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Life and FateBook

by Vasily Grossman

Who uses, recommends or left Life and Fate, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

2 people

Patrick Collison
Co-founder of Stripe. Publishes the contents of his bookshelf, marking the standouts.
recommended

Grossman’s Life and Fate is maybe a useful counterpoint.

2026-10-11·x.com ↗

Antony Beevor
British military historian, author of Stalingrad, Berlin and The Second World War.
recommended

These were the notebooks that we worked on in Moscow and one realised that here was most of the raw material for Life and Fate which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II.

Five Books interview on the best books about World War II

2019-06-01·fivebooks.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.