Books like Confederate Tide Rising

I think this is a particularly strong book because it provides details about the Confederate decision-making process that I have not read elsewhere.

The interpretation of the historical sources is also outstanding. Glatthaar clarifies the thinking of Confederate leaders about important issues, such as the raising of armies and their provisioning.

The book helped shape my understanding of the challenges Davis and Lee faced and the solutions they undertook to solve them.

Kegel ties together threads in the early history of the war that have an impact on its later course.

These include the adoption of an offensive strategy that would push the war out of Virginia and into Pennsylvania. Kegel elevates the importance of Stonewall Jackson as a strategic thinker in particular and elucidates his influence on Robert E. Lee.

In my own studies, I have found that Jackson did indeed make suggestions Lee later followed, particularly when it came to offensive operations, but Kegel leaves out a key figure in his work - Jefferson Davis.

Like Jackson, Davis shared a preference for offensive action, but Davis did not adopt this opinion from Jackson. Similarly, Davis and Lee had discussed many times taking the fight to the enemy before Jackson became involved at a strategic level.

Lee then carried out Davis’s orders in September 1862 when he led his army across… show more.

This is another important book on the development of Confederate strategy.

Like Harsh, I think Woodworth places too much emphasis on Lee, but he at least includes Davis as a protagonist. To that end, Woodworth’s claim that Davis was convinced the South should fight a defensive war is flat out wrong. He is keen enough to point out how P.G.T. Beauregard, Gustavus Smith, Stonewall Jackson, and even Joe Johnston all clamored for an offensive that would dampen Northern will to win the war.

He simply misses the fact, however, that Davis agreed with them. Davis, however, was the only man of the group who had a national perspective and knew what could be accomplished given the men and materiel limitations of his armies.  

This is the most detailed history of the Battle of Antietam available and is filled with insight. 

The stories Hartwig unearthed are compelling and fascinating. Of all the books on Antietam, this one makes you feel closest to the action. It is a moving, often chilling, read.

Hartwig also offers new thoughts on the effectiveness of George McClellan as a general and even some criticism that will be new to many readers.

The book stumbles when it comes to developing a wider perspective, including the lack of an explanation of why Robert E. Lee decided to fight at Antietam. This weakens the book’s impact a bit as the reader continues to come away bewildered about why the general would have taken such a dangerous risk with his army.

Kaplan does a marvelous job describing, as the subtitle indicates, “the secret history of nuclear war.” It is in a sense a sequel to Kaplan’s earlier The Wizards of Armageddon, which examined theorists of nuclear annihilation. In The Bomb, Kaplan takes us on a deep dive into the bowels of actual doomsday planning; an unforgettable and darkly educational trip!

I consider Millett the finest historian of the Korean War, and this, Volume Two of his trilogy, makes that case abundantly clear.

The sheer scope of his research, the clarity of his writing, his grasp of the overarching strategy, and his understanding of Korean history run through this book.

If Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth examined the scientific, ecological, and social impacts of nuclear war, Robert Scheer’s With Enough Shovels is a direct inquiry into the Reagan Administration about their initial thoughts on the subject. Those thoughts, frankly, are frightening. As the title implicates, then-Deputy Under Secretary of Defense T.J. Jones literally suggested that surviving thermonuclear war was easy: “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top…it’s the dirt that does it…if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” Comments by Reagan, Vice President Bush, Defense Secretary Weinberger, and an increasing contingent of “Neo-Conservatives” writing in journals such as Commentary echoed these sentiments. In part, Scheer’s book began a long process of the Reagan Administration scaling back their bravado and recognizing the real dangers of the atomic age. 

A wonderful book! James Church is former intelligence officer, and in Bamboo and Blood, he weaves a tale of murder and missile deals, set in the context of North Korea's famine. 

With its evocation of cold, snow, and death, Inspector O encounters a giggling Israeli agent; a solitary, lonely North Korean general; a former colleague from a failed mission; a bevy of North Korean diplomats; and a Swiss counterintelligence officer. The tale ends with Inspector O's caveat to the Israeli agent: "Belief is easy. It's doubting that causes difficulties." 

Inspector O survives the famine, and another winter, as does North Korea. This novel by Church, like his debut spy thriller/mystery, A Corpse in the Koryo: An Inspector O Novel, is one to be savored.

This book genuinely changes our understanding of British defence policy before the First World War. It is often assumed that the German challenge to British naval supremacy before 1914 was a mirage and that fears that Germany might launch an invasion of the British Isles were simple scaremongering. The reality was different. The Royal Navy may have been bigger and stronger than its German counterpart, but its task was harder and its leaders were not confident that they could prevent German soldiers from landing on British soil. Based on first-rate research, this book explains why.

In the whole of military history, no year was more important than 1945. Why? Because it introduced nuclear weapons to the world and the world to nuclear weapons. Both before and after Hiroshima new weapons have always affected the way war is waged; whereas nuclear ones, by threatening to turn even the “victor” into a radioactive desert, have cast doubt on the purpose for which may be waged and even whether it can be waged at all. 

As the current war in Ukraine has shown once again, provided both sides have a credible second-strike capability using nuclear weapons to win a war is impossible. So what can they be used for and how? Proceeding step by step Schelling, a Nobel-Prize winning professor of game theory, provides the answers in ways that not only have not been improved upon since the book was published in 1965 but are… show more.