100 books like Irving Berlin

I read this book as a boy, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s the story of American PT boats in the South Pacific during World War II, and the story behind the title captivated me. Every soldier knows that he or she might be sacrificed by a commander to gain time for a retreat or as part of a super-dangerous mission.

The sailors on the boats in White’s story were living examples of how they could be expendable. Even as a boy, this book made me grateful for what I had and grateful to the members of the uniformed services who protected us. That they would make such a commitment makes me love America even more. 

I am an absolute sucker for origin stories about American subjects, and especially origin stories that I should know and don’t. Plus, I love anything and everything that Floyd Cooper illustrated, so that book hits all the right notes for me.

I was taken right away by the young narrator, who participates in America’s first Memorial Day, and astonished to hear that like so many things that matter in America—including the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier—Memorial Day came about by popular acclaim.

That the first one was organized by former slaves in South Carolina not even a month after the Civil War ended, well, that really makes Memorial Day a day for rememberin’. I loved America more when I finished this book than I did before I opened its cover. 

I am also a sucker for rituals. We don’t have enough of them in this country, and this book is about a modern American ritual that makes me think about the specifics of American military service and why I should recall it. People will often ask me what they can do personally to help honor our service members.

When I read this book about why we have white tables, what their elements should be, and what each of those elements represents, I had a much better idea of the right response. If I were a kid, I would have a lot of questions by the time I finished reading this book, and that is a very good thing. 

I love this book because it got me to consider one of the classic, relatively modern patriotic songs in brand new ways. I knew the lyrics to the first verse and chorus of Woody Guthrie’s song, of course. I bet most adults do. But when I saw the Jakobsen illustrations, a perfect counterpoint to the lyrics, I could hear the music soaring in my mind.

I also love that by the book’s end, the lyrics that I didn’t know as well were now part of me and always would be. I have traveled widely and know how gorgeous our land is. It was even more gorgeous to me by the time I finished. 

I stumbled on this novel when I was looking for something else (a common writers’ problem). It was written in 1932 and banned the next year by the Nazis and is set amongst the gangs of young men struggling to survive in a harsh and desperately impoverished Berlin. The descriptions of the hard side of the city are brilliantly drawn and the characters are so real you long for their lives to improve even when you know there is almost no hope of it. Haffner was a social worker who clearly knew Berlin’s streets well. To add to the poignancy of his writing, nothing is known about his fate beyond a summons before a Nazi tribunal in the late 1930s. After that, he disappears. I really hope his book doesn’t.

A book with disturbing lessons for our time. This book charts the lives of three women during the 1930s and 40s as the Nazis rise to power and use book burning as a tool to destroy culture and freedom of expression. I adored and was completely captivated by the clever way the author wove a complicated story between three women in three different cities and times. 

Almost a character in itself is the spectre of book censorship and the damage it can inflict on society. This book has some very moving scenes–a burgeoning lesbian love affair, a children's game amid the horror of war, a finale that had me reaching for the tissues, and more. The amount of research in this book is incredible!

It's too easy to dismiss the Second World War. To relegate that epochal conflict into realms of ancient history, action films, kitset models, unread Father's day gifts, and black & white footage. But we all live through the consequences of this epic global struggle. This was the last time western civilisation brought itself close to destruction and it was a close call. 60 million lives were lost and no one died easily. The war was also raging just shy of 80 years ago. In the scheme of human history, that's recent.

Beevor's history of the global conflict - and it was global - is a page-turning affair. Vivid, engaging, heartbreaking, shocking. Really fine storytelling and a first class history, encompassing the great conflicts of east and west (China's experience of the war is much overlooked in the west but not in these pages). I found myself engrossed by this monumental… show more.

Berlin, 1945. As Russian forces close in around Hitler’s bunker, shots ring out underground. Rather than face the avenging Russians, the Fuhrer, along with his wife, Eva Braun, commits suicide. Yet as fanatical Nazis salute the burning bodies in the Reich Chancellery garden, the real Adolf Hitler is crawling through the bunker’s air ducting…

And so begins Joseph Heywood’s superb military thriller, a book I read in less than two days and one that paints a realistic, chaotic picture of the last days of the thousand-year Reich. As Herr Wolf is hunted across war-torn Europe by a team of Soviet special operations soldiers, it is the Fuhrer himself who threatens to be the architect of his own downfall. So good, I may have to read this one again.

When Iris Carpenter was reporting on the war she, like all journalists, was subject to the rules of the military censors. But once the conflict was over she was free to publish the truth of all that she’d seen, and her 1946 memoir is an extraordinarily candid, occasionally harrowing read. As her title suggests, Carpenter’s principal objective was to expose the prejudice and stupidity against which she and her female colleagues had to battle, simply to get to the front—her account was one of the primary sources for my book. But she was also a fearless eyewitness and her memoir provides rare insights into the conditions of war, both its camaraderie and its horror.

This is another book that manages to paint a picture of what life was like in Berlin during the war.  Roger Moorhouse tells some fascinating stories, such as that of Paul Ogorzow, the so-called S-Bahn Murderer. The fact that a serial killer was operating around Berlin’s railway system was a dilemma for the authorities who tried and failed to lay the blame on either Jews or Poles. Ogorzow was eventually captured convicted of the murder of eight women and of attacking thirty-seven more during 1940 and 1941. The fact he was a Nazi Party member was a deep embarrassment and didn’t help him: he was executed just days after his conviction.