100 Books Like George C. Marshall, Vol. 1

This book showed me how important it was for women to write ancient history and how different their interpretations of that history could be. Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra does full justice to her complicated subject and the fraught historical era she had to negotiate.

I appreciate how richly Schiff evokes Cleopatra’s world, from the palace in Alexandria she lived in as a child to the fleet she commanded in her last, fateful battle. Even more, I love how skeptically Schiff reads the ancient sources on Cleopatra and how thoughtfully she constructs her own more nuanced portrait of the powerful Egyptian queen.  

Imagine you’re Vice President Lyndon Johnson on Nov. 22, 1963. The Secret Service just hustled you into a secure room at the Dallas hospital where doctors are desperately trying to keep President John F. Kennedy alive after an assassination attempt. What’s going through your mind? If Kennedy dies, what are your next steps? Robert Caro found out. Pulitzer-winner Caro is the greatest historian of our lifetime—and a brilliant, accessible writer who makes it impossible to put down a 700-page nonfiction book. The Passage of Power is the fourth of a planned five-volume biography of Johnson, the man who helped turn Martin Luther King’s dream into reality, and then self-imploded with the Vietnam War. Caro’s final volume will be an instant best-seller.

If there’s a common trait of Republican and Democratic politicians, it’s that George Washington is always fair game to hijack. We’re told that Washington was devoutly religious or that he was a deist; that he was a true democrat or a slave-holding aristocrat; that he single-handedly smote the British; that he believed in states’ rights or supported a strong federal government. Washington is anything you want him to be. Lengel, who helped edit the Washington papers, begs to differ. His short book tackles many of the Washington myths with an easy writing style for general readers and endnotes for those who want to double-check his debunking.

General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American liaison to Chiang Kai-Shek’s China during World War II, was the opposite of a politician. Blunt, profane, disrespectful, and sarcastic—he called Chiang the “peanut”—Stilwell was incapable of being politic, which makes Tuchman’s book the ultimate political biography. Like many great biographers, including three of the five authors on this list, Tuchman came to history from journalism or publishing, not from academia, something she felt was an asset in helping her write in a style that produced both a Pulitzer and best sellers.

Known critically as the School of Dictators, Gill has written the first in-depth anthropological account of US military training for Latin American officers at the School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Georgia. She discusses the way that Latin American military officers sent to the school are attracted to the “American way of life,” how the courses enhance officers’ ability to exercise indiscriminate violence, their enduring ties to the global U.S. military mission, and downplay of human rights violations, which School officials attribute to “a few bad apples.” Carefully researched, thoughtfully structured, and exceptionally well-written, Gill shows that foreign training of Latin American military officers plays an important role in U.S. imperialism. 

I’ve included Ana, Jan, and María’s book on my list not because it is entirely about neutrality and war (although that theme plays a major part in the book) but because it pushed me to appreciate the effects of the First World War at a more global level. 

The modern name of the war, of course, includes the word ‘world’ in it, but the fighting was primarily European-focused. This book shows, however, that the war had a much wider reach–influencing China, Japan, South America, Mexico, and Africa, amongst other places. For example, the book shows that there was a clash of Empires in Africa–between neutral Portugal and belligerent Germany; and in neutral Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, societies were split down the middle between the rival camps supporting the Allies and the Germans.

I found the book to be a really important demonstration that we need to think differently about wars–the… show more.

There are a handful of books that, upon finishing, I remark with absolute admiration, “I wish I would have written that.” This is one of these select, extraordinary books. Yergin presents an eye-opening, at times uncomfortably shocking, journey through petroleum geopolitics, challenging conventional notions about historical events, the modern world order, and how it came to pass.

This is a book I have read over and over. Jünger, a German infantryman, paints a picture of trench warfare that does nothing to glamorize combat, but I found the ideas of duty, bravery, leadership, and even ethics in its pages.

I appreciate that this memoir began as Jünger’s journal and was re-written and edited over a number of years, which allowed for the level of reflection that I feel is necessary for a memoir. 

When my wife and I met in 1975, one of the things we had in common was that we both owned a copy of Growing Up Female. And the bindings on both copies were pretty worn out. This is a deeply personal journal of compelling photographs and eloquent text about women—from a feminist’s point of view.  What I love about this book is how deeply moving it is and how well it demonstrates a narrative approach to taking, editing, and sequencing first-person photographs. Not to mention that this book sold 25,000 copies (unheard of for books of photography) and had a significant impact on the view of a woman’s place in our culture.  

I think this book explains why genocide happens under the cover of war. It made me see why both World War I and World War II were marked by genocides. I really liked how the author explained why the Armenian Genocide was a key event of World War I.

Balakian is a poet who turned to history writing to explain the experience of genocide and demonstrate the central importance of the international response to genocide. He uses interesting source material from eyewitnesses and official archives to trace both the humanitarian response and military decisions that brought the US into the war on the side of the Allies in the wake of the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.