Here are 100 books that The Storm of Steel fans have personally recommended if you like
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My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
I was still a child when the Vietnam War ended, but for some reason, I always felt it was my war. It’s what I read about; it filed the movies I watched in high school. It was the war we trained for when I joined the Marines.
Marlantes arrived in Vietnam about the time I was born. Like the three preceding it, his memoir was written with a great deal of time for reflection. I feel that this interval between the action and the recounting of it adds a level of complexity to remembrances of a very harrowing time.
"Matterhorn" author Karl Marlantes' nonfiction debut is a powerful book about the experience of combat and how inadequately we prepare our young men and women for the psychological and spiritual stresses of war. One of the most important and highly-praised books of 2011, Karl Marlantes' "What It Is Like to Go to War" is set to become just as much of a classic as his epic novel "Matterhorn". In 1968, at the age of twenty-two, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty Marines who would live or…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
Before reading this book, I knew very little about the British Burma campaign. Fraser’s memoir is so compelling because it was written forty years after the events it describes.
I love that he can reflect on his time in Burma and the knowledge gained over the intervening period. I also appreciate that he acknowledges how the passage of time may have colored his memories.
After 25 years of chronicling the military misadventures of Flashman, the Victorian arch-cad, George MacDonald Fraser has temporarily deserted fiction to write this, his own personal account of the Burma War. In this book he describes life and death in Nine Section, a small group of hard-bitten and possibly eccentric Cumbrian borderers with whom the author, then 19, served in the last great land campaign of World War II. The book describes the experience when the 17th Black Cat Division captured a vital strongpoint deep in Japanese territory, held it against counter-attack and spearheaded the final assault in which the…
My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
This book is the story of an incredible life. I love reading about service members who achieve great things after their time in uniform, especially when discussing how their service impacts their follow-on careers.
Daly has lived an amazing life from the frozen battlefields of Korea to the Kennedy administration. Daly’s journalism training is apparent in that he provides only the most important details and recollections from a life filled with incredible adventures.
This memoir was also written well after the events discussed which I feel is a requirement for a true reflective memoir.
An Irishman in the U.S Marine Corps, Charles U. Daly thinks fighting in Korea will be an adventure and a way to live up to a family tradition of service and soldiering. He comes home decorated, wounded, and traumatized, wondering what's next. His quest for a new mission will take him to JFK's White House, Bobby Kennedy's fateful campaign, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and a South African township devastated by the AIDS epidemic. Chuck's life is a true story of living up to Kennedy's challenge to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
My entire life has revolved around the military. At seven years old, I decided that I would serve my country as a Marine, so my formative years were spent reading as much as I could about the ideas of service, leadership, combat, and sacrifice. I joined the Corps at seventeen and spent the next twenty-one years trying to live up to those stories I read as a child. Now, I divide my time between training special operations Marines for combat, writing about my experiences, and encouraging veterans of all services to put their stories on paper as a senior editor for the Lethal Minds Journal. I share the lessons I’ve learned in my weekly substack, Walking Point.
I love Tellessen’s writing style. It is honest, brutal at times, and often beautiful. I began my Marine Corps service as a Marine Grunt and share a kinship with Tellessen. Many of his stories feel like stories that I lived or could have lived.
I think that is the gift of a great storyteller. He tells the good and bad of what it means to be a Marine in a way that makes me wish I was young enough to do it all again.
2023 Eugene Sledge Award winner for best Marine Corps memoir of the past three years
Kacy Tellessen is a grunt. After completing high school in rural Washington, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and began the hero's journey he imagined might parallel those epic tales he'd consumed throughout adolescence. But what Tellessen lived through--from boot camp to the battlefield and home again--had little in common with Homer's tales or Hollywood's depictions.
In his memoir, Tellessen offers a truer account of life as an infantryman: the complicated, conflicting, adrenaline-pumping, and traumatic experience of war. Though much of our country's fighting and…
I’m a historian of modern Europe and France and have focused my research and writing on the First World War for almost 30 years now. The war remains the “original catastrophe” of the catastrophic 20th century and continues to shape our world in decisive ways here in the 21st century. I don’t think there are many topics that are of clearer and more urgent interest, and what fascinates me most is how every day, individual people experienced these colossal events, events that seemed only very personal and intimate to most of them at the time. It is with this in mind that I’ve chosen the books on my list.
Not as well known as Henri Barbusse’s great novel Under Fire (Le feu), Chevalier’s book should be on everyone’s shelf of works on the Great War. This aptly titled novel is very obviously based on Chevalier’s own experiences serving as a soldier at the front. The writing is haunting and evocative of the extreme trauma of combat, the miseries of life in the trenches, and the emotional responses of young soldiers to the broader society that sent them to war.
First published in 1930, Fear graphically describes the terrible experiences of soldiers during World War I. It tells the story of Jean Dartemont, a young man called up in 1915. He is not a rebel, but neither is he awed by hierarchical authority. After an exceedingly short training period, he refuses to follow his platoon and is sent to Artois and the trenches. With absolute realism, Gabriel Chevallier depicts what he experienced every day, for months: violence, blood, death, bodies ...
One day, he is wounded, evacuated and hospitalised. The nurses consider it their duty to stimulate the soldiers' fighting…
Tim Cook is the Great War historian at the Canadian War Museum. Since 2002, he has curated the permanent First World War gallery of the CWM, which has been visited by an estimated 8 million people, and he has created many temporary, traveling, and digital exhibitions. He is also the author or editor of 13 books of Canadian military history. For his contributions to the study of Canadian history, he is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Order of Canada. He has selected five books that cover the scope of the war, from its origins to the legacy.
Amid the industrial war of fire and fury, a key question remains on how the soldiers survived. Watson’s book explores the experience for British and German soldiers, drawing upon their letters and diaries. Enduring the Great War offers new ways to understand the war of the trenches, how morale was sustained, and it provides an inner portrait into the men who took in the grinding warfare.
This book is an innovative comparative history of how German and British soldiers endured the horror of the First World War. Unlike existing literature, which emphasises the strength of societies or military institutions, this study argues that at the heart of armies' robustness lay natural human resilience. Drawing widely on contemporary letters and diaries of British and German soldiers, psychiatric reports and official documentation, and interpreting these sources with modern psychological research, this unique account provides fresh insights into the soldiers' fears, motivations and coping mechanisms. It explains why the British outlasted their opponents by examining and comparing the motives…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
Both of my grandfathers served in WWI. Growing up on their stories, I had a keen interest in WWI. A lover of history, I attended an exhibit at the Smithsonian called The Faces of War that focused on prosthetic masks made by artists during WWI for men whose faces had been mutilated by war. Having always wanted to write a historical novel, I merged my interest in WWI with a newfound passion for these faces of war and wrote Day Lights the Bone (not yet published). The novel is set in a military hospital in Wandsworth, England, during the final months of WWI. I am a professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN, where for many years I taught and served as Director of The Creative Writing Programs.
The culmination of the trilogy, The Ghost Road, continues Barker’s exploration of the morality of war as the war draws to an end. Dr. Rivers’ successful treatment of Billy Prior has resulted in Prior’s return to the front where he prepares to enter the war’s final battles, detailing his experiences in a diary. Rivers’ himself continues to care for patients while revisiting pivotal scenes from his own past.
Set in the closing months of World War I, this towering novel combines poetic intensity with gritty realism as it brings Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy to its stunning conclusion.
In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making." In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with…
I’m originally from New York but have lived in Portugal for the last 33 years. I write my novels in English and my children’s books in Portuguese. As anyone who reads my latest novel will discover, I have been greatly influenced the mythology and mystical traditions of various religions, especially Judaism (kabbalah). Happily, I discovered early on that I adore writing about people who have been systematically persecuted and silenced. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment to explore taboo subjects and topics that others would prefer to forget or conceal. When I’m not working on a book, I like to garden and travel.
World War I caused 20 million deaths and left 21 million wounded.
Soldiers who survived the gas attacks and trench warfare often returned to societies eager to forget the atrocities of the conflict and move on. Remarque’s insightfully written novel details the struggles of three German soldiers who return home only to discover that they may have no place in a nation that has learned almost nothing from what they regard as a senseless and immoral war.
In May of 1933, this novel and the rest of Remarque's writing were declared “unpatriotic” by the Nazi dictatorship and all his novels were banned.
After surviving several horrifying years in the inferno of the Western Front, a young German soldier and his cohorts return home at the end of WW1. Their road back to life in civilian world is made arduous by their bitterness about what they find in post-war society. A captivating story, one of Remarque's best.
I’m an experienced historian, biographer, and storyteller. I’ve written widely about Australian politics, social history, sport, and World War I. My biography of Australia’s most famous fighting general, Pompey Elliott, won multiple national awards, and I assembled his extraordinary letters and diaries in a separate book, Pompey Elliott at War: In His Own Words. Another biography, Will Dyson: Australia’s Radical Genius, about a remarkably versatile artist–writer who was Australia’s first official war artist, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. My multi-biography Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History, and I’ve written a sequel, Life So Full of Promise.
It’s not common for books about WWI to contain detailed analysis of both the battlefields and the home front (although this dual coverage is a feature of my lost generation multi-biographies).
To compile a comprehensive history of Australia during the war that combines what happened at home with what occurred at the various fronts is indeed a daunting task, yet Joan Beaumont accomplished it with conspicuous success in this acclaimed and award-winning book.
Winner of the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History.The Great War is, for many Australians, the event that defined our nation. The larrikin diggers, trench warfare, and the landing at Gallipoli have become the stuff of the Anzac 'legend'. But it was also a war fought by the families at home. Their resilience in the face of hardship, their stoic acceptance of enormous casualty lists and their belief that their cause was just, made the war effort possible.Broken Nation is the first book to bring together all the dimensions of World War I. Combining deep scholarship with powerful…
I retired from Drexel University in 2015 after thirty-six years as a professor of German and European History of the 19th and 20th Centuries. My sub-specialty in the History of Technology carried over into publications that over the years focused increasingly on the Prussian/German Army (The Politics of Technological Change in Prussia [1993] and The Kaiser’s Army [2001]) and naval conflict (Clash of the Capital Ships [2021]).
Paschall brings to this book his insightful experience of army organizations and war as an infantry officer and veteran of the Vietnam conflagration. Readers can follow in detail the allied offensives of 1917, Germany’s last gasp effort to win on the Western Front in 1918 after Russia’s collapse in the east, and the retreat and breakdown of the once impressive German army in the waning months of the war.
January 1917. On the Western Front the armies of Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France were locked in grim stalemate. Repeated attempts by both sides to achieve breakthrough in the face of machine-gun fire, barbed wire, long-range artillery, and poison gas had brought only enormous casualties. The Defeat of Imperial Germany focuses on the innovative plans created by generals on both sides in their struggles to dislodge the entrenched enemy and to restore maneuver and victory on the Western Front. In a series of vivid analyses of successive offensives, Paschall examines the problems of command and what happened when the…
