Reading Still Matters

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 ...

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland is a gripping account of the Allied invasion of mainland Italy from the beach landings near Messina and Salerno. The campaign in Italy was meant to be short and low risk, but it turned out to be anything but.  Between September and December 1943, the Allied powers and the Germans engaged in brutal combat that essentially stalled at the Gustav Line south of Rome.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4xk5YQ3      Savage Storm is the first book by James Holland that I have read and so I was pretty excited to read it and get a sense of what Holland is all about. I chose Savage Storm because Canada did play a pretty significant role in the fighting and so I wanted to read up on that aspect of the history as well. I am Canadian after all.       And I really enjoyed Savage Storm . Unlike any military history books I have read, Holland used the journals of combatants from both sides t...