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Abu Dave posted:Anyone got any reccomendations for books about the Ottoman Empire? It's fairly obscure and academic, but I really liked Islamic Gunpowder Empires. Although it also covers the Safavid and Mughal empires, it describes the Ottomans in the context of a larger geopolitical transformation occurring in the early modern world, as well as how the empire fit into the Islamic world at the time. The bibliography is pretty extensive, which can point you towards other modern works on the subject.
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Jul 20, 2014 17:24
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DeceasedHorse posted:It's fairly obscure and academic, but I really liked Islamic Gunpowder Empires. Although it also covers the Safavid and Mughal empires, it describes the Ottomans in the context of a larger geopolitical transformation occurring in the early modern world, as well as how the empire fit into the Islamic world at the time. The bibliography is pretty extensive, which can point you towards other modern works on the subject. This was just mentioned earlier as well. Just how academic is it? It is a slog to read though?
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Jul 21, 2014 00:29
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Quixotic1 posted:I just finished Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It surprised me that CIA's ops seem to be a coin flip or worse odds, and that the agency is like a snowball going down a mountain and can't course correct to fix its problems ever since its inception. I just started the audiobook of this today, and it should be what I'm looking for. Thanks.
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Jul 21, 2014 01:23
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I just started on The Drive on Moscow 1941 (while trying out the new Kindle Unlimited service) and what stuck out to me immediately is that the book always refers to unit names in Arabic numerals, which is great because the Germans would name their Korps and Armees with Roman numerals and it'd drive me nuts trying to quickly parse them.
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Jul 21, 2014 11:19
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Count Roland posted:No. Most of the 2nd half of the book is filled with minute details of treaties, agreements, meetings, memoranda, who said what when, and so forth. If you're looking for a review, re-read the first half or so, which is excellent, and quite relevant plenty of stuff today. Whew, thanks. That last portion I read really drained all the enjoyment out of that book. I'll probably go back and re-read the first half in a year or something.
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Jul 21, 2014 18:08
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Count Roland posted:This was just mentioned earlier as well. Just how academic is it? It is a slog to read though? I didn't consider it to be a slog- it's certainly not a narrative history or anything though, although I'm not aware of anything along those lines anyway. There is a kindle version though, so you could always download a sample and see if you like it. So. French Revolution and the pre-Naploeonic Revolutionary wars. I recently realized that although I know a fair amount about Napoleon, I've never really read all that much about the actual revolution or the ancien regime itself. It looks like there is this whole convoluted and contentious historiography going back 200 years on the subject so there doesn't really seem to be a a good place to start. Anyone have any favorites to recommend?
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Jul 22, 2014 21:37
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Can anyone recommend any good books on Apartheid (in South Africa), I'm looking for something other than just the Mandela story, I'd love to learn more about the first half of the 20th century or the divestment campaigns and international reaction or lack thereof in the 70s and 80s, or just something grossly comprehensive.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:07
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DynamicSloth posted:Can anyone recommend any good books on Apartheid (in South Africa), I'm looking for something other than just the Mandela story, I'd love to learn more about the first half of the 20th century or the divestment campaigns and international reaction or lack thereof in the 70s and 80s, or just something grossly comprehensive. Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog is quite good. He's a South African Journalist who was at the hearings for Truth and Reconciliation after Apartheid ended every day for South African TV. He has a first hand account of that pivotal moment in time. I read it for my Modern Africa class in college and quite enjoyed it.
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Jul 23, 2014 07:10
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I'm working my way through American History, and I've recently reached the Great Depression. I have 6 books to get through before I reach WW2, but I want to get some recs now. 1. The best book on the Pacific War, bonus points of it chronicles the Sino-Japanese conflict and the early development of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 2. Books that focus on key battles or campaigns: Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein or the whole Western Desert Campaign, Operation Barbarossa 3. I've read The Wages of Destruction. Are there any similar works on the economy and politics of Imperial Japan that you can recommend?
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Aug 3, 2014 16:46
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:I'm working my way through American History, and I've recently reached the Great Depression. I have 6 books to get through before I reach WW2, but I want to get some recs now.
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Aug 3, 2014 17:28
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FMguru posted:I can recommend Eagle Against The Sun by Ronald Spector as the best single-volume book on the Pacific War. It emphasizes the US-Japan conflict way more than China or Burma or what Britain was doing, and is very strong at analyzing what the US did right and wrong (it's the book that first made the point about how potentially catastrophic the split Nimitz/MacArthur command could have been). It's almost 30 years old, so maybe something else has come along to replace it. The Amazon page looks promising. I'll add this to the list. Thanks!
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Aug 3, 2014 17:55
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Hedrigall posted:Can anyone recommend good books about This is from a page and a while back but he deserves a more complete answer. That answer is, of course: http://www.amazon.com/Problem-From-Hell-America-Genocide/dp/0465061516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407126215&sr=8-1&keywords=a+problem+from+hell To your second point, Powers's tome is and will be for some time the go-to source for "Genocide in general". Her bibliography, whose length one reviewer compared to a small book, includes many sources addressing your first request. Just noticed this is a 2013 edition so it's current.
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Aug 4, 2014 05:44
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Any recommendations for books with lots of maps? In other news I picked up that CIA book mentioned earlier. Hope to start it this weekend!
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Aug 6, 2014 14:52
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Can anyone suggest a good history of the Six-Day war? Ideally something that offers an impartial telling of the facts and the politics involved and isn't just propaganda for one side or the other.
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Aug 8, 2014 00:25
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rasser posted:I always wanted to read Hitler's Willing Executioners, but I've seen this claim that he's a bad historian repeated too often. It's rarely qualified more than above, and I think it's a drat shame given 1. I would like to read a book on the subject 2. I have no clue which methods a good historian uses, that I might distuingish in a text? This is from a page back, but it deserves some kind of real answer, especially as the question of what a historian actually does and how you judge good vs. bad historical scholarship is really goddamned important for any kind of thread that discusses history books. The best, most accessible, short explanation of what the hell it is that academic historians actually do that I've yet found is this BBC article on the subject. Note that it's 9 pages each with its own unique link on the left there, but if you download the .pdf you get the whole thing. It is well worth a read. As for specific books on the subject of why Germans participated in the Holocaust, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men is probably the most succinct, accessible introduction to that topic out there. If you're interested in the Goldhagen Controversy the afterward is also an amazing direct counter to Goldhagen. This was necessary in the second edition of Ordinary Men precisely because Goldhagen used a lot of the same records that Browning did and the competing interpretations really needed to be addressed. If you've ever wanted to see the academic version of bitch-slapping someone, this is about as good as it gets.
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Aug 9, 2014 19:00
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Thanks a bunch! I will read this tonight, and Browning's book has been added to my wishlist. I was really happy to get yor reply.
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Aug 10, 2014 19:24
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:2. Books that focus on key battles or campaigns: Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein or the whole Western Desert Campaign, Operation Barbarossa Shattered Sword for Midway. You can supplement it with Craig Symonds' The Battle of Midway for a perspective from the American side, but Shattered Sword I would consider to be essential reading for the battle. Neptune's Inferno for Guadalcanal David Glantz's Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941 can be very dry and lacks "personal perspective" stories, but he gives a much better perspective on what really happened during the first 6 months of the Eastern Front than German-sourced accounts, shattering many stereotypes about Barbarossa
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Aug 10, 2014 19:35
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I've started reading Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and Minister of Arms. I'm only about 120 pages in at this point. The author discusses the more emotional side of Hitler. He was part of Hitler's inner circle and was witness to Hitler announcing his fear of imminent death due to his failing health as early as 1935. Definitely an interesting take from someone who was granted the profession Hitler idealized and failed at --architecture.
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Aug 11, 2014 01:15
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Ughhhhhhh gently caress that self promoting war criminal Speer. Maybe, maybe take him with a grain or five of salt if you want to try and figure out what small talk with hitler was like but even then be wary.
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Aug 11, 2014 05:52
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scootsmagoo posted:I've started reading Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and Minister of Arms. I'm only about 120 pages in at this point. The author discusses the more emotional side of Hitler. He was part of Hitler's inner circle and was witness to Hitler announcing his fear of imminent death due to his failing health as early as 1935. Definitely an interesting take from someone who was granted the profession Hitler idealized and failed at --architecture. He also pretty cleverly got off basically scot-free and is an extremely untrustworthy source. Sure, keep reading it for entertainment value, but by no means should you base any historical assumptions on the veracity of his statements alone.
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Aug 11, 2014 08:05
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I've already read numerous other books about World War Two (Rise and Fall by Shirer and others). I'm reading this solely for perspective and understand its inherent subjectivity.
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Aug 11, 2014 13:30
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I wouldn't take Shirer as stone-cold infallible cannon either. Rise and Fall was a very important work for the time, and it remains a fairly decent, broad treatment of the general outlines of the causes and the course of the conflict, but there is just a mountain of scholarship that has been undertaken since then and an even bigger mountain of sources that have been examined by historians seeking to understand the era that Shirer either didn't have access to or didn't have time to sift through. Basically it's a book published in 1960 and needs to be understood as such. He gives the Holocaust very short shrift and argues for a very extreme form of the Sonderweg thesis - the idea that there was something uniquely deviant in German history and its developmental path during the early modern era that made the rise of German fascism inevitable - that was controversial even back then.
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Aug 11, 2014 17:05
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Austen Tassletine posted:Can anyone suggest a good history of the Six-Day war? Ideally something that offers an impartial telling of the facts and the politics involved and isn't just propaganda for one side or the other. I've read Six Days of War by Michael Oren. It was alright, it depends on what you're looking for. The Six Day was was a pivotal time, history in Israel/Palestine and the Arab world are often discussed in pre- and post-'67 terms. I wanted to know about the war from this regional context. Instead, the Oren spends most of his time detailing the activity of the Israeli and Egyptian leaders. What meetings they go to, what phone calls they get, what decisions they make and when and why, who knew what when (most involved were getting conflicting information all the time, as happens in war), who they spoke with and agreed with and argued with. It was interesting to see the inside of a war effort from the perspective of the highest levels: Presidents, secretaries of defense important generals and diplomats etc. There was a fair bit of detail in the movements of military units and what territory they were taking, but it wasn't written from the soldiers perspective at all. It also wasn't the strategic sort of book I was looking for, it didn't discuss wider politics very much. It did mention the year or two preceding the war and various incidents and retaliations from both sides, though this is also largely without context. Finally, Oren is the former Israeli ambassador to the US. He didn't discuss politics much so I didn't find him terribly biased, but he's hardly uninterested.
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Aug 12, 2014 01:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:Shattered Sword for Midway. You can supplement it with Craig Symonds' The Battle of Midway for a perspective from the American side, but Shattered Sword I would consider to be essential reading for the battle. Yes to both of those. And while you're at it, _Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors_, about Leyte Gulf, is by the same guy as _Neptune's Inferno_, and it's even better. If you made the Battle off Samar into a movie nobody would believe it. quote:David Glantz's Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941 can be very dry and lacks "personal perspective" stories, but he gives a much better perspective on what really happened during the first 6 months of the Eastern Front than German-sourced accounts, shattering many stereotypes about Barbarossa Glantz's _When Titans Clashed_ is equally dry but extremely good. Glantz and Erickson's _Road to Stalingrad_ and _Road to Berlin_ are collectively definitive; earlier work just didn't have access to the primary sources.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:01
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Thanks to all who recommended Legacy of Ashes. It was excellent. I'm about to start Ghost Wars, but I'm also curious about the history of the Guantanamo Bay prison camps. Any suggestions?
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Aug 16, 2014 00:17
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Speaking of Legacy of Ashes, I just finished Wizards of Langley, by Jeffrey Richelson. It's a very dry and unexciting history of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, and all the alphabet soup groups that fell under the umbrella. It's got a load of good info about intelligence gathering that didn't involve Human Intelligence, since Legacy of Ashes drills into your skull just how horrible the CIA was about that. This book is meant to show the projects they were involved with that did produce successes like various satellite and recon planes and radars. However, dry and unexciting. So I really don't recommend it. But am hoping that Spycraft by Robert Wallace proves much better.
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Aug 17, 2014 10:25
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blakout posted:Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog is quite good. He's a South African Journalist who was at the hearings for Truth and Reconciliation after Apartheid ended every day for South African TV. He has a first hand account of that pivotal moment in time. I read it for my Modern Africa class in college and quite enjoyed it.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:51
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Does anyone know of an English language history of the South-East Asian Kingdoms
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Aug 22, 2014 15:55
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Inspired by Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcast I read GJ Meyer's A World Undone which was pretty good. Is there a good book to read that bridges the gap in world affairs from the end of World War 1 to the beginning of World War 2? After seeing how the first world war ended I'd be interesting in seeing the nitty gritty of the league of nations and all the chips falling into place for the rise of fascism and associated shenanigans.
adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Aug 23, 2014 |
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Aug 23, 2014 05:48
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adebisi lives posted:Inspired by Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcast I read GJ Meyer's A World Undone which was pretty good. Is there a good book to read that bridges the gap in world affairs from the end of World War 1 to the beginning of World War 2? After seeing how the first world war ended I'd be interesting in seeing the nitty gritty of the league of nations and all the chips falling into place for the rice of fascism and associated shenanigans.
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Aug 23, 2014 07:40
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Could anyone recommend a good book about the opium wars?
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Aug 23, 2014 19:49
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Mr.48 posted:Could anyone recommend a good book about the opium wars? It's been almost 10 years, but I read this one back in college. I've got it in a box somewhere. I remember really liking the class it was assigned for and a glance back at a review paper I wrote way back then indicates that I enjoyed the book. I still remember the broad history of those events despite not really doing anything with that topic, so clearly it was effective as well.
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Aug 23, 2014 21:18
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Is there a book similiar to A World Undone but for WW2?
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Aug 28, 2014 16:36
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Abu Dave posted:Is there a book similiar to A World Undone but for WW2? Are you specifically looking for a single-volume overview of the events of the war, or an analysis of any particular part, or. . . ? A bit more detail on what you want would help a lot.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:52
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Basically a overview similiar to how A World Undone does it; Chronologically I guess including the events leading up. Don't mind if it's several books, I don't like books that get too into technicals though about weapons and such. This might be a impossible request considering the source material hah.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:57
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Any good South American histories? It just feels like my knowledge is super fuzzy post-Conquistador stage. Spanish American wars of independence, 20th century dictators, whatever, don't know where to start.
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Sep 18, 2014 06:22
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TheFallenEvincar posted:Any good South American histories? It just feels like my knowledge is super fuzzy post-Conquistador stage. Spanish American wars of independence, 20th century dictators, whatever, don't know where to start. http://www.amazon.com/Open-Veins-Latin-America-Centuries/dp/0853459916
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Sep 18, 2014 07:33
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Can anyone help me find a book that covers Muslim expansion into the Iberian peninsula? Like, just the beginning portion, something explaining who was there before the takeover happened and how/why it was possible.
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Sep 19, 2014 03:03
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Any good books on the Russo-Japanese War? I feel like that's an era of history I'd like to know more about, having over the years gained a deeper appreciation and interest in similarly sometimes lesser discussed conflicts like the Crimean and Franco-Prussian. I'd also like to read more on the Korean War perhaps. I've always had an outside grasp of the whole thing, more like how the Korean War fit into the Cold War and how it affected X or Y, not the actual details of the conflict and maybe stuff about the clash between Truman and MacArthur. Having recently read Philip Roth's novel Indignation, set during the Korean War, and having read the awesome novel The Orphan Master's Son, I have been starting to think more on the Korean War and how little I know about the actual events of it (vague things about the Chinese and those POWs who ended up staying with the North Koreans/Chinese). Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 07:00
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TheFallenEvincar posted:Any good books on the Russo-Japanese War? I feel like that's an era of history I'd like to know more about, having over the years gained a deeper appreciation and interest in similarly sometimes lesser discussed conflicts like the Crimean and Franco-Prussian. There's a real lack of good works in English on the war. The best general books in English are Connaughton's Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: Russia's War With Japan and Warner's dated The Tide at Sunrise. Nish's The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War is good for the politics behind the war, but it's really dry and academic. Pleshakov's The Tsar's Last Armada is a really fun read about the armada's long and terrible trip to Tsushima (and the battle itself), and generally how lovely it was to be a Russian sailor.
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Sep 24, 2014 15:38
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