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These are great suggestions and I will be looking to get a hold of a few but I have one request. Have you read or do you know of any great political history/us history/founders books that lean heavily toward the informative side and less on the entertainment side? Also, any suggestions on material on democracy, capitalism, and government would be great too. Thanks!

Bill,

i recently discovered your work over at PJTV. after watching several of your Afterburner segments, i have come to the conclusion that you are a genius. keep up the great work.

i imagine you’re familiar with the works of Barbara Tuchman. if you have not read The Zimmerman Telegram or A Distant Mirror; i highly recommend them.

joe

T.R. Fehrenbach is an excellent writer whose histories are very readable.

‘This Kind of War’ – Korean War, an excellent study of what happens when you fail to prepare for war.

‘Lone Star’ – history of Texas. Which you might think would be of limited use if you’re not from Texas. But no! It’s entertaining and well written and worth a read.

I would like to add one other great educational book to your list.
“The Discoverers” by Daniel Boorstin. It’s a great read on how
art, superstition, science and technology progressed and merged over
the centuries.

Another author—sci-fi, actually, but his books usually incorporate historical insights just as incisive as Bill’s—is John Ringo. In fact, his recent book, “The Last Centurion,” had material so highly reminiscent of “Tribes” that I would not be one bit surprised to find a copy of Silent America on his bookshelf and E3 bookmarked on his computer.

Lots of great Vietnam books…

BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST – Halberstam
BRIGHT SHINING LIE – Neil Sheehan
WE WERE SOLDIERS ONCE AND YOUNG – Moore and Galloway

The only one I recognized was Flags of Our Fathers! Oh, and the Black Hawk Down, but thought it was only in movie form.
Nice to see the list of books that inform you. Sheds light on why the Afterburners are so excellent.
After watching the American Exceptionalism Afterburner and the Breitbart/Cannae Afterburner and the Truman/Jon Stewart Afterburner, it was pretty apparent you were no lightweight in history. I figure I will just let you do all the heavy lifting and will keep looking for more Afterburners to give me my history credits. I probably will not read too many (or none) on this list. I want to, but I know myself. I checked out de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and skimmed only a few paragraphs so far. It is a big book. I am not sure I will ever finish it. I can barely read through my Bible. But still trying. So, forgive the laziness and accept for now gratitude for your erudition. We appreciate it!
MORE AFTERBURNERS PLEASE!

Kevin. I wonder that too! Anyone (Bill?) have any idea where to steer Kevin for reading in those categories?

Not to denegrate the fine books Bill recommends, but the best, most relevant history book I have ever read is the first volume of Winston Churchill’s Second World War series, “The Gathering Storm”. The story of the appeasement of Britain and France when faced with a rising Nazi Germany has enormous relevance to today’s world. My second choice might be a harder read, but Te History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon also has enormous relevance. Just reading a book by an enlightenment author, rather than the appalling politically correct drivel that comes out of modern authors, even conservative ones, is very refreshing.

[...] Want something good to read? [...]

Awesome. Thanks Mr. Wittle.

“The History of England” by Thos. Babington Macaulay — an excellent history of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. The chapters which depict the downfall of James II and the conquest of William of Orange are as good as any novel. And Macaulay is one of the all-time great stylists; I wish I could write like him. It’s a multi-volume set, may only be available through used booksellers, but absolutely worth the effort to find and read. I’ve been through it twice and will probably read it at least once more.

“Does God Exist?” by Hans Kung — on the one hand, an excellent survey of the arguments for and against the existence of God, with Kung eventually coming down on the “Yes” side. On the other hand, a well-written and knowledgeable journey through the history of Western Philosophy in general. Wow. The impact of these ideas and thinkers cannot be overestimated, yet most people have no idea of their existence and how they have helped shape everyday life.

Two great war books:

2006 “The Religion”, by Tim Willocks, is a fabulous fictional depiction of the unsuccessful siege of Malta by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1565: historically accurate, sexy and up-close violent;

1948 novel “Stalingrad” by Theodor Plievier tells the story of the collapse of the “cauldron” and final German defeat from the viewpoint of the GI–it’s overwhelmingly realistic, horrifying, mind-bogglingly vicious. A stunning forgotten masterpiece.

Very good suggestions all. May I add “With The Old Breed, At Peleliu and Okinawa” by E. B. Sledge, introduction to the latest edition by Victor Davis Hanson. This is an incredible unvarnished first hand account of an enlisted Marine in the Pacific theater WWII.

Some GREAT books here. (I do a yearly re-read of Shelby Foote’s Civil War Narrative and it’s the highlight of my reading year)

I’d like to add William Shirer’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’. It is unsettling at times, but for pure history, it’s got to be one of the top books of the 20th century.

Most of Stephen Ambrose’s work is excellent as well.

The Sajer book was outstanding, nice to see it mentioned here.

Freedom Just Around the Corner, Walter A. McDougall
Cousins Wars, Kevin Phillips
Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer

I recommend anything by the great Paul Johnson but especially “Birth of the Modern” and “Modern Times”. Excellent, accessible writing that is both pithy and intellectually honest– a great combination.

Two books on the USN in WWII I would recommend:

Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors, incredible detail about the U.S. destroyers of Taffy 3 that engaged the Japanese cruisers and battleship Yamoto off the Phillipines. What a magnificant weapons system a WWII Fletcher Class destroyer was. And what magnificant men we had to sail them.

At War With The Wind, about the fight against the Kamikazes. Same comment about our sailors.

And one oustanding book from over a decade ago: Mig Pilot, about Lt Victor Belenko, the pilot who defected to Japan in the Mig-25. It will open your eyes about the USA compared to the USSR in a unique way.

May I recommend Gordon Rhea’s excellent series of books on a perennially poorly understood campaign, Grant’s Overland Campaign of 1864:
THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS
THE BATTLE OF SPOTSYLVANIA COURT HOUSE
TO THE NORTH ANNA RIVER
COLD HARBOR

Also, a cool book I ran across recently, STEALING THE GENERAL by Russell Bonds, about the Great Locomotive Chase…

I’ll second “Tin Can Sailors” and “MIG Pilot” and add “Airwar” by Edward Jablonski. It’s out of print, but you can easily find it on Amazon. It gives a very good account of air warfare during WW2, from the opening Blitzkrieg days, through the Battle of Britain, and finishes with the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. It also has a very good treatment of the tactical campaign–both the U.S. Navy one in the central Pacific and the less well-known one by 5th Air Force in the southwest Pacific–against the IJN and the Japanese Army.

Required background reading for understanding the modern Middle East — “A Peace to End all Peace” by David Fromkin. This richly-detailed book essentially tells us how we got to where we are today, beginning about 1900, and running through the mid-1920s. Events in the Middle East and all the machinations in Europe during WW1 that were short-sighted, cynical, or incredibly naive, and rarely accounted for local aspirations, conditions, or prejudices. This book should be mandatory for every U.S. president, vice-president, SecState, SecDef, national security adviser, and intelligence agency head.

Guy Sajer – a blast from the past. Will have to track down a copy and re-read it.

VDH – Enjoyed his books when they first came out, but since then have taken a couple of DVD history courses where the presenters are very critical of some of his findings.

SOLDIER by Antony Herbert. An excellent book on the U.S. Army during the 50-60’s. Herbert was one of the most decorated U.S. soldiers during Korean War and later commanded an Airborne Brigade in Vietnam.

CRUCIBLE OF WAR by Fred Anderson. A superb history of the Seven Years War (”French and Indian Wars” as you Americans call it) and covers not just the war in North America, but also in Europe, Africa and India. Anderson also details the fallout between the American colonists and the British politicians/soldiers and how seeds of rebellion were planted.

MUD, BLOOD and POPPYCOCK by Gordon Corrigan. Explodes many of the common myths pertaining to the British Army and World War I (e.g. Life in the trenches, casualty rates, court martials and executions, etc.).

I want to recommend “Special Providence” by Walter Russell Mead. While it’s not exactly a history book, he uses numerous historical references, to support his organizing of Americans into four schools of thought. “Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian.” This book made me reevaluate my own political position from Libertarian, to Jacksonian Libertarian.

Read anything by Joseph Ellis. I particularly liked “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation” and “American Creation: : Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic.”

Also, Daniel Boorstin’s “The Americans” series. These are three books written from 1958 to 1973: “The Colonial Experience,” “The National Experience,” and “The Democratic Experience.” The last one ventures into 20th Century history and Boorstin’s liberal views occasionally show (but not obstructively), but all in all they provide a great look at the spirit and society of the American peoples over the centuries.

Oh, and although not all of them are about history, read any book you can find by John McPhee. He is the best non-fiction writer in the English language today, in my opinion. I’ll read anything he writes and be enjoyably entertained and educated, even if I have not interest at all in the subject (or didn’t before I picked up the book).

[...] Bill Wittle has a recommended reading list. [...]

A self-taught historian is the best kind. So many university types are master cherry pickers with a propensity for leaving out the details that contradict the narrative. Well done!!

I read Plagues and Peoples many years ago and I still consider it the best book I’ve ever read.

My list list

The Last Lion by William Manchester
Ballentine Book’s series on war. From battles and weapons systems these books just rock.
Erickson’s The Road to Stalingrad and its sister book from Stalingrad to Berlin are the best overview of the Eastern Front of WWII ever written
Simon Sebag Montefiori’s Young Stalin and the Court of the Red Commissars are
Raul Hilberg’s History of the Holocaust is the definitive work on the subject but Daniel Goldenhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners is also excellent
For US history I recommend anything written by anyone with the last name Shaara. Especially the Killer Angels and their works on the Revolutionary War.
Robert Conquest’s works on Soviet Russia are mandatory reading on the subject

Sometimes the best history is to be found in novels:
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Saylor’s Sub Rosa series featuring everyone’s favorite Roman PI, Giordanus the Finder
Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is an amazing look at the birth of the modern world (warning 2400 pages).
Alan Furst’s WWII novels are incredible works which I cannot reccomend too highly.
Taiko and Musashi are masterpieces of fiction and window into the history of the Japanese Shogunate

Add this book to your list of “worth-reading”: Richard Brookhiser’s “George Washington: Founding Father”.
Brookhiser focuses on the most interesting facets of Washington’s life and addresses the false accusations leveled against Washington’s legacy. An easy, quick read simply because it’s written so well.

A geographer-sociologist who was studying cross-cultural anthropology, archeology and world history discovered a lawful, but heretofore unrecognized global, geographic pattern to warfare and social violence, going back 6000 years.

Absolutely mind-blowing:

Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World

Here’s a link to a free summary article:
http://www.orgonelab.org/saharasia_en.htm

Wow! No wonder I enjoy your commentary; we share the same library! My wife had a good laugh reading this one; she recognized nearly all of the books you posted — they’re all sitting on our bookshelves!

Although I no longer own the Shelby Foote Civil War books — I plowed through them three times and decided that was enough. They are a brilliant series, though, and I recommend them to anyone who hasn’t read them yet. I don’t think anything else can touch them for an understanding of the War of Northern Aggression (yes, I’m a southerner). I’ve only recently read Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys, and found myself weeping through both of them.

I haven’t read Case Closed yet, but will look it up in my local library. Thanks!

Bill,
Thanks for the list. I especially agree with “Flyboys”. I consider myself a history buff, but I learned many things from that book that are not taught to High School and college kids today.
I would like to add a biography to the list.
“Boyd-The fighter pilot that changed the art of war”,By Robert Coram.
This is a wonderful lesson on how one determined person can make huge contributions and move seemingly immovable objects with the force their personality alone.

Thanks for the book suggestions. I got my history of Hitler’s bunker from my father who was there just after the Russians trashed the site before the rest of the allies where there. He took pictures of the gardens so I got see this site.

Don’t forget:

“The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan

“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson

“The Capitalist Manifesto” by Andrew Bernstein

I’d add:

Iron Coffins – outstanding tale of life in a u boat in wwii

A World Lit Only by Fire – pre-renaissance europe, and an outstanding depiction of life at that time

I’ll chime in late to recommend pretty much everything ever written by John Keegan.

Make an Amazon list!!

> And I flat out DEFY any reader to believe that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on JFK after finishing CASE CLOSED by Gerald Posner.

Read it. Posner approaches it as a complete disciple of the single-individual theory and sets out to prove it. He does an ok job making his case, but there are several instances in it where he just flat out ignores directly contrary evidence to his theory, states the data, and then blithely walks past it never once asking several questions that anyone with an open mind would instantly put forth. I’d have to dig out the copy where I wrote my notes in, but the most obvious one is the tale of him and some people going hunting in Russia. Now Oswald is given a shotgun, and it’s clear from this that he cannot hit the broad side of a barn door. With a shotgun… If you know anything about shotguns, it’s that they are about as directionless a weapon as you can devise — if you can get a “laser pointer” within two feet of a target, it’s going to hit that thing. But Oswald can’t do that two-three years before he pulls off a series of three shots that a talented marksman would be hard pressed to equal. It’s not quite a “trout in the milk”, but it’s awfully close to making the case, single-handedly, that JFK was either the unluckiest president to ever exist, or that there was another shooter. And Occam’s Razor says “the latter”.

I also recommend that one watch the director’s cut of JFK — there are a couple scenes which were elided in the final cut, largely because they presented information that was out of sequence with other known/discovered information. A scene which was cut (presumably because it mentions Clay Shaw before the scene where they find out who he is) is part of the scenes that take place at the Book Repository where Oswald made his shots. It details some very interesting information about Shaw that just doesn’t fit with other known information, if he were who he said he was.

To my mind, the only thing Posner does is muddy the waters back up. When he fails to address the point about Oswald’s horrible shooting, along with others I don’t recall off the top of my head, he leaves questions unanswered which certainly should be addressed in a book as detailed as his book was.

Another source for information about history is SF “alternate” history. While they often deal with variances in what actually happened, they can provide a good backdrop for the people and the times. You can use Wiki to fill in the differences. Three of the best authors for this are Harry Turtledove (Ph.D. in Byzantine History, and he uses that as a topic often), S.M.Stirling, and John Barnes. All do non-historical fiction, too, so be sure you get a history book if that is what you are after.

Turtledove has also written some non-SF historical fiction under the name of Turtletaub, notably Justinian, about the second Byzantine emperor of that name (the first one is the famous one), and about Greece after Alexander, in the form of Over the Wine-Dark Sea, The Gyphon’s Skull, Owls to Athens, and others. The latter series are tales of the adventures and experiences of two Greek cousins who operate a trading ship around the Mediterranean in the decades after the death of Alexander.

Also by Turtledove along with co-author Judith Tarr, is “Household Gods”, which is essentially historical fiction in the guise of SF — a young, divorced attorney beset by woes wishes she lived in simpler times before going to bed. When she awakens, she finds herself in 2nd century Carnuntum, near the Roman Empire’s borders, and slowly grows to appreciate just how cushy she has it nowadays.

Again, much of what Turtledove (and the others) writes is alternate history. It’s often not events that happened, but events that might have happened, or happened differently, with the same/similar settings and peoples. Turtledove, for example, has an alternate history of WWII in which magic takes the place of science and technology. But if you look, you will find that there is no question almost everything that happens has an analogue in the “real” events. Ditto for the Sentry Peak series, which is a similar variation on the Civil War, with magic in place of technology, but there’s no question that he’s still telling you the historical tale of the Civil War campaign involving the Battles of Chattanooga and Chickamauga. And Turtledove does some similar things with Byzantine history in his tales of Videssos, a thinly-disguised variation on Byzantium, which his doctoral degree is in. He’s written three series set in Videssos, at least two of which can be associated with real sequences of events in the history of Byzantium.

The chief advantage of historical fiction is that it makes the people, events, and places come alive. Instead of dry tales of this battle or that one, you get the feeling of actually having been down in the middle of the events in question, and getting a real feel for what it was like in the place and time.

.

Try Barbara Tucuman “August 1914″, also called “The guns of August”, her Pulitzer prize winning history of the first month of the first world war on the western front. Brilliant.

Also, Anthony Beevors’ superb “Berlin,the Downfall”. Reads like a novel, but is packed with more facts than you can shake a stick at. Did you know, for example, that the last soldiers to defend the Chancellory in Berlin were Frenchmen? French SS guys recruited to fight in Russia, and did so all the way to Moscow, and then back again to Berlin.

Reading your book list of history books made me want to tell you about Lacqueur (sp?) and his book on post-wwII European history. Also don’t forget Himmelfarb on the Enlightenment. I’d also like to mention in relation to your blog about teh American spirit and how much it owes to our immigrant history that my grandfather(the one from Rotterdam not the one from near Erzerum)once told me that he came to America because he, being the son of a working man, was not permitted to go to university. He was an excellent amateur astronomer, and he wanted his son to be able to be an astronomer if he so desired. His son was not one, neither was his grandson – but his great-grandson is an astrophysicist in Ohio. He (the great-grandson), of course, doesn’t get it – but I do. I think (and hope!) that the astrophysicist will, too, eventually. Good work!

Great lists. I see Winston Churchill mentioned above. His 4 volume “History of English Speaking Peoples” is worth a visit. It took me a year the get through the first time but well worth the read. Oddly, it wasn’t in the bookstore at the Churchill museum in London when I visited.

For first hand contemporary accounts of Communism in America and living in Nazi Germany, both “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers and “I Will Bear Witness” by Victor Klemperer are hard to beat.

“John Adams” and “1776″ by David McCullough are both popular and engaging histories of our founding. I was especially impressed with the level of commitment of our founding fathers and their perseverance through incredible challenges to give us this country we love.

“Gulag” by Anne Applebaum is a good look at the dark underbelly of Soviet Communism. (Well, actually all of Soviet Communism was pretty dark.)

“Ghost Soldiers” by Hampton Sides tells the story of the Bataan Death March, the survivors and their rescue from a Japanese concentration camp.

I’m looking forward to reading all your suggestions, Bill. Your incredible writing and grasp of historical context are why I registered at PJTV.