June 2012 Meeting: "To End All Wars"

The book discussed at the June 2012 meeting was To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild, one of our favorite authors.

This is what Barnes and Noble says about the book:

World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.  

Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the “war to end all wars.” Can we ever avoid repeating history? 

Winner of the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction

Here is a summary of the club's discussion.

Here is a comment on the book by a club member.

During the meeting one of our members gave a brief summary of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam  Eliza Griswold. Here is his comment on the book.

May 2012 meeting: "1861: The Civil War Awakening"

The Barnes and Noble History Book Club met to discuss 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart.

Here is what Barnes and Noble says about the book:

1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents’ faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal. It set Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom. 

The book introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes — among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Adam Goodheart takes us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at this moment of ultimate crisis and decision.

Click here for a summary of the discussion of the book at the meeting.

Here are comments on the book by a club member.

• Comment 3
• Comment 2
• Comment 1

April 2012 meeting: "Ornament of the World"

The Barnes and Noble History Book Club met this month to discuss Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal.

Here is the Barnes and Noble description of the book:

Widely hailed as a revelation of a "lost" golden age, this history brings to vivid life the rich and thriving culture of medieval Spain where, for more than seven centuries, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, and literature, science, and the arts flourished.

Click here for the comments by one of our members on the book. 

March 2012 meeting: "The Great Gamble"

The March meeting of the the Barnes and Noble History Book Club discussed The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan by Gregory Feifer.

Here is the description of the book from the Barnes and Noble website:

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a grueling debacle that has striking lessons for the twenty-first century. In The Great Gamble, Gregory Feifer examines the conflict from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground. During the last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent some of its most elite troops to unfamiliar lands in Central Asia to fight a vaguely defined enemy, which eventually defeated their superior numbers with unconventional tactics. Although the Soviet leadership initially saw the invasion as a victory, many Russian soldiers came to view the war as a demoralizing and devastating defeat, the consequences of which had a substantial impact on the Soviet Union and its collapse. 

Feifer's extensive research includes eye-opening interviews with participants from both sides of the conflict. In gripping detail, he vividly depicts the invasion of a volatile country that no power has ever successfully conquered. Parallels between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are impossible to ignore—both conflicts were waged amid vague ideological rhetoric about freedom. Both were roundly condemned by the outside world for trying to impose their favored forms of government on countries with very different ways of life. And both seem destined to end on uncertain terms. 

A groundbreaking account seen through the eyes of the men who fought it, The Great Gamble tells an unforgettable story full of drama, action, and political intrigue whose relevance in our own time is greater than ever.

Click here for a comment by a member of the club on the meeting.

Click here for the members original comment on the book.

February 2012 meeting: "The Enemy at the Gate"

In February, 2012 we read The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe by Andrew Wheatcroft.

Here is the description of the book from the Barnes and Noble website:

In 1683, an Ottoman army that stretched from horizon to horizon set out to seize the “Golden Apple,” as Turks referred to Vienna. The ensuing siege pitted battle-hardened Janissaries wielding seventeenth-century grenades against Habsburg armies, widely feared for their savagery. The walls of Vienna bristled with guns as the besieging Ottoman host launched bombs, fired cannons, and showered the populace with arrows during the battle for Christianity’s bulwark. Each side was sustained by the hatred of its age-old enemy, certain that victory would be won by the grace of God. 

The Great Siege of Vienna is the centerpiece for historian Andrew Wheatcroft’s richly drawn portrait of the centuries-long rivalry between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires for control of the European continent. A gripping work by a master historian, The Enemy at the Gate offers a timely examination of an epic clash of civilizations.

Here are posts by one of our members on the book:

• A last thought on The Enemy at the Gate
• A Janissary's Essay: How I Spent the Summer of 1683
• Review: The Enemy at the Gate
• A thought on the 1683 Siege of Vienna
• History seems to strange, and our times will feel strange to more enlightened future people

January 2012 meeting: "The Cold War"

In January 2012 we discussed The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis.

Here is the description of the book from the Barnes and Noble website:

The “dean of Cold War historians” (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.

Here are some posts on the book by one of our members:

• Thinking about the end of the Cold War
• Benefits of Size versus Benefits of Local Rule
• Gaddis' book, The Cold War

December 2011 meeting: "The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome"

In December, 2011 the History Book Club discussed The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome by Christopher Kelly. We had a lively and thoughtful meeting -- including a couple of new members. As we had read "Augustus" by Anthony Everitt a few months ago about the peak of the empire we connected with the Kelly when he describes the irony of the name of the last emperor of the destroyed empire, Romulus Augustulus, "his name a pathetic recollection of the legendary founder and its first emperor". Kelly goes on to say that "it was a measure of Romulus' unimportance that he was not even thought worthy of assassination" but was pensioned off in the country.  We all agreed, however, that the answer as to why the Roman empire "declined" and "failed" was "all of the above".  In other words too many reasons, external and internal, to enumerate.The discussion did range to what set the Huns on the move including speculation that it was military and "living space" pressures from the Mongols.

Here is the Barnes and Noble website description of the book:

History remembers Attila, the leader of the Huns, as the Romans perceived him: a savage barbarian brutally inflicting terror on whoever crossed his path. Christopher Kelly, a professor of ancient history at Cambridge University, presents quite a different portrait. Drawing on original texts, including the only eyewitness description of Attila and his court, Kelly reveals Attila to be both a master warrior and an astute strategist. His Attila brilliantly exploited the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman Empire, conspiring with a treacherous Roman general, avoiding the assassination plots of a powerful eunuch, and accepting a marriage proposal from the emperor's sister. A compelling and original exploration of the clash between empire and barbarity, The End of Empire challenges our own ideas about imperialism, civilization, terrorist, and superpowers.

Here are some posts by one of our members on the book.

• The End of Empire 
• Attila and the Huns (A good name for a band!)
• Thougths on reading about Attila