The Thanksgiving Book Orgy
 

Ah, they came - my quarterly WWII book pigout. Nine books to lead me into Christmas. Over the last couple of years or so I began doing more specialized reading in the ETO. Of course I read a lot of works about American units in Europe as well as memoirs. Looked at the Eastern Front, several memoirs of German soldiers. Did a lot of air war, concentrating on US bombing and fighters, and battle of Britain. When I was a kid I read everything I could get my hands on about Pacific Theater, but other than Eugene Sledge's With The Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa (if you read only one book about the USMC in the Pacific, make it this one) I haven't read much on it in the last 10 years or so.

Books of the current crop:
1. The Germans In Normandy - Richard Hargreaves
2. The Battle Of Kursk - David Glantz and Jonathan House
3. The Few - Alex Kershaw
4. Alamo In The Ardennes - Jon McManus
5. Red Storm On The Reich - Christopher Duffy
6. The Last Battle - Cornelius Ryan
7. The Fall Of Berlin - Anthony Read and David Fisher
8. The Last 100 Days - John Toland
9. The Bulge - Danny S. Parker

The only generally acknowledged classic is the Cornelius Ryan book, although after reading Anthony Beevor's book I think Beevor is probably the leading English writer on Berlin now. Toland's Berlin book came out almost simultaneously with Ryan's (1966) and it will be interesting to see if his book has been unfairly overlooked today, or if maybe it hasn't aged so well. David Glantz is the leading expert English-language writer about the Red Army in WWII - I've never read him and trust he's reliable. Disappointed in Alex Kershaw's The Few - like an idiot I confused it with another book and thought I was getting (yet another) RAF in the Battle of Britain book, but this is about only Americans flying in the RAF. Kershaw did The Bedford Boys and The Longest Winter, which was an excellent description of the combat of a single Intel platoon in Losheim, but he really put a lot of post-battle fluff in it to make it book-size. Alamo In The Ardennes is a look at some of the lesser-known Bulge fights by not-so-famous units - no 101st Airborne or Eisenborn Ridge in here. The Bulge I got through E-bay ($10 for a new book, large book), and it's odd at first glance. A day-to-day history of Allied and German actions, it has all kinds of very detailed maps (many of battalion-level actions) and many pictures. The pages are slick and the print is sharp, but the pictures look like they've been transmitted across a 1945 teletype - they're horribly dark and fuzzy. Well, it was printed in Hong Kong. It may have been $10 down the drain, we'll see.

I'll surface again with a report.

Read this one first!:naughty:

Of those, I have only read Fall of Berlin, an excellent book. Unfortunately, us college students don't quite have the funds to go to borders and buy out tons of books, plus my interests recently have turns to late 1800s/early 1900s USA, with books on Theodore Roosevelt, Devil in the White City, Andrew Carnegie, the Filipino Insurrection, and the like. Also I have a broadening interest in Australian Colonization, with the book "A Commonwealth of Thieves"

Okay, Coke, Glantz it is - I'm still finishing up John Keegan's Six Armies In Normandy.

Yep, vM, one of the few advantages to being an old fart is (somewhat) more money and a lot more time. ;)

*cleans lube off bookmark* I have come thoughly dis-prepared for this thread.

Ouch, the only author I recognized on that list was Ryan, and I don't think that much of him. Don't get me wrong, he is a great writer. But as far as I know, he only writes popular history. He's not a real historian. He also wrote "A Bridge too Far" and (I think) "The Longest Day".

Oh, there's not a single writer, other than Sir John Keegan, of any book I've ever commented on here who is a true historian - they're popular historians at best. (Glantz might fight me over that; I've never read him but for some reason I think he may claim to be an academic.) It has nothing to do with their research, because some of them do tremendous work; it has more to do with the rigorous academic style that true "Historians" use - massively footnoted, and usually written in a deadly, ponderous style. To them, William Shirer (Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich) is a "popular historian", and so he is, technically. But I can generally tell who is reliable and who is not, regardless of their "popularity".

Oh, I can't wait! I'd join you, but that ain't to legal. :-P

I'm excited because I will have some books that aren't a pile of merde.

On my current read list are:

The Devil in the White City
Andrew Carnegie
TR: After the White House
Commonwealth of Thieves
1491


And I also plan on rereading F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

They aren't that bad, the last ones I read were:

Postwar, by Ton Judt;
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret MacMillan; and
The First World War, by John Keegan.

I would consider all of those to be serious histories and all of them are quite readable.

(btw, that's not ALL I read, I also have plenty of brain candy which I am not going to admit to publicly.)

Good on ya'. Especially the Hayek - essential for an undertsanding of the intellectual underpinnings of an entire school of modern political thought. Hell, Hayek is an intellectual underpinning all by himself.

I don't know the first two but I've read everything Keegan has published in the last 30 years and agree completely. Just because they're true historians doesn't mean they can't be read or enjoyed. Everyone would consider Martin Gilbert a stellar historian and his Churchill biography is wonderful. Ditto David Chandler - a true historian who is the definitive author on Napoleon. Same for Douglas Southall Freeman, the last word on Robert E. Lee.

If you like histories, I recommend the other two. Actually, I found Keegan's the hardest to read, (even though I've read it twice). Not his fault really, its just that in reading about WWI, I get lost in the endless corps names and numbers.

Oh yea, and don't forget Massey.

If you want a good book on WW1, look no further then:

The Myth of the Great War- John Mosier

Trust me, you won't regret it.

Robert Massie? Yes.

(Sorry for the dp, but the 30-minute edit window is ridiculously short.)

Which reminds me of A Soldier Of The Great War by Mark Helprin. Part is about WWI in th Alps between the Austrians and Italians, and simply jaw-dropping descriptions of what it took to fight on Europe's roof. But more than war, it's about life, heroism, despair, love, loyalty, tenacity, loss, regret, hope. Grand themes, things worth dying for. You know, Literature with a capital "L". Your spirit feels larger for having read it.

Helprin is like some fictional character himself, or at least a character out of WWI: Harvard, Oxford, gets bored with talk and joins British Merchant Marine; emigrates to Israel and joins IDF, first in infantry, then as fighter pilot, and serves in the Yom Kippur War. Becomes a novelist, journalist and think-tank fellow. His path is so classically that of a CIA asset that I'd almost bet my house he's a spook.

vM - I have to dl the program we were talking about to another computer - this is at 90% capacity.

Hrm, I'll look into that book for sure once I'm through my current reading list. And ok, cools mate:P