I took a look at my bookshelves and found these books that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in modern history. They are listed in no particular order, and they are on different subjects, but they are all great books! Here is my quick video about these these books.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (1975) (the partition of South Asia into Pakistan and India)
Puyi. The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China (1967)
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1963) (the opening month of the Great War)
Siegfried Knappe, Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949 (1992)
Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (1949) (autobiography by America's most decorated soldier of World War II)
John Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976) (ground-breaking examination of the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, Somme)
Robert Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980) (masterful, and massive, account of Russia's most important tsar)
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970) (required reading)
Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (1960) (The most amazing account of Russia's nineteenth-century revolutionaries was written by this Italian historian and originally published in Italian as Il populismo russo, 1952)
Nicholas Riasanovsky (and Mark D. Steinberg), A History of Russia, 9th ed. (2018) (There is simply no better historian of Russia than the late Riasanovsky. This history has been in continuous publication since the first edition in 1963.)
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984) (lot of fun reading)
Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (1961) (The lives of Russian revolutionaries in exile in Europe in the nineteenth century crossed paths in all kinds of tangled, emotional encounters. This entertaining book is so much different than the later dry histories written by E. H. Carr.)
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)
Pavel Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade (1968) (the 1840s in Russia)
Harrison E. Salisbury, 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (1960) (World War II on the Eastern Front)
Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky, What Really Happened to the Class of 1965? (1976) (high school graduates in the middle of the Vietnam War and protests in the US)