The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer - Lengthy history book about the Third Reich written by someone who lived in Germany for a time. It's also partly biographical about Hitler, though it also focuses on the structure of the German government as well as German military matters in the war. It is also viewed as the definitive work on this period of history.
I have a bit of criticism concerning this: Shirer's book advocates the so-called Sonderweg theory that Germans are a nation of warmongerers and antisemites, and that Nazi Germany was the logical end conclusion of this development. It was popular in the 60s among left-liberals, but since then historiography has moved away from the theory.
If I may propose a book about Nazi Germany/Hitler, Hitler's Revolution by Richard Tedor. It draws extensively from hundreds of German language original sources, and details in depth both the internal support and opposition to Hitler. Probably best book I've read on the subject.
I salute you my good sir. Jesus, you really took the post seriously. But no, seriously. Thank you. That's way more books than I'll probably read anytime soon but I have them all on my to-read list.
Would you have any historical fiction you'd recommend as well?
Thank you guys for all the wonderful recommendations! If anyone has any more please feel free.
It's an extremely long list with low standards for inclusion, I could pare it down a lot into two smaller lists, a list of things I find relevant to modern American life and one of books built out of interesting stories.
The Men Who United the States
Rome of the Caesars
The Worldly Philosophers
Mad Bad and Dangerous to Know
Wicked River
Cattle Kingdom
Slavery by Another Name (not relevant, but I think it's an extremely important tragic story necessary to understand how badly Reconstruction failed)
A Disease in the Public Mind
Storm Before the Storm
Days of Rage
Season of the Witch
Blacklisted by History
Blood in the Water
Bridge at Andau (to Ukraine situation, as well as in a vivid depiction of how an angry people can suddenly burst forward from small courageous actions)
Every Man a King
American Nations
Albion's Seed
Devil is Here in these Hills isn't really relevant, but I think it's relevant to Americans to understand how badly the White proletariat was screwed in the country, the nation was a Third World country that clawed its way to the top and some aspects of the story (like West Virginians living under an effective dictatorship while being told to "save democracy" from the constitutional monarchy of the Kaiser) rings bitterly true today with Ukraine and Russia.
Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar and The Right Stuff are exceptionally well-written. Fifth Sun, Last Days of the Incas, and Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun all go well together if you specifically study conquistadors. Plagues and Peopls and Escape from Rome have the most value (along with Guns, Germs, and Steel) for providing, in accessible language, theory applicable worldwide to explain major historical phenomena.
Specifying historical and removing things that I specifically did not like:
TOO LONG DIDN'T READ TOP RECOMMENDATIONS
Shogun (by James Clavell) - British pirate held hostage/pawn in Sengoku Jidai Japan
Aztec (by Gary Jennings) - Aztec commoner Forrest Gumping and fucking his way through Aztec history/society
Gone With the Wind - Narcissistic plantation belle deals with Civil War/Reconstruction hardships, toxic romance
Lonesome Dove - Cattle drive from Texas to Montana, romantic subplots, constant death (Oregon Trail-like)
Pillars of the Earth - Construction of a cathedral in Anarchy England (hardships of common folks, monastic life)
Corelli's Mandolin - Italian occupation of Cephalonia in WW2
Yiddish Policemen's Union - Best in alternate history
Celestial Matters - Alternate history science fiction where ancient Greek science is all correct
CIVIL WAR
Good Rebel Soil: Excellent novel about Champ Ferguson, Upper Cumberland partisan who was one of just two officers executed (Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville, was the other). It's from Ferguson's perspective and the author wove a bunch of different strands of Ferguson lore (he's one of those that no one has a real accurate backstory on) together. The writing is folksy, somewhat pulpy, but I thought it was very effective.
Bound for the Promised Land: Same author, biographical novel of a runaway slave turned Colored Troops soldier and later Buffalo Soldier. I thought the Colored Troops part was actually a low point and the Buffalo Soldier material mostly boring/rambling, it's like it became unfocused at that point and just drifted around, but the depictions of slavery/runaway/Reconstruction in South and North are spot on. Really good depiction of plantations, ballsy choice with romantic interest. The ending is very interesting. I liked it a lot.
Gone with the Wind is a masterpiece. The author is a huge bigot but the portrayal of the Confederacy is way more nuanced than anyone would imagine. It is not pro-Confederate at all. The book has a very rich portrayal of plantation life (I was constantly seeing stuff in it where I was like "I read about that!") and it explores wartime suffering, anomie after having your world destroyed (by your own failure), and the main character is a raging narcissist that alienates herself from everyone through what are otherwise understandable emotional reactions to her hardships. Fascinating psychological study.
Confederado do Norte: Sort of a murder adventure about a little girl whose parents take part in the Confederado exodus to Brazil, her parents are killed and she ends up cast out into Brazilian society. There's not really a big way to pitch it without spoiling much of it. There's nothing exceptional about it, it's just competently written if you are interested in that subject matter.
MARITIME
Master and Commander: I didn't really like it a ton, because the story wanders around going nowhere and its frontloaded with a ton of nautical jargon, but it is the main book of its specific niche (generally speaking, people read Horatio Hornblower as casuals/younger, Master and Commander as serious sail enthusiasts/older).
Old Glory: This one is actually fun, batshit over-the-top adventure story about an Irishman fleeing home from the evil Anglo-Irish lord, falling in with John Paul Jones and the American revolutionaries and becoming his super-competent first mate. Jones' naval raid on Britain is portrayed in the story. The villain is obsessed with buggering women and at one point the Irish hero (who is described as being big like an ox) asserts his dominance over the tribe of savages on the Caribbean island he's marooned on by slaughtering their warriors with his bare hands and takes the chief's teenage daughter as his wife.
JAMES CLAVELL
Clavell has a series, The Asian Saga, of books that all kind of read the same and are basically epic thrillers, all set around events in which Asians and Europeans are interacting, all heavily fictionalized (real events, some quite obscure, but fictional names). I've read two so far.
Shogun is about a real-life British pirate who was shipwrecked in Japan and eventually became a samurai due to his use as a naval advisor to Tokugawa Ieyasu, and it's a masterpiece, really intense writing, really insane Japanese society (Clavell heavily exoticizes Orientals; he was in a Jap POW camp and plays them off like a race of aliens).
Tai-Pan is about the retarded feud between two merchants in Hong Kong at the very start of Hong Kong, Opium Wars background. It read very well but then wrapped up with a million loose strands and what felt like a deus ex machina fuck you ending although it was foreshadowed the whole time but only if you understand meteorology. I liked it but compared to Shogun the way it just suddenly lurches into an ending was bad.
OLD CIVILIZATIONS
Pillars of the Earth is a top-tier book, multigenerational (really, two generations) epic about the construction of a cathedral framed around the family of the cathedral's architect and his stepson during Anarchy England. Ton of insight into monastic life. Complex story. Big emotional payoff by the end.
Aztec is extremely, extremely good, crazy epic of the Aztecs through one man's first person perspective (framed as a sort of interrogation/life story by the Spanish) from before Conquest up through it and its aftermath. It's a picaresque, the character is like Forrest Gump but clever, wandering his way through all the big events of Aztec history and all strata of society and experience, war hero, adventurer merchant, government spy, scribe, etc. The book is incredibly perverted and violent in a way that is pointless to describe here, it's just a constant salacious mindfuck, you have to read it. Like Forrest Gump / The Aristocrats skit / Aztec civilization.
Ben-Hur is a really solid book of revenge, very famous Hollywood movie that I enjoyed but seems like shit after the book. A Jewish nobleman's son is falsely accused of treason and his family is thrown into destitution by his Roman childhood friend. He dedicates himself to revenge, earning his freedom from the Romans and place in their society, forming a plot to create cells for a new uprising, but when the Messiah comes into the picture it changes the direction of things. What's impressive is that this thing was written by the Governor of New Mexico in the 1800s, but it reads like a genuine adventure novel, it's pro-Christian but it's not like some hokey inspirational thing, legitimate adventure story.
River God was really shit for the first half, to the point I almost gave up on it. It eventually gets good. Heavily fictional version of the Hyksos invasion of Egypt, first time (in the novel at any rate) that Egyptians encountered horse cavalry.
OLD AMERICA
Lonesome Dove is one of my top novels, up there with Gone With the Wind and some others. Epic story, many perspectives, of a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, trying to establish the first ranch there. Romantic subplots, side characters pursuing their own unrelated stories that end up intersecting with the main story, and other stuff happening along the way. It's hard to describe, it's just that Lonesome Dove is a Western in terms of subject matter but it's literary fiction, not genre fiction. The writing is extremely rich, rich characterization, complex story. It's something akin to what you'd read in schools. Very moving book. They made a good miniseries of it, I saw the miniseries first so the book felt like a huge expansion (giving the internal thoughts of characters and a lot of scenes that had to be cut).
The Wild Ohio is a fun adventure story - more or less - about a Scottish Highlander and a Virginia planter's son, both American soldiers, escorting a group of French Revolution refugees to a settlement in the Northwest Territory during Washington's presidency. Along the way they have to deal with conspiracy to waylay the refugees. I was mostly interested in the portrayal of what are basically two different chunks of Old South society, their personality clash. The story is very loosely based on real events (in that there really was a Gallipolis and some real events are referenced).
Barkskins is an epic about the lumber industry and about the making of the North (Canada, the upper Midwest, New England) through the perspectives of Indians and Whites, through two families, both of whom come over on the same French ship together. One family goes on to become rich timber magnates. The other family goes on to wallow in poverty as the lumberjacks. From earliest New France to the present day. It's one of those things where the scope is so long that it's really a series of many short stories that just tie into each other through causality. Not all of its great, most of it's interesting.
MISCELLANY
Corelli's Mandolin was adapted into a movie that doesn't do it anywhere near justice. It's an epic about WW2 Cephalonia, Greek island that the Italians occupied. Captain Corelli is a kindly Italian officer who prefers to make merriment with the locals and have his soldiers frolic than instill order, runs the company like his own musical band. He's just one of a suite of characters with their own intersecting dramas going on. Very nice book, very sympathetic characters, lots of interesting subplots, emotional. Ending is pretty tough.
The Clan of the Cave Bear is solid, it's kind of science fiction too. Premise is Neanderthals take in a Cro Magnon girl, and it's her life story of dealing with the truly awful society she doesn't fit into. Much of its depiction of Neanderthals was based on science that was cutting edge at the time but is now outdated (things like assuming they couldn't make fluent speech like us) and there's science fiction elements (genetic memory plays a role, Neanderthals depend on it and so are extremely culturally conservative). It's kind of tough to read because the injustices dealt to the cavegirl are so frustrating, but it succeeds at what a book is supposed to do of convincing you of its story.
If you liked The Godfather movie than the book is the movie but with some really interesting expansion on the singer Frank Sinatra expy character. He's like a coprotagonist in the book, they really downplayed his role for the movie. The book ends up feeling weaker than the movie - unfocused, kind of pointless - but again, if you like the movie, the book is good. (The book came first.)
ALTERNATE HISTORY
Yiddish Policemen's Union is about the gold standard, about detectives solving a murder case (that ends up tying into Jewish prophecy/religious musings) in an Alaska that has become the center of global Jewry after a real-life refugee program proposal is implemented. No Israel, Jewish Alaska instead. The book is incredible for its characterization and the worldbuilding, no lore dumps or stuff, instead the way the guy just describes his city is the most real I've ever seen someone sell a constructed setting.
Celestial Matters is a fascinating book that I give highest recommendations for just on creativity. The premise of it is that in a world where Hellenic civilization never died out, ancient Greek science is all correct, Ptolemaic astronomy, Aristotelian physics, humor theory, etc. The author then uses this to tell a retro science fiction story about a mission to steal matter from the Sun. It's hard science fiction, but science fiction as Greeks would have envisioned it.
Peshawar Lancers is a good adventure story set in a post-apocalyptic (post as in they've fully recovered) Anglo-Indian regime, Europe got destroyed, the British Empire is now effectively an Indian dynasty. It has a ton of stuff from Indian cultures scattered through it, main conflict is driven by Gnostic-pagan Russians trying to assassinate the Anglo-Indian royalty. It's the book equivalent of a pulpy adventure novel and it goes too far with that near the end but is solidly entertaining for most of it.
Protip: If you have ADD like me, download a program that reads .pdfs or just plain audiobooks for less obscure books. I have a backlog of like 100 books I need to read, and I have been breezing through them by having one on virtually every waking moment while in work and while I play vidya with friends.
Protip: If you have ADD like me, download a program that reads .pdfs or just plain audiobooks for less obscure books. I have a backlog of like 100 books I need to read, and I have been breezing through them by having one on virtually every waking moment while in work and while I play vidya with friends.
I’m a graduate student and I prioritized reading history over my actual studies. It took up about a fourth of my waking day. If I had a 9-to-5 id have little time for anything else and if id applied to studying my own boring field I’d have gotten a lot further along in my career by now.
Started off I was just reading to clear out books id accumulated over the years. Started to keep a record of what I read on each day. Started to measure how many I read in a given month. Started to want to see the number go higher. And I’d tend to do it first thing - get my pages in, or better exceed them - along with my chosen exercise for the day, my instruments, other makework I called productivity. If I’d spent half the reading time working out I’d be Chad Thundercock by now.
After three years of that shit I finally hit a 5 book a month average - 2/3 nonfiction and 1/3 fiction, reading at a goal pace of 60 pages a day each - and that had really meant more than. 5 lately to have raised the average up. And for like a month I was finding nothing I read was enjoyable anymore. I’d read and it went right through my brain with no retention.
Then I came home from Winter break to a place that makes me miserable, with a new gaming computer, and suddenly couldn’t bring myself to do anything but just play that all the time or id be blanketed in crushing sadness so thick I couldn’t even think. Now I’ve started reading a bit again. It’s basically obsessive behavior, the nonfiction anyways.
I’ll tell you this, I’ve learned that academic books generally aren’t worth the time. They are too boring, dry, and say too little. The books that have actually given me the most joy for my time (though rarely anything significant to think about) are those, like Wicked River, that just wander around telling tales about their subject and wax poetic about it.
And as far as fiction goes, long historical epics in the 600-1000+ range seem to please me the most consistently (but not always, Leon Uris’ Trinity sucked).
I’m a graduate student and I prioritized reading history over my actual studies. It took up about a fourth of my waking day. If I had a 9-to-5 id have little time for anything else and if id applied to studying my own boring field I’d have gotten a lot further along in my career by now.
Started off I was just reading to clear out books id accumulated over the years. Started to keep a record of what I read on each day. Started to measure how many I read in a given month. Started to want to see the number go higher. And I’d tend to do it first thing - get my pages in, or better exceed them - along with my chosen exercise for the day, my instruments, other makework I called productivity. If I’d spent half the reading time working out I’d be Chad Thundercock by now.
After three years of that shit I finally hit a 5 book a month average - 2/3 nonfiction and 1/3 fiction, reading at a goal pace of 60 pages a day each - and that had really meant more than. 5 lately to have raised the average up. And for like a month I was finding nothing I read was enjoyable anymore. I’d read and it went right through my brain with no retention.
Then I came home from Winter break to a place that makes me miserable, with a new gaming computer, and suddenly couldn’t bring myself to do anything but just play that all the time or id be blanketed in crushing sadness so thick I couldn’t even think. Now I’ve started reading a bit again. It’s basically obsessive behavior, the nonfiction anyways.
Good on you man. There's nothing wrong with putting your energy into one key hobbie. I legitimately respect the shit out of your reading-ethic (if that's even a thing). I need to do the same. I have so many reference books on horror films and film history I've had forever that I just need to sit down and read, or at least write. I also am going through that period of despair clouding my mind at most waking hours so maybe that could help.
I just get so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff I want to read that I just choose not to do anything, which is obviously the worst alternative.
Would any of you have decent recommendations for broad condenscened histories of countries or wars? Like a decent all-around guide to North American history or anything similar that would go into some detail while also spanning a large chunk of history?
You could check out Latin America's Wars, which is two volumes long and summarizes every major conflict fought by Latin American countries up to 2001. "Condensed" is a relative term, but they are a great starting point if you want to learn about wars that aren't just 1776, 1860, WWI, or WWII.
Frank Dikotter's trilogy of books regarding the chinese cultural revolution books, starting with The Tragedy of Liberation, then Mao's Great Famine and The Cultural Revolution.
It's a demanding ask, but surely someone here has the right type of autism for this:
Does anyone have a good book(s) on the evolution of armor, including helmets, from the Ancient to Late Medieval periods. I have had a hard time finding good explanations for the "why" of the historical progression. I would also like to know more about the regional variations in these time periods.
Frank Dikotter's trilogy of books regarding the chinese cultural revolution books, starting with The Tragedy of Liberation, then Mao's Great Famine and The Cultural Revolution.
Seconding this recommendation, these are excellent. He's written more on China that I want to get around to reading sometime.
Another interesting book I found from the footnotes of one of the Frank Dikotter books: Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes which is a history of Chinese Communist attempts to reform "undesirables" such as prostitutes and petty criminals.
A little niche, but I really liked White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian. It tells the story of Grigory Semyonov, his underlings, and their bloody reign in the Russian Far East during the Russian Civil War. It's full of cruelty, violence, armored train warfare, the Czech Legion's long march east, partisans, Kolchak's doomed efforts at dealing with Semyonov, Ungern-Sternberg's bullshit, and the Allies' dicking around in Siberia not doing anything productive (and an intro chapter on Siberia I liked). Above all, it describes how Semyonov fucked over any chance the Whites had of winning because of his own greed and ego and antagonized everyone in Siberia who could have helped him (minus his Japanese backers). You can find it for free online, and the only complaint I have is the grammar being a little screwy in places (although that might be the file formatting).
I liked the The Guns of August . It's an excellent book on the first month of WW1, the events leading up to the outbreak of the war, the prewar plans of Germany and France, and the actual execution of said plans. It goes in depth on how the war degenerated from a war of maneuvers to the trenches. If you're interested in WW1, definitely worth a read.
Very rare perspective of Chinese history as it delves into the local history and the lives and situations of common peasants. It's a collection of stories from the Local History of Tancheng county in Early Qing dynasty China written by Hung, the county magistrate. The basic gist of the story is that Tancheng has been experiencing 50 years of near constant suffering, and the people are struggling to survive, so how does Hung apply a law written by imperial scholars who are out of touch with the on-the-ground realities.
One example of this that will pop up a lot is widows, as the Legal Code preferred widows not to remarry out of honor and virtue, makes sense from the perspective of a Confucian scholar from the Imperial court, but not so much from the perspective of the average commoner, as this could make life much more difficult, especially for Tancheng as its people already struggle to survive.
I would highly recommend The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It's a detailed and compelling overview of the destruction of the Russian People under Communism.
Very rare perspective of Chinese history as it delves into the local history and the lives and situations of common peasants. It's a collection of stories from the Local History of Tancheng county in Early Qing dynasty China written by Hung, the county magistrate. The basic gist of the story is that Tancheng has been experiencing 50 years of near constant suffering, and the people are struggling to survive, so how does Hung apply a law written by imperial scholars who are out of touch with the on-the-ground realities.
One example of this that will pop up a lot is widows, as the Legal Code preferred widows not to remarry out of honor and virtue, makes sense from the perspective of a Confucian scholar from the Imperial court, but not so much from the perspective of the average commoner, as this could make life much more difficult, especially for Tancheng as its people already struggle to survive.
I recall, from Chinese history class, something of a Confucian official, high up, saying it is better widows starve to death and keep their honor intact than dishonor themselves going out into the world. Chinese culture is callous and disgusting.
So far I recommend SOG by John Plaster. There are several books on my list that I learned about from Kiwis posting in A&L, @Vecr was probably the one that mentioned Days of Rage, other people mentioned Season of the Witch and Mad Bad and Dangerous to Know and maybe others. SOG was recommended by Kiwis. Often the ones I've been exposed to through here have turned out the best.
SOG is about Green Beret commando raids (helicopter supported) into Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. It's not an operational military history, but it's more of a popular history - storytelling - that's very vivid. Highly enjoyable reading.
Two books I mention a lot around here that go together are Albion's Seed and American Nations, but now that I've read both I actually have issues with both. The basic thesis of Albion's Seed is that four distinct British regional cultures were planted in the Thirteen Colonies that had completely different ways of life, more related to their culture back home than to each other in the colonies. South English aristocrats and their servants to the Chesapeake Bay, East Anglian merchants to Puritan New England, Midland Quakers and German Anabaptists to the Delaware and Susquehanna, and Borderers and Scots to the Appalachians. The author is going for an academic style argument, set out to prove his position that American colonial culture did not exist (people who came to the US brought their old culture and if anything intensified their differences). I think the author, perfectly well-meaning, overly exoticizes and exaggerates them though, his interpretation of Puritans leaves out a lot of their seedy underclass behavior (it reads more like the Puritans aspirations for themselves) and his Appalachians are played off like magical barbarians, but if you read much else on the literature, you know Puritans were magic crazy. But, it's still a fascinating look into what really were some strange, experimental cultures. To me the Quakers and Appalachians come off the most sympathetic and the Cavaliers probably the best to live with, the Puritans are just human garbage, very orderly and disciplined but despicable, life-hating, negating people.
American Nations, then, took the ideas of Albion's Seed and expands them to argue that contemporary American culture is best understand as a rivalry of major regions that each consider themselves the most authentic expression of "Americanness" (that is, they see their own culture as America and everyone else as deviations away from it), and the lack of understanding of this sectarian conflict - a sectarian conflict where most parties aren't even aware of the ethnic aspect - is part of what drives it. He adds nuance to it by splitting the Lowland Southerns into separate Chesapeake and Lowcountry peoples (the settlers of South Carolina, he argues, were mostly from Barbados, had a much more brutal and reactionary society than the Virginians, and were the core of the Deep South), adding in the Dutch, French, and Spanish perspectives (which goes a long ways towards explaining New York City's unique character, it's cosmopolitan and commercial nature is a Dutch attitude), and adding in the West and Pacific Coast as new nations. He explains that the original colonial cultures pretty much just moved west acquiring lands in the same climates, so Yankees went into the upper Great Lakes along the coast, Pennsylvanians moved into the farmlands of the Midwest, Southerners kept to the humid subtropical climates. The Yankees went around and settled Hawaii and the Pacific Coast, and the West emerged as a sort of interaction of Midwesterners and Upper Southerners.
American Nations doesn't really prove its case (though if you read the blogs he shows a lot of evidence) so much as it just retells the basic history of the America with that lens of ethnic strife (major political shifts generally being a group flipping allegiance). It's analysis of the French is garbage and it goes off the rails into rabid anti-Southern and anti-conservative hatred the more modern it gets. But I think the point that Americans are different peoples all sharing the same name and country and so at each others throats is extremely insightful and it has been massively influential on my thinking.
Stalin book is focused on Stalin's court life and personal relationships. Absolutely fascinating psychological portrait, I found this fascination with Stalin's lifestyle and the way he related to people.
I would highly recommend The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It's a detailed and compelling overview of the destruction of the Russian People under Communism.
Oh boy, there are so many good history books out there that I have read, but I can't remember all of them.
So here is a few samples: Anything by Anthony Beevor
Beevoer came to mainstream attention when he wrote Stalingrad back in the early 00s and it is for a good reason. It is a great overview of the battle and it is just a good read. His other books are also awesome (Market Garden is a favorite of mine) The Sleepwalker and The Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark.
I see this two as companion pieces to each other. The Sleepwalker is great in how it go over how WW1 started and whom the players were, and Iron Kingdom is among the best books about Prussia that I have ever read. Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.
Great book about the hardship that civilans expereinced in Eastern Europe between the end of the Russian civil war and the end of WWII. Reading it, make you realize how similare both Hitler and Stalin was with their treatment of civilans and how brutal they were. I also recommend The Red Prince by him. It is about an Habsburg who was determinded to Ukraine Cause after the first World War and it is also a history of the Habsburg in the early 20th century in that area. The book is crazy in every good sense.
