Perhaps you've fantasized of rounding up religious conservatives and shipping them somewhere far off. In 1922, Lenin did something like this, and the result, of course, was appalling. Lesley Chamberlain has written a highly compelling account of the "philosophy steamers," two ships Lenin packed with anti-Bolshevik thinkers—eminent religious philosophers Semyon Frank and Nickolas Berdyaev among them—and their passages to Paris, Prague, and Berlin. (Might not be best on that late-summer cruise.)

Lenin's Private War
By Lesley Chamberlain; St. Martin's Press; $27.95