What are you reading?
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Addai
, mai 12 2010 04:55
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#1704
Posté 21 mars 2015 - 01:17
lil yonce
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Can anyone suggest a good book on the histories of US domestic or foreign policies?
#1705
Posté 21 mars 2015 - 01:59
mousestalker
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It's a fun series. Pure fluffy goodness
#1707
Guest_Stormheart83_*
Posté 21 mars 2015 - 05:46
Guest_Stormheart83_*
Guest_Stormheart83_*
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This, Warhammer 40K: Stormcaller
Hard cover! It's so smexy.
Hard cover! It's so smexy.
#1708
Posté 21 mars 2015 - 06:00
KingTony
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I LOVE this cover.
- Johnnie Walker aime ceci
#1711
Posté 03 avril 2015 - 09:10
DrBlingzle
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Very interesting, it gives a very detailed description of ancient greek and Roman military (their equipment, training, campaigns, etc) and how they developed. It also contains parts on their enemies (Macedon, Persia, etc) and their culture. It's fairly pricey but if you're interested in that area of history I'd strongly recommend it.
#1712
Posté 04 avril 2015 - 02:01
Puzzlewell
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Finally started working on the His Dark Materials series yesterday! The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights depending on where you're from) is proving to be rather enjoyable so far so I look forward to working more on it. Daemons are pretty amazing and I want one of my own. 
Don't worry, I'll be avoiding the movie at all costs too.
#1713
Posté 12 avril 2015 - 05:43
Dominus
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I've been reeeeally happy with how it's turned out so far. Bought on impulse, the writing's witty and very detailed. It's a thriller put in a modern setting, a Cynical Husband with a Happy-Go-Lucky Wife. It's been a great read.
- mousestalker aime ceci
#1716
Posté 12 avril 2015 - 08:06
Voxr
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^Ba da-tisssss
I'm reading Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins and it is delightful.
- mousestalker aime ceci
#1717
Posté 12 avril 2015 - 09:33
Aimi
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The most recent non-class/non-thesis book I have read was David Stahel's The Battle for Moscow. And I'm kind of ambivalent about it.
Stahel has written a series of books on the first five months of the Great Patriotic War, beginning in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, continuing through the Kiev battles and Operation Typhoon in the fall, and ending with the most recent book on the final German push toward Moscow. They are apparently an outgrowth of his MA thesis, a fairly common tactic for academic historians.
The running theme through the books has been an emphasis on the German military's unfitness to accomplish the objectives it set for itself. Time and time again, Stahel shows how the Ostheer's offensives were overreaches of epic proportions, and that the army simply did not have the juice to do the things that it was trying to do. He demonstrates that the army was permeated by this sense of unreality at virtually every level of command, and asserts that the final failure of Barbarossa and Typhoon was essentially preordained.
After the war, the commanders of the Wehrmacht defended themselves to civilization by claiming that they had no knowledge of, let alone involvement in, the atrocities committed by German soldiers and paramilitaries on the Eastern Front. This defense became largely accepted by much of Western historiography for a long time, but has been proven false repeatedly since then. Stahel takes the time to put a few more nails in the coffin. This is a good thing, because the myth is bizarrely persistent among many casual readers. But it's one of the first things that made me wonder about who the book's intended audience was. To my knowledge, and I may be wrong about this, academic historians don't tend to set much store by that stuff anymore, not since the Historikerstreit back in the 1980s. The myth is mostly kept alive by the mass-market pop-history crowd.
But detailing war crimes committed by the average soldiers of the Wehrmacht, with the knowledge, and often approval, of their commanders is important to Stahel's narrative, because the books focus on the experience of the Ostheer's individual soldiers. By examining the privations of the Landser (and, at the same time, the even worse privations of the civilians that they mistreated and killed), Stahel constructs one of the key pillars of his argument, that the German military was exhausted merely by doing what it did, and that further offensives - seizing Moscow in a vicious urban siege, or pushing on to Gorkiy, or what have you - would simply have been out of the question.
That section of the book is very strong. But other parts of the book were decidedly weaker, and they left me feeling a bit unfulfilled. For one thing, emphasizing the experience of the common soldier came at the expense of a coherent operational narrative. Although there are many maps with considerable precision (no small feat for a military history book, I know), the narrative portion of the book bleeds together into a sort of overall mush of 'this was all pointless and doomed from the start'. On one level, that's fine, because it's actually one of Stahel's points: when Army Group Center tried to take an operational pause between the two phases of Typhoon in early November, most of its forces were still engaged in active fighting. And the lack of fuel meant that there was little possibility for maneuver, making most engagements into straight-up knock-down drag-out slugfests. But having a disorganized narrative to illustrate a disorganized reality is a bit too meta for me, and I felt that it made things more difficult to comprehend for the reader.
But that's a relatively small gripe. There's a more serious one: I don't feel that Stahel adequately demonstrated one of his most key points, the resurgent power of the Red Army. The book is almost entirely taken up by the German experience; there is almost no discussion whatsoever of the Soviet side of things. Stahel points out that the outcomes of Barbarossa and Typhoon were not merely German failures but Soviet successes, but these successes are rarely shown. Instead, he harps on German logistical problems, overextension, and exhaustion - which, while all true, lead to the impression that the Soviet forces involved were merely taking advantage of a German self-inflicted defeat. I know that Stahel doesn't think that; he writes as much in the book. But what he shows is something entirely different. He has a brief discussion of Soviet reserve armies and the Stavka's plan for employing them, he has a couple of paragraphs' worth of 'snapshot' on K.K. Rokossovskiy, and he talks about Anglo-American Lend-Lease products and their outsize effect on German morale compared to their relatively minor battlefield impact. But that's really it. For most of the book, the Soviets are faceless enemies that are getting facerolled until they aren't, while the book is written from the perspectives of Bock, Halder, Kluge, Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt, and countless German Landser.
To be fair, that's an incredibly big ask. Proficiency in both German and Russian sufficient to read primary sources is hard to come by, and access to Russian sources is undoubtedly pretty restricted. Not everybody can be David Glantz. Stahel's initial work was on the Ostheer, so in the expanded book series it makes sense that he'd continue to focus on it. I also have no way of knowing what was cut from the manuscript before publication; from the introduction, it almost seems as though Stahel had a more robust discussion of the Soviet side in there but was unable to include it in the final product.
There are other, minor nitpicks. For example, Stahel refers to the repeated appearance of "will" in the diaries and communications of the Wehrmacht generals. He points out how they had constructed a view of battle that emphasized moral rather than material factors, that ultimate success or failure depended on a commander's will to keep fighting regardless of losses or cost - a view that appeared increasingly preposterous as shoestring German forces attempted to take on ever larger Soviet opponents. He connects this view of "will" in battle to Nazi ideology, suggesting that Nazism had permeated and corrupted the military elite in terms of doctrine much like it had done in terms of war crimes. I wouldn't argue that the Wehrmacht's generals were deeply morally corrupted by Nazism, but to attribute their emphasis on "will" to Hitler rests on a fairly shaky evidentiary basis. Emphasis on a commander's "will" and tenacity had a long history in theory; it went back to Clausewitz ("War is thus an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will") and appeared in both recent German military command manuals, Das FuG (1921/23) and Truppenführung (1933/34). (In paragraph 3 of Truppenführung's introduction: "One's own will is pitted against the independent will of the enemy.") Stalin and Zhukov constructed the Great Patriotic War as a test of will, as did, in an earlier era, Foch and Haig. German commanders may have expected "will" to override material factors to a degree, but that was a fairly common military command error, not a particularly Nazi one.
This is not to say that Stahel's efforts to draw connections between Nazi ideology and the experience of war in Russia were generally bad. On the whole, they were quite good. I especially appreciated his segment on what the Nazi system 'expected' of individual soldiers - ideologically, superhuman effort was basically required of every individual in an impossible way. And his bit on Nazi efforts to frame everything as a struggle, and the impact of that framework on the way that front soldiers and civilians thought about the war was very good. His portrayal of the experience of German soldiers is excellent, right up there with Bartov and Rutherford.
Overall, I would say that what was in The Battle for Moscow was very good, but what wasn't there was noticeable. I enjoyed reading it, and I felt that it made a good contribution to the field, but was left hoping for something a bit more ecumenical to deal with both Soviet and German forces on a broader scale.
Stahel has written a series of books on the first five months of the Great Patriotic War, beginning in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, continuing through the Kiev battles and Operation Typhoon in the fall, and ending with the most recent book on the final German push toward Moscow. They are apparently an outgrowth of his MA thesis, a fairly common tactic for academic historians.
The running theme through the books has been an emphasis on the German military's unfitness to accomplish the objectives it set for itself. Time and time again, Stahel shows how the Ostheer's offensives were overreaches of epic proportions, and that the army simply did not have the juice to do the things that it was trying to do. He demonstrates that the army was permeated by this sense of unreality at virtually every level of command, and asserts that the final failure of Barbarossa and Typhoon was essentially preordained.
After the war, the commanders of the Wehrmacht defended themselves to civilization by claiming that they had no knowledge of, let alone involvement in, the atrocities committed by German soldiers and paramilitaries on the Eastern Front. This defense became largely accepted by much of Western historiography for a long time, but has been proven false repeatedly since then. Stahel takes the time to put a few more nails in the coffin. This is a good thing, because the myth is bizarrely persistent among many casual readers. But it's one of the first things that made me wonder about who the book's intended audience was. To my knowledge, and I may be wrong about this, academic historians don't tend to set much store by that stuff anymore, not since the Historikerstreit back in the 1980s. The myth is mostly kept alive by the mass-market pop-history crowd.
But detailing war crimes committed by the average soldiers of the Wehrmacht, with the knowledge, and often approval, of their commanders is important to Stahel's narrative, because the books focus on the experience of the Ostheer's individual soldiers. By examining the privations of the Landser (and, at the same time, the even worse privations of the civilians that they mistreated and killed), Stahel constructs one of the key pillars of his argument, that the German military was exhausted merely by doing what it did, and that further offensives - seizing Moscow in a vicious urban siege, or pushing on to Gorkiy, or what have you - would simply have been out of the question.
That section of the book is very strong. But other parts of the book were decidedly weaker, and they left me feeling a bit unfulfilled. For one thing, emphasizing the experience of the common soldier came at the expense of a coherent operational narrative. Although there are many maps with considerable precision (no small feat for a military history book, I know), the narrative portion of the book bleeds together into a sort of overall mush of 'this was all pointless and doomed from the start'. On one level, that's fine, because it's actually one of Stahel's points: when Army Group Center tried to take an operational pause between the two phases of Typhoon in early November, most of its forces were still engaged in active fighting. And the lack of fuel meant that there was little possibility for maneuver, making most engagements into straight-up knock-down drag-out slugfests. But having a disorganized narrative to illustrate a disorganized reality is a bit too meta for me, and I felt that it made things more difficult to comprehend for the reader.
But that's a relatively small gripe. There's a more serious one: I don't feel that Stahel adequately demonstrated one of his most key points, the resurgent power of the Red Army. The book is almost entirely taken up by the German experience; there is almost no discussion whatsoever of the Soviet side of things. Stahel points out that the outcomes of Barbarossa and Typhoon were not merely German failures but Soviet successes, but these successes are rarely shown. Instead, he harps on German logistical problems, overextension, and exhaustion - which, while all true, lead to the impression that the Soviet forces involved were merely taking advantage of a German self-inflicted defeat. I know that Stahel doesn't think that; he writes as much in the book. But what he shows is something entirely different. He has a brief discussion of Soviet reserve armies and the Stavka's plan for employing them, he has a couple of paragraphs' worth of 'snapshot' on K.K. Rokossovskiy, and he talks about Anglo-American Lend-Lease products and their outsize effect on German morale compared to their relatively minor battlefield impact. But that's really it. For most of the book, the Soviets are faceless enemies that are getting facerolled until they aren't, while the book is written from the perspectives of Bock, Halder, Kluge, Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt, and countless German Landser.
To be fair, that's an incredibly big ask. Proficiency in both German and Russian sufficient to read primary sources is hard to come by, and access to Russian sources is undoubtedly pretty restricted. Not everybody can be David Glantz. Stahel's initial work was on the Ostheer, so in the expanded book series it makes sense that he'd continue to focus on it. I also have no way of knowing what was cut from the manuscript before publication; from the introduction, it almost seems as though Stahel had a more robust discussion of the Soviet side in there but was unable to include it in the final product.
There are other, minor nitpicks. For example, Stahel refers to the repeated appearance of "will" in the diaries and communications of the Wehrmacht generals. He points out how they had constructed a view of battle that emphasized moral rather than material factors, that ultimate success or failure depended on a commander's will to keep fighting regardless of losses or cost - a view that appeared increasingly preposterous as shoestring German forces attempted to take on ever larger Soviet opponents. He connects this view of "will" in battle to Nazi ideology, suggesting that Nazism had permeated and corrupted the military elite in terms of doctrine much like it had done in terms of war crimes. I wouldn't argue that the Wehrmacht's generals were deeply morally corrupted by Nazism, but to attribute their emphasis on "will" to Hitler rests on a fairly shaky evidentiary basis. Emphasis on a commander's "will" and tenacity had a long history in theory; it went back to Clausewitz ("War is thus an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will") and appeared in both recent German military command manuals, Das FuG (1921/23) and Truppenführung (1933/34). (In paragraph 3 of Truppenführung's introduction: "One's own will is pitted against the independent will of the enemy.") Stalin and Zhukov constructed the Great Patriotic War as a test of will, as did, in an earlier era, Foch and Haig. German commanders may have expected "will" to override material factors to a degree, but that was a fairly common military command error, not a particularly Nazi one.
This is not to say that Stahel's efforts to draw connections between Nazi ideology and the experience of war in Russia were generally bad. On the whole, they were quite good. I especially appreciated his segment on what the Nazi system 'expected' of individual soldiers - ideologically, superhuman effort was basically required of every individual in an impossible way. And his bit on Nazi efforts to frame everything as a struggle, and the impact of that framework on the way that front soldiers and civilians thought about the war was very good. His portrayal of the experience of German soldiers is excellent, right up there with Bartov and Rutherford.
Overall, I would say that what was in The Battle for Moscow was very good, but what wasn't there was noticeable. I enjoyed reading it, and I felt that it made a good contribution to the field, but was left hoping for something a bit more ecumenical to deal with both Soviet and German forces on a broader scale.
#1718
Posté 12 avril 2015 - 10:20
Althix
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Spoiler
a very nice book if you do sports a lot... and i guess for daily life as well.
also re reading
#1719
Posté 13 avril 2015 - 10:35
Rawgrim
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The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.
Halfway through it. Pretty damn good so far.
- mousestalker aime ceci
#1722
Posté 16 avril 2015 - 01:50
aoibhealfae
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Probably the best novel he wrote.
- Dermain et Voxr aiment ceci
#1723
Posté 16 avril 2015 - 06:30
Aimi
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Probably the best novel he wrote.
impossible to choose a favorite imo; American Gods, Neverwhere, and Ocean are all so good
one of my friends strenuously argues for Good Omens but that's not really my thing
- Dermain aime ceci
#1724
Posté 16 avril 2015 - 06:33
Voxr
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impossible to choose a favorite imo; American Gods, Neverwhere, and Ocean are all so good
one of my friends strenuously argues for Good Omens but that's not really my thing
I think American Gods is my favorite. But Neverwhere is a super close second.
All of Gaiman's stuff is good though.
- Dermain aime ceci
#1725
Posté 16 avril 2015 - 07:19
Aimi
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I think American Gods is my favorite. But Neverwhere is a super close second.
All of Gaiman's stuff is good though.
he's going to be doing a show not too far from where I live in a couple of weeks, already got tickets and a date
