Books like The Great War for Civilisation — picked by fans

After photographers, poets have the sharpest eyes for the goings on and minutiae of life around them.

I love Szymborska’s poetry because with her, I walk down unknown streets, I eavesdrop conversations, I dissect a terrorist bombing. If photography helps open your eyes, Szymborska’s intimate yet vast vision opens a higher mind. She shows me life through her eyes: often puzzled, sometimes bemused, but always loving.

I love Map as it’s a generous collection of her luminous works with her last poems. Map is the final poem; it closes with the lines "… they spread before me a world /not of this world," which aptly sum up her gifts to us. 

Of the dozens of self-help books I’ve browsed or read, this book gave me tools to replace past pains and shame with pleasure and pride.

Numerous books helpfully tell you what you lack, gleefully list what you need to change. This one offers an important further step: it provides neural tools that helped me to change and make the changes last. I knew vaguely—like a small pain that is easy to ignore but which limits your movement—my ability to create, to grow ideas had always to battle a thicket of past aches, struggles, and fears.

This book not only helped me through that—it’s a guide, consequently, to lead a longer, richer life. Without a doubt, it’s one of the most transformational books in my life.

What do you get when you cross the meditations of a Trappist monk with the teachings of a Taoist master? Wisdom rolled into small. tasty bites.

I find lots to chew on here: precisely honed, almost poetic epigrams and short stories that capture timeless truths and insights. I was enchanted to discover the book in my teens; it suited my short attention span. Now fifty years later, its humour, pithy fables and quotability seem ever pertinent, ever fresh.

I love it for random dips as a way to sign off for a day’s meditation.

From my school days, Ernst Haas’ photography has been a source of inspiration and exasperation, even intimidation.

Creation is his crowning glory, not only for the peerless elegance of his images, but also for his masterclass in pacing and book design. I love the boldness of a double-page spread with nothing but an arc of light.

I love the quiet studies in which not a blade of grass or minute drop of water is misplaced. It inspired my journey in photography before I even owned a camera, and right now I can shiver from an immersion in its magisterial vision.

A master of nonfiction crime writing, William Swanson uses his W.A. Winter pen name for fictional works, including this 2022 book that clung to my thoughts weeks after the last page. Based loosely on a Minnesota crime spree in the 1950s, Winter takes readers into the mind of Joe Lavoie—the wheelchair-bound lone survivor of three brothers who engaged in a shootout with police in 1953. Set in 1991, 38 years after the crippling police gunshot, the taut writing takes you into Joe’s mind and explores his dysfunctional family on what turns out to be his last stand.

Anthony Lloyd has spent his time as a war correspondent in horrific war zones like Bosnia Herzegovina and Chechnya and seen some of the worst conditions that modern war and ethnic hatreds have to offer.

Rather than just reporting on the experience, he gives you a sense of what it feels like to be in those situations, and then he goes further. While it has become common to talk about adrenaline junkies, Lloyd ups the ante by describing the heroin addiction he reverts to whenever he returns to England between assignments, and the perspective this brings to the narrative takes it to an entirely deeper level.

This book engaged me at an emotional and psychological level in a version of life that I could otherwise never even imagine. For me, that is exceptional writing. 

Plenty of memoirs have been written by combat pilots, but Call Sign Kluso is truly one-of-a-kind. It weaves a captivating personal narrative within the context of America’s resurgence from the post-Vietnam era, while demonstrating the US Air Force’s transformation into the high-tech, cutting-edge organization that defeated Saddam Hussein during Operation Desert Storm. 

“The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.” Thus begins one of the greatest war novels by one of the greatest living writers of espionage thrillers. 

Frederick Forsyth’s epic story of the Persian Gulf War mingles fact with fiction, and never lets up its humming current of suspense. Incidentally, that laughing man was Gerald Vincent Bull, a real historical figure who invented a super-gun for Saddam Hussein. Not exactly the safest line of work. 

His assassination triggered a Rube Goldberg series of events that only Forsyth would have the… well… foresight to use as the first sentence in this violent, epochal tale. 

It’d be hard to imagine a former marine, who served during the 1980’s or 1990’s, not identifying with Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead.

Swofford and his unit land in the desert sand to kickoff Operation Desert Shield, and months of boredom, anxiety, and self-doubt blanket the men. This isn’t your typical “shoot ‘em up bang bang” war diary. In fact, Swofford is a sniper who never fires a shot.

But months of patrolling an empty desert, living “the suck” life, eagerly awaiting a war to start, and the fear of the unknown drag on these marines and test their sanity. After months of grinding, the Gulf War begins then quickly ends. 

Set in former Yugoslavia, this powerful novel follows a girl whose only chance of survival is to escape war and rebuild a life elsewhere.

I found the way the author tells this story beautiful, even though the story is tragic, and describes the complexities of civil strife as well as their impact on ordinary people living in a country that is now split into Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.

“Fiction does give you a capacity for empathy,” says the author. It should–and I found that this one does.