Here are 100 books that The Charity of War fans have personally recommended if you like
The Charity of War.
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I’m a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where I teach and write about topics ranging from feminism to World War. I became interested in the history of the Armenian Genocide because my grandmother was a survivor. Other books I’ve written include: Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain; Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East and The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide.
This magisterial and sweeping history explains why the Ottomans went to war on the side of the Central Powers and how they failed to achieve victory. It discusses the military confrontations and battlefront traumas that resulted from the decision to go to war against the Allies in 1914 in a highly readable and engaging style.
By 1914 the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and they pulled the Middle East along with them into one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Unlike the static killing fields of the Western Front, the war in the Middle East was fast-moving and unpredictable, with the Turks inflicting decisive defeats on the Entente in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia,…
I’m a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where I teach and write about topics ranging from feminism to World War. I became interested in the history of the Armenian Genocide because my grandmother was a survivor. Other books I’ve written include: Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain; Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East and The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide.
Reading this book you will come to understand the extent of the suffering brought on by World War I to Ottoman society.
I particularly like Akin’s retelling of the experience of ordinary people who lived through the ordeal. Accounts of the war by soldiers and survivors of the nearly decade-long conflict that engulfed Ottoman lands add texture and shape to the military narrative that began in 1914 and only came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
The Ottoman Empire was unprepared for the massive conflict of World War I. Lacking the infrastructure and resources necessary to wage a modern war, the empire's statesmen reached beyond the battlefield to sustain their war effort. They placed unprecedented hardships onto the shoulders of the Ottoman people: mass conscription, a state-controlled economy, widespread food shortages, and ethnic cleansing. By war's end, few aspects of Ottoman daily life remained untouched.
When the War Came Home reveals the catastrophic impact of this global conflict on ordinary Ottomans. Drawing on a wide range of sources-from petitions, diaries, and newspapers to folk songs and…
I’m a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where I teach and write about topics ranging from feminism to World War. I became interested in the history of the Armenian Genocide because my grandmother was a survivor. Other books I’ve written include: Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain; Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East and The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide.
I like this book because it shows in maps and in thoughtful storytelling why the Middle East mattered to World War I.
Focused on the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and after, Fawaz’s book shows the importance of what some in Europe considered a secondary front in the war. The end of the Ottoman Empire, destroyed by World War I, had profound consequences for the peoples living in former Ottoman lands in modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel.
The Great War transformed the Middle East, bringing to an end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Arab lands while giving rise to the Middle East as we know it today. A century later, the experiences of ordinary men and women during those calamitous years have faded from memory. A Land of Aching Hearts traverses ethnic, class, and national borders to recover the personal stories of the civilians and soldiers who endured this cataclysmic event.
Among those who suffered were the people of Greater Syria-comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine-as well as the people of Turkey, Iraq,…
Studying unexplored topics has always fascinated me as a historian. Some overlooked aspects in history might shed a new light on many things that we consider obvious. I studied the Ottoman home front during the First World War from an unusual perspective by taking up the concept of moral crisis. Until very recently, talking about the First World War in the Middle East meant talking about only the European side of the story such as the famous “Lawrence of Arabia” and/or only political events that were attached to the Anglo-British rivalry. Instead, we need a “new” history of this watershed event that takes the local aspects into consideration. After all, the Great War was the most remarkable moment in the history of the Middle East which shaped its modern dynamics.
Based on a wide array of archival sources, the book discusses the Ottoman governance of Greater Syria during the First World War. During the war, the Ottoman government-appointed Cemal Pasa, one of the chief names of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, as the commander of the Fourth Army and the military governor of Ottoman Arab provinces to lead a campaign against in the British-held Suez Canal. However, in addition to the military aim of this appointment, there was also a political and social one that can briefly be summarized as further centralization of the state through the “iron fist” of the governor. The book presents us the power struggle in the region between the Ottoman government, Arab leaders, Zionists, and the Central Powers (the allies of the Ottoman Empire during the war) who attempted to increase their influence in the region after the British and French were declared…
During the First World War, Cemal Pasha attempted to establish direct control over Syrian and thereby reaffirm Ottoman authority there through various policies of control, including the abolishment of local intermediaries.
Elaborating on these Ottoman policies of control, this book assesses Cemal Pasha's policies towards different political groups in Syrian society, including; Arabists, Zionists, Christian clergymen and Armenian immigrants. The author then goes on to analyse Pasha's educational activities, the conscription of Syrians- both Muslim and Christian, and the reconstruction of the major Syrian cities, assessing how these policies contributed to his attempt to create ideal Ottoman citizens.
I’m a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where I teach and write about topics ranging from feminism to World War. I became interested in the history of the Armenian Genocide because my grandmother was a survivor. Other books I’ve written include: Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain; Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East and The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide.
I think this book explains why genocide happens
under the cover of war. It made me see why both World War I and World War II
were marked by genocides. I really liked how the author explained why the
Armenian Genocide was a key event of World War I.
Balakian is a poet who turned
to history writing to explain the experience of genocide and demonstrate the
central importance of the international response to genocide. He uses
interesting source material from eyewitnesses and official archives to trace both
the humanitarian response and military decisions that brought the US into the
war on the side of the Allies in the wake of the first large-scale genocide of
the twentieth century.
A History of International Human Rights and Forgotten Heroes
In this national bestseller, the critically acclaimed author Peter Balakian brings us a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history.
Awarded the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best scholarly…
My desire for food-related studies originates from my personal experience of starvation. Born in 1957 in rural China, I soon stepped into China’s Great Famine (1958-1962). During this famine, over 30 million people died of hunger, mostly peasants, including my grandpa (my mother’s father). As a growing child, I was hungry and today I still remember how my family struggled to feed us. After becoming a student at an agricultural university, I had the opportunity to think and started to ponder over food-related issues. After graduation, I became an academic and have since focused my energy on studies concerning food, chiefly, China’s food supply and food security.
Few Western intellectuals are aware of the scale of the atrocities during China’s Great Famine. If they had been and had written more on the famine, there could have been a greater impact on popular consciousness.
Yet, Dikötter cared to painstakingly search through local archives, and with his fine book, depicted the well-hidden human miseries to a much broader global audience. This is another book by a person who is foreign to China that greatly inspired me to look into improving China’s food security.
In this prize-winning book, Dikötter confirms that the famine was the worst man-made human catastrophe, not a natural calamity. Book prize judges regarded it as stunningly original and hugely important.
A groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine: winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 2011
'A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore
'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre
'A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal
Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death.
Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to…
My desire for food-related studies originates from my personal experience of starvation. Born in 1957 in rural China, I soon stepped into China’s Great Famine (1958-1962). During this famine, over 30 million people died of hunger, mostly peasants, including my grandpa (my mother’s father). As a growing child, I was hungry and today I still remember how my family struggled to feed us. After becoming a student at an agricultural university, I had the opportunity to think and started to ponder over food-related issues. After graduation, I became an academic and have since focused my energy on studies concerning food, chiefly, China’s food supply and food security.
This book records the memories of the devastation and loss of the famine survivors, providing grass-root evidence of the man-made catastrophe.
Zhou traveled to many provinces to search and interview the survivors, with a focus on nine that were worst hit by the famine. It is emotionally hard for a survivor to recall past miseries. It is even harder, indeed emotionally traumatizing, for a researcher to go through many miseries of the survivors to get this book compiled. I admire her courage and resilience.
A powerful account of China's Great Famine as told through the voices of those who survived it
In 1958, China's revered leader Mao Zedong instituted a program designed to transform his giant nation into a Communist utopia. Called the Great Leap Forward, Mao's grand scheme-like so many other utopian dreams of the 20th century-proved a monumental disaster, resulting in the mass destruction of China's agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China. In this remarkable oral…
My desire for food-related studies originates from my personal experience of starvation. Born in 1957 in rural China, I soon stepped into China’s Great Famine (1958-1962). During this famine, over 30 million people died of hunger, mostly peasants, including my grandpa (my mother’s father). As a growing child, I was hungry and today I still remember how my family struggled to feed us. After becoming a student at an agricultural university, I had the opportunity to think and started to ponder over food-related issues. After graduation, I became an academic and have since focused my energy on studies concerning food, chiefly, China’s food supply and food security.
I was shocked when I first came to know this book, the first to unravel the large-scaleabnormal death during China’s Great Famine. I was shocked because it was written by a person who was foreign to China and was far away from the famine, not by a person who was from China or someone who lived through the famine.
Also shocking are the book’s many revelations; the most important of which is that the Great Famine was man-made, not due to natural disasters as the Chinese regime always told us.
As a result, this book greatly inspired me to look into the causes and consequences of the famine and how to improve China’s food security to avoid future famines.
Combining years of interviews, extensive research, and painstaking detective work, a journalist exposes the horrible result of Mao Zedong's attempted utopian engineering in China between 1958 and 1962, uncovering a bloody trail of terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder.
I have loved the Malvern Hills my whole life, first living on a sheep farm at their foot and then in my great-grandparents’ old house at the very top. As a teenager I fell for a farmer’s son (now my husband) and spent all my time on his Herefordshire farm. My upbringing firmly engrained a deep love of rural life into me, so it was natural it became integral to my writing. To write with authenticity about a way of life I am so passionate about, I immerse myself in farming research and keep my hand in on a local farm when it comes to busy times such as lambing.
This book was published in 2018 and yet it already feels like a true classic.
It is the beautiful, poignant, and often poetic story of a rural community as one world war ends but the threat of an unsettled nation still lies heavily in the air.
Told through the eyes of a child on the brink of adulthood, there are moments of such naïve tenderness it pulled hard at my maternal senses.
The early part of the twentieth century saw so much change in the lives of small communities and I found this investigation of how the shifting world affected the way farmers lived and worked deeply fascinating. This resonated with me and the research I’ve done into the current issues of change farmers are facing now.
'A masterpiece' JON MCGREGOR 'Impossible to forget' THE TIMES 'Astonishing' GUARDIAN 'Startling' FINANCIAL TIMES
WINNER OF THE EU PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
'BOOK OF THE YEAR' NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE
The fields were eternal, our life the only way of things, and I would do whatever was required of me to protect it.
The autumn of 1933 is the most beautiful Edie Mather can remember, though the Great War still casts a shadow over the cornfields of her beloved home, Wych Farm.
When charismatic, outspoken Constance FitzAllen arrives from London to write about fading rural traditions, she…
I have a passion for this theme because I served as an armor officer in the U.S. Army for more than twenty years. I saw the effect of both thinking and non-thinking commanders first-hand in places like the inter-German border during the Cold War, Iraq in combat during the first Gulf War, and Bosnia in ‘operations other than war.’ My experience drove me to continue my military studies resulting in four degrees, including my PhD and my current occupation as a professor of military history. My search for understanding war and military decision-making reflects a desire to better instruct the future leaders among my college students and readers.
With unmatched research and brilliant analytical thought, Nicholas Lambert upends long-accepted explanations of a military disaster—the Gallipoli Campaign—that not only rocked Britain in World War I but reverberates in international relations to this very day. His forensic examination of the British government’s symbiotic political, diplomatic, economic, and military decision-making should be required reading for all students of those disciplines. His approach dismantles accepted histories derived from the political assignment of blame and instead gives the reader an understanding of policy decisions tortured by a wide array of then-pertinent circumstances ranging from the price of a loaf of bread to the power of a Russian Tsar. We can hear the echoes of Lambert’s analysis in today’s cable news reports regarding globalization, disruption to wheat markets, and the political impact of inflation. A timeless work indeed.
An eye-opening interpretation of the infamous Gallipoli campaign that sets it in the context of global trade.
In early 1915, the British government ordered the Royal Navy to force a passage of the Dardanelles Straits-the most heavily defended waterway in the world. After the Navy failed to breach Turkish defenses, British and allied ground forces stormed the Gallipoli peninsula but were unable to move off the beaches. Over the course of the year, the Allied landed hundreds of thousands of reinforcements but all to no avail. The Gallipoli campaign has gone down as one of the great disasters in the…
