Books About World War II

[erpowers]

Can anyone give me the name of a few good books about World War II? I am looking for books that detail how the war began.

[stevebreeze]

1. if your just starting out reading about WWII I would suggest

"War and Remembrance" by Herman Wolk. It is a work of fiction but has most of the history correct. It is an easy read and could give you some base of knowledge to start from.
I love histroy and have read a lot of WWII books. good reading.

[Captain Hilts]

8. I'm not a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin, but No Ordinary Time about the Roosevelts...

is a quick, interesting read for folks not accustomed to big, heavy history books.

[erpowers]

12. Read One Book

Other than histroy classes and watching certain things on the history channel I read the book "Flags of Our Fathers" I also read a book about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, but I have not actually read a book that details the start of the war. I recently started reading "Grand Expectations" and the author mentioned the start of World War II. I just wanted to do some further reading on the start of the war.

[Captain Hilts]

13. If you like the Indy story, you'll like Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. nt

[Sequoia]

15. Which book did you read about the USS Indianapolis?

I read about it in "Fatal Voyage", by Dan Kurzman and it was 100% good. It was the book that got the little 12 year old boy Hunter Scott to do a school project about it and he got the captain of that ship to be cleared of wrong doing. Another book was written about that incident, "Left for Dead". That boy grew up and is now in the navy.

[amerikat]

2. Winston Churchill's "The Gathering Storm" is good.

In the opening volume, The Gathering Storm, Churchill tracks the erosion of the shaky peace brokered at the end of the First World War, followed by the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and their gradual spread from beyond Germany's borders to most of the European continent. Churchill foresaw the coming crisis and made his opinion known quite clearly throughout the latter '30s, and this book concludes on a vindicating note, with his appointment in May 1940 as prime minister, after which he recalls that "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial."

There are five more books in the series, covering the entire war.

[Captain Hilts]

5. Yeah, but it's HIS take on it.

That's a 'plus', but it's also a 'minus'.

[amerikat]

9. It's a good start. No period in modern history has

been written about as much as WW2. There are so many books to read on that subject
that no one person could read them all. If the OP reads any of the suggestions posted
in this thread he will have many choices and a lifelong reading list, as each suggestion will lead to many other good reads.

[Warpy]

3. "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Shirer

is still considered the definitive work on the beginning of the European war some 50 years after its publication. It's still available, Amazon has it in paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Third-Reich-William-Shirer/dp/0671728687

[Lionel Mandrake]

10. Shirer is popular and journalistic, but certainly not definitive.

In The coming of the Third Reich, a very distinguished historian at Cambridge University, Richard J. Evans, says this about Shirer:

His book is full of human interest, with many arresting quotations from from the actors in the drama, and it is written with all the flair and style of a seasoned reporter's dispatches from the front. Yet it was universally panned by professional historians. The emigre Germain scholar Klaus Epstein spoke for many when he pointed out that Shirer's book presented an 'unbelievably crude' account of German history, making it all seem to lead up inevitably to the Nazi seizure of power. It had 'glaring gaps' in its coverage. It concentrated far too much on high politics, foreign policy and military events, and even in 1960 it was 'in no way abreast of current scholarship dealing with the Nazi period'. Getting on for half a century later, this comment is even more justified than it was in Epstein's day. For all its virtues, therefore, Shirer's book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first-century reader.

[The Magistrate]

4. If You Are Interested In The Beginnings, Ma'am

A very good work is "The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-1941", by Messers. Read and Fisher.

As its title indicates, it focus is the 'Hitler-Stalin Pact', but in dealing with this, it necessarily illuminates a good deal of the diplomacy of the period from 1937 on, and does so with a focus on Soviet activities, and English-Soviet and Polish-Soviet relations, that is not often gone into in Western histories, but is of crucial importance.

[Captain Hilts]

6. Follow it up with the Greatest Battle that I have another thread about. nt

[Captain Hilts]

7. I'm still thinking....nt

[Lionel Mandrake]

11. A very good book IMHO is

A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II by Gerhard L. Weinberg.

You might take a look at the reader's comments at Amazon.com, and then decide whether this book is for you.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Arms-Global-History-War/dp/0521618266/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232089302&sr=1-1

[EPIC1934]

14. Kolko

The best book about WWII I have read is Gabriel Kolkos bookThe Politics of War 1943-45. This book is as much about the beginning of the war because it deals incredibly with the broad economic and political goals of the major players before the war too. This book is so essential in revising our view of how the Cold War began. It shows Stalin for the reactionary he was.

[scholarsOrAcademics]

16. Kolko is thorough

in his research, but limited to what was available, declassified so to speak. His book the Limits of Power is another excellent book.
Thank you for mentioning his The Politics of War.