Yesterday I finished reading A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (amazon) by Vasily Grossman. A month ago I blogged about needing more information about the Russian front, and I count myself lucky to have found this book. Grossman was a writer first, journalist second, so he brings out the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘wwii’
“Europe slid over the edge of a cliff.”
I’ve just finished reading book number three (in a planned series of four) about WWII: A Short History of World War II by (my uncle) James Stokesbury. Having covered the rise of fascism through the 1930s and the emergence of Nazism in particular, I used Jim’s book to refresh my memory of both the sequence [...]
“The dark valley through which we have marched together.”
After…I dunno, like eleven years, I’ve finally finished reading The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (amazon | indigo) by Piers Brendon. I picked it up along with Richard Evans’ The Coming Of The Third Reich (which I talked about in February) to help make sense of the interwar period and run-up to WWII, [...]
“A revolution of destruction”
After three months (!) I have finally finished reading The Coming Of The Third Reich by Richard Evans (amazon). A highly worthwhile and ultimately troubling book about how the Nazis came to rule Germany in the early 1930s. To those of us too young to remember WWII, Hitler and Nazism seem like bogeymen, monsters sprung [...]
Time: the revelator
Yesterday a friend asked, via Twitter, “Where were you 45 years ago today?” I hadn’t quite woken up yet so it took me a second to place the date: November 22. It was 45 years ago yesterday that JFK was assassinated. History has a funny way of messing with your perception of time, particularly when [...]
