Historical Book Recomendation Thread

In another futile attempt at reviving the thread, I wondered if anyone can recommend any books on Russian and Chinese military doctrine in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. I don't expect any book to cover both at the same time, I'm just interested in both themes.

The essays contained in The Battle For China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War do a pretty good job of describing Nationalist doctrine, insofar as it existed. There are also efforts to describe differences between doctrine taught at the Baoding Military Academy and the Huangpu Military Academy. It doesn't really cover Communist doctrine, with the except of the essay specifically on the subject of Nationalist and Communist guerrilla warfare in North China. Chinese Communist military doctrine is a matter of some dispute, from what I understand, because of sharp differences between doctrine the way it was meant to be portrayed in the works of Mao, Lin Biao, etc., and doctrine the way it was actually exercised in the field. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the subject to be able to recommend anything good. Dreyer's China at War 1901-1949 covers a wider remit with less depth but is more or less adequate on doctrine. (It does a better job of providing a narrative of military operations and institutions.)

For the Soviets, David Glantz's Stumbling Colossus and Colossus Reborn do an excellent job covering Red Army doctrine in the late 1930s and in the first two Periods of War. Glantz has written other specialist monographs on Soviet doctrine across the twentieth century generally and has also covered the "deep battle" concept specifically, and his bibliographies are full of excellent references, especially if you can read Russian.

All of these works cover "doctrine" in a very general sense, primarily in terms of strategy and operational art with some small discussion of minor tactics. (Colossus Reborn is a bit different because of the depths that it plumbs, so to speak.) Most doctrine produced by armies is actually oriented a different way: they produce an immense amount of doctrine related to tactics and logistics and relatively little on the bigger picture. Very few nonspecialists care about doctrine.

Thank you very much! It's mostly because I have a great interest in early 20th Century China and I wondered if, given the Soviet aid to the Nationalists, their doctrines would look somewhat similar somehow.

JohannaK said:

In another futile attempt at reviving the thread, I wondered if anyone can recommend any books on Russian and Chinese military doctrine in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. I don't expect any book to cover both at the same time, I'm just interested in both themes.

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I'm pretty sure some of my old colleagues at the Joint Services Command and Staff College (UK) wrote on Soviet doctrine in the inter-war years (they certainly taught it). It's not really my area but if you search around the staff pages you might find something interesting.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

Phrossack said:

Any good place to start for a history of French Algeria?

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This doesn't help you right now but James McDougall just finished his big book on Algeria (I think he's been writing it for a decade or so now). If I recall correctly it's with the publishers now (Cambridge University Press?), so should be about by the end of the year.

In all likelihood it'll be 'the' text on the subject for the foreseeable, so keep your eye out.

Two recommendations from me - Britain After Rome by Robin Fleming and The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark. Clark is fairly well known around here as the writer of Iron Kingdom, and this new book (on the beginning of the Great War) is written in very similar style, and gives much more detail, particularly on exactly what lay behind the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and why it was such an important event, than any other book I've read - and that includes Hew Strachan's otherwise excellent book. A lot of historians have seen the assassination as essentially a convenient excuse or only a tiny straw breaking the back of a system which was so unstable that it would necessarily fall apart at the slightest provocation - Clark disagrees, quite convincingly.

Fleming's book is about England between the end of Roman rule and the beginning of the Norman period, and takes a quite unusual approach - most of it is more archaeology than history, much more general trends, living conditions and economic history than the stories and deeds of great or famous people. I don't make a secret of liking that approach, and it certainly does a great job of getting across what it might have been like to live in Anglo-Saxon England, much better than conventional history books do. At the same time, I do wonder whether it's not a little incomplete to treat the details of kings, battles and invasions only extremely briefly, if at all.

I'd be careful with Clark. I don't think it squares well with the old Fischer stuff (let alone the more recent work of people like Annika Mombauer). "Sleepwalking" to war ignores the active steps Germany took to instigate it (but, then again I'm in the 'it was largely Germany's fault' camp).

Have you read Michael Neiberg's book on the start of the war?

I'm no expert, but I'm in the "It was largely Conrad von Hötzendorf's fault".

Has anybody read the "new" book by Ian Kershaw : To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 ?

35 years - WW1, the interwar-years, WW2 and the first postwar years before Cold War started getting hot - on 624 pages including maps, etc.

Anyone else read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World? Just finished it, found it to be fascinating even if a bit much adulation for Genghis (to be fair Genghis Khan has always been fascinating to me).

Crisis in the Middle East - 60 years ago. Two new books. In the words of the reviewer:

A new administration comes to power, convinced that its predecessor has made a hash of Middle East policy. The new team’s big idea: a bold diplomatic overture to the region’s leading Muslim state. True, that leading Muslim state has a bad habit of sponsoring terrorism and threatening important allies. But the new team believes that much of this bad behavior is a response to provocations by the West and by Israel. Anyway, like it or not, the troublesome Muslim state represents the future, its local enemies outdated legacies of the past. By squeezing Israel and other allies for concessions, the United States could prove its own good faith — and get on the right side of history.

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IKE’S GAMBLE
America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East
By Michael Doran

The gamble - on Nasser - failed. But, the reviewer maintains,

This book is subversively revisionist history with sharp relevance to the present.

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The relevance being that both Eisenhower and Obama can be termed pragmatists looking at a successor who might not be.

Then we have

BLOOD AND SAND
Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace
By Alex von Tunzelmann

The Suez crisis coincided with the USSR's suppression of the revolt in Hungary.

The Suez crisis of 1956 was one of the moments. It began as a last gasp of colonialism, a plot by Britain and France, working with Israel, to reclaim the Suez Canal, recently nationalized by Egypt. The scheme was the fruit of human folly, principally and most notably that of the British prime minister, Anthony Eden.

The grand conspiracy was doomed to fail. The canal was blocked for months, causing a crippling oil shortage in Europe. The Arab-Israeli conflict worsened, and the Muslim world was inflamed against its old overlords in the West with lasting consequences. (...)

The turmoil and danger created by the Suez crisis and the Hungarian rebellion have largely faded from popular memory. With “Blood and Sand,” Alex von Tunzelmann, an Oxford-educated historian with an eye for human detail as well as a sure-handed grasp of the larger picture, does a marvelous job of recreating the tension and bungling that swept up Cairo, London, Moscow, Budapest, Paris and Washington during the harrowing two weeks of Oct. 22 to Nov. 6, 1956.

The background of the crisis was complex, and some readers may get slightly dizzy as the author corkscrews back in time from her gripping narrative. But the ultimate reward is a deeper understanding of the forces at work, as well as a wild ride down a zigzag trail left by the flailing of men with bloated and broken egos.

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Gripping drama. As indeed it was for those who lived through it.

From here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/b...1014&nl=bookreview&nlid=61820453&ref=headline

historix69 said:

Has anybody read the "new" book by Ian Kershaw : To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 ?

35 years - WW1, the interwar-years, WW2 and the first postwar years before Cold War started getting hot - on 624 pages including maps, etc.

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I haven't, but it's on my (rather long) Amazon list, so I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has, or otherwise will post something about it once I do eventually read it.

Well, alright then - another book on Adolf:

HITLER
Ascent 1889-1939
By Volker Ullrich

A quite unremarkable man:

When Adolf Hitler turned 30, in 1919, his life was more than half over, yet he had made not the slightest mark on the world. He had no close friends and was probably still a virgin. As a young man, he had dreamed of being a painter or an architect, but he was rejected twice from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. He had never held a job; during his years in the Austrian capital before World War I, he survived by peddling his paintings and postcards, and was sometimes homeless. When war broke out in 1914, he entered the German Army as a private, and when the war ended four years later, he was still a private. He was never promoted, the regimental adjutant explained, because he “lacked leadership qualities.”

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But then, of course, things changed.

Hitler’s mediocrity is all the more noticeable in this book because Ullrich strives not to mythologize his subject, knowing how many myths are already in circulation. There is a tendency, in stories about Hitler, to try to locate the magic key that explains him. Thus people sometimes say that he hated Jews because a Jewish doctor failed to save his mother from cancer, or that he was sexually neurotic because he was missing part of his genitals. Ullrich summarily dismisses both of these legends, noting that Hitler actually had a good relationship with his mother’s doctor, and that records of his medical examinations reveal no physical abnormality.

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Dang.

It might have taken a world war, the Great Depression and other calamities to prepare the way, but in the end Germany decided to see Hitler just as he saw himself; the country matched his psychosis with its own. What is truly frightening, and monitory, in Ullrich’s book is not that a Hitler could exist, but that so many people seemed to be secretly waiting for him.

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Hmmm.

(From here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/books/review/hitler-ascent-volker-ullrich.html)

Agent327 said:

Gripping drama. As indeed it was for those who lived through it.



From here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/b...1014&nl=bookreview&nlid=61820453&ref=headline

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A gentleman who recently passed away at my church was in the Marines in 1956, and once gave my class a vivid description of his perspective on those events. Long story short, he was a 1st lieutenant at the time, and when the riots broke out in Hungary his unit was placed on alert. Given all the early Cold War propaganda that he and his men had absorbed in their training up to then, it was the general opinion among those in Camp Lejeune that war was hours away and were generally shocked by the stand-down. It seemed inconceivable to them the U.S. would leave anti-Soviet democratic rebels to their fates. Furthermore it blew their minds that Eisenhower was the one who didn’t pull the trigger.

I know his account is just filled to the brim with the usual survivor’s bias and bottom-up military thinking. But it’s still an interesting first person account of the time.

Cold Wars are best left as is, I reckon. That said, tensions were rife and the threat of war was definitely in the air. Combined with Ike's dismay about Britain and France's adventure around the Suez Canal, it showed he could be very coolheaded in times of crisis. But I think your marine was not alone in his disappointment that nothing happened after all.

Two more biographies:

AMERICAN ULYSSES
A Life of Ulysses S. Grant
By Ronald C. White

The Ohio-born son of a tanner, he survived West Point, did well at war in Mexico, then resigned from the Army amid rumors of heavy drinking. He failed in business, failed in farming and finally fell into his father’s leather shop in Galena, Ill. The Civil War slid him back into uniform. When he fought, he rose. However high his rank, though, he remained a nobody from nowhere, and he knew it. (...)

The author of the highly regarded “A. Lincoln: A Biography” and several other books, White details mistakes, but not flaws. He wants us to admire Grant — for good reason. This worthy book solidifies the positive image amassed in recent decades, blotting out the caricature of a military butcher and political incompetent engraved in national memory by Jim Crow era historians. It illuminates Grant’s loving marriage, the sense of honor that made him agonize over debts, also his fundamental decency. It convinced me of his deep faith, and that his drinking has been grossly exaggerated. (...)

I wish that “American Ulysses” delved more deeply into Grant’s contradictions, yet agree with its final tally. White delineates Grant’s virtues better than any author before, and they outweighed his flaws. By the end, readers will see how fortunate the nation was that Grant went into the world — to save the Union, to lead it and, on his deathbed, to write one of the finest memoirs in all of American letters.

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(From here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/b...1021&nl=bookreview&nlid=61820453&ref=headline)

And

KARL MARX
Greatness and Illusion
By Gareth Stedman Jones

“If anything is certain,” Karl Marx once declared, “it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” This remark, though often quoted, is rarely understood with the depth it demands. The 20th-century intellectuals and party ideologues who proudly called themselves Marxists typically had a clear sense of their doctrine: Marxism as they conceived it was a theory of society that pulled away the mystifying veil of capitalism to reveal the economic exploitation at its core. It promised a bracing and universal concept of human history that portrayed class conflict as the final engine of change. More than this, it served as the modern name for an ancient but enduring dream: to put an end to unfreedom, and to realize the words of the old prophet, to “wipe the tears off every face.” (...)

“Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion,” by the British historian Gareth Stedman Jones, has many virtues, among them a graceful style of narration that will guide even readers unfamiliar with 19th-century history through the period’s political controversies. Stedman Jones has a keen grasp of intellectual history, and skillfully conveys the various themes in philosophy and economics from which Marx forged his own ideas. He has written the definitive biography of Marx for our time.

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Oddly, in the review Rheinische Zeitung is misspelled. (Could be a typo though.)

(From here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/b...1021&nl=bookreview&nlid=61820453&ref=headline)

Anyone know a good book on the 1911 Chinese Revolution, or about the fall of the Qing and early republic more generally?

Jonathan D. Spence's The Search for Modern China is quite more broad and I feel like it doesn't go into as much detail as I'd have wanted, but is otherwise quite fine.

Let's talk Alan Greenspan:

THE MAN WHO KNEW
The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
By Sebastian Mallaby

In 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, a 33-year-old economist named Alan Greenspan argued that central banks should beware of letting financial markets get too comfortable. The Federal Reserve’s success in smoothing economic fluctuations in the 1920s, he said, had led to the dangerous belief that “the business cycle is dead.” The crash and depression that followed were “inevitable” consequences of that cavalier attitude toward risk.

Sound familiar? As Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006, that same Alan Greenspan presided over what was called “the Great Moderation,” a period when business-cycle downturns were muted and investors became convinced that the Fed had their backs. Greenspan hadn’t forgotten his earlier worries: A few months before he stepped down, he cautioned that “history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low-risk premiums.” Sure enough, it didn’t.

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So how did Greenspan become a household name, you might ask.

In his autobiography, published in 2007, Greenspan depicted his rise to power as a series of lucky coincidences. Mallaby describes in detail how Greenspan climbed to the top, and it’s a much more interesting story.

(...) It was Greenspan’s libertarianism that propelled him into politics, but his other attributes that made him successful at it. At Rand’s urging, he delivered a series of lectures in 1963 and 1964 on the “Economics of a Free Society,” inveighing against, among other things, “one of the historic disasters in American history, the creation of the Federal Reserve System.” A few years later, a Rand fan who had attended one of the lectures brought Greenspan into Richard Nixon’s orbit. He signed on as a policy adviser to Nixon’s 1968 campaign, and learned quickly (...) there are many other juicy stories about Greenspan’s subsequent rise from chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Ford administration to informal minister without portfolio in the early Reagan years to boss of the Fed. These stories generally don’t make Greenspan look bad, just politically astute to a fault.

With the election of Bill Clinton, who proved endearingly willing to let Greenspan do his thing, the need for such maneuvering waned. By the time George W. Bush took office, Greenspan’s reputation was such that he was pretty much untouchable. He had gained for himself and the Fed a remarkable amount of freedom. He just chose not to use it.

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And then he said Goodbye.