I've written up several more/less annotated lists of books at various times in the past. To keep track of what I've already listed, I've collected those lists here. Over the last 4 weeks I've spent a lot of time scrounging through bookstores, making lists of more/less recent books that caught my eye for one reason or another. This list turned out to be longer and more scattered than past lists. It's taken at least as long to go through my notes, look up the actual authors and titles -- not easy to ready my scribbles -- and add a little commentary. Along the way, I've picked up even more titles. Then as I neared completion I realized the list had grown too long for a single post anyway. So this is the first of several installments, each 40-50 books long. This selection started by picking out history books, but I'm still working through my notes, so more may show up later. Not sure how many more there will be. I have at least enough left over for two more posts.

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Jonathan Alter: The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (paperback, 2007, Simon & Schuster): Something to bone up on: Paul Krugman has argued how important it is for a Democrat winning the 2008 election to push critical legislation through in the new administration's first 100 days. I suppose someone could do a comparative analysis for Democrats -- Clinton sure blew his first days, digging a hole that he never climbed out of. In any case, this year is the best prospect we've had in a long time for a Roosevelt-level tsunami. In any case, the history should be inspirational.

Alan Axelrod: The Real History of World War II: A New Look at the Past (2008, Sterling): Despite the title, this looks like a high school textbook, a nicely organized and illustated compendium of what everyone knows, with little or no additional insights. Author also wrote The Real History of the American Revolution: A New Look at the Past, just a year ago.

Andrew Bacevich: American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (paperback, 2004, Harvard University Press): Author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, a conservative who has been one of the most effective critics of US militariam. This book singles out the post-Cold War period. Note that Bacevich has a new book coming out in August: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

James Bacque: Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (revised edition, paperback, 2007, Talonbooks): Canadian historian, looks into the underside of post-WWII occupation in Europe -- Giles MacDonogh's After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation is a newer and longer book on same subject. One reason these books are of current interest is that they suggest that all occupations are flawed -- I've seen reports of Young Republicans boning up on the US occupation of Germany and Japan during their flight to Baghdad. History could have served them better (not that they cared).

Dagmar Barnouw: The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans (2005, Indiana University Press): A study of German remembrance and opinion of WWII -- mostly a story of repressed memory and distancing. Don't know how well it addresses a couple of things I wonder about: 1) post-WWII Germany (and Japan) provide a sort of "best case" outcome for defeat and occupation in a modern war, so I wonder just how good that "best case" really is; 2) to the extent Germans (and Japanese) have adopted the American view of responsibility in the war (that they have is why they are best cases) has this allowed the US to take further advantage of them in ways that will ultimately be seen as unfair and self-damaging.

James Barr: Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-1918 (2008, WW Norton): Although Britain had established effective control over Egypt and the Sudan earlier, their intervention in the Middle East starts here under the pretense of fomenting Arab nationalist revolt against the Ottomans, a schizophrenic mix of imperialism and liberation that they never understood much less mastered.

Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present (paperback, 2001, Harper Perennial): Big book, one I keep thinking I should pick up and read, not least because it appeared in Billmon's last reading list.

Antony Beevor: The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1938 (paperback, 2006, Penguin Books): The latest big book on a subject I wish I knew more about. Americans who fought for Republican Spain were subsequently diagnosed and disparaged as "premature anti-fascists" -- a rather bizarre ailment given what the fascists went on to do, all the more so given the way Neville Chamberlain is castigated for his appeasement of Hitler over the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland. The first great appeasement was over Spain, as the British, French, et al., failed to recognize what those "premature anti-fascists" knew damn well. Beevor has several war books, including previous ones on Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943 and The Fall of Berlin 1945.

Chris Bellamy: Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (2007, Knopf): Big book on the side of the war that usually gets underrecognized here. Not sure how good it is.

Patrick J Buchanan: Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (2008, Crown): Looks more like how Buchanan lost his mind. The loss of the British empire was pretty much in the cards regardless of the world wars that nudged Britain along. But the wars themselves were part of the mindset that built the empire in the first place. Germany's will to war came from the same desire for empire, pumped up marginally by revenge fantasies. To say the world wars could have been avoided is to say that Britain and Germany should have been allies instead of rivals. Right-wingers have often noted the availability of a worthy common enemy in Stalin, but in order to get that far you have to reconcile yourself to Hitler and all he stood for. I doubt that even Buchanan really wants to go that far, so why is he entertaining the prospect?

Jim Cullen: The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (new edition, paperback, 2004, Oxford University Press): A brief history of the stereotypical ideal for all America (well, almost all America).

Alfred-Maurice De Zayas: A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans (second edition, paperback, 2006, Palgrave Macmillan): This is an interesting story, and I think it has some relevance for establishing the historical context of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine -- Arabs often ask why they and not the Germans should suffer for the Holocaust, so part of the answer is that some Germans did. On the other hand, I'm not convinced that the forced removal of Germans from east Europe was such a terrible revenge -- many were newly planted as part of the Nazi war effort, and the others were used as rationales for Nazi expansionism.

Saul Friedlander: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (paperback, 2008, Harper Perennial): The latest massive survey of the Holocaust -- actually, the second volume of a set, following Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939.

AC Grayling: Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (paperback, 2007, Walker & Co.): All of a sudden there are a bunch of books that raise serious questions about the Allied bombing campaigns in WWII -- more general ones like Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke and more specific ones like: Paul Addison/Jeremy A Grant, eds: Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945; Frederick Taylor: Dresden: Tueday, February 13, 1945; Keith Lowe: Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943; Hans Erich Nossack: The End: Hamburg 1943; Marshall De Bruhl, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden. In between: Herman Krell: To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II; and Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945.

David Halberstam: War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (paperback, 2002, Scribner): First Bush; had Halberstam lived longer he could have written a sequel, War in a Time of Madness. Never read him, and not sure how sharp he really is, but this covers a big subject: how the armed forces avoided shrinking by finding new enemies and new missions after the cold war ended. I noticed another Halberstam book that might be interesting: The Fifties.

Max Hastings: Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (2008, Knopf): Big book on the last year of the war against Japan, filled with atrocities on all sides. Author of a number of other WWII books, including the matching Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945, plus one on the Korean War.

Arthur Herman: Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (2008, Bantam): It rather trivializes matters to see this as a personal rivalry, don't you think? The side-by-side pictures on the cover are evocative, especially if you recognize the economic depredation India underwent at Britain's hands -- India's share of world GDP was reduced from 20% to something like 3% before they were able to throw off the British yoke. Herman previously wrote How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It -- not what you'd call an India scholar.

Tony Horowitz: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War (paperback, 1999, Vintage Books): A journalistic survey of residual Confederate fans, sympathetic enough to be recommended by some, presumably rooted accurately enough in history to be useful.

Tony Horowitz: A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008, Henry Holt): General history of the European discovery of America, possibly incorporating travelogue. First section on Discovery hits Vinland and Santo Domingo, but the rest, up through Plymouth, settles in the future continental US.

Harold James: The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (2006; paperback, 2008, Princeton University Press): Short book on comparative empireology, with Rome and Britain as the obvious counterpoints. Previously wrote: The End of Globalization: Lessons From the Great Depression, another exercise in historical analogizing.

Charles Kaiser: 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (paperback, 1997, Grove Press): Amazon reader: "this book gives great insight to the days of rage and the background leading up to the reign of terror in America." What? Mixed reports on the music part. Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year That Rocked the World covers the same ground plus more international.

Derek Leebaert: The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World (paperback, 2003, Back Bay Books): Finally, an examination of what it cost America to wage the cold war. I doubt that the accounting includes many factors that I would add in, such as how it undermined labor unions, shifting US politics to the right, exacerbating inequality, and so forth.

Margaret Macmillan: Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (paperback, 2003, Random House): History of the post-WWI negotiations, six months that didn't change the world nearly enough. Interesting subject, although I've always felt Arno J Mayer was the historian to read on it. Macmillan also wrote Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (originally Nixon in China with same subtitle). The consistency in subtitles is striking.

J William Middendorf II: A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement (2006; paperback, 2008, Basic Books): A memoir by an insider.

David Milne: America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (2008, Hill & Wang): Title's a low blow, but that's where you have to swing to connect. The more I read about the Vietnam War, the deeper it sinks in just how pervasive a force Rostow was. He was lurking everywhere. Any time anyone had a brief glance of sanity, he was there to rub it out.

Steven Mithen: After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5,000 BC (paperback, 2006, Harvard University Press): Looks to be a fairly definitive book on archaeological sites from the period. Mithen has a number of books scratching out clues from scant archaeological evidence, most recently The Singing Neandethals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.

Benny Morris: 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (2008, Yale University Press): Morris did much of the first pass of serious research on the Palestinian refugee crisis coming out of Israel's 1948 War for Independence, and wrote a good general history, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999. He's also turned into a rabid racist, applauding the expulsions that tactful Israeli politicians have long tried to sweep under the rug.

Gary B Nash: The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2005; paperback, 2006, Penguin Books): More of a bottom-up take on the American Revolution, covering Indians, slaves, anonymous mobs, and bystanders.

Gary B Nash/Graham Russell Geo Hodges: Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and the Betrayal that Divided a Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull (2008, Basic Books): Freedom and slavery, seen from three views of the American revolution -- the betrayal, of course, was Jefferson's.

Robert O Paxton: The Anatomy of Fascism (paperback, 2005, Vintage): Author previously wrote a book about Vichy France, as well as a more general book on 20th century Europe. This one tries to extract common traits and variations of fascism, making it useful for the question of whether contemporary movements are effectively fascist -- of course, I'm thinking of the Republican fringe.

William R Polk: The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution (paperback, 2007, Harper Perennial): Fairly basic big picture history of colonial America, background for his American Revolution chapter in Violent Politics. Also curious about his earlier book, Polk's Folly: An American Family History, where he kicks around stories of ancestors, including a president, a general, various others.

Clive Ponting: A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (revised/updated edition, paperback, 2007, Penguin): Update of a book originally published in 1992. Looks back at effects of environmental degradation on various ancient civilizations, as well as projecting current environmental problems into the future. Seems to parallel Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed -- e.g., by starting with the Easter Island example.

Joachim Radkau: Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (2008, Cambridge University Press): Wide ranging survey, mostly organized by topic although many topics are historically specific -- e.g., the effects of colonialism. Epilogue on "How to Argue with Environmental History in Politics."

Alfred S Regnery: Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (2008, Threshold Editions): With Goldwater and Reagan on the cover, looking up and towards, well, their left. Book is reverential and celebratory -- among other things, the movement has bought a lot of books from the family publishing business.

James Reston Jr: Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors (2005; paperback, 2006, Anchor): The fateful year of 1492 is belatedly remembered for the coincidence of those three things. Reston has become a prolific historian of the middle ages -- The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 also looks interesting.

Sharon Rudahl: A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (paperback, 2007, New Press): At last in comics, a real superhero for you.

David Stafford: Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II (2007, Little Brown): Looks like this is limited to Europe, which leaves out the big picture (e.g., the collapse of colonialism, the origins of the cold war) in favor of a tighter, no doubt gory, narrative. At this point I'm more interested in what came next -- Giles MacDonogh's After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation picks up the story.

Sean Wilentz: The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008 (2008, Harper): Now that we can start to see how the train wrecks, it does make some sense to pin the conservative swing of the last 40 years on its sunny-minded, muddle-headed icon: the real bookends of Nixon and Bush are too cynical to define anything anyone could have believed in. Wilentz wrote a monumental book of early American history, The Rise of American Democracy -- something I'd like to relax with. This one seems likely to become a standard account of the era.

Simon Winchester: The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (2008, Harper): That would be Joseph Needham, author of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. I recall reading once about how all American Russia scholars hated Russia (or at least the Soviet Union) but all China scholars loved (even Communist) China.

Gordon S Wood: The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (2008, Penguin Books): Collection of essays, mostly book reviews from 1981 to 2007. I've always liked the utility of books about books -- not only do you get two views, you pick up a sense of how history is crafted, and how historians think. Wood is the preeminent political historian of the American Revolution/Consitution period.