Love The War Beat, Europe? Readers share 100 books like The War Beat, Europe...

By Steven Casey,

Here are 100 books that The War Beat, Europe fans have personally recommended if you like The War Beat, Europe. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

This book was a lifesaver for me as I began to explore media-military relations about a decade ago.

Briefly but authoritatively Sweeney charts the relationship between the American military and the media from the Revolutionary War to the early twenty-first century. Sweeney, a former journalist himself, also writes well and this is a joy to read.

The subtitle suggests Sweeney’s take on the subject, and Sweeney’s work generally has been invaluable to me and this book would be the place to start for anyone interested in the subject.  

By Michael S. Sweeney,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Military and the Press as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Because news is a weapon of war - affecting public opinion, troop morale, even strategy - for more than a century America's wartime officials have sought to control or influence the press, most recently by ""embedding"" reporters within military units in Iraq. This second front, where press freedom and military imperatives often do battle, is the territory explored in ""The Military and the Press"", a history of how press-military relations have evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first century in response to the demands of politics, economics, technology, and legal and social forces. Author Michael S. Sweeney takes a chronological approach,…


Book cover of Reporting War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

Moseley was the Chief European Correspondent for The Chicago Tribune for the last forty years of the twentieth century and although published by a university press is more a work of journalism than original scholarship. 

It is based largely on the memoirs of an extraordinary number of reporters, many American but many more not. The real virtue of this book is how wide-ranging it is, covering the entire war and reporters from all of the combatant countries.

Readers get a vivid sense of how World War II was just that—a war that raged across the globe. 

By Ray Moseley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Reporting War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II's daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In this fascinating book, Ray Moseley, himself a former foreign correspondent who encountered a number of these journalists in the course of his long career, mines the correspondents' writings to relate, in an exhilarating parallel narrative, the events across every theater-Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan-as well as the lives of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies.

Moseley's broad…


Book cover of Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

I first encountered Ed Kennedy while doing research in the AP archives and have spent the better part of a decade untangling what proved to be the biggest controversy over press coverage of the war—Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender.

No American war correspondent was more experienced than Kennedy, who reported for the Associated Press from the Spanish Civil War until the end of World War II.

Given that Kennedy acted as an AP bureau chief in both North Africa and Paris, his memoir, written in the late 1940s but not published for sixty years, is the best insider account we have at how American reporters interacted with army public relations and censorship officials during the war.

By Ed Kennedy, Julia Kennedy Cochran (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ed Kennedy's War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

On May 7, 1945, Associated Press reporter Ed Kennedy became the most famous -- or infamous -- American correspondent of World War II. On that day in France, General Alfred Jodl signed the official documents as the Germans surrendered to the Allies. Army officials allowed a select number of reporters, including Kennedy, to witness this historic moment -- but then instructed the journalists that the story was under military embargo. In a courageous but costly move, Kennedy defied the military embargo and broke the news of the Allied victory. His scoop generated instant controversy. Rival news organisations angrily protested, and…


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

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.

The team attempts a new route up…

Book cover of A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

I first encountered Liebling’s work about Normandy during World War II when I received a Fulbright fellowship to teach at the university in Caen in the 1980s.

His Normandy Revisited was the only book in the library at VCU that had Normandy in the title. I’ve been a fan ever since, as his work is both canny and often laugh-out-loud funny. Liebling worked for the New Yorker for many decades, and wrote the best long-form journalism of the war.

Liebling possessed an intimate knowledge of French language and culture, which gave him unparalleled access to civilians both in French North Africa and in Normandy in the months after D-Day.

By Pete Hamill (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A. J. Liebling as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the most gifted and influential American journalists of the 20th century, A. J. Liebling spent five years reporting the dramatic events and myriad individual stories of World War II. As a correspondent for The New Yorker, Liebling wrote with a passionate commitment to Allied victory, an unfailing attention to telling details, and an appreciation for the literary challenges presented by the discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate nature of war. This volume brings together three books along with 26 uncollected New Yorker pieces and two excerpts from The Republic of Silence (1947), Liebling's collection of writing from the…


Book cover of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls

Philip Graves Author Of Consumer.ology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping

From my list on understanding consumers and your consumer self.

Why am I passionate about this?

Having studied statistics in the 1980s and realised that forecasting energy reserves wasn’t for me, I stumbled into a career in market research. A chance reading of a book on psychoanalysis opened my eyes to how little we all understand ourselves and I started to look for better ways to identify how consumers think. After developing techniques from psychoanalysis and behavioural science I started my own consultancy firm in 2005. Over the last seventeen years I’ve been lucky enough to advise some of the world’s biggest brands, make regular appearances in the media discussing consumer affairs and, with my book Consumer.ology, to upset some of the biggest market research companies.

Philip's book list on understanding consumers and your consumer self

Philip Graves Why did Philip love this book?

Early in my career I was responsible for running the UK brand tracking and customer experience studies of a global brand. I was constantly battling to reconcile what the research told me with what the real data from the business showed was actually going on. This book, written by someone who was a senior editor at the Gallup market research company for years, helped me appreciate some of the reasons that survey results are inaccurate. It also reveals how opinion polls can be used to distort elections and manipulate people – scary stuff.

By David W. Moore,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Opinion Makers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With a new afterword by the author

Drawing on over a decade's experience at the Gallup Poll and a distinguished academic career in survey research, David W. Moore—praised as a "scholarly crusader" by the New York Times—reveals that pollsters don't report public opinion, they manufacture it. In this highly critical book, he describes the questionable tactics pollsters use to create poll-driven news stories-including force-feeding respondents, slanting the wording of questions, and ignoring public ignorance on even the most arcane issues. More than proof that the numbers do lie, The Opinion Makers clearly and convincingly spells out how urgent it is…


Book cover of The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II

Janet Somerville Author Of Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War 1930-1949

From my list on women war correspondents.

Why am I passionate about this?

Janet Somerville taught literature for 25 years in Toronto. She served on the PEN Canada Board and chaired many benefits that featured writers including Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Alice Munro, Azar Nafisi, and Ian Rankin. She contributes frequently to the Toronto Star Book Pages, and has been handwriting a #LetterADay for 8 years. Since 2015 she has been immersed in Martha Gellhorn’s life and words, with ongoing access to Gellhorn’s restricted papers in Boston. Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949 is her first book, now also available from Penguin Random House Audio, read by the Tony Award-winning Ellen Barkin. 

Janet's book list on women war correspondents

Janet Somerville Why did Janet love this book?

Like their male counterparts, Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Clare Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Sigrid Schultz faced the danger inherent in reporting from war zones, but, unlike the men, these women often had to improvise to get access. Ever intrepid, Gellhorn noted, “If they don’t want to accredit you, you just do it, any little lie will do.” 

By 1945 there were 250 women accredited to the Allied armies as reporters and photographers. Everyone had something to do that felt necessary, though post-war many were “shredded up inside.” With the narrative drive of a well-paced thriller, Mackrell’s essential work will have you reaching for more about the words and lives of these trailblazing six.

By Judith Mackrell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Correspondents as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent.

"Thrilling from the first page to the last." —Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women
 
"Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the best…Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories." —New York Times Book Review
 
On…


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Book cover of Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World

Harry and Arthur by Lawrence J. Haas,

With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time…

Book cover of Creative Labour

Paul Saintilan Author Of Managing Organizations in the Creative Economy

From my list on management in the creative industries.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve spent my life in music and the creative industries, having worked in major record companies in London (among other places), and have loved every minute of it. Over the past 20 years, I've also studied it academically and run courses on entertainment management in colleges and Universities. It is rewarding to work with people who want to make a career in the creative industries. A colleague once said to me, “If you can give me a graduate who can have a conversation with a Chief Financial Officer and not freak them out, and then have a conversation with an artist and not freak them out, then you will be doing the world a great favor, because this is comparatively rare.” 

Paul's book list on management in the creative industries

Paul Saintilan Why did Paul love this book?

I loved this book because it takes three creative industries–television production, record companies, and magazine journalism–and interviews workers about what makes them feel bad about working in the industry and what makes them feel good. ‘Good creative work’ makes us feel motivated, fulfilled, and self-realized. Bad work makes us experience things like powerlessness and self-estrangement.

This is really important, given the growing importance of wellness and mental health in the workplace. Although it was published in 2011 for a largely academic audience, it still has profound things to say about creating a workplace that is positive and not psychologically corrosive. 

By Sarah Baker, David Hesmondhalgh,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Creative Labour as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What is it like to work in the media? Are media jobs more 'creative' than those in other sectors? To answer these questions, this book explores the creative industries, using a combination of original research and a synthesis of existing studies.

Through its close analysis of key issues - such as tensions between commerce and creativity, the conditions and experiences of workers, alienation, autonomy, self-realisation, emotional and affective labour, self-exploitation, and how possible it might be to produce 'good work' - Creative Labour makes a major contribution to our understanding of the media, of work, and of social and cultural…


Book cover of Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices

Margaret Hillenbrand Author Of On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China

From my list on the cultural lives of China’s migrant workers.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a professor of Chinese studies, and I’m especially interested in what the close study of culture can reveal about aspects of contemporary Chinese life that are usually dominated by the perspectives of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. I’m fascinated not so much by how cultural practices reflect social change but by how they sometimes make it happen, particularly in societies where overt political action is blocked. As my book picks show, I’m intrigued by the inventiveness and drive of people who create culture, often new forms of culture, under conditions of oppression, exploitation, and duress.

Margaret's book list on the cultural lives of China’s migrant workers

Margaret Hillenbrand Why did Margaret love this book?

This path-breaking book was a huge inspiration to me as I began to dig deeper into the relationship between culture and labor in contemporary China.

By the time Sun’s book came out in 2014, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists inside and outside China had already carried out extensive studies of the largest migration in human history and the scorching inequalities that mass movement of people has generated. But Sun shows in compelling detail that this exodus from the Chinese countryside is a deeply cultural movement, too.

Blending ethnography with probing and compassionate analysis of poetry, videos, photography, and activist protest, Sun argues that culture can be the crucible of political consciousness for working people trapped in the grinder of underclass life. I’ve returned to this book again and again.

By Wanning Sun,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Subaltern China as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Behind China's growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups. In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the country's hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers, who embody China's most intractable problems of inequality. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author argues that despite the critical role their labor has played in enabling and sustaining the country's remarkable economic growth, workers and peasants have become the nation's "subalterns."

Sun focuses especially on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that exist between various social groups. She shows…


Book cover of Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell

Howard Sounes Author Of This Woman: Myra Hindley’s Prison Love Affair and Escape Attempt

From my list on biographies to put you in the mind of a criminal.

Why am I passionate about this?

The author of biographies, histories, and true crime books, Howard Sounes is best-known for Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, now in an updated edition; Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life; and Fred & Rose, the bestselling story of married English serial killers Fred and Rose West. Other books include Amy, 27, Seventies, Heist, and biographies of Paul McCartney and Lou Reed.

Howard's book list on biographies to put you in the mind of a criminal

Howard Sounes Why did Howard love this book?

The best true crime books are similar to any good biography, in that they are crafted, powerfully-researched lives of unusual people. With true crime, the life of the subject usually goes awry, however, by degrees from childhood, culminating in disaster, which affects others. Crime takes different forms. This gripping book charts the downfall of the brilliant but unscrupulous media baron Robert Maxwell, ending in his mysterious death in 1991. Had he lived, he may well have gone to jail, like his daughter, Ghislaine. Author John Peston has an eye for grotesques and a nice sense of humour. 

By John Preston,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Fall as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the UK’s 2022 Costa Prize for Biography

“A portrait of one of the most enigmatic figures in the annals of white-collar crime. . . . A well-researched, compelling book that uncovers many mysteries about a media tycoon.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the acclaimed author of A Very English Scandal, a thrilling and dramatic true-life account of the rise and fall of one of the most notorious media moguls of all time: Robert Maxwell.

In February 1991, Robert Maxwell triumphantly sailed into Manhattan harbor on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to buy the ailing New York Daily News. Taxi drivers stopped…


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Book cover of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

No Average Day by Rona Simmons,

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.

The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on…

Book cover of The Age of American Unreason

Joel Stein Author Of In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

From my list on saving democracy from populism.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started worrying about populism in 2008, when vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin chastised the elitists, whom she defined as “people who think they’re better than anyone else.” Meanwhile, she thought she was so much better than anyone else that she could serve as backup leader of the world despite the fact that she believed that the political leader of the United Kingdom is the queen. After she lost she vowed, “I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist.” She was unaware that there is a third option: to study so that you know more than the next person. 

Joel's book list on saving democracy from populism

Joel Stein Why did Joel love this book?

If you’ve ever wondered if people today are dumber than people in the past, you should watch Idiocracy. And then read this book. It shows how we’ve devolved into people who look at lists of the best five books and never actually read those books. In 2008, for a column for the L.A. Times, I had her take a quiz from the author of the book How Dumb Are You?: The Great American Stupidity Quiz and she got two wrong. I got 11 wrong. The point is: Read her book instead of mine.

By Susan Jacoby,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Age of American Unreason as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A cultural history of the last forty years, The Age of American Unreasonfocuses on the convergence of social forces—usually treated as separate entities—that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; and the triumph of video over print culture. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of “junk thought” that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.


Book cover of The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce
Book cover of Reporting War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II
Book cover of Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press

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Interested in mass media, the news media, and war correspondents?

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