Suggestion For History Books

[Rev. Rye]

Honestly, I don't read history books all that often (mostly because when I go to Half Price Books, I'm more focused on honing my craft with the fiction section), but, for what it's worth, here are a few I really found myself absorbed in:

• The Brilliant Disaster by Jim Rasenberger. It's a book about the clusterfuck that was the Bay of Pigs invasion. Someone should really make a Tora! Tora! Tora!-style movie about it, but I know that doing so would likely require a level of cooperation between the US and Cuba that's not only unprecedented, but also likely illegal.
  
• The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (aka Atrocities) by Matthew White: a very witty historian guides us through the 100 bloodiest events in History from the Second Persian War to the Second Congo War. Surprisingly, he doesn't have a section on the Holocaust, primarily because he thinks it's too tied up in WW2 and if he devoted an entire chapter to every single event in WW2 that could have qualified on its own. To counter this, he does include a sizable section on why Holocaust Denial is idiotic.
  
• The Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson. It's the definitive chronicle of the American Civil War, having several one-ups on Shelby Foote's Civil War Trilogy, including: 1) It's less ungainly. 2) It's by an actual historian. 3) It spends a lot of time going over the various events that made the war inevitable. 4) It doesn't have any of the Pro-Confederacy bias that occasionally slips through Foote's fingers.
  
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Do I really have to explain it?
  
• The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. When I was in college, this book really fascinated me. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember reading about how much more perceptive its historiography was than one would expect from a book almost 100 years old.
  
• Popular Crime by Bill James. The famous baseball analyst turns his eye to true crime and explains his ideas behind various infamous crime stories.
  
• Vive La Revolution by Mark Steel. Mark Steel gives a revisionist account of the French Revolution, about how it started with good intentions, but ended horribly.