Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings
This book is on the Army Chief of Staff Reading List so I read it when it became available. I’ve read a lot of WWII both in my life and in over the last few years. As this is professional reading, I suppose the kind way to phrase it is that I am over-saturated with WWII at the moment. I was a history major in college, I’m in the military, and my father was described by John Mulaney this week on SNL – he is […]
Chernobyl 01:23:40 by Andrew Leatherbarrow
If you’ve been watching HBO’s Chernobyl than you’ve probably jumped down the nuclear disaster rabbit hole, and you may be looking for something to explain the finer details of the disaster. If, like me, you’re a laymen and can understand the basics of the technology but not the specifics, than a lot of the books out there may be daunting. Maybe you want a more personal account, but you don’t want to pick up one of the 500-800 page tomes out there documenting survivor stories, […]
The aura that surrounds John F. Kennedy is, by itself, worthy of enough attention to warrant a book all by itself. From his familial history to his infamous relationship with women to his storied political career and untimely, traumatizing assassination, few Americans are both so well known and mysterious. I’ve stated before my intention to read a biography on every president. This goal grew out of a plan to rank every president (plus Jefferson Davis) by various criteria. I generally have that done already, but […]
Primo Levi’s memoir The Reawakening begins where his Survival in Auschwitz ended. It’s the last days of the WWII, and Levi is trying to stay alive in what passes for a hospital or sick bay in concentration camp. Levi, who committed suicide in 1987, was an Italian Jewish writer and a chemist. He was arrested in as a part of the Italian resistance in 1943, and to escape being shot as a partisan, he confessed to being Jewish, and after a short interment in Italy, […]
