Here are 100 books that The Hawk and the Dove fans have personally recommended if you like
The Hawk and the Dove.
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I’ve always loved history, especially U.S. history, and, as a White House official for President Clinton, I saw it made up close. As a historian, I have focused in particular on America’s role in the world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when I came to recognize that President Kennedy was right: “Domestic policy can hurt you, but foreign policy can kill you.” Over the last quarter-century, I’ve concentrated my work on America’s efforts to lead the West and promote freedom around the world. I read voraciously, write a column on foreign policy for leading outlets, and discuss global affairs often on TV and radio.
I love everything by the renowned historian Max Hastings, and Inferno is one of his most absorbing works. I loved this book in particular because, unlike most World War II books–which focus on either (1) how Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and other leaders conducted the war or (2) how soldiers, sailors, and aviators fought it on the ground, in the seas, or from the air–this book does both.
It puts you in the room with FDR and other world leaders, and it puts you on the battlefield in the Pacific, northern Africa and Italy, the Soviet Union, and finally, Germany and Japan as the Axis Powers fall in ignominious defeat. Even after 651 pages, I didn’t want this book to end.
A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. A book which shows the impact of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world- soldiers, sailors and airmen; housewives, farm workers and children.
Reflecting Max Hastings's thirty-five years of research on World War II, All Hell Let Loose describes the course of events, but focuses chiefly upon human experience, which varied immensely from campaign to campaign, continent to continent.
The author emphasises the Russian front, where more than 90% of all German soldiers who…
I’ve always loved history, especially U.S. history, and, as a White House official for President Clinton, I saw it made up close. As a historian, I have focused in particular on America’s role in the world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when I came to recognize that President Kennedy was right: “Domestic policy can hurt you, but foreign policy can kill you.” Over the last quarter-century, I’ve concentrated my work on America’s efforts to lead the West and promote freedom around the world. I read voraciously, write a column on foreign policy for leading outlets, and discuss global affairs often on TV and radio.
I love this book, which is warm and beautifully written, because it tells the story of the most vital and consequential political partnership of the last century. Roosevelt and Churchill, both heroes of mine, saved freedom by steering the Allies to victory in World War II over the mighty, ravenous, bloodthirsty, and seemingly invincible Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
This book brings Roosevelt and Churchill to life, showcasing their astounding brilliance and strength, along with their very human pettiness, impatience, and skullduggery, as they work in close concert with one another, press one another, and, when necessary, even work around one another. It’s a marvelous story and a gripping read.
The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in…
I’ve always loved history, especially U.S. history, and, as a White House official for President Clinton, I saw it made up close. As a historian, I have focused in particular on America’s role in the world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when I came to recognize that President Kennedy was right: “Domestic policy can hurt you, but foreign policy can kill you.” Over the last quarter-century, I’ve concentrated my work on America’s efforts to lead the West and promote freedom around the world. I read voraciously, write a column on foreign policy for leading outlets, and discuss global affairs often on TV and radio.
I love this book because it’s an inspiring story of selfless patriotism, of six men of great wealth and accomplishment who set aside their private careers and personal ambitions to serve their country at a time of awesome need.
Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen–as America emerged victorious in World War II but uncertain about the future, these friends and colleagues crafted the policies that created what later became known as the “American Century.”
This book is a deeply researched, fast-paced story of unsung heroes that left me nostalgic about the nation’s glorious past and, even after 741 pages, thirsting for more.
The Wise Men introduces the original brightest and best, leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar chaos: Averell Harriman, freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, author of Containment; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense during the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’ve always loved history, especially U.S. history, and, as a White House official for President Clinton, I saw it made up close. As a historian, I have focused in particular on America’s role in the world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when I came to recognize that President Kennedy was right: “Domestic policy can hurt you, but foreign policy can kill you.” Over the last quarter-century, I’ve concentrated my work on America’s efforts to lead the West and promote freedom around the world. I read voraciously, write a column on foreign policy for leading outlets, and discuss global affairs often on TV and radio.
I love stories about America at its best, its most uplifting, its most inspiring, and I can’t imagine anyone telling the story of the Berlin airlift and what he calls “America’s finest hour” in more gripping detail than Andrei Cherny in The Candy Bombers.
With style and elegance, he takes you into the White House, where Truman decides to save West Berlin from Stalin’s attempted conquest, and he puts you in the cockpits of the pilots who delivered food and other necessities on a round-the-clock basis to the desperate people of that city. How good is this book? I wish I had written this book myself.
In the tradition of the great narrative storytellers, Andrei Cherny recounts the exhilarating saga of the unlikely men who made the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history.
The Candy Bombers is a remarkable story with profound implications for our own time. Cherny tells the tale of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and secondstringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat, but also won the hearts of America’s defeated enemies, inspired people around the world to believe in America’s fundamental goodness, avoided World War III, and won the greatest…
Teresa Fava Thomas, Ph.D. is a professor of history at Fitchburg State University and author of American Arabists in theCold War Middle East, 1946-75: From Orientalism to Professionalismfor Anthem Press. I became interested in people who became area experts for the US State Department and how their study of hard languages like Arabic shaped their interactions with people in the region.
Although women have worked in diplomacy, their experiences serving in the United State Foreign Service are little known or understood. Her experience began in 1944 and she represented the USA in many countries, from Honduras to Zambia, in the State Department. Advancing your career and learning foreign languages while facing the professional challenges of operating in a wide variety of consulates and embassies makes for a fascinating story and explains a different perspective.
"In Abroad for Her Country, Jean M. Wilkowski shares the story of her extraordinary career in the U.S. Foreign Service during the last half of the twentieth century. Born in an era when few women sought professional careers, Wilkowski graduated from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College and the University of Wisconsin and then rose through the ranks at the Department of State, from Vice Consul to the first woman U.S. Ambassador to an African country and the first woman acting U.S. Ambassador in Latin America.
During her thirty-five-year diplomatic career, Wilkowski was sent first as a vice consul to the Caribbean during…
My interest in the ancient Near East began when I was about 8 years old. One day, when couldn’t find anything to do, I started paging through a book on Assyrian art that I found in one of my parents’ bookcases. I was hooked. I wanted to know what made those mysterious ancients tick. How did they understand the world they inhabited? How did they live? What made them fight so hard and so often? I became an Assyriologist in order to answer those questions, and I’ve been working toward that goal ever since.
Outside of specialists, few people know about the complex international relations that developed in the Near East in the 2nd millennium BC, during the Middle and Late Bronze Age when Egyptian, Hittite, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Mitannian kings competed to gain power, prestige, and territory. Leaders created an intricate system of treaty agreements, diplomatic protocols, trade relations, and dynastic marriages to further their aims and keep peace. (Wars played a big role as well.) Diplomatic correspondence from these periods reveals the personalities of the kings involved: some complain, some wheedle, and others command, but all are anxious to retain power and earn the support of their gods. Well-chosen quotes from ancient sources and Podany’s lively writing style make this a rewarding and entertaining read.
Amanda Podany here takes readers on a vivid tour through a thousand years of ancient Near Eastern history, from 2300 to 1300 BCE, paying particular attention to the lively interactions that took place between the great kings of the day.
Allowing them to speak in their own words, Podany reveals how these leaders and their ambassadors devised a remarkably sophisticated system of diplomacy and trade. What the kings forged, as they saw it, was a relationship of friends-brothers-across hundreds of miles. Over centuries they worked out ways for their ambassadors to travel safely to one another's capitals, they created formal…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
Award-winning journalist and historian Andrew Nagorski was born in Scotland to Polish parents, moved to the United States as an infant, and has rarely stopped moving since. During a long career at Newsweek, he served as the magazine's bureau chief in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw, and Berlin. In 1982, he gained international notoriety when the Kremlin, angered by his enterprising reporting, expelled him from the Soviet Union. Nagorski is the author of seven books, including The Nazi Huntersand Hitlerland.
Ivan Maisky served as the Soviet Union’s ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943. In his extensive diaries, he chronicled his frequent interactions with Churchill and other British officials. He predicted that 1941 would be “the decisive year of the war,” which proved accurate. But, like his boss Joseph Stalin, he refused to believe at first that Hitler would turn against the Soviet Union, with whom Germany had signed a non-aggression pact. His diary shows how quickly the Kremlin acted as if it had always opposed Hitler’s plans—and made increasingly strident demands for Western aid. The makings of the future Cold War are already evident in this account.
Highlights of the extraordinary wartime diaries of Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London
The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Churchill's rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the…
I became interested in North Korea in 2002 when the George W. Bush administration declared the country to be part of an Axis of Evil, along with Iraq and Iran. Bush had lied about Iraq, to justify a war against that country, and I wondered what evidence, if any, his administration had that North Korea was either evil or part of an axis. The answer was none. Bush was able to propagate one North Korean myth after another because the public knew very little about the country. I wished to give people some background so they could make sense of what they were reading and hearing about North Korea in the news and social media.
Leffler’s book is about much more than North Korea, but it covers world events that are critical to understanding the communist Korean state, its birth, and its conflict with the United States. I drew heavily on Leffler’s work in my own book to place North Korea within the context of surrounding geopolitical developments.
I’m a recovering ambassador, now running an Oxford college. After almost 25 years in diplomacy, including working in no 10 for three prime ministers, I realised that education is upstream diplomacy. If we are to find a way through the challenges ahead – from climate change to pandemics and economic crisis to artificial intelligence – we must act, urgently, to upgrade why, what, and how we learn. I set out to ask hundreds of the most inspirational people on the planet what they wished they had known, and what they would share with the next generation if this was their last day.
In this gently articulated yet profoundly challenging book, Omar offers advice to his son and reflects on the assassination of his father. He challenges us about the dangers of certainty and the importance of liberty of thought and speech. “I want you to beware of anyone who tells you, with utter conviction, what you should think.” The letters are to his son, but the contents are great truths for all of us.
In a series of personal letters to his sons, Omar Saif Ghobash offers a short and highly readable manifesto that tackles our current global crisis with the training of an experienced diplomat and the personal responsibility of a father. Today's young Muslims will be tomorrow's leaders, and yet too many are vulnerable to extremist propaganda that seems omnipresent in our technological age. The burning question, Ghobash argues, is how moderate Muslims can unite to find a voice that is true to Islam while actively and productively engaging in the modern world. What does it mean to be a good Muslim?…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
I am a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland and I am fascinated by big picture questions about how we became the peculiar creatures that we are. Shortly after I was asked to compile a list of recommendations, I attended my friend Ashley Hay’s book launch of Gum. This beautiful book does not just present a bunch of facts about Australia’s iconic trees, but uses this lens to examine many broader issues from colonial history to climate change. Reading it inspired me to create the present list of books that, unlike the rote learning of dates that marked many history classes at school, take much more interesting, novel vantage points from which to understand why things turned out the way they did.
Occasionally, a novel perspective on events that changed the world can also be presented in a novel (sorry). Gore Vidal’s Creation is one example that left a deep impression on me. With the invention of writing, human philosophies could manifest in lasting new ways that profoundly shaped the world. Vidal’s historical fiction invites us to entertain the possibility that a single human living in the 5th century BC could have met the founding fathers of many of today’s moral traditions. It tells the story of the imaginary life of Cyrus, a Persian diplomat, grandson of Zoroaster, who travels the world and meets Socrates, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius among others. This may not be an easy read, and I recall it involved a lot of name-dropping, but it is worth the effort – providing a fascinating comparative perspective on religion and the human quest for meaning.
A sweeping novel of politics, war, philosophy, and adventure–in a restored edition, featuring never-before-published material from Gore Vidal’s original manuscript–Creationoffers a captivating grand tour of the ancient world. Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athens–the Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Socrates–Cyrus recounts…
