologically sound future society. Hailed by the Los Angeles ...
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Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-income Neighborhood by Jay MacLeod
This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publicat...
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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq In her groundbreaking reporting over the past few years, Na...
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Selected Poems, 1965-1975 by Margaret Atwood
Poems deal with death, self-image, disasters, politics, children, evolution, history, the news, language, dreams, animals, and love
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Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986 by Margaret Atwood
Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Atwood has also written eleven volumes of poetry. Houghton Mifflin is proud to have published SELECTED POEMS, 1965-1975, a volu...
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A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron
This is the remarkable story of one endearing dog’s search for his purpose over the course of several lives. More than just another charming dog story, A Dog’s Purpose touches on the universal ques...
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Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann
Greatly expanded bilingual edition of the 1994 Marsilio edition, Songs in Flight.
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Madame Curie - A Biography by Eve Curie by Eve Curie
Marie Curie is a women who changed the face of science for all time, not just because of her discovery of the radioactive element Radium and her work with it, but because of her incredible strides ...
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Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on...
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
A New York Times bestseller—the outrageous exploits of one of this century's greatest scientific minds and a legendary American original. Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thri...
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The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born by Ayi K. Armah
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is the debut novel by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. It was published in 1968. It tells the story of a nameless man who struggles to reconcile himself with the ...
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The Death of Woman Wang MMP by Jonathan Spence
In The Death of Woman Wang the award-winning historian Jonathan Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure time and place: provincial China in the late 17th century. Drawing on a range of sources,...
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