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I read David Glantz's Operation Barbarossa over a couple of days. It's only a few hundred pages and very readable (except for the Nazi army corps all having Roman numeral names).
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Aug 21, 2023 01:26
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I read a short pocketbook by Albert Meltzer collecting documents by and about the international anti-Francoist resistance in the post WWII climate. Short but quite informative. Has one of the longest titles I've ever seen while looking it up online. Big breath "The International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement: A Study of the Origins and Development of the Revolutionary Anarchist Movement in Europe 1945-73 ... Reference to the First of May Group". The title on the cover of my edition just says, "The International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement: First of May Group" which is a lot snappier.
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Aug 24, 2023 18:36
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I just watched The Peacemaker again. Any recommendations for Yugoslav War? Broad coverage/overview is fine. I don't need a 800 page tome. And maybe more speicifc a seperate book on just the Kosovo War?
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Aug 27, 2023 01:53
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Digital Jedi posted:I just watched The Peacemaker again. Misha Glenny's Fall of Yugoslavia was written fairly close to the actual events, but is still a good overview. You asked for books, but there's two BBC documentary series up on YouTube that are pretty great: The Death of Yugoslavia and the Fall of Milosevic. Once you have a bit of an overview, Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies will give you an in-depth examination of all the contentious issues that are still relevant to current post-Yugoslav politics, and will give you a good understanding of the revisionist BS about the wars that you are likely to encounter online from partisan sources.
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Aug 27, 2023 18:35
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Digital Jedi posted:I just watched The Peacemaker again. First of all, I second the BBC documentary recommendation, they represent the best overview I am aware of. The Glenny book is decent enough. However, I am of the opinion that those two should absolutely be followed by Gagnon’s The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. The Yugoslav War is very much part of my lived experience and I have always been an obsessive consumer of media, who also studied pol-sci later. Nobody came even close to articulating what the war was really about from my perspective compared to Gagnon. Absolutely devastating read for me as a person who had to go through much of that crap, but so spot on and worth a read.
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Aug 27, 2023 19:49
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Just placed my pre-order for Kaldellis' The New Roman Empire, very excited for the arrival of October now.
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Aug 28, 2023 01:40
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Holy poo poo, we're bringing her back? I'm ready
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Aug 28, 2023 02:03
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Thanks for the recommendations. I'll be adding both books to my list to eventually get to. In the meantime, i have watching the BBC doc. Something about 90s docs in 360p from youtube that just feels right
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Aug 28, 2023 03:23
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PittTheElder posted:Just placed my pre-order for Kaldellis' The New Roman Empire, very excited for the arrival of October now. This appears to be already available on Canadian amazon, I know what I'll be reading for the next few weeks.
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Aug 28, 2023 19:51
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John Keay posted:And therein, for the Chinese, lay the problem. ‘The Tarim Mummies’ (Tarik being the name of the river that once drained the now waterless Tarim basin of eastern Xinjiang) are mostly not of Mongoloid race but of now DNA-certified Caucasoid or Europoid descent. China: A History was published in 2008.
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Sep 1, 2023 09:34
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PittTheElder posted:Just placed my pre-order for Kaldellis' The New Roman Empire, very excited for the arrival of October now. drat, looking forward to this, have it on preorder now.
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Sep 1, 2023 16:51
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He now informs me that the Yue people were not Mongoloid, but rather Malayo-Polynesian. Fascinating stuff.
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Sep 2, 2023 09:33
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I'm currently reading Hitler's Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum, and I'm a) finding it really compelling and b) depressed after reading some amazon reviews that are taking it and using it as pro-Nazi messaging. Can anyone recommend some good sources directly identifying and criticizing its shortcomings?
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Sep 5, 2023 07:15
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Ithle01 posted:drat, looking forward to this, have it on preorder now. Same, and, wonderfully, even though it lists as a pre-order it showed up as available to read immediately? Not gonna question it.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:04
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Unfortunately gave up on The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. I can tell it's mostly going to be "and this happened, and this happened, with these larger economic currents, and so on..."
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Sep 12, 2023 05:15
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Ithle01 posted:drat, looking forward to this, have it on preorder now. I think I’ll wait for the paperback but hey, turns out the kindle preview of a thousand page book is a pretty hefty chunk! Enjoying it so far, he’s bringing some of the lightness of voice you get in the podcast. Edit: actually, has anyone read his Romanland? He’s making some claims about the, I guess, cohesion and maybe homogeneity of Roman society in the 4th century, like how society in Egypt just wasn’t divided along ethnic and linguistic lines. That seems surprising to me looking at Hellenistic and early Roman Egypt but then that was literally centuries before so well aware I’m out of the areas I’m familiar with. GhastlyBizness fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Sep 12, 2023 |
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Sep 12, 2023 06:45
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm currently reading Hitler's Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum, and I'm a) finding it really compelling and b) depressed after reading some amazon reviews that are taking it and using it as pro-Nazi messaging. Can anyone recommend some good sources directly identifying and criticizing its shortcomings? If you're looking for more academic reviews (which are what will be doing what you want) I'd start by searching H-Net and JSTOR. JSTOR you'll be able to do the search free but need university/library access to get the review, as what you're really doing with that is searching academic journals for reviews. Still a good way to get a citation if you want to crawl around and find a more open means of accessing it. edit: doubly so for older works like this, H-Net tends to focus on more recent scholarship. Here's a randomly plucked journal review from 1970 on JSTOR. Again, you'll need some credentials to get in, but even if you don't this might give you a bread crumb to find it some other way: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786243 edit 2: and don't read amazon reviews. They're trash, and doubly so for anything history. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Sep 12, 2023 |
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Sep 12, 2023 13:13
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I blame this entirely on reading Master and Commander: what are the best books on Horatio Nelson and his career? I currently have (as companions to reading A-M) Herman's To Rule the Waves and Lavery's Nelson's Navy on order, and I own the Napoleon biography. Which is to say I'd also like recs for overview books for the Napoleonic wars as well!
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Sep 13, 2023 03:35
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Are there any good books about the invasion of Grenada? I’m sure Osprey has put something out, god bless them, but I’m hoping for something that includes the political context.
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Sep 14, 2023 20:21
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StrixNebulosa posted:
Books on the Napoleonic wars came up a few pages back and Alexander Mikaberidze's The Napoleonic Wars came up. I've enjoyed the audiobook of it but I listen to audiobooks to get to sleep so I'm not necessarily looking for the same thing I want in a reading book.
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Sep 14, 2023 21:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you're looking for more academic reviews (which are what will be doing what you want) I'd start by searching H-Net and JSTOR. JSTOR you'll be able to do the search free but need university/library access to get the review, as what you're really doing with that is searching academic journals for reviews. Still a good way to get a citation if you want to crawl around and find a more open means of accessing it. Are we allowed to post sci-hub links? If so, https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786243 will work.
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Sep 15, 2023 04:47
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I appreciate it, I was able to read that particular review earlier, though I hadn't found it very persuasive; Schweitzer spends a lot of space saying that Schoenbaum doesn't cover topics that I am reading him actively cover, and ends by saying he disagrees with Schoenbaum's thesis, then restating it as his own position. I may give Schweitzer's own book, Big Business in the Third Reich a shot in a year or so when I clean up my reading backlog- and I'll look for other reviews. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Sep 15, 2023 |
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Sep 15, 2023 05:12
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm currently reading Hitler's Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum, and I'm a) finding it really compelling and b) depressed after reading some amazon reviews that are taking it and using it as pro-Nazi messaging. Can anyone recommend some good sources directly identifying and criticizing its shortcomings? The works which directly criticise Schoenbaum are in German solely, to my knowledge. However, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 is a response in part to various modernization theories with regards to Nazism (Schoenbaum included), so could be what you want for a different narrative.
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Sep 15, 2023 19:44
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sube posted:The works which directly criticise Schoenbaum are in German solely, to my knowledge. However, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 is a response in part to various modernization theories with regards to Nazism (Schoenbaum included), so could be what you want for a different narrative. Thanks, this looks right up my alley. Folks can probably guess why I'm particularly interested in reading about the fascist co-option of, e.g., class-based populism, social institutions, and the subversion of democratic functions at this moment in time.
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Sep 16, 2023 06:17
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Discendo Vox posted:Thanks, this looks right up my alley. Folks can probably guess why I'm particularly interested in reading about the fascist co-option of, e.g., class-based populism, social institutions, and the subversion of democratic functions at this moment in time. I don't know anything about the Schoenbaum so I couldn't say how this book relates to its thesis, but another more recent book on this subject that might interest you is Peter Fritzsche's Germans Into Nazis which is about how Nazism was the culmination of a 20-year period of rising popular political mobilization in Germany that ended up with the Nazis' racial social revolution, making the case that it didn't come out of nowhere.
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Sep 16, 2023 13:27
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I've realized I know next to nothing about the Eastern Front during World War 2. Any good introductory books that focus on the Soviets? Most of the ones I see are about more specific topics, like just the Siege of Stalingrad.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:18
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:I've realized I know next to nothing about the Eastern Front during World War 2. Any good introductory books that focus on the Soviets? Most of the ones I see are about more specific topics, like just the Siege of Stalingrad. When Titans Clashed is a bit dry but a good overview of the Eastern Front.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:25
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vyelkin posted:I don't know anything about the Schoenbaum so I couldn't say how this book relates to its thesis, but another more recent book on this subject that might interest you is Peter Fritzsche's Germans Into Nazis which is about how Nazism was the culmination of a 20-year period of rising popular political mobilization in Germany that ended up with the Nazis' racial social revolution, making the case that it didn't come out of nowhere. Seconding this, it's excellent. If you really want a reading list for this, there are a few others I'd also recommend. Anderson's Practicing Democracy is a very good look at how democratic norms were established in Imperial Germany. This is important because it establishes that there WAS a democratic tradition and baseline and that it wasn't just Nazis subverting the relatively young Weimar Republic. This gives you a pretty solid baseline to understand what the situation was as the Nazis rose to power and what, exactly, it was they were undermining. This will also show a bit of how the German context in the 1930s is very different from North American and Western European contexts in the 2020s, but not so radically that you can just dismiss it as a young, failed democracy getting strangled in the crib. Koon's The Nazi Conscience pairs well with Fritzsche in that while Fritsche follows the political and social aspects of the Nazi revolution, Koonz looks at how Nazi values became normalized in German society. How do you establish anti-Semitism as a respectable social virtue and prime a nation not only for an authoritarian, fascist takeover but genocide that can be couched as a morally correct option? I think it's an important link in understanding not only how political radicals can take over a government, but how they in turn can radicalize the population in pursuit of their underlying agenda. Finally, if you want a bit of a palate cleanser after staring into the abyss for ~1000 pages I'd finish up with Jarausch's After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995. Unlike the others, I'm including the subtitle on this one because it so beautifully summarizes the trust of the work. How the gently caress do you get from 1945 to a functional society grounded on democratic principles? Don't get me wrong, one that still has many problems, but ultimately problems that aren't greater or worse than any of their neighbors. There are better individual books if you're interested in specific aspects of the post-war rehabilitation of Germany, but it's probably the best single volume that covers the entire swath of the end of the war through reunification.
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Sep 16, 2023 18:27
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StrixNebulosa posted:I blame this entirely on reading Master and Commander: what are the best books on Horatio Nelson and his career? I currently have (as companions to reading A-M) Herman's To Rule the Waves and Lavery's Nelson's Navy on order, and I own the Napoleon biography. You might also be interested in the book Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander, by David Cordingly; Cochrane's exploits were a huge influence on the Aubrey/Maturin novels.
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Sep 16, 2023 22:28
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Cyrano4747 posted:Seconding this, it's excellent. Where would you place Götz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries among these and the previous recommendations?
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Sep 16, 2023 23:29
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:I've realized I know next to nothing about the Eastern Front during World War 2. Any good introductory books that focus on the Soviets? Most of the ones I see are about more specific topics, like just the Siege of Stalingrad. Russia’s War by Overy and Ostkrieg by Stephen Fritz are both sufficient.
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Sep 17, 2023 02:47
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FPyat posted:Russia’s War by Overy and Ostkrieg by Stephen Fritz are both sufficient. Acebuckeye13 posted:When Titans Clashed is a bit dry but a good overview of the Eastern Front. Thanks for the two recommendations! I picked up "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege" by Anthony Beevor while I was at the store, but I was looking for something less about that specific battle and more about Russia and the USSR leading into WW2. Though my knowledge on the topic is so slim I might as well just start here. I'll check these other recommendations out as well, thank you!
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Sep 17, 2023 03:16
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Be prepared to read about a level of horror you may never have encountered before. The eastern front is a top pick for worst place to be, ever.
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Sep 17, 2023 04:18
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Hannibal Rex posted:Where would you place Götz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries among these and the previous recommendations? It’s excellent but the list was already long and I figured that Fritzsche and Koonz covered a lot of similar ground. If you’re specifically interested in the economic ways that people were led into acquiescence it’s a must read, though.
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Sep 17, 2023 04:38
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Just added the final book of Jonathan Sumption's five-volume Hundred Years War history to my e-reader.
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Sep 17, 2023 06:11
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:Thanks for the two recommendations! I picked up "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege" by Anthony Beevor while I was at the store, but I was looking for something less about that specific battle and more about Russia and the USSR leading into WW2. Though my knowledge on the topic is so slim I might as well just start here. I'll check these other recommendations out as well, thank you! Beevor is a good writer but not the world's best historian, but he's the guy who's written the big popular books on the Eastern Front in recent years so he's a good enough place to start. I haven't read it myself but I've heard good things about Mark Edele's recent book Stalinism at War, so that might be the more comprehensive history of the USSR before and during WW2 that you're looking for. Also, my typical recommendation for a good Eastern Front book from the Soviet perspective is Vasily Grossman's A Writer At War which won't give you a strategic overview of events but which is pretty unparalleled for giving you a look into what it was like to be in the Red Army.
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Sep 17, 2023 13:49
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vyelkin posted:
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army is another good entry point to that subject. It's well written, accessible, and reasonable in length. It also focuses on the experiences of individuals in a way that gives it a more slice of life flavor. Some Russian historian friends of mine have some things they'll nit pick and complain about with it, but nothing too egregious to my understanding.
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Sep 17, 2023 14:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army is another good entry point to that subject. It's well written, accessible, and reasonable in length. It also focuses on the experiences of individuals in a way that gives it a more slice of life flavor. Some Russian historian friends of mine have some things they'll nit pick and complain about with it, but nothing too egregious to my understanding. Yeah it's a good book! I'm sure I've recommended it before itt.
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Sep 17, 2023 14:21
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PlushCow posted:You might also be interested in the book Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander, by David Cordingly; Cochrane's exploits were a huge influence on the Aubrey/Maturin novels. Ooh, I would! Thank you!
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Sep 17, 2023 14:31
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Rand Brittain posted:Just added the final book of Jonathan Sumption's five-volume Hundred Years War history to my e-reader. had no idea this was out, thanks for the heads up!
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Sep 17, 2023 16:35
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