Reading Still Matters

I recently read The Guns of August by the late Barbara W. Tuchman. It’s a book that I have always wanted to read, since this Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative history book has been read and reviewed glowingly by so many history fans!  How many history books written in the early 1960s are still talked about in such glowing terms? Not many, that’s for sure. See it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4eKM1cJ By way of overview, The Guns of August provides a detailed, dramatic account of the prelude to and the opening month of World War I, tracking the diplomatic failures and ultimately the military maneuvers of August 1914 up to the first battle of the Marne.   Tuchman opens the book with the 1910 funeral of King Edward VII, which served as a grand gathering of Europe's royalty and masked the underlying geopolitical rivalries. The men and women that would soon be lined up against each other in the trenches, visited London for the funeral.   Its amazing to think it was just 4...

A book I have wanted to read for some time is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin .  It was written back in 2010, but remains one of if not the only comprehensive look at the mass atrocities committed by the Soviet Union first, and then Nazi Germany later, during the period of time between the early 1920s to the late 1940s.  Check it out on Amazon here:  https://amzn.to/4uvDdxj Bloodlands does a great job of putting this period into a single, unified history that shows how both the Soviets and the Germans operated independently, in coordination, and in response to each other’s actions in terms of the repression of minorities and perceived enemies.   Basically, the title refers to a specific geographic region in Central and Eastern Europe that lies east of Berlin but west of Moscow.   The main focus was on the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and the western areas of Russia. These were the ...

I recently completed Poland: A History by Adam Zamoyski which had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now. The title should give you a pretty good hint at what this one is about, basically it’s an overview of the history of the Polish people and Polish state from around the tenth century up to the end of the Lech Walesa period following the Soviet collapse.      And for those of you who have been reading Polish history for a while now, this might be a book you have come across before in a different guise. Zamoysky originally published this back in 1987 as The Polish Way , although this is a revised and updated edition which re-evaluates Poland’s past with a "fresh eye." Basically, we have a general extension of the time covered as the book now includes more about post-Soviet developments. So, if you have already read The Polish Way , then be forewarned. I haven’t read The Polish Way, so I am not sure how different it actually is. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn...

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Tom Holland is very interesting take on Western Europe during the two centuries surrounding the apocalyptic year 1000.  Basically, Holland takes us through a 200-year period across the various regions of Europe in order to demonstrate that the events of this time period created the society that would ultimately become modern Europe.  For Holland, this was the period when the area that is now Europe became something other than just the shattered remains of the Western Roman Empire.   Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4oinnEB The historical narrative pivots around the year 1000 and the pervasive fear of the Antichrist and the Second Coming, and digs in on how these apocalyptic anxieties influenced the actions of rulers, clergy, and peasants alike. Generally, Holland works the history region by region. Treating as separate but connected narratives, the happenings in what would become Italy, Spain, Fran...