Across The Black Waters — Indian-British Soldiers at the Western Front
That British, French and German soldiers fought and died in their millions on the Western Front in WW I is …
Tag Archives: Books:War
Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War….
The civil war in Spain, 1936-1939, was the dark warning to the world of the war to follow, in almost every …
The Wound: Algeria then, Afghanistan now…
The Wound /Des Hommes, is an absolutely remarkable novel from Laurent Mauvignier, his seventh [now up to eleven] in the …
1914: Slender Novel, Big War
Although Jean Echenoz is both widely read and a winner of multiple literary prizes in France you’d have to …
The Great Swindle: Opportunities in France, 1919
Pierre Lemaitre has won a substantial following both in his native France and abroad for writing crime fiction. His Commandant Camille …
Zinky Boys: Russian Dead in Foreign Lands
Zinky Boys, Svetlana Alexievich‘s third book, and the third about war, reveals in it’s flip, bitter title, the pervading feeling …
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919
Nothing like good history, thoroughly researched and well written, helps better to put in place pieces of the immense human puzzle …
The African Queen: WW I Adventureland
Needing a break from my sometimes distressing immersion in WWI memoirs and history [here, here and here] I thought I’d …
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain’s Memoir of WW I
Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, recently brought to view by the movie of the same name, unaccountably escaped my decades long reading …
Boots to the Sun — An Italian Memoir of the “Great War”
Two indispensable companions are always with me on late-life trips across the seven continents. Leading the way is my excited-to-be-there, take-everything-in life …
Naples Liberated: Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin”
It is hard to think of another work of fiction of such savage irony as Curzio Malaparte‘s La Pelle (1949) …
The Pope and Mussolini
Reading David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini:The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe will be a …