100 books like Ed Kennedy's War

By Ed Kennedy, Julia Kennedy Cochran (editor),

Here are 100 books that Ed Kennedy's War fans have personally recommended if you like Ed Kennedy's War. Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

This book was a lifesaver for me as I began to explore media-military relations about a decade ago.

Briefly but authoritatively Sweeney charts the relationship between the American military and the media from the Revolutionary War to the early twenty-first century. Sweeney, a former journalist himself, also writes well and this is a joy to read.

The subtitle suggests Sweeney’s take on the subject, and Sweeney’s work generally has been invaluable to me and this book would be the place to start for anyone interested in the subject.  

By Michael S. Sweeney,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Military and the Press as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Because news is a weapon of war - affecting public opinion, troop morale, even strategy - for more than a century America's wartime officials have sought to control or influence the press, most recently by ""embedding"" reporters within military units in Iraq. This second front, where press freedom and military imperatives often do battle, is the territory explored in ""The Military and the Press"", a history of how press-military relations have evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first century in response to the demands of politics, economics, technology, and legal and social forces. Author Michael S. Sweeney takes a chronological approach,…


Book cover of The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War Against Nazi Germany

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

This is a book I wish I had written, far and away the best book about coverage of the Second World War in Europe. 

It is based on a wealth of archival research and features both celebrated reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow, and less well-known ones like Homer Bigart and Don Whitehead. Although award-winning scholarship, Casey’s work is accessible to any curious reader. Casey is English but understands well the American military, the American press, and American culture generally.

Casey explores the war in the Pacific theater in a subsequent book, The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan.

By Steven Casey,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The War Beat, Europe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the North African desert to the bloody stalemate in Italy, from the London blitz to the D-Day beaches, a group of highly courageous and extremely talented American journalists reported the war against Nazi Germany for a grateful audience. Based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, War Beat, Europe provides the first comprehensive account of what these reporters witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the
home front's perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American history.

In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative, Steven Casey takes readers from the inner councils…


Book cover of Reporting War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

Moseley was the Chief European Correspondent for The Chicago Tribune for the last forty years of the twentieth century and although published by a university press is more a work of journalism than original scholarship. 

It is based largely on the memoirs of an extraordinary number of reporters, many American but many more not. The real virtue of this book is how wide-ranging it is, covering the entire war and reporters from all of the combatant countries.

Readers get a vivid sense of how World War II was just that—a war that raged across the globe. 

By Ray Moseley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Reporting War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II's daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In this fascinating book, Ray Moseley, himself a former foreign correspondent who encountered a number of these journalists in the course of his long career, mines the correspondents' writings to relate, in an exhilarating parallel narrative, the events across every theater-Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan-as well as the lives of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies.

Moseley's broad…


Book cover of A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

I first encountered Liebling’s work about Normandy during World War II when I received a Fulbright fellowship to teach at the university in Caen in the 1980s.

His Normandy Revisited was the only book in the library at VCU that had Normandy in the title. I’ve been a fan ever since, as his work is both canny and often laugh-out-loud funny. Liebling worked for the New Yorker for many decades, and wrote the best long-form journalism of the war.

Liebling possessed an intimate knowledge of French language and culture, which gave him unparalleled access to civilians both in French North Africa and in Normandy in the months after D-Day.

By Pete Hamill (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A. J. Liebling as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the most gifted and influential American journalists of the 20th century, A. J. Liebling spent five years reporting the dramatic events and myriad individual stories of World War II. As a correspondent for The New Yorker, Liebling wrote with a passionate commitment to Allied victory, an unfailing attention to telling details, and an appreciation for the literary challenges presented by the discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate nature of war. This volume brings together three books along with 26 uncollected New Yorker pieces and two excerpts from The Republic of Silence (1947), Liebling's collection of writing from the…


Book cover of The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II

Janet Somerville Author Of Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War 1930-1949

From my list on women war correspondents.

Why am I passionate about this?

Janet Somerville taught literature for 25 years in Toronto. She served on the PEN Canada Board and chaired many benefits that featured writers including Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Alice Munro, Azar Nafisi, and Ian Rankin. She contributes frequently to the Toronto Star Book Pages, and has been handwriting a #LetterADay for 8 years. Since 2015 she has been immersed in Martha Gellhorn’s life and words, with ongoing access to Gellhorn’s restricted papers in Boston. Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949 is her first book, now also available from Penguin Random House Audio, read by the Tony Award-winning Ellen Barkin. 

Janet's book list on women war correspondents

Janet Somerville Why did Janet love this book?

Like their male counterparts, Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Clare Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Sigrid Schultz faced the danger inherent in reporting from war zones, but, unlike the men, these women often had to improvise to get access. Ever intrepid, Gellhorn noted, “If they don’t want to accredit you, you just do it, any little lie will do.” 

By 1945 there were 250 women accredited to the Allied armies as reporters and photographers. Everyone had something to do that felt necessary, though post-war many were “shredded up inside.” With the narrative drive of a well-paced thriller, Mackrell’s essential work will have you reaching for more about the words and lives of these trailblazing six.

By Judith Mackrell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Correspondents as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent.

"Thrilling from the first page to the last." —Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women
 
"Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the best…Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories." —New York Times Book Review
 
On…


Book cover of You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

Janet Somerville Author Of Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War 1930-1949

From my list on women war correspondents.

Why am I passionate about this?

Janet Somerville taught literature for 25 years in Toronto. She served on the PEN Canada Board and chaired many benefits that featured writers including Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Alice Munro, Azar Nafisi, and Ian Rankin. She contributes frequently to the Toronto Star Book Pages, and has been handwriting a #LetterADay for 8 years. Since 2015 she has been immersed in Martha Gellhorn’s life and words, with ongoing access to Gellhorn’s restricted papers in Boston. Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949 is her first book, now also available from Penguin Random House Audio, read by the Tony Award-winning Ellen Barkin. 

Janet's book list on women war correspondents

Janet Somerville Why did Janet love this book?

Becker writes vibrantly about three intrepid journalists who covered the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia: Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine writer Frances Fitzgerald, photojournalist Catherine Leroy, and combat reporter Kate Webb, whose insistence on getting close to the action led to her capture. Their individual stories, including traumas and injuries are set in relief against wider history.

By Elizabeth Becker,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked You Don't Belong Here as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The long buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the official and cultural barriers to women covering war.

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French dare devil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.

At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and…


Book cover of The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler

Brooke L. Blower Author Of Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper

From my list on surprising histories about Americans abroad during WWII.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a history professor at Boston University, where I teach and write about modern American popular thought, political culture, trade, travel, and war especially in urban and transnational contexts. I enjoy histories that are based on deep and creative bodies of research and that push past timeworn myths and clichés about the American past.

Brooke's book list on surprising histories about Americans abroad during WWII

Brooke L. Blower Why did Brooke love this book?

The efforts of antifascist foreign correspondents to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies are well known. 

Olmsted shines a light on the less-recognized but equally consequential collaboration between American and British rightwing journalists who did not want their nations to war against Hitler. Olmsted’s account brims with hilarious passages about the eccentric lifestyles of media moguls such as William Randolph Hearst and Lord Beaverbrook, as well as jaw-dropping quotes from the editorial pages of their newspapers.

By Kathryn S. Olmsted,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Newspaper Axis as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How six conservative media moguls hindered America and Britain from entering World War II

"A damning indictment. . . . The parallels with today's right-wing media, on both sides of the Atlantic, are unavoidable."-Matthew Pressman, Washington Post

"A first-rate work of history."-Ben Yagoda, Wall Street Journal

As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the…


Book cover of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts

Mike Hulme Author Of Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity

From my list on the contested meanings of climate change.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been fascinated by the weather since as a schoolboy I avidly followed the cricket scores and the fate of tomorrow’s match. This co-dependence of my passion for cricket with the state of the weather turned into a professional career as, first, a research scientist and then later a professor of geography, I studied the idea of climate and the many ways in which it intersects with our social, ecological and imaginative worlds. As human-caused climate change became a defining public and political issue for the new century, my interests increasingly focused on understanding why people think so differently about the climate, its changes, its future trajectory—and what to do about it. 

Mike's book list on the contested meanings of climate change

Mike Hulme Why did Mike love this book?

Too often, climate change debates reduce to throwing around scientific facts – how much warming, how soon will it happen, how many people will it affect, and so on. Candis Callison recognises that such arguments don’t get us very far when deciding what to do. There are different types of facts. In this book she shows why the facts about climate change that really matter in different human worlds – in corporations, in religious groups, amongst journalists, in village communities – are social facts; these are shared ‘facts’ about what climate change means to different social formations. And it is through these diverse communal facts that climate change comes to matter.

By Candis Callison,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How Climate Change Comes to Matter as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.

The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral…


Book cover of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

Claudia Smith Brinson Author Of Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina

From my list on revealing what is hidden, lost, forgotten.

Why am I passionate about this?

I lived in sixteen places by the time I was twenty-two. A peripatetic youth may teach you that different is interesting, that stereotypes don’t hold, that the emperor has no clothes. When I moved South and worked as a journalist, I found black elders’ stories so different from the official stories of white authorities. Horrified that these men and women would die with their heroism untold, I interviewed more than 150 black activists for Stories of Struggle. I want to know what is missing; I want it found. Like a detective, an anthropologist, a scientist, and yes, a journalist, I want to know, and I want others to know.

Claudia's book list on revealing what is hidden, lost, forgotten

Claudia Smith Brinson Why did Claudia love this book?

The Race Beat quickly turns to open conflict. White-owned media wake up to the atrocities of racism. (It was way past time to pay attention. Exploring that is among the reasons I appreciate the book.) What follows seem like war movies.

We learn just how hard it was to get the story, photograph, or film; get the story out; get yourself out. Journalists for the white-owned Northern press, black-owned press, and TV networks are assaulted by enraged mobs during the Montgomery bus boycott, Central High School’s desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas; James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi; and Freedom Rides into Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama.

They dodge attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham and club-wielding ”posse men” in Selma. They persist. They make a daily record. Without them, the movement would have been “a bird without wings,” said John Lewis, Freedom Rider (and later, US senator). 

By Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Race Beat as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.

Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who…


Book cover of Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

Constance Hays Matsumoto Author Of Of White Ashes

From my list on beyond Oppenheimer: the truth, reality, and horror.

Why am I passionate about this?

I write stories and poetry intended to influence positive change in our world. Since marrying Kent 25 years ago and then growing to know and love his parents, something stirred in me to learn more and to write Of White Ashes. In our research, we relied on over 50 primary Hiroshima sources, visited the family home in Hiroshima, saw the bomb shelter my father-in-law dug into the side of a hillside, visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the few buildings that still stand, and walked where my father-in-law walked. Researching and writing Of White Ashes changed me—forever. My article, "How the History of Nuclear Violence Shapes Our Present", was published in CrimeReads.

Constance's book list on beyond Oppenheimer: the truth, reality, and horror

Constance Hays Matsumoto Why did Constance love this book?

Since John Hersey’s Hiroshima is my top book pick about the Hiroshima bombing, it makes sense that Fallout is another favorite.

Blume uses her journalistic talents to take the reader on a thrilling journey through the U.S. Government's attempts to cover up the horrific effects of the blast and its aftermath and the efforts to keep secret Hersey’s necessary article about Hiroshima right up to its publication.

Many believe the lessons in Hiroshima served as a deterrent that has kept the atomic warfare genie in its bottle for all these many years. Fallout tells the story of just how difficult it was to pull that off. Buckle up.

By Lesley M M Blume,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Fallout as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in the news media, war correspondents, and censorship?

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