100 books like The Charity of War

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.

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.

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.

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… show more.

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.

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.

I was shocked when I first came to know this book, the first to unravel the large-scale abnormal 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.

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. 

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. 

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.