Here are 100 books that Freaks of a Feather fans have personally recommended if you like
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My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
I was still a child when the Vietnam War ended, but for some reason, I always felt it was my war. It’s what I read about; it filed the movies I watched in high school. It was the war we trained for when I joined the Marines.
Marlantes arrived in Vietnam about the time I was born. Like the three preceding it, his memoir was written with a great deal of time for reflection. I feel that this interval between the action and the recounting of it adds a level of complexity to remembrances of a very harrowing time.
"Matterhorn" author Karl Marlantes' nonfiction debut is a powerful book about the experience of combat and how inadequately we prepare our young men and women for the psychological and spiritual stresses of war. One of the most important and highly-praised books of 2011, Karl Marlantes' "What It Is Like to Go to War" is set to become just as much of a classic as his epic novel "Matterhorn". In 1968, at the age of twenty-two, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty Marines who would live or…
My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
Before reading this book, I knew very little about the British Burma campaign. Fraser’s memoir is so compelling because it was written forty years after the events it describes.
I love that he can reflect on his time in Burma and the knowledge gained over the intervening period. I also appreciate that he acknowledges how the passage of time may have colored his memories.
After 25 years of chronicling the military misadventures of Flashman, the Victorian arch-cad, George MacDonald Fraser has temporarily deserted fiction to write this, his own personal account of the Burma War. In this book he describes life and death in Nine Section, a small group of hard-bitten and possibly eccentric Cumbrian borderers with whom the author, then 19, served in the last great land campaign of World War II. The book describes the experience when the 17th Black Cat Division captured a vital strongpoint deep in Japanese territory, held it against counter-attack and spearheaded the final assault in which the…
My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
This is a book I have read over and over. Jünger, a German infantryman, paints a picture of trench warfare that does nothing to glamorize combat, but I found the ideas of duty, bravery, leadership, and even ethics in its pages.
I appreciate that this memoir began as Jünger’s journal and was re-written and edited over a number of years, which allowed for the level of reflection that I feel is necessary for a memoir.
Originally published in 1920, The Storm of Steel is a first-hand account of World War I trench combat lifted from the diaries of Ernst Jünger, a German infantryman who would become one of Europe's most talented writers. The book was first translated into English in 1929 by Basil Creighton, the acclaimed translator of many other classic works of German literature, and was widely hailed as a masterpiece.
The Storm of Steel remains the definitive account of World War I, following Jünger through several major engagements as he develops from an eager young soldier into a battle-hardened officer. Subsequent revisions by…
My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
This book is the story of an incredible life. I love reading about service members who achieve great things after their time in uniform, especially when discussing how their service impacts their follow-on careers.
Daly has lived an amazing life from the frozen battlefields of Korea to the Kennedy administration. Daly’s journalism training is apparent in that he provides only the most important details and recollections from a life filled with incredible adventures.
This memoir was also written well after the events discussed which I feel is a requirement for a true reflective memoir.
An Irishman in the U.S Marine Corps, Charles U. Daly thinks fighting in Korea will be an adventure and a way to live up to a family tradition of service and soldiering. He comes home decorated, wounded, and traumatized, wondering what's next. His quest for a new mission will take him to JFK's White House, Bobby Kennedy's fateful campaign, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and a South African township devastated by the AIDS epidemic. Chuck's life is a true story of living up to Kennedy's challenge to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can…
I’m an OG ATLien (born in Atlanta, Georgia) and served in the US Marine Corps and the US Army. I hold a degree from Kennesaw State University and taught high school social studies from 2004 - 2006, before my military reenlistment which jumpstarted the events in my memoir.
My War is a true story set in 2004 post-invasion Iraq told by a US Army grunt on the bottom of the totem pole.
As a former infantryman near the bottom myself, I could relate to the rollercoaster ride war grunts endure that can go from extreme boredom and amp up to fierce combat in an instance. Buzzell’s language is grunt speak which is unrefined and full of profanity, not for everyone, but it’s the perfect dialect for describing everything from battles to talking trash with other grunts.
I also appreciated that Buzzell guided us through his life as a struggling twentysomething, before joining the army, rather than taking the reader straight to battle. Gen Xers will love \m/.
Colby Buzzell traded a dead-end future for the army-and ended up a machine gunner in Iraq. To make sense of the bloody insanity surrounding him, he started a blog about the war and how it differed from the government's official version. As his blog's popularity grew, Buzzell became the embedded reporter the Army couldn't control-despite its often comical efforts to do so.
The result is an extraordinary narrative, rich with unforgettable scenes: the Iraqi woman crying uncontrollably during a raid on her home; the soldier too afraid to fight; the troops chain-smoking in a guard tower and counting tracer rounds.…
I am an archaeologist dealing with prehistoric societies for the last 30 years. For many hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors worldwide practiced shamanism and altered states of consciousness. I think this is what makes us human and what allows the persistence and success of our genus. The more I learn about these two subjects, the more I understand their importance and relevance to us today. There is a lesson sent to us by past societies: Pay respect to the world. Respectful behavior is assisted by shamanism and altered states of consciousness. We can be better, feel better, and do better, and the books I recommended are the beginning of this wonderful way.
I am crazy about this book, as this book almost made me crazy (in a good sense).
It tells the story of one of the most famous holocaust survivors and writers and how the nightmares from the concentration camp, known as Auschwitz, haunted this survivor. He suffered for years until he was treated with LSD. His mind was changed for the better. He stopped dreaming about the suffering he had experienced, and this was done by changing his consciousness.
It shows how much our mind is open to improvements and what is the real power and benefit of practicing shamanism and altered states of consciousness. And how it worked for many years for our ancestors, and how we can benefit from it nowadays. Such a powerful and hope-making book!
Though the author survived two years in Auschwitz, the memories of the horrors he experienced gripped him mercilessly for years until he found relief through psychotherapy. This book is the author's unforgettable memoir of that experience.
Some of my first memories as a kid are of films and TV shows about World War Two; the theme tune and credits of The World At War TV series still haunt me even now. But to be honest, the bombing of Germany never gripped me as much as, say, the war in Russia, that is, until I started to read up on it. It was a revelation. Suddenly, I saw incredibly young men fighting to survive in the most hostile environment on the planet–or rather above the planet, miles above, in fact. To me, I find the war they fought alien, but at the same time so absorbing I lose myself in it.
The best thing about reading this book was that it shone a light–if you can forgive the pun–on the otherwise unseen world of the nighttime air battles over Germany.
Before I read it, I admit I thought of the night war as some sort of game of chess, somehow fought at a comfortable distance. Boiten’s book shredded that distance and brought me face-to-face with the reality of it all in a gratifyingly unsentimental way.
Perhaps the most powerful image it left me with was of young British (and allied) airmen suddenly being blown out of the sky by an enemy they all so often never saw until their aircraft was turned into a horrifying fireball.
The night airwar over Western Europe was a long, intensive and costly airwar campaign. Theo Boiten tells this often harrowing and sometimes inspiring story using the personal accounts of over 70 veterans from both sides. The book is illustrated with many rare and previously unpublished photographs from the personal collections of those veterans and forms a record of this important aspect of 20th-century history.
I came to England on a Rhodes Scholarship from South Africa in 1961 and have been a Professor at the London School of Economics and Brandeis University. I am the Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. My interests are the politics of Eastern Europe, the history of the Jews, and the conflict in the Middle East. I have witnessed the transition from communist rule to democracy in Poland and the end of apartheid in South Africa. There are growing threats to democracy and political pluralism, and I very much hope that these can be successfully resisted.
This book deals with a neglected aspect of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in occupied Eastern Europe. The young women whose activities it describes were determined to respond to the brutal murder of their families and the violent destruction of their communities which they had witnessed. Some of them were as young as 15, and they were active, above all, as couriers linking Jewish resistance groups in more than ninety different cities of Poland. They were also involved in armed actions, bombing German train lines and on one occasion blowing up a town's water supply.
What I found particularly moving is the way it describes in detail the actions of some of the women who engaged in these activities.
'Original and compelling, an untold story of rare and captivating power' Philippe Sands
'A fascinating history about a little-known group who took on the Nazis . . . The individual tales of these courageous young women are remarkable' Independent
'Rescues a long-neglected aspect of history from oblivion, and puts paid to the idea of Jewish, and especially female, passivity during the Holocaust. It is uncompromising, written with passion - and it preserves truly significant knowledge. ... Judy Batalion has uncovered a trove of unknown or forgotten information about the Holocaust of genuine import and impact.'…
Like many people, I have experienced my share of suffering. I have also spent a lifetime exploring the suffering of others through great works of literature and art. My attraction to Japanese literature–imbued with a Buddhist sensitivity to loss–reflects my taste for the melancholy beauty of works of art that transmute suffering into aesthetic form. The qualities I find in Japanese literature are in wonderfully long supply in writings from around the world. My list of favorite books is a small testament to that aesthetic work which has the potential to heal us.
Reading these messages in a bottle discovered buried under a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, I am staggered and amazed at the indomitable human capacity for resilience and creativity.
I read these harrowing literary masterworks, which report on the most hellish degradations, and I am stunned that Zalmen Gradowski, from deep within his suffering, could wrest from the horrors before him and from his own despair, a literary art that is beautiful and solacing. I am reminded of the human capacity, which we all must certainly share, to snatch shreds of beauty from the darkest of circumstances and of the human hope that somewhere beyond one’s own hell lives a sympathetic ear.
A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz.
On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner's powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III.
I was born on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin. Raised during the often troubled, often wonderful decade of the 1960s, I learned to stand up for what I thought was right. I joined forces with my beautiful wife during our high school years, and together, we ran away to build our own life aided by the Oneida principle of “looking ahead seven generations.” Encountering many obstacles along the way, including a poetry professor who said that what I wrote wasn’t poetry and a theater professor who said that if what I wrote was any good it was already being done. Still, I continue to write.
Some stories are hard to digest, but a must-read for everyone who hopes to see a better tomorrow. This book tells about six European Jewish children who survived the holocaust. I found many things disturbing, but if we don’t know our history, we won’t be able to stand against the tide of human resentments that the world suffers over and over and over again.
In a book that will touch hearts and minds, acclaimed cultural historian Marilyn Yalom presents firsthand accounts of six witnesses to war, each offering lasting memories of how childhood trauma transforms lives.
The violence of war leaves indelible marks, and memories last a lifetime for those who experienced this trauma as children. Marilyn Yalom experienced World War II from afar, safely protected in her home in Washington, DC. But over the course of her life, she came to be close friends with many less lucky, who grew up under bombardment across Europe-in France, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway,…
