Books like Scoop — picked by fans

Churchill famously said that history would judge that he was right, and he would write the history. I admire David’s forensic approach to Churchill’s use of omissions and careful phrasing in this book to lend plausibility to counterfactuals regarding how Hitler could have been stopped. A masterpiece of historiography that enabled me to read Churchill’s work with new eyes.

Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning opener to his World War II trilogy reads like a novel. It also succeeds in the almost impossible task of bringing military history alive, weaving expertly drawn biographies of individuals at all levels of the US military into a grand narrative of the campaign to liberate North Africa in 1942-43.

This is simply one of the finest books to be written on the final critical two years of the Pacific War, with extensive detail on the Japanese side of the conflict and plenty of new insights into the better-known American story. It is a big book, but this was a large conflict both in terms of space, time, and the resources deployed. It was also chiefly a story of amphibious naval warfare, an original and significant development in modern warfare that too often gets understated. By the end of the conflict, the American armed forces had created the shape that they were to employ for the next half-century in projecting power overseas.

Alright, this is not technically a book about WWII letters, but it’s very close, and my favorite historical accounts’ book ever. Just like with wartime correspondence, Ernie Pyle wrote from the battlefield about the daily routine of the regular GI while experiencing it himself. Just like in a personal military letter, you get to know a tired civilian in uniform rather than a multi-medal bearing superhero with a thirst for action. With his exceptional writing, Pyle painted touching and realistic portraits, not of the Generals we've already read all about, but of the simple soldier who simply did his job and won the war with his sweat and blood.

Another classic—this one, from 1955, which was twice made into a movie, in 1958 and in the superior 2002 remake, with Brendan Frazier and Michael Cain. The Quiet American is described as many things—as a Vietnam war book, as a critique of American imperialist impulses. But at heart, it’s the story of a love triangle.

And the woman at the center of the love triangle, Phuong, is an all-time favorite character of mine. With watchful attention and subtle silences, she dictates the fate of the two men. More important than anything we ever see her say are the things we see her do and not do. 

I love the novel’s spare prose and its observations and asides, which are astute and oftentimes quite funny. And in the book’s pages, Vietnam, in the years just before the disastrous French then American wars, comes vividly to life. But Phuong is the reason… show more.

The Way of the World details a journey made in 1953 from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in an unreliable Fiat. The elements of adventure, reportage, whimsy and hope are gathered in this permanent resident of my bookshelf. I often re-read this book, penned from the diaries of then-24-year-old Nicholas Bouvier, and wish I had been born 40 years earlier so that I could have joined him and his artist friend Thierry Vernet on their epic road trip!

Bouvier, a Swiss national cited as a "traveler, writer, and photographer," transcends these rather workaday classifications in this seminal volume, becoming more philosopher and poet–the narrator of a timeless, haunting prose classic and one that echoes the escapades of Robert Byron in his book, The Road to Oxiana, a generation earlier. 

I have read and re-read News from Tartary countless times, and the pages of my paperback copy are no longer attached to its spine. Its author, Peter Fleming, was the elder brother of writer Ian Fleming, who, it is said, modeled his fictional hero, James Bond, upon the exploits of his elder sibling.

The book is a rip-roaring, real-life adventure set in the mid-1930s (the best time for exploration). Peter, a special correspondent for The Times newspaper, sets off on a six-month trek overland, by horse and camel, from Peking, China, to Kashmir, in British India. It is superbly written—travel literature at its finest—and an evocative record of a lost era in history, just before WW2 and the Chinese Civil War. 

Robert Capa is the photographer I admire most. He died young, but he is forever remembered for his early work in the Spanish Civil War and later during the D-Day landings of WW2. His images and his character were, of course, much more nuanced, and I think he, of all the Magnum photographers, gets closest to capturing the human element of both war and its aftermath.

Whenever I begin to doubt why I continue in the thankless task of photojournalism, I read Capa’s Slightly Out of Focus again. Yes, the Hungarian emigre tells a tall tale, and his friend Ernest Hemingway helped him brush up the text—which was originally intended as a screenplay—but, my God, what a humorous and inspiring autobiographical record of Capa’s adventures in World War 2 this is! 

What William Dalrymple is to India, Philip Marsden is to Ethiopia. They are both inspired travel writers and scholarly historians. What I particularly loved about The Barefoot Emperor was that it actually reads like a page-turning thriller. Central to the story is the towering figure of the Emperor Tewedros, a brilliant military commander, political reformer, and charismatic leader, who was both loved and loathed by the warring factions that made up his kingdom. His rise and fall compare with anything achieved by Julius Ceasar or Genghis Khan, and Marsden captures his incredible, true-life story with bravura writing that leaps off the page. He turns a searing searchlight onto one of the most forgotten episodes in African history and captures it all with a breathtaking sense of spirit of place.        

This book made me fall in love with ancient Egypt. It might not take place in the past but the findings of the main characters take you straight back in time. The descriptions of the places and the way of living in ancient Egypt-Ethiopia-The blue Nile, easily trigger your imagination and you find yourself creating pictures in your head. Also, the adventure is breathtaking.