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Mr Crucial posted:Can anyone recommend any good books about spies in Cold War Europe? I've been reading one called Farewell about a KGB agent who turned traitor and started selling secrets to French intelligence, but it suffers from a bad translation from the original French and Vetrov's story isn't the most interesting anyway. It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember Peter Wright's Spycatcher being a pretty cool read.
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Jan 21, 2012 04:57
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Conduit for Sale! posted:Speaking of, does anyone know a good book on Alexander the Great? I briefly looked for one on Amazon but couldn't find anything that looked good. I've had my eye on Robin Lane Fox's biography for a while, but I haven't read it. And there's always Arrian and Plutarch.
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Jan 31, 2012 01:00
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Ulio posted:Any good books about the Age of Discovery? I wouldn't mind different perspectives(natives/explorers). Would also like the expedition part to be included and not only the discovery. One about Cortes and Mexico would be specially great but all others are welcome too. If you don't mind reading a primary source, Bernal Diaz's The Conquest of New Spain is a good first-hand account from one of the conquistadors who overthrew the Aztec empire and served under Cortes.
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Aug 7, 2012 22:59
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Red87 posted:I'm looking for some Roman history type books. I really enjoy the legion/war type books the most. Anyone have some recommendations? I prefer kindle/ebook versions since work travel keeps me from carrying a lot of books with me and I finish them too fast usually that I run out of material on trips. Xenophon's Anabasis (available on the Kindle as The Persian Expedition) is a fun, first-hand account of a mercenary Greek army stuck in Persia. If you want something Roman, Caesar's two books, ]The Conquest of Gaul and The Civil War are good reads, too.
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Aug 11, 2012 03:19
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Abyss posted:Searched this thread and couldn't find anything similar to a request. I was wondering if anyone knew of books which covered how modern media could have shaped the perception of historical events. Such as media coverage of the Civil War or presidential debates. I guess this could be considered alternate history, but I'm not looking for fiction as much as an analysis. Not sure if this is quite what you're looking for, but there's The Image by Daniel J. Boorstin. It's about how the media constructs things so they can report on them: press conferences, presidential debates, etc.
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Sep 7, 2012 01:41
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feraltennisprodigy posted:Are there any solid books on the crusades that feature a lot of first hand accounts? (Ie. narratives from soldiers or others who participated in them, if any of those were written down at the time) Penguin has a couple: This one has two accounts, one from the fourth crusade by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and another about Louis IX's later crusades. There's another one I'm not too familiar with made of first-hand accounts about the first crusades, too. There's also the Book of Contemplation, written by an Arab in the 12th century which touches on the Crusades from the other side.
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Jan 11, 2013 16:58
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ChetReckless posted:
Thanks for this, it sounds right up my alley. Has anyone read any of Anthony Everitt's biographies? I've had my eye on the book he wrote on Cicero for a little while, but I saw he has ones on Hadrian and Augustus, too. Are they any good?
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Jan 23, 2013 04:14
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DerLeo posted:Does anyone know a good book for historically significant speeches? Dover has a bunch of them, like this one full of 20th century speeches, and they're all pretty cheap, too.
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Mar 4, 2013 03:10
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If you want a social history, maybe check out some of Studs Turkel's work?
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Mar 5, 2013 04:44
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stawk Archer posted:
I've got a couple of these volumes. They're enjoyable reads and I liked the more colorful parts (the last king being expelled from Rome and Hannibal crossing the Alps come to mind), but I know what you mean: there's only so many times you can read about who was Quaestor each year. I'm also a big Plutarch guy, although I wish someone (Oxford? This would be right up your alley) would made a modern translation that preserves the way Plutarch contrasted his lives, not having them divided up by era. I understand why Penguin did that (it's easier for general readers who only want to read about Casear or Alexander the Great, but couldn't care less about the other), but I'm surprised the only full translation out there is Dryden's. Can anyone recommend any books about Alexander the Great? I'm leaning towards Robin Lane Fox's biography, but I'm willing to be persuaded to another one.
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Mar 11, 2013 18:09
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stawk Archer posted:This is great: http://www.thelandmarkancienthistories.com/index.htm That reminds me, what's a good edition of Polybius? I know Penguin abridged him a bunch, so is there another edition I should keep my eyes open for?
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Mar 23, 2013 03:10
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Stravinsky posted:Don't get me wrong, Penguin can do a pretty good job most of the time. But what they did to Histories is just baffling. Yeah, by and large I stick to Penguins. There's only a couple of ones I'm not interested in (a prose translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Polybius come to mind) so my history shelf is almost all Penguin Classics. They've got so much out there that nobody else does, it's hard to fault them unless they do something really strange.
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Mar 25, 2013 23:42
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But isn't that more or less what happened? Mao wasn't exactly a nice person.
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Apr 1, 2013 23:16
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Christoff posted:Also Rome and Greece and everything around it. Don't care about a particular person or era. I just love reading little factoids about them. I'm a big fan of Plutarch's lives. He was a writer in the second century AD who wrote biographies comparing various Greek figures to famous Romans (Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, for example). Penguin has a few good editions out there, if you don't mind them separating the lives by era. A good starting place is he Fall of the Roman Republic, which covers Caesar, Cicero, Sulla and some other major figures.
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Apr 21, 2013 00:52
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stawk Archer posted:Are there any suggestions for a good translation of Appian's histories? I haven't read it yet, but Penguins seems like the best one out there: Oxford doesn't have one and Landmark's is forthcoming (whatever that means) and everything else I see on Amazon looks like stuff in the public domain.
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Apr 29, 2013 00:33
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DeceasedHorse posted:No, but I just bought it and it looks very interesting, I'm sort of still working on the Liberation Trilogy and 1453 so it'll probably be a while before I get to it but I'm all jazzed up for some more Vietnam after completing the (excellent) audio book of A Bright Shining Lie (which I'd recommend in any format, although personally I think the ending is kind of abrupt). Neil Sheehan's A Bright and Shining Lie and David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest are great reads about America in Vietnam and I think each won a Pulitzer back in the day.
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May 4, 2013 00:41
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1stGear posted:My nephew is getting ready to turn 10 and has a pretty intense fascination with a lot of the little WW2 figurines and miniatures his dad has gotten him. I was thinking about getting him a simple history of the war for his birthday and was looking for input. His reading level is pretty high though he is still a ten-year old. Are there books that would be suitable? Night by Elie Wiesel. I'm serious: I read it in school around that age, it had a pretty big impact on how I felt about war at the time.
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Jul 18, 2013 03:00
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Also: Penguin Classics has a good book called Chronicles of the Crusades you might wanna look into: it's two different first-hand accounts of crusades, one to Byzantine and another to Egypt.
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Jul 30, 2013 00:45
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I've been on a huge biography kick lately, reading all of Robert Caro's LBJ books (I'm about halfway through Master of the Senate; it's easily my favourite one so far) and I'm wondering if there's any other presidential biographies at about the same level: not fluff pieces, not ghostwritten autobiographies (like Reagan's awful memoir), but something along the lines of Caro's books or Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes.
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Apr 2, 2014 17:22
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gohuskies posted:If you like Caro, you absolutely must read The Power Broker, his biography of Robert Moses. It's a single volume and a masterpiece. It's focused on power and how it is accumulated and used, like the LBJ series, but it looks at the city level rather than Congress/federal. Thanks for this, I'll keep my eyes open for it! I'm only vaguely familiar with who Moses was, but it sounds interesting. On a related note, has anyone read Steven Ambrose's biography of Richard Nixon? Once I finish The Years of Lyndon Johnson, I'm thinking about moving on to the next President and the local library has all three volumes.
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Apr 14, 2014 01:40
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dublish posted:I haven't read that, but I thought Rick Perlstein's Nixonland was pretty great when I read it 5 years ago. It's only 1 volume but it's not a biography, so probably not quite what you're looking for. That's one I keep hearing good things about, but the local library doesn't have a copy and I'd rather stick with something they have for now. I'll probably read it eventually.
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Apr 15, 2014 17:47
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