My favorite book is a book I re-read, having first read it in the 1970s.
Telling the complicated story of Hitler and the Nazi Party in one, if large, volume is an amazing achievement. I wondered if it might be dated, but even though it was published in 1960 it remains the single best history of that period.
I was fascinated with the quote of Hans Frank, Nazi Governor General of Poland, before he was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946: “A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased.” I found Shirer’s riveting and exciting history as close to a page-turner as a history book can get. I have read hundreds of books on the Nazis and is there one single book that does it all?” Yes, it’s Shirer.
It was Hitler's boast that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. Instead it lasted only twelve. But into its short life was packed the most cataclysmic series of events that Western civilisation has ever known.
William Shirer is one of the very few historians to have gained full access to the secret German archives which the Allies captured intact. He was also present at the Nuremberg trials.
First published sixty years ago, Shirer's account of the years 1933-45, when the Nazis, under the rule of their despotic leader Adolf Hitler, ruled Germany is held up as a classic…
In 1528 a Spanish expedition landed in Florida. Three hundred men set out by land while the others sailed. They marched north along the Florida coast in a region abounding in swamps, poisonous snakes, and harsh vegetation while hoping to join the ship-borne men later. They never did.
I felt their despair, chronicled by NúñezCabeza de Vaca, as they spent eight years of slavery, indescribable suffering wandering through deserts, amid severe weather, naked, unprotected making their way west into Texas and northern Mexico. In the end, of the 300 men who had landed in Florida four would survive.
I found the tale so vivid I felt I was on their expedition. This is their incredible story.
This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of "Castaways (Naufragios)", Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernan Cortes. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native people along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving them as a slave…
I enjoy a good war story. However, telling the story of the Pacific War seemed daunting to me because of its vastness.
I found Ian Toll, in this first of his trilogy, enlivens the Battle of Midway, Coral Sea, Saipan, Leyte Gulf, Tarawa, and the others with electric excitement and clarity. I knew that Japan's two-generation rise from feudal and pre-industrial origins to the status of a major economic and military power was more than remarkable it was unprecedented in the entire course of human history.
Japanese hubris led to the attack on Pearl Harbor battling the “sleeping giant” of America for almost 4 years. Toll, avoiding the drudgery of reading about battles, tells the story with such mastery I felt I could relate the story myself.
On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss. Pacific Crucible tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history and seized the strategic initiative.
Ian W. Toll's dramatic narrative encompasses both the high command and the "sailor's-eye" view from the lower deck. Relying predominantly…
A sequel to Clifford A. Wright's groundbreaking A Mediterranean Feast, An Italian Feast celebrates the cuisines of the Italian provinces from Como to Palermo. An illustrated culinary guide and vade mecum (book of ready reference) meant to be the most comprehensive book on Italian cuisine, it includes over 800 recipes from the 109 provinces of Italy's 20 regions.
An Italian Feast is a book about Italian food, how Italians cook, eat, and how their food is an intimate part of their culture, perhaps even a defining element of "Italianness." It is the first book – in any language – to comprehensively explore the gastronomy and cuisine not just of Italy, and not just the regions of Italy, but all 109 provinces of Italy.
