I second Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I had it on my list for 20 years, but was intimidated by the sheer size of it. When I finally plunged in, I found it surprisingly readable for a layman, and of course comprehensive.
Another vote for The Boys in The Boat … and then a bit of historical fiction that ties in with the Hudson River theme portion of that book is The Traitor’s Wife by Allison Pataki.
The Traitor’s Wife is about Benedict Arnold and Peggy Shippen Arnold who plotted to give up West Point to the British. It seems to me that we all know the broad outlines of the story, but the book touches on the inner workings of the Revolution and life in America at a time when no one knew what the future would hold and which side would win out.
Written by a local law professor:
Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was written with a newspaperman’s eye, it was basically an on the ground view of what was going on there, and more importantly, it also was an eyewitness account of the German people themselves, and isn’t full of the decades of trying to sugar coat what happened, that most German’s didn’t know until it was too late, that they didn’t realize what Hitler was doing, and like Larsen’s book it points out that it would have taken someone pretty out of it not to know (Shirer made the statement that if the Nazi era Germans later cursed Hitler, it was for losing the war, and Manchester in his book “The Arms of Krupp” laid out not only the roots of the whole ubermensch idea (and that is another fantastic book), but also that it took a generation to break from all of that.
No one book is going to do it on Nazi Germany and how much what happened was a case of , as Churchill said, the “Imponderable If’s accumulating”. If the USSR didn’t exist, Hitler would have been disposed of even if he came to power, but the western countries and institutions like the Catholic Church saw Hitler as a bulwark against Soviet communism (it was the big reason behind the UK’s appeasement policy; it wasn’t weakness, dear old Neville and his umbrella at Munich, it was the belief they could work with Hitler, since after all, Germany was a “Christian” nation; when for example the US ambassador to Germany started filing harsh reports on the Nazi regime, he was told to cease and desist, and the US government put pressure on newspapers and such to tone down reporting, as not to displease Hitler). If France hadn’t taken such a beating in WWI, they likely might have forced Hitler out of power by simply sending a company of men when Hitler took the Rhineland, and at the time of the invasion of Poland had France fought back, they very well likely would have beaten the German army on the western Front and basically forced hitler out (France had more troops, armor, aircraft and artillery than Germany did), there were only a couple of German Divisions on the western front,but France was just too haunted by WWI and the millions they lost that they didn’t have the will to fight.
Daniel Goldhagen’s books on the German People and on the Vatican also help frame the picture of why Hitler succeeded and why things happened the way they did (and for example, why the Church was one of the biggest conduits for escaping German war criminals at the end of WWII, many of them travelled under church papers).
In terms of “Searching for Hitler” on the History Channel, I recommend watching it, the guys who did the investigating were not the typical schnooks you see on programs there, and they investigated claims, and they laid out the case step by step, including detailing how an escape could have happened, the likely route, and also it highlights the planning the Nazi’s had in case the war went badly. They are very careful to say they can’t prove anything, what they did show was there was a lot of question about the tale of how Hitler died, how there weren’t eyewitness accounts, how the story of the gunshots being heard was basically BS, and how there would have been routes out. The people investigating it included someone who professionally tracked war criminals, and a guy who was the UN nuclear investigator they made the movie “Syriana” about. To be honest, it made my think at the end that there was a good chance Hitler could have escaped and died in South America, among other things, with the cold war raging and South America a hotbed of cold war actions, no one wanted to upset the apple cart, no one cared. One of the reasons I think that there is some validity? The program came about when papers were declassified, reams of them, of reports of Hitler being alive in South America, and they were declassified only in 2014…why? If it was all myth, why only release them 60 years after the fact…tells me something was being hid, and like much classified stuff, because it was politically embarassing…
Finished the Hot Zone. It was really good. I had to look up what Ebola does to the body and I think his descriptions are a bit off and way over sensationalized. With that said, I still think this was a great book. It seems to have stood the test of time (20 years is a long time in the health/science world!) and shows how dangerously close we really are to a global pandemic. I’m actually truly amazed that it hasn’t happened yet.
I will say that reading it is not for those with a weak stomach (which I do have but luckily words don’t bother me all that much… it’s the images I can’t stand!)
Up next is Bonk, a suggestion by @VeryHappy . I happened to see it on my advisor’s shelf and remembered someone on here had recommended it. So I asked if I could borrow it 
@romanigypsyeyes :
We are pretty close to one, and infectious disease specialists are worried about it. One of the things that is worrying them is with the kind of warm temperatures we are seeing in much of the world, that the diseases like ebola that tend to concentrate in the tropics are going to spread further, especially as the vectors, like mosquitoes, start ranging further and further. People think of global warming/climate change in terms of things like bad storms, seacoast being buried and destruction, but if the predictions are true about how the climate is getting warmer, we may see big problems long before coastline is lost and so forth.
Today on NPR I heard about a nonfiction book that sounds absolutely fascinating: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer.
It’s about efforts of save precious old manuscripts.
Ha ^^^ I put that on hold at the library about three weeks ago.
A fun and fast read is The Joy of Drinking by Barbara Holland. Apparently our founding fathers were quite often pickled. When you’re not sure of your water supply…
http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Drinking-Barbara-Holland/dp/1596913371
P.S. Anything by Barbara Holland is good!
The Zika virus is a disaster happening right now. Very scary, IMO.
The Zika Virus is absolutely and completely being overblown. Yes, if you and/or your sexual partner are pregnant, it is absolutely something to potentially be fearful of (Note: it hasn’t actually been proven that this is tied to microcephaly. There are conflicting reports about whether or not there has even been in an increase in cases since Zika appeared- or if there is simply an increase in “reported” cases which turn out to be false positives.). For the vast, vast majority of everyone else it is like getting a mild flu… and that’s if you even show any symptoms at all (only about 20% of people do).
There are plenty of diseases that people should actually be afraid of. Zika shouldn’t really be on that list, IMO. (Again, unless you and/or your partner are or plan on becoming pregnant in the very near future.)
Here’s a link: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/zika-virus-outbreak/brazil-revises-birth-defect-count-zika-investigation-n505486
I thought they had confirmed the microcephaly link in the past couple of weeks for sure. Don’t remember the study, but saw something in the past 10 days or so. The CDC site is reporting that it is a cause as well. There also apparently are links to Guillain Barre, which can be very serious. So far there have been 388 cases of travel-related Zika in the United States. The types of mosquitoes that spread Zika do live in parts of the US, and it can also be sexually transmitted. Also… people get pregnant without planning to. And avoiding mosquito bites is difficult (if it were easy, we would have wiped out malaria long ago).
Certainly it isn’t our biggest public health threat, but attention and funding now can keep it from becoming a much bigger deal. Would hate to see it get a strong foothold in our more tropical states – you can’t expect people to avoid getting pregnant and/or mosquito bitten forever, and the consequences can be pretty dire. And like all public health threats, borders don’t stop it. So it if we ignore it in the rest of the world, it will eventually be on our doorstep.
The problem is that we’ve been trying to fight this “thing” for years (centuries, really). The only real way is to control the A. Aegypti mosquito… which we’ve spent billions upon billions of dollars doing over the years. A surge in funding now isn’t really going to do anything.
I’m not saying it’s not a problem. I’m saying I hate the media hype around these things and the overkill reaction that they elicit. Every time a new illness pops up, it 's a “disaster” and we throw billions at it.
Yes, I recognize that people get pregnant accidentally (and yes, I know all too well that half of US pregnancies are unplanned/unwanted/mistimed). This is especially problematic in Latin/South American countries where contraception and abortion are limited if not completely outlawed.
And yes, I’ve heard about the possible link between GBS and Zika. But I’ve not seen anything that says Zika is any more likely to cause GBS than any other virus/infection.
Back to books… I’m quite a ways into Bonk and I am laughing out loud at least once or twice during every page.
There are conflicting reports about whether or not there has even been in an increase in cases since Zika appeared- or if there is simply an increase in “reported” cases which turn out to be false positives.). For the vast, vast majority >>>>
I swear I saw a leading evening news report saying the CDC (maybe)had positively confirmed the link.
Imperfect Garden
Hope and memory
Both by Tzvetan Todorov
When Death Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. (Read most of it on a flight yesterday. So beautiful)
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (World War I memoir)
Unbroken. (Former Olympian Louis Zamperini in WW II)
The Devil’s Cup (world history of coffee, highly entertaining)
Anything by David McCullugh (sp), the Killer Angels technically fiction but historically accurate.
@GCMom -
Both are great books. If you liked Goodbye to All That, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon and Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell are also good reads.
I am reading “Hissing Cousins” about the rivalry between Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Pretty interesting.
I would also recommend a historical fiction “America’s First Daughter”. It is about the life of Patsy Jefferson Randolph, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson. It is fiction but as someone who has made a study of Jefferson and his family, it rings very true. All plots and subplots are real. Only the emotions and the dialogue of the characters are imagined but realistic.