Military Book Buzz

Buy The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945

Published: September 11, 2007 (Knopf )

Author:  Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns

Book Description - This book is loaded with photographs, maps, and testimonials from civilians and service people alike. It encompasses both the European and Pacific theaters of war, as well as the home front. The narrative is rich and easy to read, and the photographs show just what it was like to be in battle or work on an assembly line back home. The personal accounts from the front add an element of actually being in the fighting to the book. Of particular interest to was the story of the Army’s 442nd infantry. This unit was composed entirely of Japanese-Americans who fought in the European theater. Other points of interest include an informative section on the movement of Japanese-Americans to relocation camps inside the United States, war bond drives conducted throughout the war, and, mainly, the brutality of combat in both the European and Pacific theaters.

Buy This Republic of Suffering

Published: January 8, 2008 (Knopf)
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Book Description- An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.  During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives.  An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million.  This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual.  The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.  The author describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.  Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg.

Buy Strategic Challenges

Published:  January 2008 (Potomac Books Inc.)
Book Description - Since 2001, the United States has endured a tumultuous period, one dominated by the 9/11 attacks and all that has followed: the war on terrorism, the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, looming confrontations with known or suspected proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, and episodic explosions of mass violence in chronically unstable regions. In this second half of the decade, these and related strategic challenges will test the skill, tenacity, and imagination of the current and the next U.S. administration and the American public. How well these challenges are managed then, or mastered, will greatly influence whether future historians look back upon this decade as a dangerous passage toward a more peaceful, globally connected order or as a descending path into an ever more fragmented, violent world.

This volume explores seven looming, as yet unmastered strategic challenges facing the United States. Each chapter tackles one of the following challenges: tackling global terrorism, stopping WMD proliferation, undertaking defense transformation, protecting the homeland, strengthening relations with allies and partners, engaging other major powers, and defusing conflicts in unstable regions. Each chapter takes a similar approach: defining the problem at hand (i.e., a short discussion of relevant trends); explicating current U.S. efforts to master the challenge (i.e., U.S. objectives, methods, degree of success or setbacks); and analyzing looming choices that U.S. policymakers will face in the next decade and, as appropriate, the consequences of alternative courses of action. Strategic Challenges capitalizes on the great regional and topical expertise of the INSS professional research staff to present an authoritative overview of the global strategic environment facing the United States.

Buy Chosin

Published:  15 Dec 2007 (Zenith Press)
Author:  Eric Hammel
Book Description - The story of one of the iconic battles of military history is told for the first time in gut-level detail in this book.  From the point of view of the men in the foxholes and tanks, outposts and command posts, Chosin offers a harrowing, firsthand account of the 1st Marine Divisions breakout battle against overwhelming Chinese forces in the bitter North Korean winter of 1950. Eric Hammel describes the errors and miscalculations by American higher-ups as well as the heroic efforts of those on the ground, from intelligence officers to engineers and war-weary POWs. The result is the most complete book ever written on this epic battle.

Published:  4 Dec 2007 (Berkley Hardcover)
Author:  Milo S. Afong
Book Description - In Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is a special breed of marine for whom the prey is the enemy-and every day is hunting season. This marine is a HOG-a Hunter of Gunman.

These are the gripping, gut-wrenching true stories of those marines in Iraq whose sole purpose on the battlefield is to take out the enemy-one combatant at a time. Every time a HOG puts his eye to the glass, it means death for whoever is unlucky enough to end up in his crosshairs. No warning shots. No disabling wounds. No regrets. That’s what a HOG does.

Here, former Scout/Sniper Team Leader Milo S. Afong reveals what it takes to be a Hunter of Gunmen. He describes the intensive training that turns expert infantrymen into one-shot life-takers, building Marine Scout/Sniper teams and how they operate in the field-and under fire-and how HOGs get the job done under any conditions.

From sniping from a rooftop in Baghdad, to unknowingly being surrounded in a palm grove in the city of Hit, these stories will transport you right into the heat of the desert war, where one squeeze of the trigger can make all the difference.”

 
Buy Hunt for Nazi Spies

Published:  30 Dec 2007 (University Of Chicago Press; Tra edition)
Author:  Simon Ketson
Book Description - From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government’s declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regime’s attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers.

Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist.

Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.

Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; Tra edition (December 30, 2007)