100 books like This Is Not Who We Are

I am a huge fan of everything Paul Fussell (1924-2012) published. He was a colorful character in real life and earned his chops as a literary critic of modern war when he landed in France with the 103rd Infantry division in 1944, was wounded fighting in Alsace, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

I couldn't put down his book. I find most important the universal way he describes the gap between the way common soldiers experience battlefields, in contrast to how the war is portrayed to the general public by observers at home, propagandists, and the like who interpret the war from a safe distance. I was always impressed by the sharp manner of his writing. He traces the pulverization of pre-1914 Victorian values as they collided with the sheer force and brutality of modern steel and gas technology.

I loved surveying the direct and profane language… show more.

This book is beautiful even as its subject is ugly: how the shock of the Great War led inexorably in Germany to the rise of Hitler.

I loved the aesthetics of this book. Eksteins begins by transporting us back to Paris, sitting us in the audience on opening night in May 1913 for Stravinsky's ballet The Rites of Spring, which caused mayhem because of the wild dance techniques and jarring music. Eksteins then takes us on a journey through the culture of Weimar Germany as Berlin seized the title of Europe's cultural capital from Paris.

I was enraptured by the dizzying esthetics of modernism, dada, surrealism, and other, punctuated bursts of artistic trends, both celebrated and opposed, in a right-wing backlash that had real-world consequences. Ekstein's thesis convinced me counter-intuitively that Hitler and Nazism were connected in the irrational conglomeration of birth and destruction, first introduced by Stravinsky.

This book… show more.

I was riveted by this revisionist history of how America got into World War I and changed American society and politics. He shows how much of American collective memory about why WWI was fought, and the perception of Germany in America was fashioned, to a large extent, by British propaganda. He also shows why Germany had no choice but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which eventually brought the United States into the war.

Had the British modified the naval blockade on Germany, which starved the German population in a horrific manner, the United States might never have become involved. But Great Britain was determined to make sure Germany would never again pose a threat to its colonial overseas empire. President Wilson at first understood that American neutrality was the means by which he could have brokered peace, but British and French recalcitrance, and eventually the deaths of relatively few… show more.

I usually get bored by very long books too full of dates, people you have never heard of, and endless details, and I am a historian! But I make an exception for this book.

Clark took me back vividly to a period in history that has been covered so often by rewriting the old storylines of WWI with flair and freshness. I came to better understand why World War I was not just a fluke, started by the black swan event of the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife in a backwater of the empire on June 28th, 1914.

In spite of the title, if the European leaders were sleepwalkers, and in a narrow sense they were, Clark also provides plenty of evidence that the underlying tensions in the Austro-Hungarian empire were like huge dry piles of straw just waiting for a flame to ignite… show more.

There are lots of stories about spies, and there are great histories about American missionaries.

But Sutton brings them together in a refreshing way, revealing the moral and political conundrums that arose once the United States turned to (mostly) men of faith to do undercover wartime work, from showering North Africa with propaganda and rescuing Doolittle’s downed raiders from China to stealing secrets and plotting assassinations.

This book is based on reports, reflections, and correspondence of prison chaplains who interacted with imprisoned Nazi perpetrators awaiting trial and, in some instances, execution.

What the prisoners confessed to the clergy and, even more, the criminal behavior they failed to acknowledge I find so revealing. The prisoners felt guilty for individual personal transgressions (like cheating on their wives). Here, they had chosen to sin. But they felt no guilt about their participation in genocide since they saw themselves as having acted perforce on behalf of the community of the “Volk.”

Kellenbach brings this astonishing fact home in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and empathic. After reading her book, I finally came to understand what Adolf Eichmann meant when he claimed that he was “the victim of a fallacy” at his trial in Jerusalem.

We rarely stop to think about memorials in terms of what emotion might have prompted them.

That is what Doss does here, covering a wide range of subjects and geographic sites. It is clear from her analysis that grief, fear, gratitude, shame, and anger have inspired a range of works representing a range of motivations for commemoration.

After reading this book you will never look at memorials in the same way. I had never thought of memorials in terms of emotional affect before and now consider it a major factor to be considered.

Etienne Benson’s work on the history of radio tracking of wild animals is a model in combining environmental history, animal studies, and history of technology.

The book is also a fantastic example of how diverse networks of people—including hunters, conservationists, and animal rights activists—link up through a device, in this case the radio transmitter.

The CRISPR story took a shocking turn in 2018 when a Chinese scientist attempted the unthinkable – overseeing the birth of twin girls with edited DNA.

I devoted multiple chapters to this saga in my book (resulting in the book’s ban in China); meanwhile, Stanford law professor Hank Greely produced an excellent account of the entire story in CRISPR People. Greely eloquently guides the reader beyond the headlines, offering valuable context and shrewd legal analysis, before asking whether this scandal could happen again.

This book challenged my thinking about the implications of compassion taking a decisive role in policy.

Not undermining the import of compassion or empathy, it reveals how these moral sentiments are taking precedence over formal rights in decisions about asylum for refugees, aid, access to health or mental health care, and even justifying a military action.

Under the emergent logic of humanitarian reason, structural inequities and violence are easily rendered invisible as the most poignantly shaped public narratives of suffering gain sway over historical conditions of structural injustice and dominance. Fassin draws upon fieldwork in South Africa, Venezuela, Palestine, and Iraq, as well as policy in France, showing how the logic of humanitarian reason can abandon those who are positioned in the most precarious conditions.