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Ask HN: What are your favorite history books?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite history books?

#11
post #9

BH Liddell Hart's tomes on WWII. Brilliant books. Although he clearly was a little "too sympathetic" to the German cause.

Upvoted, I'll include The Other Side of the Hill as well.

It's true, he sounds too enthusiastic with the German operations and very sympathetic to some Nazi officers (Rommel and Manstein for example), but I think it stems from his overall enthusiasm with strategy and military operations in general.

While for most people a dead soldier is still a horribly murdered human, I think his view is that battles between armies do not count as atrocities (not an uncommon view) and officers who didn't murder civilians (or allege they didn't know civilians were murdered under their command) should not be tried for war crimes. Of course that's a bit too much to swallow, especially on the soviet side.

By the way, the same argument was applied for scientists as well (see Wernher von Braun and the operation paperclip bunch, who also "didn't know")

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite history books?

#12
This might be a bit more on the national zeitgeist than the others mentioned so far, but I recently finished Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow and am now halfway through Chernow's George Washington. They're very dense, but very readable. I'm enjoying them thoroughly.

I also recently finished Beneath The Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan. He's normally an epic fantasy author, but he wrote a narrative account of a true story about a young boy in Milan who spied on the Nazis. I highly enjoyed it.

To hijack this thread a bit, though, I'm interested in reading more about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Can anyone recommend a good book on it? (Something digestible yet info-rich, like Chernow's books, preferably.)

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