What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

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RFalvo69
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by RFalvo69 »

The biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Jobs was really a strange person. I watched the movie by Danny Boyle, and it does a good job in showing the flaws and the quirks of Jobs - even if the context is fictitious (the backstage of three products’ launch).
"Yes darling, I served in the Navy for eight years. I was a cook..."
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by cpdeyoung »

@Wodin

I saw Grey Bastards on the new books shelf at my public library and remembered your recommendation.

This book is every bit as good as you indicate. I, like you, am waiting for a continuation. The book is profane, and vulgar, but if you are an adult go for it. The author himself says it will be years before he lets his young son read it. It is a dense story, but the author does a good job of keeping the threads weaving. I found it easy to care about the characters.

Give it a try, maybe especially, if it a genre you do not normally read. Fantasy is not an area I am well read in, but I will be watching for this author.

Chuck
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warspite1
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by warspite1 »

Annoyingly I'm having to temporarily shelve Shattered Sword for a couple of weeks or so. I've ordered (and should have delivered on Tuesday) Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II.
Now Maitland, now's your time!

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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by HeinzBaby »

ARMAGEDDON
The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945
Sir Max Hastings Author.
I've read a few of his books: Falklands, Bomber Command and Overlord.

He really lifts the lid off the warm fuzzy feeling about the Allied effort in the last year and a half of the war in Europe.
A comment Marshal Zhukov hit it on the nail, when when the Allies landed in Normandy, ..Eleven months before the end of a six year war was only to prevent Stalin from reaching Paris.
Hastings has been critcized as being too 'Harsh' in his books, but he covers it well, all warts n' all, how the Red Army surged over Prussia and Eastern Europe like a Mechanised Medieval Army hell bent on Bloody revenge of rape and pillage to the Fiasco of Arnhem.
This one, Armageddon is a bloody 'Good Read' but then I've found all his books are.
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by Chickenboy »

ORIGINAL: HeinzBaby
A comment Marshal Zhukov hit it on the nail, when when the Allies landed in Normandy, ..Eleven months before the end of a six year war was only to prevent Stalin from reaching Paris.

An interesting take, to be sure. I suspect that Zhukov may have been rather downplaying the role of the British, Canadians and Americans in Western Europe to buttress their own claims of superiority. Stalin wasn't best known for his embrace of free expression amongst his generals, you know. Any fantastic claims of Zhukov or the like need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt.
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by warspite1 »

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: HeinzBaby
A comment Marshal Zhukov hit it on the nail, when when the Allies landed in Normandy, ..Eleven months before the end of a six year war was only to prevent Stalin from reaching Paris.

An interesting take, to be sure. I suspect that Zhukov may have been rather downplaying the role of the British, Canadians and Americans in Western Europe to buttress their own claims of superiority. Stalin wasn't best known for his embrace of free expression amongst his generals, you know. Any fantastic claims of Zhukov or the like need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt.
warspite1

+1

As I mentioned in the thread about India, Hastings is seemingly trying ever harder to remain relevant.

I certainly have great respect for what the ordinary Soviet achieved in World War II and there is no doubt the Red Army broke the Wehrmacht. But very little in life is simple.

What if the Allied generals had been able to treat the lives of their men with the total disregard for life that the Soviet generals treated theirs when attacking or defending.

It would be interesting to see where the Soviets would have been without (amongst other things):

- lend lease
- the air war in west and in the Mediterranean. There were more German aircraft in these theatres than in the East where they were desperately needed and where the war would be won or lost.
- the huge numbers of men and artillery pieces defending the homeland against the bomber offensive. Again that artillery would otherwise have been in the east where it was needed.
- the numbers of troops tied down fighting in Italy and later France

Hastings can re-visit history all he likes (it's not always a bad thing to question accepted versions of events) but I think he oversteps the mark too often of late.

Now Maitland, now's your time!

Duke of Wellington to 1st Guards Brigade - Waterloo 18 June 1815
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by Orm »

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: HeinzBaby
A comment Marshal Zhukov hit it on the nail, when when the Allies landed in Normandy, ..Eleven months before the end of a six year war was only to prevent Stalin from reaching Paris.

An interesting take, to be sure. I suspect that Zhukov may have been rather downplaying the role of the British, Canadians and Americans in Western Europe to buttress their own claims of superiority. Stalin wasn't best known for his embrace of free expression amongst his generals, you know. Any fantastic claims of Zhukov or the like need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt.



The Soviets edited out lots of US, or British, made equipment from their photos in order to downplay the importance the received equipment played. So I am not going to take the word of a Soviet Marshal. No matter how good he might have been at his trade.

I've read that USSR even edited out things that can signal that Soviet soldiers had looted...
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by loki100 »

ORIGINAL: warspite1

...
- the huge numbers of men and artillery pieces defending the homeland against the bomber offensive. Again that artillery would otherwise have been in the east where it was needed.
...


as an aside to this, it wasn't just artillery pieces. Something like 70% of the German shell production was for AA guns, and that was of course mostly used up against Western Allied aircraft. Its a huge diversion of effort and resources.
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by loki100 »

Geoffrey Wawro The Austro-Prussian War - not something I knew anything about apart from how it is treated in wider 19C European History. Decided I wanted to know more after wading through Gat (History of Military Thought) in the summer as he argues it was the moment when Jomini fought Clauswitz (by proxy) and that everyone drew the wrong conclusions.

Its well written but the maps could be better.

Few bits that stood out. Europeans looking down on the performance of American Armies in the Civil War were really missing the point. All of Italy, Austria, the secondary German states and Prussia faced massive in-battle desertion rates as the lethality of rifle fire became obvious. he cites a battle in the Rhineland where about 25% of a Prussian brigade deserted. Prussia was as bad operationally and logistically as everyone else. For all Benedict's endless failings, there were about 4 hours at Sadowa when he could have won the war simply by a sustained frontal attack.

In terms of games, makes me wish that Brother against Brother will be revived and extended. From this, its the perfect rendition of mid-19C combat at the regimental/tactical level. Also increases my respect for Frank Hunter's Campaigns on the Danube - the only game where your corps can get spread out over 50 miles of roads while you are working out how to actually fight a battle.

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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by Zorch »

+1
Wawro also wrote a book on the 1866 Austro-Prussian War.
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by SundiataWTF »

Just finished Neptune's Inferno. It focuses on the naval side of the campaign for Guadalcanal. It uses battle reports, letters between high ranking officers and oral histories from participants at all levels and from both sides build an epic narrative that reads like a thriller. Highly recommended!
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by warspite1 »

ORIGINAL: SundiataWTF

Just finished Neptune's Inferno. It focuses on the naval side of the campaign for Guadalcanal. It uses battle reports, letters between high ranking officers and oral histories from participants at all levels and from both sides build an epic narrative that reads like a thriller. Highly recommended!
warspite1

This book divides opinion on these forums like no other. Glad you enjoyed it - I didn't last more than a chapter or so....

If you like that then I'd recommend Guadalcanal (Frank).
Now Maitland, now's your time!

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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by Titanwarrior89 »

This forum.[X(]
"Before Guadalcanal the enemy advanced at his pleasure. After Guadalcanal, he retreated at ours".

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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by alfresco »

Just started The Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson.
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by Aurelian »

Just about finished book 5 of Mark Berent's Wings of War series.
Watched a documentary on beavers. Best dam documentary I've ever seen.
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by warspite1 »

ORIGINAL: warspite1

Annoyingly I'm having to temporarily shelve Shattered Sword for a couple of weeks or so. I've ordered (and should have delivered on Tuesday) Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II.
warspite1

Finished reading this. The book was broadly as expected - better in some areas (the author had obviously done some research) but as expected, or worse, in others.

Even allowing for the lowest guestimate, 1.5m Indians died. That is a huge number and their story deserves to be told. About the best thing I can say about this book is that the Bengal Famine is now more widely known.

By the standards of today, Empires were, by their very nature, wrong - even the most benign. But humans being humans, they have been a constant throughout history. I totally reject the current trend to view historical figures and historical events through a 21st Century lens. This is as absurd as it is pointless. By this methodology every history book would be reduced to denouncing just about everything ever done by anybody. Just think about it.

Unfortunately the author makes the mistake (although no doubt intentional on her part) of creating a work so one-sided as to border in places on fantasy (the description of Bengal pre the British should begin "once upon a time"). She doesn't seem to realise that doing this actually detracts from the message she seeks to get across. This method of telling the story of course panders to those who don't need converting, but to readers who are interested in the full story, such bias immediately leaves one wondering what is actually true.

At least 1.5m Indians died and that is an absolute tragedy, they died on the British Government / Government of India's watch and that needs to be explained and not air brushed out of history. But the author's contention is that the famine and its aftermath were deliberate acts by Churchill. She does not successfully make that case, although presented as it is, the evidence makes for some unpleasant reading at times.

But the lack of balance in her book is what is most damaging to her argument. For example she makes great play of being 'astonished' at Leopold Amery's view of Hitler from the early 1930's, but there is no mention of Gandhi believing Hitler to "not be as bad as he is depicted", as late as 1940. There are two sides to every story but this book contains only one. That is the route she chose to go down fair enough, but it simply means that her account needs to be treated with caution.

In summary, this was worth reading - but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Now Maitland, now's your time!

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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by warspite1 »

Further to watching 100 days to Victory, I've ordered this - which generally seems to have good reviews.

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Now Maitland, now's your time!

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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by Zorch »

King Arthur: The Making of the Legend by Nicholas Higham. A scholarly examination of the mythological and quasi-historical King Arthur.

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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by altipueri »

Ghandi actually contributed to the famine because his hindu nationalists threatened farmers who had surplus grain to prevent them selling it to relieve famine elsewhere. So blood is on his hands.

Also Churchill arranged for extra ships to take grain, and both US and Australia contributed. A devasating explosion at Bombay docks didn't help - it destroyed about 45,000 tonnes of grain.
ORIGINAL: warspite1

ORIGINAL: warspite1

Annoyingly I'm having to temporarily shelve Shattered Sword for a couple of weeks or so. I've ordered (and should have delivered on Tuesday) Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II.
warspite1

Finished reading this. The book was broadly as expected - better in some areas (the author had obviously done some research) but as expected, or worse, in others.

Even allowing for the lowest guestimate, 1.5m Indians died. That is a huge number and their story deserves to be told. About the best thing I can say about this book is that the Bengal Famine is now more widely known.

By the standards of today, Empires were, by their very nature, wrong - even the most benign. But humans being humans, they have been a constant throughout history. I totally reject the current trend to view historical figures and historical events through a 21st Century lens. This is as absurd as it is pointless. By this methodology every history book would be reduced to denouncing just about everything ever done by anybody. Just think about it.

Unfortunately the author makes the mistake (although no doubt intentional on her part) of creating a work so one-sided as to border in places on fantasy (the description of Bengal pre the British should begin "once upon a time"). She doesn't seem to realise that doing this actually detracts from the message she seeks to get across. This method of telling the story of course panders to those who don't need converting, but to readers who are interested in the full story, such bias immediately leaves one wondering what is actually true.

At least 1.5m Indians died and that is an absolute tragedy, they died on the British Government / Government of India's watch and that needs to be explained and not air brushed out of history. But the author's contention is that the famine and its aftermath were deliberate acts by Churchill. She does not successfully make that case, although presented as it is, the evidence makes for some unpleasant reading at times.

But the lack of balance in her book is what is most damaging to her argument. For example she makes great play of being 'astonished' at Leopold Amery's view of Hitler from the early 1930's, but there is no mention of Gandhi believing Hitler to "not be as bad as he is depicted", as late as 1940. There are two sides to every story but this book contains only one. That is the route she chose to go down fair enough, but it simply means that her account needs to be treated with caution.

In summary, this was worth reading - but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
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RE: What Book Are You Reading at the moment?

Post by loki100 »

3 recent offerings ranging from the engaging to the very poor.

So lets start at the bottom. Hill The Red Army and the Second World War, poorly edited (its full of typos despite being a Cambridge Uni Press book) and in essence an endless repetition of two sort of interesting insights. The contribution (to my knowledge) was the argument that the 1937-8 purges as such were not the reason for the poor Red Army leadership in 1941. He points out the Soviets had 9 divisions in 1929 and it was the expansion, allied to the destruction of the training cadre, that really caused the problem.

The rest revolves around constantly re-iterating that Soviet doctrine used recon as a form of combat not of information gathering in the Western or German style. Its a valid point but the Soviet model also made some sense in terms of wider capacity and overall doctrine. The other bit is to point out that Soviet command and control was weakened both by lack of investment in communications technology as well as overall weaknesses in the command cadre.

Really not recommended and it makes me doubt the value of other volumes in the same series.

Much better is David Stahel's edited Joining Hitler's Crusade. At a purely technical level its a really good eg of how to do and write up comparative political or historical case studies. 3 main sections looking first at the varying motivations of the states that joined the Germans in Barbarossa, then the volunteers from the various Nazi occupied states in Western Europe and then the motivations of collaboration of citizens from within the Soviet Union. Most of the chapters really cover the decision to join and are skimpy on what happened during the war and the varying exit strategies. But a good enjoyable read and I learnt a lot.

Finally read Wahro's Franco-Prussian War. Excellent stuff, better written than his earlier study of the Austro-Prussian war. Came out of it with a real understanding of just why MacMahon walked into the trap at Sedan, the almost-WW1 style horror of Gravelotte and how the French squandered the huge advantage the Chassepot rifle gave them. My only grumble is a poor treatment of the Paris Commune - not just because it sits at the end of his real focus but the casual assumption it was some sort of Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. Doesn't detract from an excellent book though and there are plenty of more balanced studies of the Commune.
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