100 Books Like The General's Son

My line of work has only enhanced my fascination with spies and spying. Espionage was on the periphery of my world and I was privy, on occasion, to snippets of information that shed light on certain events. Reading this book was like being privy to a host of secrets, many during my own era. How fascinating to be taken through the history of espionage from biblical times until today. The author reveals missing pieces to many significant moments in history, where monumental decisions were made based on information bought and sold, died for, killed for, stolen, or extracted by torture or coercion. Equally fascinating is how so much of that information was misinterpreted, denied, ignored, inflated, or simply misplaced. Great battles were won and lost, kingdoms toppled, fortunes spent and made, often based on a single snippet of information.

I read this book when I was 16 years old. It was my first military history book and I could not put it down. Up until then I had only read military fiction: War and Peace, Ben Hur – the bigger the books the better. What captivated me most about Fuller's 2 volumes was the battles he chose to describe, starting with Salamis in 480BC, had the outcomes been different the course of world history would have changed significantly. The world in which we live in today would not be the same. This only served to intensify my interest in the detailed descriptions and at the end of each battle I'd try and imagine how history might have been impacted had the outcomes been reversed. 

This is the remarkable, true story about an upper-class English woman, Susan Travers, who was chauffeur to French General Pierre Koenig during his North Africa campaign leading the Free French Foreign Legion while attached to the British 8th Army. Koenig became famous for holding out against German General Erwin Rommel at the battle of Bir Hakiem. Susan chose to remain at Bir Hakiem when all other women had been evacuated. At the height of the battle, running out of ammunition, Koenig ordered the evacuation and she drove him through machine-gun fire and a minefield, spearheading the hair-raising escape for the 3,000 soldiers. Susan was my friend and I was the first person to whom she revealed her secret love affair with Koenig, the basis of this book.

Henry Goulding was commander of the WW2 Special Boat Service. There is a dark, incomplete story here. The real drama is hidden between the lines and yet to be proven. Henry Goulding was a friend of Churchill, accomplished spy, fiercely patriotic, yet he did something out of character when he hid a briefcase packed with top-secret documents in his attic. He was summoned to a hospital in Scotland, despite being fit and healthy, escaped after a scuffle, telephoned his wife, was returned to the hospital where he died shortly after, apparently of natural causes. His medical records have never been released. I was contacted by his granddaughter, who years later found the briefcase, and asked if I might write a more detailed book tackling the mystery behind his death, a book begun by Sir Paddy Ashdown who died before completing a chapter. 

This book is currently out of print.

I have been teaching from this book for many years. Books about Israel are fraught with bias. Many are post or anti-Zionist. They do not represent Israeli mainstream and the Israeli perception of history. Anita Shapira is Israel’s foremost historian of Zionism who received the Israel Prize, the highest prize Israel confers on its leaders. She describes and explains the emergence of Zionism in Europe against the backdrop of relations among Jews, Arabs, and Turks. Shapira describes the challenges that Zionists had to face in Palestine and from 1948 onwards in the newly established state. Much of her research is based on primary sources: archival sources, including diaries, memoirs, and other documents. This book does an excellent work of explaining Israeli history, politics, and society.

Reading this story really makes you feel what it’s like to live under Israeli occupation, and maybe that’s why this book is being banned. Twelve-year-old Karim and his family can’t leave their house during the army’s curfew, and Karim is tired of dealing with his siblings and parents when all he wants to do is play soccer.

When he’s allowed out, Karim befriends a boy from the refugee camp, and they build a soccer field in an old junkyard. But when Karim gets stuck there when the Israeli soldiers come back and impose another curfew, things get scary, and Karim has to grow up fast to stay safe.

I loved this book because it tells the entire history of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis through the real-life relationship between one Palestinian refugee and the Israeli woman who was born in the house he was expelled from. The young adult version, based on the adult book, is packed full of details, but all told with nuance from the perspectives of the people involved.

Written by a journalist, the book is easy to follow and interesting. Like in real life, some of the differences are resolved, but most aren’t, leaving the reader interested in learning more.

This book has been coauthored, according to an agreed-upon format, by an Egyptian, an Israeli, and a Palestinian scholar. Thoughtful and innovative, the book provides a balanced overview of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

It provides basic information on the evolution of the conflict, including its critical and foundational Palestinian dimension; it explores the varied and numerous efforts to resolve the conflict; and it then goes on to portray and assess the perspectives of the major parties to the dispute.

Written by a distinguished team of scholars, the book offers valuable insight into the opposing narratives that have fueled the conflict for so long. It discusses key developments in the history of the conflict and considers these developments within a domestic, regional, and international context.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe revisits the formation of the State of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. If this had happened today it would have been called "ethnic cleansing". Totally debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers stunning archival evidence to show that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population.