Books represent one of our greatest and most convenient means of escape. By means of the book, the reader can make his way into any number of historical ages and fascinating places. Always ready to be read, the book is the very essence of availability. As one book lover commented: "Books are quiet. They do not dissolve into wavy lines or snowstorm effects. They do not pause to deliver commercials. They are three-dimensional, having length, breadth and depth. They are convenient to handle and completely portable." What more need be said?
Michael Korda, With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the
Battle of Britain (Harper).The Battle of Britain is one of the most well-known phases of World War II. Even so, it remains as compelling as ever. Those relatively few men who flew with such bravery were, for a time, all that stood between Adolf Hitler and his domination of Great Britain. Had Britain fallen, Nazi Germany would have controlled virtually all of Western Europe. Beyond this, a defeated Britain would have left the United States vulnerable on the seas and around the world.
Though several good books have been written about the Battle of Britain, Michael Korda brings a distinctive and thorough approach to this phase of the war. With Adolf Hitler rebuilding Germany's power in the air, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin fatalistically predicted, "The bomber will always get through." In the summer of 1940 fewer than 2000 young fighter pilots proved the Prime Minister wrong. those pilots and their crews saved Britain and gave hope to free peoples around the world. The Battle of Britain, named as such by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, stands as one of the greatest moments in the history of any democratic people. As Korda explains, "Like the defeat of the Spanish Armada and Nelson's victory at Trafalgar over the combined fleets of France and Spain, it is etched deeply into the national consciousness as a moment of supreme danger when Britain, alone, courageous, defiant, without allies, defeated a more powerful and warlike enemy in the nick of time."
With Wings Like Eagles is an accurate and well-written account that takes the reader into the drama of those days and the lives of the pilots. Korda places the Battle of Britain within the larger context of the war and, in the end, makes clear that, had Britain fallen, the world we know would be a remarkably different place.
An excerpt:
Hitler was not wrong in thinking that many people in England, on the left as well as the right, would still have preferred a compromise peace to a continued, all-out war. As late as May 26, 1940, more than two weeks after Churchill took office as prime minister, Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary who George VI and most of the Conservative Party had hoped would replace Neville Chamberlain as prime minister instead of Churchill, revealed to the War Cabinet that he had been talking to the Italian ambassador in London about the possibility that “signor Mussolini” might agree to inquire of the Führer what his terms would be for peace with Britain. This démarche dismayed Churchill when he heard of it—his own opinion, as expressed later to the members of the larger cabinet, was, “We shall go on, we shall fight it out here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.” Halifax’s chat with the Italian ambassador, however much it alarmed and displeased Churchill, must have kindled optimism in Berlin. Hitler himself had thrown the British what he intended to be an olive branch, in the form of a long speech in which he offered to guarantee the continued existence of the British Empire and fleet in return for a free hand for Nazi Germany in Europe. So far, the results of this were disappointing, to be sure, but who could be certain that in the face of invasion the British might not come to their senses and replace Churchill with, say, Halifax, or Lloyd George, and agree to sit down at the bargaining table like sensible people? The British were defeated, Hitler believed—the fact of their defeat had simply not sunk in on them yet.
Simon Baatz, For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder
that Shocked Chicago
(Harper).The 1920s represented a time of social foment in America. Old ways of thinking were giving way to new patterns of life and thought. A nation that considered itself morally innocent in the aftermath of World War I had to face some stark and dark realities about itself in the next decade. One of the darkest events of that decade took place in 1924, when two wealthy young men of privilege callously murdered a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks -- just for the thrill of it.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were friends, homosexual lovers, and self-styled intellectuals. They came from some of the most well-established Jewish families in Chicago and they had received educations of the highest quality. No one could claim that these two young men came from difficult backgrounds. They had suffered no deprivation. Nevertheless, they proved themselves to be depraved and cruel murderers who kidnapped, tortured, and brutally murdered a 14-year-old boy just because they wanted to know what the experience would feel like.
When Leopold and Loeb came to trial, the crucial question was not their guilt, but whether the two would face the death penalty. The legal proceedings that allowed these two murderers to escape execution became a model for the sensational criminal trials that would follow in subsequent decades. Into this scene stepped Clarence Darrow, soon to be famous as the attorney for the defense in the Scopes trial. Darrow's defense would throw into question everything Americans believed about guilt, personal responsibility, and moral action.
Simon Baatz tells his tale with the skill a reporter and the skill of a historian. For the Thrill of It is one of most compelling criminal legal thrillers of our times. Readers of this book will gain an understanding of America in the 1920s even as they follow one of the most interesting criminal investigations and trials and the nation's history. Beyond this, the reader will have to think through some of the most difficult moral and theological issues that arise when we are confronted with the darkness of human depravity.
An excerpt:
The denial of free will and evil intent and the rejection of punishment as a response to crime necessarily assumed a radical revision of courtroom procedure. All three of Darrow’s psychiatrists—White, Healy, and Glueck—subscribed to a medicalizing ideology; all three hoped to extend and expand the influence of psychiatry within the courtroom in a way that would challenge the authority of the legal profession. The legal framework that determined the judicial process in the American courtroom was, according to White, hopelessly outdated; it relied on nineteenth-century concepts and methods that, because they took no heed of modern science, were entirely unsuited to the present day.
White’s animus toward contemporary legal procedure found its focus in the concept of insanity. The court customarily could find a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity; in the American courtroom, the accepted definition of a defendant’s insanity was the inability to distinguish right from wrong. But insanity, according to White, was solely a legal concept; it had no basis in medical science. Moreover, this legal concept took no account of the complex character of mental illness. According to medical science, the dichotomy between sanity and insanity simply did not exist; an individual might have any one of any infinite degrees of mental illness, all of which lay on a continuum.
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at
War ( Penguin Press).World War II holds a special place in the American mind -- and for good reason. This global cataclysm represents one of the greatest dramas in human history. Richard Evans, Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge University, has now completed a massive three volume work that represents one of the most comprehensive and accessible accounts of Nazi Germany and World War II. In The Third Reich at War, Evans completes his history of Adolf Hitler's Germany, tracing the rise and fall of Hitler's military machine.
The book begins with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and ends with the downfall of the Nazi regime. The Third Reich at War is a large book, for it has an enormous story to tell. Richard J. Evans' achievement is to tell this massive story in a way that maintains the reader's attention and provides detail missing from other accounts. The Third Reich "continues to command the attention of thinking people around the world," Evans states. For this reason, thinking people will be especially appreciative of The Third Reich at War.
An excerpt:
Hitler’s hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war. It was a frequent theme of his mealtime monologues. After the war was over and victory assured, he said in 1942, the Concordat he had signed with the Catholic Church in 1933 would be formally abrogated and the Church would be dealt with like any other non-Nazi voluntary association. The Third Reich ‘would not tolerate the intervention of any foreign influence’ such as the Pope, and the Papal Nuncio would eventually have to go back to Rome. Priests, he said, were ‘black bugs’, ‘abortions in cassocks’. Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. ‘Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.’ ‘The best thing,’ he declared on 14 October 1941, ‘is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science.’ He was particularly critical of what he saw as its violation of the law of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. ‘Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.’ It was indelibly Jewish in origin and character. ‘Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.’ Christianity was a drug, a kind of sickness: ‘Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease.’ ‘In the long run,’ he concluded, ‘National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.’ He would not persecute the Churches: they would simply wither away. ‘But in that case we must not replace the Church by something equivalent. That would be terrifying!’ The future was Nazi, and the future would be secular.
Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's
Education (Penguin Press).Greg Mullaney is a most unusual writer. In The Unforgiving Minute he tells the story of his experience through four years at West Point, training as an Army Ranger, studies at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, and his experience as an officer commanding a platoon in Afghanistan. The Unforgiving Minute is fascinating at every turn, revealing the inner thoughts and remarkable experiences of a young man emerging as a leader in battle. The book will be of interest to a wide variety of readers, all of whom will learn a great deal as this young man reveals his own experience and reflections.
The Unforgiving Minute is in account that mixes courage with intelligence and deep patriotic commitment with a reflective mind. This book is an account of education, growth into manhood, and the demands of leadership. It unites the intensity of battle with the anguished thoughts of a young man who desperately wants to be worthy of the trust invested in him.
An excerpt:
Only perfection was acceptable. Attention to detail was beat into my head with the regularity of a jackhammer. A loose belt buckle, and undone shoelace, dust on the brim of my service cap, all resulted in the same ominous rebuke: You just killed your platoon.
During those first few months, the connection between battlefield leadership and attention to detail was hard to make. Seven years later the link would be obvious. Military command, perhaps unlike any other profession, demands that its practitioners see with absolute clarity both the forest and the trees. Any number of missed details could compromise a mission, from forgetting to bring an extra battery for the tactical radio to skipping the maintenance for the one tiny piece of a machine gun that fails in a firefight. Miss a digit on a GPS coordinate, and an artillery round could land on friendly troops. One mistake really could kill your platoon.
Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans
Won the War in the West, 1941 -- 1945
(Harper).
Andrew Roberts is a writer who evokes the
style and magisterial
scope of Winston Churchill as historian. It is no accident, for Winston
Churchill has been a fascination of this author and, to a considerable
extent, it is Churchill's worldview that shapes Andrew Roberts'
understanding of World War II. In Masters and
Commanders,
however, Roberts is not looking only to Winston Churchill and his
leadership of the war. To the contrary, Roberts makes the case that the
Allied conduct of World War II came down to an absolutely unprecedented
partnership between Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alan
Brooke, and George C. Marshall.
In Roberts'
fascinating account, Roosevelt and Churchill emerge as
the great political strategists who are able to work together to forge
a united effort among the Allied powers. They were complemented by
General Sir Alan Brook and General George C. Marshall, who brought
military genius to bear on the daunting challenge of defeating Nazi
Germany. Masters and Commanders is
an absolutely compelling read as a work of history. Roberts has done
the hard work of the historian in digging out correspondence and
historical records in order to fill in significant gaps in our
knowledge of the relationships between and among these four significant
leaders. The strength of this book is that, in making his case, Roberts
allows us to meet each of these four men in a whole new
way.
An
excerpt:
Because Nazi Germany was an
autocracy, Hitler was able to impose
a grand strategy on his generals that a few at the beginning, but many
by the middle and almost all by the end, thought suicidal.
Subservient
subordinates such as Jodl and Keitel failed to ask searching questions,
and few other German generals had the access or the courage to
criticize their Fuhrer’s plans to his face, on the rare occasions that
they were give the opportunity to be apprised of them
beforehand.
Flawed strategies, such as the ‘no withdrawal’ policies in Tunisia,
Russia and Italy, were therefore not subjected to the kind of unsparing
analysis that would undoubtedly have halted their adoption in a
democracy. By complete contrast, the strategies of the
Western Allies
had to be exhaustively argued through the planning Staff, General
Staff, Chiefs of Staff and then Combined Chiefs of Staff levels, before
they were even capable of being placed before the politicians, where
they were debated in microscopic detail all over again. As we
have
seen, the British and American Chiefs of Staff spoke their minds
without fear or favour, in a way that Hitler’s lieutenants could
not.
Even Stalin, as the war progressed, gave more and more autonomy to the
members of the Stavka (High Command) in Moscow, as well as to
commanders in the field.
Neil Bascomb, Hunting Eichmann
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
The arrest and
trial of Adolf Eichmann took place almost a
half-century ago now, and though his name lives in infamy, the story of
his capture and its significance is largely lost to the current
generation. Now arrives Hunting Eichmann by
Neal Bascomb, and the story comes alive
again.
Bascomb has written the only full account of
Eichmann's capture and
its aftermath. He tells the story with great skill, and he sets the
record straight on a number of questions. The most
interesting fact
about the search for Adolf Eichmann in the years after World War II is
the fact that he was not even on the top list of wanted Nazi criminals
at the war's end. Eichmann's central role in administering
the "Final
Solution" and the murder of millions of Jews in Germany and central
Europe became evident only in the years after the
war.
Eichmann's eventual capture and arrest owed
much to a German
prosecutor, who sent Israeli officials word that Eichmann was living in
Argentina with his wife and sons. From there, the Israelis
took over
the investigation and search. Bascomb writes the story like a
spy
thriller -- which it certainly is. But this story is much
more than a
thriller, it is a much needed reminder of the necessity of moral
judgment, legal justice, and personal accountability.
Bascomb's
account of Eichmann's capture is an adrenalin-laced read. His
account
of Eichmann's trial in Israel is shorter, but very
important.
Eichmann was executed in Israel on May
31, 1962. He was the first and, so far, the last person
executed after trial in Israel. Hunting Eichmann
serves as a reminder of why the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann
remains one of the most important events of the twentieth
century.
An excerpt:
As
dawn broke the next day, Harel turned over the last page in
the thick dossier. He was deeply unsettled by the portrait he
now had
of Adolf Eichmann. Here was a man, Harel surmised, who had
assembled
the apparatus to kill millions of people, who had separated children
from their mothers, driven the elderly on long marches, emptied out
whole villages, and sent them all to the gas chambers. All
the while,
he had been beating his chest in pride for being faithful to the SS
oath, a soldier and an idealist. It was clear to Harel that
Eichmann
had killed without compunction and was an expert in police and
intelligence methods. Of this he had no doubt. If
Eichmann was still
alive, he had managed to elude his pursuers time and again and had
removed all traces of his existence over the past dozen
years. This
new information from Germany, solid as it appeared to be, might be yet
another false lead. Nevertheless, given what he now knew
about
Eichmann, Harel set about finding out if that was the
case.
Alan Huffman, Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the
Worst Maritime Disaster in American History
(Collins).
The explosion and sinking of
the Mississippi riverboat Sultana
is one of the least known events of the most tragic period in American
life. In April 1865, with the war won and the nation exhausted, the
Sultana moved
up
the Mississippi carrying hundreds of Union soldiers. An estimated
2400 passengers were on the vessel when it exploded and sank in a fiery
disaster that cost almost 1700 lives.
Adding insult
to injury, most of the passengers aboard the
Sultana were newly liberated prisoners of war who
were finally headed home. Though unknown to most Americans today, the
sinking of the Sultana represents the worst
maritime disaster in this nation's history. Sultana is a book
that makes for compelling reading that reaches the
heart.
An
excerpt:
Perry Summerville awoke to find
himself flying through the air.
His first thought was that the Sultana had been running close to shore
and he had been swept off the deck by an overhanging limb.
When he hit
the water he plummeted into the depths, came up about a hundred feet
from the boat, and began swimming back toward it, calling for help,
only to see that it was on fire. He instinctively turned
downstream
and swam away, which was not easy on his bum leg, with his shoulders
and chest severely bruised by the blast and fall, and his back scalded
by the steam. He found a section of the boat’s railing to
hold on to,
and he glanced back in wonder at the terrible scene, at the silhouettes
of people clamoring on the decks, some being consumed by flames, while
hundreds dove into the water, in most cases to
drown.
Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of
U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan
(Scribners).
Every war constitutes a collection of
human stories from the edge of
courage and the extremes of existence. Author Doug Stanton tells the
story of a small group of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who went into
Afghanistan shortly after September 11, 2001, and then went after the
Taliban. In Horse Soldiers,
Stanton follows the experience of these soldiers as they experience the
euphoria of an immediate victory only to find themselves ambushed, out
numbered, and in an apparently hopeless
situation.
Horse Soldiers
is a story that demands to be told and Stanton tells it well. No one
reading this account will believe that the establishment of a lasting
peace in Afghanistan will be anything but unspeakably difficult -- and
unquestionably important.
An
excerpt:
In reality, everyone had already
decided that they would not be
taken alive, if a gun battle came to that. They’d sat on
their cots
and written what they called their “death letters”—last missives home
to wives and family about last thoughts. One Special Forces
soldier
had poured his heart out. He truly expected not to come home
at all.
“If you are reading this letter,” he wrote to his family, “things are
not well for me. And I [had] so many things I wanted to do
with you
both. I love you and think of you as often as
possible. You made me
the happiest man in the world.” He had told his fellow
soldiers,
“Look, we’re in this together. And we need to know that
coming back
isn’t really an option for us. If we get killed in the
process, we get
killed. I don’t want [us] to shy us away from what we have
to do.”
After writing their letters, the men removed
wedding rings and
emptied wallets of any possibly incriminating photos of family and
friends (images and information that could be used against them in a
torture session) and dropped these tokens of identity in large manila
envelopes provided for the occasion. These were sealed and
handed for
safekeeping to the chaplain.
Norman Stone, World War One: A Short
History (Basic Books).
Though
World War II is a matter of almost constant fascination for
modern Americans, the same cannot be said in the same sense for World
War I. For most Americans that first world war appears so distant from
our modern historical consciousness. At the beginning of that war,
Europe was governed by crowned heads who ruled as if history would
never sweep them away. In World War One,
Norman Stone does what few historians would even attempt to do -- he
tells the story of World War I in a brief 200-page account that puts
the disaster of this global war into an understandable
context.
Stone, an historian who formerly taught at
Oxford University, now
lives and teaches in Turkey -- the site of some of the most intense and
disastrous fighting of the first world war. Without flinching, Stone
tells the story of the hubris and insane optimism that brought Euro
ispe into this disaster and he recounts the blunders and grinding
murderousness of this war. Most Americans want to know more about World
War I and, most importantly, they want to understand what that war
meant. World War One: A Short
History is a great place to find those questions
answered.
An excerpt:
A
fire eating diplomat in the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry
called the Archduke’s murder ‘a gift from Mars’ – a wonderful excuse to
solve all problems. Austria would be great again, Russia
would come to
hell, even Turkey might be taken over. In six weeks, a
Bismarckian
victory. It was, the German emperor said, ‘Now or
never’. War was to
be provoked, and the murder of the Archduke provided a perfect
occasion. The Austrians were told that they should use it to
attack
Serbia, Russia’s client, and the means chosen was an ultimatum,
containing demands that could not be accepted without the loss of
Serbian independence. As it happened, the Austrians were not
at all
enthusiastic for war with Russia – Serbia, yes, but Russia was too
great. The worries translated into delays – the Hungarians to
be
placated, the harvest to be brought in, and so on. Discreet
banging on
the table came from Berlin, and on 23 July the ultimatum was sent
off.
On the 25th, it was accepted but with reservations, and the Austrians
declared mobilization – still no declaration of war. There
was more
banging of the table in Berlin, and war was declared on the
28th.
Robert Harvey, Maverick Military Leaders: The Extraordinary Battles
of Washington,
Nelson, Patton, Rommel, and Others (Skyhorse
Publishing).
Robert Harvey, a recognized military
historian, argues for what he
calls a "golden age of military leadership." He dates this from 1757
and the Battle of Plassy to 1945 and the defeat of Germany and Japan.
As he considers this era, Harvey argues that a succession of great
military leaders redefined war and military leadership in order to
produce the modern world and the shape of the military we know
today.
In calling military leaders leaders
"mavericks," Harvey points to
leaders who had greatness thrust upon them. Many of them came from
humble backgrounds and experienced setbacks and embarrassments that
would have ended the careers of lesser men. In the end, these men
changed the world and their military exploits are the stuff of legend.
These men, generals, admirals, and marshals -- were paragons of
leadership who reshaped both the world and the art of war through their
genius. Harvey tells the story through essays that trace the stories of
twelve remarkable leaders whose strategies and leadership qualities are
studied even today. Maverick Military
Leaders will be enjoyed by anyone seeking to
understand war, leadership, and the shaping of the modern
world.
An
excerpt:
Douglas MacArthur displayed a
thoroughly old-fashioned taste for
sharing the risks of the frontline with his men when it had become
unfashionable; cool thinking on the battlefield; a huge penchant for
seizing military opportunities as they arose as well as a gifted
tactical grasp; a devotion to his men; and a desire to keep the numbers
of casualties down even among the enemy. He also displayed
some skill
in selecting officers (although too many were sycophants); superb
coordination of command and control in battle; the high intelligence
evident in his speeches, his paternalist rule in Japan and his humanist
attitude to his profession of war; contempt for disadvantageous odds;
and an insufferably charismatic, superior and flamboyant
personality.
He was almost addicted to insubordination from an early age—towards
Pershing, Roosevelt (whom, however, he admired) and then Truman (whom
he did not).
Like so many of the mavericks, he
became a major political
leader and administrator, as proconsul of Japan for six years,
following in the footsteps of Clive, Washington, Wellington and
Grant.
Yet, like all of them except Washington, he was a poor politician on
his native soil, failing to understand that military glory, command and
proconsular authority abroad cannot readily be transferred to the
sphere of democratic politics, with its compromises, half-truths and
accommodations with lobbies. In Asia, however, like Caesar,
‘he did
bestride this narrow world like a colossus’. He was a
maverick, one of
the very last of the great warriors and a genius in
warfare.
__________________________________
A
special note. Horse Soldiers and The
Unforgiving Minute
contain brief episodes of inappropriate language that emerge, in the
main, from conversations recounted in the context of battle.
