1861
by Adam Goodheart
(Knopf, $29)
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With Civil War titles estimated in the tens of thousands, one might assume that all that needs to be known has already been written, said David Shribman in The Boston Globe. Adam Goodheart’s superb account of the conflict’s first year “shows us that even at 150 years’ distance there are new voices, and new stories to be heard about the Civil War.” Barely a page goes by in 1861 that doesn’t contain “an insight of importance or a fact that beguiles the reader.”
The Crimean War
by Orlando Figes
(Metropolitan, $25)
Orlando Figes’s compelling new history “illuminates a conflict so dimly understood that even the participants were unclear about its objectives,” said The New Yorker. Figes excels at bringing to life this unusual war—which found Anglican Britain and Catholic France siding with the Muslim Ottoman Caliphate against the Orthodox Russian czars. The 1853–56 war was particularly brutal: Passages of Figes’s book “could make a hardened war correspondent’s blood run cold.”
To End All Wars
by Adam Hochschild
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28)
Adam Hochschild’s “pensive narrative history” finds a fresh angle on World War I, said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.org. Focusing on Britain’s “patchy but persistent” movement of war resisters, he helps us both to see patriotic fervor in a fresh light and to “feel anew the shock of modern technological warfare.” The author of 2006’s Bury the Chains is “a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it’s challenged.”
The Storm of War
by Andrew Roberts
(Harper, $30)
“I would have said it couldn’t be done, to do the whole of World War II in 600 pages and get it right, not at any rate without leaving out great chunks,” said Michael Korda in TheDailyBeast.com. But Andrew Roberts “has managed to do it, and do it superbly well.” If you’re looking for a concise, well-reasoned history, “this is it.” Roberts’s Holocaust chapter, for example, “leaves nothing out, but he manages to get it all into 30 pages: a miracle.”
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