I’ve devoted most of my life as a writer, historian, and teacher to understanding and connecting the events of the 20th century and their origins in the deep past. I believe World War I stands as one of the greatest human tragedies because the bloodiest events of the past century were directly caused by it. The tyrants Hitler and Stalin who thrived on mayhem and parasitized their societies were simply inconceivable without the destruction wrought by the Great War. I’m sometimes asked how I get up in the morning. I reply, ‘writing 20th-century history is a dirty job but some of us have gotta do it.’
Paul Ham’s Hiroshima Nagasaki will infuriate anyone who still believes the atomic bombs avoided a land invasion of Japan, ‘shocked’ Japan into unconditional surrender, and ‘saved up to a million American servicemen’. These post-war fabrications were part of an ex post facto narrative concocted by politicians to justify a war crime, as Ham’s exhaustive research demonstrates.
Hiroshima Nagasaki is being made into a 6-part television series by an Anglo-Australian production company. No American studio would touch it because, as one studio head remarked, ‘It’s not the story we were taught in school’.
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This semi-autobiographical novel is the most emotionally accurate story of the irruption of the First World War on the mind of a young Englishman that I’ve read.
Aldington sets his pen to exposing the ‘Old Lie’ that it was ‘sweet and right to die for your country’ – a lie indulged in most ostentatiously by the very politicians and press barons who were responsible for sending Aldington and millions of young men like him to face needless death in an unjust war.
This remains the outstanding full-length biography of Hitler, not least because it is brilliantly written; it is also extraordinarily prescient.
Fest’s portrayal of the Nazi leader, the first to be written by a German, shows how any human society, no matter how cultured or educated, if far enough degraded and humiliated will be willing to listen to a banal, humourless bully whose singular obsessions were to pick at Germany’s war wounds and delegate the slaughter of the blameless minority he deemed responsible.
In Fest’s hands, Hitler emerges as no freak of nature with god-like powers, no monster beyond our comprehension…but shockingly human, the living fulfillment of the racist fantasies of the ordinary, pot-bellied fascists who brought him to power.
A definitive history of the most lethal battle of WW2, told with exceptional clarity, academic rigor, and narrative flair, benefiting from access for the first time for a Western historian to the Soviet archives on a battle that would prove the nemesis of Nazi Germany.
With Stalingrad, Beevor broke the mold of traditional military history, reaching a wide readership who found themselves in possession of something more than an absorbing account of a decisive battle. Stalingrad reflects the human condition in extremis.
Dispatches is the psychological descent of a mind into the lunacy of the Vietnam War, a genuine Apocalypse Now, as told by a correspondent whose literary achievement is to distill the ‘voice’ of Vietnam to the mortified reader.
It matters little that the key characters are inventions: they serve as avatars for Vietnam’s malignant futility.
Reading Dispatches you’re in the grip of a book that won’t let you go until you understand the emotional truth about this napalmed, noxious episode in history, played out in the twisted imaginations of politicians functioning light years away from the bloody tableau of their creation.
A North Vietnamese soldier remembers the disasters of war as he returns to collect the bones of his fallen comrades.
Written as a stream of consciousness that leaps between time and place, The Sorrow of War is a multi-dimensional portrait of personal loss.
Bảo Ninh’s account of the ‘screaming souls jungle’ tells you all you need to know about the pity of war, the pity war distilled.
The Sorrow of War will stand for all time as one of the quieter, so all the more telling, indictments of inhumanity.
5,888 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about war, the Vietnam War, and Russia.
We think you will like Battle Cry of Freedom, Hero, and East West Street if you like this list.
From Cathal's list on how wars are won and lost.
Beautifully written masterwork on one of the most important wars of the 19th century. It takes the reader from the experience of ordinary soldiers in battle to key debates around the cabinet table, in a rare display of dexterity and understanding of all levels of war. You will enter Grant’s HQ from where he ran the critical Western theater of operations and sit across from Lincoln as he makes the key decision for a hard war that let the Union maximize its resources and win. And you will walk into Lee’s HQ where the Confederacy lost the war in bursts of Southern hubris that led to two ill-conceived invasions of the North that provoked the final crushing.
From Mary's list on the fragile peace after the Great War.
This wasn't available to me when I was writing Dreamers of the Day, but it deepened my compassion and respect for Lawrence, despite and because of his complexity. IMO, this is the best and most complete biography with much detail not available to prior biographers, particularly about Lawrence's later work as a marine engineer and technical writer.
From Judith's list on war crimes trials and international justice.
I loved this book. Legal concepts were clearly explained. Personal stories carried the book to its end. Sands shows how two men created laws to name and punish unimaginable crimes, and another who developed a system giving those crimes the patina of legality through the personal lives of four people born in Ukraine around the same time: Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, who conceived of “Crimes Against Humanity” and “Genocide” respectively; Hans Frank oversaw the mass extermination of the Jews in the Polish territories; Leon Buchholz, the author’s grandfather, whose entire family was murdered according to those laws. The author's grandfather was the only survivor having escaped to Paris before the Final Solution was put into effect.