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Mark Hudon
Trad climber
Hood River, OR
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 19, 2013 - 12:24am PT
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Lots of great tips, thanks. You suggestions and opinions will help me decide.
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Jan 19, 2013 - 12:28am PT
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Mark, I believe that the 3 best (readable) WW2 books that I've read would be:
* John Tolands "The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945 ". Wow. Buy the 2 volume set in hardcover. As told from the Japanese viewpoint. It won the Pulitzer for a reason. $2.00 for both in hardcover right here. http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0017PT6TI/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used
* Next, on a more one on one personal level: "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" Weak ending (spoiler alert, man survives and turns Christian) but what a journey.
* Lastly, the Soviets had it 3 or 4 times worse than America, and the pivitol battle that turned the war is told in this book: "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943". If you plot out a timeline and put the much heralded American moves like D-Day and the Italy invasion in there, it gives you some thoughtful pauses.
http://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-Beevor/dp/0140284583/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358572932&sr=1-1&keywords=stalingrad
WW1 - there is only one book which stands out as so far superior to all others in my mind. Barbra Tuchmans "The Guns of August".
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Outbreak/dp/0345476093/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358573596&sr=1-1&keywords=the+guns+of+august
In my view good history should be accurate, thorough, readable, well told, interesting to the point of gripping. These are in that mold.
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Trevbo
Trad climber
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Jan 19, 2013 - 12:30am PT
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Check out 'First light', by Geoffrey Wellum... The story of a young man who joins the RAF as a 17 year old in 1939 and participates in the Battle of Britain. Eventually reaches his breaking point and suffers a stress induced breakdown from battle fatigue. Aside being a good read, considered by some to be good literature.
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Delhi Dog
climber
Good Question...
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Jan 19, 2013 - 12:32am PT
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I'll echo Guido's recommendations. Shaara writes a great narrative with characters you can actually live with and get to know.
Not as heavy as some of the others mentioned but totally readable.
Have read pretty much all of them and have enjoyed and learned from each (just finished Gods + Generals)
I finished Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand a couple months ago and would suggest that as well. True story of amazing survival set in the PO.
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BuddhaStalin
climber
Truckee, CA
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Jan 19, 2013 - 12:56am PT
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"We Band of Angels" about a bunch of military nurses in Luzon in WWII getting shelled and thrown into camps and starved out but coming up with a bush hospital and all kind of healthcare innovations including sulfa drugs (antibiotics) and other interesting stuff. Good read. Crazy sh#t.
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scooter
climber
fist clamp
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Jan 19, 2013 - 01:01am PT
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'Raising Holy Hell' Bruce Olds. Best book I have read in over a decade.
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Ihateplastic
Trad climber
It ain't El Cap, Oregon
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Jan 19, 2013 - 01:06am PT
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This is THE DEFINITIVE book. A bit long but this man knows his stuff!
The Second World War by Antony Beevor
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Jan 19, 2013 - 01:09am PT
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@Ron Anderson -- that sounds like a book I'd like to read. I know all about the overnight retooling at Boeing and Ford and GM and Pittsburg but not as much as I'd like to know. Can you dredge the title?
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Jan 19, 2013 - 01:15am PT
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Fear and Loathing HST
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 19, 2013 - 01:59am PT
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probably still too soon for serious, objective histories to be written...
where is klk in this? I wonder if he has a recommendation...
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Jan 19, 2013 - 02:04am PT
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Kerwin will chime in.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 19, 2013 - 02:12am PT
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Peleilu, the tough nut.
What TGT said, With the Old Breed. TM+
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Cancer Boy
Trad climber
Freedonia
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Jan 19, 2013 - 02:33am PT
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Catch 22!!
Slaughterhouse 5
The Naked and the Dead (not actually readable)
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Leggs
Sport climber
Home away from Home
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Jan 19, 2013 - 02:44am PT
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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen
Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, by John Ellis
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock
(Former history major in college)
Anything by Raymond Chandler. :)
~Peace
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Jan 19, 2013 - 11:36am PT
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BTW why is there this on-going attempt , in essence ,to invite revisionist history by claiming somehow that we have to wait several more years to get the real "serious" historical facts surrounding events in WW2?
The subsequent subjugation of eastern and Central Europe by the Soviets, just to bring up one example, does not require some future historian, now in diapers , to methodically unravel.
We know what happened and we know this was why Stalin and his Army did what they did in Warsaw in 1944.
This is not brain surgery folks, nor is it some matter of historical Esotericism- that only some future historian ,even further removed in time from those events- can decipher.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Maybe if we wait a little longer we can water it down a bit more so that Nazis, Stalin, and Yamamoto can become heroes of sorts. Yay!
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Jan 19, 2013 - 12:13pm PT
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ive been slammed so hadn't seen this thread.
the short answer is that there isn't any good single-volume account of ww2. (there are at least two, but i can't recommend either one.) but if you think about it, that's not surprising. even if all it talked about was policy and military strategy, the author would need to be fluent in japanese, chinese, english, french, german and russian, and have a couple lifetimes to visit all those archives. and then think of all the serious research done on all those serious questions raised by the war-- worse, the truth is there aren't quick-and-easy wikipedia style answers to most of the important questions.
mark mazower's dark continent tries to give a readable and intelligent overview of 20th century europe and is probably the best book of its type-- ww2 is the heart of that story, but he does an amazing job of setting the war in a bigger political, cultural and economic context. the book is quite good up through, say, early seventies.
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Continent-Europes-Twentieth-Century/dp/067975704X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358614425&sr=1-1&keywords=mazower+dark+continent
most of the popular books on ww2 are written by journalists who have selectively (and often poorly) cannibalized the work of folks who did learn languages and go to the archives.
but there are some really good books about this or that aspect of ww2.
richard evans's 2-volume work on the third reich is really good. not easy, because the work on nazism and fascism has been really rich. and he has good things to say still about shirer's rise and fall of the third reich, a book written back at the very end of ww2. bullock's hitler bio (which leggs mentioned) is still good, but ian kershaw's 2-volumne bio has replaced it and is a decent guide to the more recent scholarship.
i also highly recommend evans's book, lying about hitler, which is actually an account of a massive legal battle over work by one of the most controversial military historians of ww2, for having one of the best explanations of what historians actually do.
christopher browning's ordinary men is one of the best books you are going to find, not just on ww2 but in history generally. he uses the experience of one group of everyday german soldiers in poland as a way of trying to understand the least comprehensible part of ww2, the holocaust. really a brilliant book. far and away the best single work of military history i know. although it isn't the "battleship" kind of military history. wall suitable, although not uplifting.
http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068
there aren't any single volumes on the pacific theater i can name that are on par with any of the ones dealing with european materials. the number of folks who are competent in the languages is just too low. most of the popular work on pacific theater in english is written by folks who don't read any japanese much less chinese.
iris chang's rape of nanking was really popular, but is terrible history. i'm not crazy about dower's war without mercy. prange's tactical histories have been really popular, but prange couldn't read japanese much less work in the archives, so although he has detailed chronicles of what happened at what minute on which US ship, the genuinely important stuff is pretty squishy. aikira iriye's earlier books are still probably the best single place to start, but they're not filled with deathless prose. not exactly wall reading.
i can't recommend the ambrose books. none of them can be trusted. he started as a real historian-- his first book on custer got him a call from eisenhower and the paper editing gig--but he decided at some point that he wanted to be on tv, and he started cranking those things out at an impossible rate. good scholarship takes forever-- no way around it. what we didn't know was how badly he was cheating-- not only were stretches of those books ghost-written by assistants, he was actually cut-and-pasting other researcher's published work. his career ended in disgrace, once his plagiarism was documented. no one has gone back through all of the books to check them against sources, so it's hard to say where it ends. depressing episode. seems not to have hurt sales much, so the estate is probably doing fine.
keegan is a special case. the old saying, each general fights the last war, sort of applies here: keegan's military histories are really about the next war. his histories have been a platform for him to promote his particular theories into the pentagon and the wh. they interest me, partly because each is obviously a working out of what became keegan's ideas about 4thg warfare.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 19, 2013 - 12:33pm PT
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BTW why is there this on-going attempt , in essence ,to invite revisionist history by claiming somehow that we have to wait several more years to get the real "serious" historical facts surrounding events in WW2?
So are you saying that unanalyzed direct information is all that is needed? In writing any of the histories, the author must necessarily choose to present some set of the available information, weighing what is important for the narrative that they are writing, and not using other information.
That is done in from a particular point-of-view and is an important part of understanding that particular written history. Certainly if you take the point-of-view that World War II was the archetypal conflict of Good and Evil, then you will write history in a particular manner. However, one wonders if that characterization is sufficient to understand the events which lead to that war, for instance, do we still view all Germans as evil?
Important in these considerations are the more nuanced analyses taken from very different viewpoints which can be jarring to our beliefs, those which we had learned in school, from our parents and through the copious exposure to our popular culture which understandably glorified the victory, and in so doing overlooked the toll it took on that generation, and the reality which was not so glorified.
In some ways I've grown tired of the military history of WWII, while very interesting to me at a younger age, it misses the larger issues regarding the war, which is a brief and savage period embedded in the landscape of 20th century history.
And while it is not an original worry, I still do worry how a society like the German's, which was culturally, scientifically, technologically advanced and perhaps the very definition of "modern" at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries could become the Germany of the 1930s. That process is not describable in the overly simplistic concept of Good vs. Evil, at least in my opinion.
Further, the US involvement in world politics was much more minimal and much more modest than we can remember. While it is probably only a critic's speculation, there are those critics who viewed Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings as an allegory to WWII with the US being "the Shire" and its citizens hobbits... certainly not what we think of ourselves. While it is debatable that this was Tolkein's intention, the allegory is an apt one.
The US benefited greatly in its isolation, with its industrial base intact and its infrastructure largely untouched by the war. Another very interesting aspect of this period was that of the world reconstruction which was an important part of US foreign policy, interesting to look at in the light of recent international competition in all aspects of human endeavor where many in the US bemoan the loss of our advantage in the world. Isn't it interesting that that was essentially our own doing? not in diminishing ourselves but by helping others, at least that is one way to look at it. We sowed the demise of the "American hegemony" in our post WWII policies.
Further interesting history with the cold war adversary, the Soviet Union, can be much more nuanced then the overly simplistic Good v. Evil moral parable narrative. It seems there was plenty of both on each side of the suppressed conflict. And how that ended is something that is far from obvious at this point in time, though many will take up their favorite story lines and claim history as a vindication of their view points.
It would seem that seeking the simplistic view point, the one that makes "common sense" is an urge that we all feel. There is more to be gained in taking a deeper look at what happened, but getting to those depths, and returning, often takes more time, and an ability to stand off from the period, to a time when our "common sense" today is something different than the "common sense" of tomorrow.
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Double D
climber
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Jan 19, 2013 - 01:10pm PT
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The Diary of Ann Frank
The Secret Room by Corrie ten Boom
And then if you want to bring it forward a generation to the Soviet threat...
Tinker Taylor Solder Spy by John le Carre
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