My wife read Robert Leckie's classic memoir of World War II, Helmet for my Pillow, subtitled From Parris Island to the Pacific, right after the Spielberg's miniseries The Pacific brought it to our attention. I hadn't had time to read it before I taught the World War II class, and used Eugene Sledge's memoir instead. (I think I'd still make ( Read more... )

         John Steinbeck's Once There Was a War, a collection of his war reporting from World War II, was a very happy discovery. Many months ago a student came into the Creativity Center with a copy of Steinbeck's The Log of the Sea of Cortez, which I had vaguely heard of, and the student said I really ought to read it. I have a copy of his ( Read more... )

          One of the virtues of teaching college is that I get to read quite a number of books that truly deserve to be called classics; and I'm happy to throw that word around in regards to The Walls Came Tumbling Down, a memoir by Henriette Roosenburg. It may be utterly out of print soon, since it got caught up in the Common Reader debacle. I ( Read more... )

          I'm not a big fan of Zhukov's Greatest Defeat, by David M. Glantz, the latest military history volume on my reading list. Its chief virtue is that it's really the only book, in English, on Operation Mars, one of the big battles on the Eastern Front in World War II. So if you want to read about that campaign, this is the book.
          It ( Read more... )

          If you watched the HBO series The Pacific, then you experienced some of the book I've just finished: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E. B. Sledge. After we saw the series, my wife picked up and read this book, and Robert Leckie's Helmet for  My Pillow; and subsequently Sledge's other book, China Marine. With the Old Breed ( Read more... )

          I've known about the Nanking Massacre, or "Rape of Nanking" since I was a teenager, though mostly in general terms. I'd heard that The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang was good, but hadn't even bought a copy, because there were too many other books in the world. (My wife was also raised in the kind of environment where one would know about ( Read more... )