History books that warrant a good reading

[Lerxst]

I would recommend the works of John Lewis Gaddis. I am Cold War buff among other things and his works seem to be very balanced and well researched.

His latest offering "The Cold War: A New History" is fantastic read.

 

[YamoMabus]

Any biography of Naploean. By far the greatest general and man to ever live.

 

[Joby]

Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. The leadup and first 30 days of WW1. Fascinating, and extremely well written.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter Thompson. Kind of a stretch to be 'history,' but you will never look at a Presidential race the same way after you've read Thomspsons patented 'Gonzo Journalism.'

 

[Joby]

Any biography of Naploean. By far the greatest general and man to ever live.

Really?

You know he lost in the end...

But really, I find the French revolution(s), American Revolution, and British civil war very fascinating periods of history.

 

[Tashah]

Just finished reading...

Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, And Catastrophic Legacy
Andrew Cockburn / Scribner / 2007 / 232pp.

A biography of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. An unsettling and devastating exposé of a beltway megalomaniac.

 

[Slainte]

Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and it's Attempt to End War by Margaret Macmilan

Understanding what hapened after World War 1 is essential to understanding half the modern day conflicts IMO, be it Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Balkans, the Kurds and others. Also a great insight into what caused World War 2 and the horrible mess Europe got itself into in the 30's. A lot of the theories and concepts of International Relations discussed in it are more relevant today than ever.

Pretty pro-American and anti-French most of the time IMO. Justifiably I think too.

 

[Tashah]

Just finished:

Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East - Juan Cole / Palgrave / 2007 / 279pp.

Yep. The same Juan Cole known for his blog site. This is a well documented history of Napoleon's invasion and occupation of Ottoman Egypt with extensive Notes from both French military and indigenous Egyptian sources.

Napoleon's excursion into Ottoman Egypt is today best remembered for the invaluable information gleaned about ancient Egypt by the hundreds of French scientists who accompanied the 32,000 man strong invasion force. However, you will find nothing in modern Egyptology books that even hints at the bloody and debauched French occupation that Cole here documents.

Pitched battles, the burning of towns, hostage taking, executions, rape, adultry, slavery, embezzlement and extortion. It is estimated that well over 10,000 Egyptians were killed during the brief two year French occupation.

The reality of European colonialism is well presented. Recommended reading.

 

[Diogenes]

The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot.

 

[gunner]

"Stalin court of the red tsar" a good read by Simon sebag montefiore. a extremely detailed account, but very heavy in places with Stalin having a few names it can get confusing.

"Waterloo" a near run thing by David howarth. another good read about a monumentous battle, where my old regiment played a key role at hougemont farm.

i am at present reading "inside Israel-Palestine, the conflict explained by Phyllis bennis. would be interested to know more about the author if anyone has any pointers???

cheers Paul:drink

 

[aegyptos]

I'm a new member here. This is my first post. I read mostly non-fiction with an emphasis in modern history. I've been reading this thread from the beginning and I've found quite a few great books that I read in the past few years recommended by members here I thought I would second some of them, so here goes:

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis, a very good and even handed.

Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, first read this in the 1960's and then read it again several years ago after reading Castles of Steel, Dreadnought and Paris, 1919. I was in a certain mood you might say...

Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and it's Attempt to End War by Margaret Macmilan. Superior telling of how the peace was lost and who lost it.

John Adams by David McCullough. A reader above said its not history and strictly speaking its catalogued as biography but its history too, especially in the hands of a master biographer like Mcullough. Adams certainly comes off as an odd duck but the Founders weren't following a script.

A Distant Mirror. Another one by Barbara Tuchman. "The calamitous 14th Century", she calls it. Certainly was too, what with plague, cold weather/poor harvests (global cooling?), war and the reactionary catholicism of the times. Told from the vantage point of the Lord of Coucy, an important French nobleman.

History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbons. I read this in the abridged edition when I was in high school. Still reads very well and a basic text every European history buff should read. Gibbons is The Man!

Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell. Another great narrative history. Custer, the 7th Cavalry and the Little Big Horn. How they got there, warts and all.

The Civil War, a narrative by Shelby Foote. A timeless classic. Foote was a novelist not an historian. His writing is seamless and he holds you spellbound with his storytelling genius. My favorite is volume III, Red River to Appomattox.

The Collapse of the Third Republic, 1875-1940 by William Shirer. Also wrote the better known Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Its not hard to find small factual errors in either of these books but Shirer was a journalist not an historian. Still, he gives you a very good picture of what it felt like while it was happening. Combine his telling of the fall of the Third Republic with books like Strange Victory by Ernest May and To lose a Battle, France 1940 by Alistair Horne and you've got the big picture.

Too that weren't mentioned in the thread:

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East. If you want to know how that region got so screwed up just look to Britain and France. Fromkin lays it all out and makes no apologies.

The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson. A revisionist look at World War One by Britain's pre-eminent economic historian. Plays with some counterfactuals and demonstrates that Germany and wasn't all that different from Britain, France and Russia when it comes to warmongering.

 

[The silenced majority]

The Christian Life and the Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States Benjamin F. Morris 1864

 

[Tashah]

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground - Robert D. Kaplan / Random House / 2007 / 428pp

In his previous best-seller - Imperial Grunts - Kaplan took us along as he embedded with US Special Ops Forces in Africa and US Marines in Iraq and the Middle East. A riveting and unforgettable journey.

In his newest book Kaplan again embeds with US forces. He spends time with small-footprint ground units in Africa and Asia. He tours the Pacific in both surface ships and subs. Visits a missile base in Alaska. Accompanies a humanitarian mission after the Asian tsunami. He shows us a US military you rarely ever see portrayed in the media. Flexible, dedicated, patriotic, and very professional. Enjoy! :mrgreen:

 

[1069]

I just read some old book called "Cancer Ward", by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
I picked it up for a dollar at Half-price Books (even though it was like rotting, with yellowish pages falling out everywhere) because it said the author won a Nobel Prize.
I found it very enlightening, if somewhat depressing.
It's about doctors and patients in a hospital in the Soviet Union back in the 1950s and 1960s.
It tells a lot about the history of the Soviet Union, and just a lot of stuff about the day-to-day life and hardships and shortages and restrictions they faced, that I had been unaware of.
It's a good book, from a recent historical point of view. Although pretty depressing, too. Pretty heavy.
I had to read it in segments, interspersing it with lighter reading.

 

[The silenced majority]

I just read some old book called "Cancer Ward", by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
I picked it up for a dollar at Half-price Books (even though it was like rotting, with yellowish pages falling out everywhere) because it said the author won a Nobel Prize.
I found it very enlightening, if somewhat depressing.
It's about doctors and patients in a hospital in the Soviet Union back in the 1950s and 1960s.
It tells a lot about the history of the Soviet Union, and just a lot of stuff about the day-to-day life and hardships and shortages and restrictions they faced, that I had been unaware of.
It's a good book, from a recent historical point of view. Although pretty depressing, too. Pretty heavy.
I had to read it in segments, interspersing it with lighter reading.

Read: A day in the life. It's a sobering account of what happened to objectors in the glorious peoples' revolution in Russia.

 

[Tashah]

I just read some old book called "Cancer Ward", by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
I picked it up for a dollar at Half-price Books (even though it was like rotting, with yellowish pages falling out everywhere) because it said the author won a Nobel Prize.
I found it very enlightening, if somewhat depressing.
It's about doctors and patients in a hospital in the Soviet Union back in the 1950s and 1960s.
It tells a lot about the history of the Soviet Union, and just a lot of stuff about the day-to-day life and hardships and shortages and restrictions they faced, that I had been unaware of.
It's a good book, from a recent historical point of view. Although pretty depressing, too. Pretty heavy.
I had to read it in segments, interspersing it with lighter reading.

If you liked the above by Solzhenitsyn, I highly recommend...

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago"

Once again, digest somewhat slowly. :mrgreen:

 

[Tashah]

After the Reich: The Brutal History Of The Allied Occupation
Giles Macdonough / Basic Books / 2007 / 618pp.

Sobering.

I just read some old book called "Cancer Ward", by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
I picked it up for a dollar at Half-price Books (even though it was like rotting, with yellowish pages falling out everywhere) because it said the author won a Nobel Prize.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was among the Russian soldiers that captured the city of Konigsberg. He was sickened by the gang rapes inflicted upon the local girls and women and wrote of these rapes in a poem called "Prussian Nights"...

The little daughter's on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl's been turned into a woman.
A woman turned into a corpse.
​

 

[Diogenes]

If you liked the above by Solzhenitsyn, I highly recommend...

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago"

Once again, digest somewhat slowly. :mrgreen:

Be especially careful with "The Gulag Archipelago" as it chronicles behavior not normally associated with human beings. It's a very worthwhile read, though - never before (or since) have I seen such towering indignation pour from a printed page, particularly the chapter on kids in the gulag.

 

[American]

I like David McCullough quite a bit.

 

[Tashah]

The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpretators and Bystanders
Ernst Klee-Willi Dressen-Volker Riess / Konecky & Konecky / 1991 / Foreword by Hugh Trevor-Roper / Translated by Deborah Burnstone / 314 pp.

Contains incriminating documents of the Third Reich, horiffic incidents culled from the personal letters, diaries, and memoirs of German participants, testimony from trial transcripts, and a large number of rare B&W photographs.

This is a horrible book to read, and yet one that sould be read.

 

[gunner]

can anyone recommend good books on the Vietnam war? its something i would like to know more about, from snips I've read so far the US didn't come out of it to good [militarily], especially when you read 1/5 of US troops were killed by friendly fire thats about 10,000 if my facts are correct.

thanks paul.

 

[Diogenes]

Try Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow. It's as unbiased a history of the conflict as I have seen.

 

[aegyptos]

can anyone recommend good books on the Vietnam war? its something i would like to know more about, from snips I've read so far the US didn't come out of it to good [militarily], especially when you read 1/5 of US troops were killed by friendly fire thats about 10,000 if my facts are correct.

thanks paul.

The US forces acquitted themselves very well in Vietnam, winning every major engagement until they were withdrawn from combat for political reasons. The North Vietnamese Army was the toughest, most talented and dedicated opponent American soldiers ever faced in battle surpassing even the German Army of WW2.

For some good reading on the subject find:

Triumph Forsaken, The Vietnam War 1954-1965 and Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counter insurgency and Counterterror in Vietnam both by Professor Mark Moyer.

You say you have read that 1/5 of US KIAs in Vietnam came about through friendly fire. I've never seen that number before. May I ask where you read this?

 

[Leftist Protozoa]

Triumph Forsaken, The Vietnam War 1954-1965 and Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counter insurgency and Counterterror in Vietnam both by Professor Mark Moyer.

This is the same Mark Moyer who's work has been described as a “shallow, cynical, and selective effort by an American conservative who wishes to justify global military domination in the spirit of the aggressive imperialist Teddy Roosevelt” (Prof Colin Gordon in the New Internationalist). He is also the same conservative revisionist historian who wrote a long whiny piece for the National Review about not getting hired at the University of Iowa because of his extremist view of history. Yawn. At least that's why he thinks they didn't hire him. You'll find that all recommendations by aegyptos fall into this category.

Or... you could look for a book by a reputable historian.

 

[Tashah]

This is the same Mark Moyer who's work has been described as a “shallow, cynical, and selective effort by an American conservative who wishes to justify global military domination in the spirit of the aggressive imperialist Teddy Roosevelt” (Prof Colin Gordon in the New Internationalist).

The New Internationalist? Lol. Hardly an unbiased source...

The magazine has existed for over 30 years and currently is the largest left-wing magazine in circulation in the United Kingdom.

New Internationalist - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You'll find that all recommendations by aegyptos fall into this category.

Unless you can empirically demonstrate otherwise, this is opinion rather than factual.

 

[aegyptos]

Anyone who doesn't agree with LP's extreme leftwing agenda is automatically a shallow revisionist :roll:

I would heartily recommed that people read all the texts they can find about the war in Vietnam. I have read all of the books mentioned in this thread and I have found Moyer's two the best on the subject. Karnow's book is excellent. I own it and I often refer to it. Dr. Moyer is Professor of History at West Point. Of course the extreme Left is going to blackguard him just as they blackguard everything else about capitalist America. They cannot fault his scholarship so they attack him personally. Ignore LP. He's simply trolling and, as you can see, has nothing of substance to offer on this subject.