the year in books [XI]

Every year I try to read a few books on the world wars, and these are some of this year's collection. Max Hasting's 1914: Europe Goes to War chronicles the events that led to the Great War (a.k.a. World War One) and how that war began up until the evolution of trench warfare on the western front. William Craig's Enemy at the Gates details the Germans vs. Russians at the Battle of Stalingrad; he pays particular attention to the experiences of soldiers and civilians, making this a phenomenal book. I wasn't as impressed with Prit Buttar's Retribution, which picks up after Stalingrad, for he deals mostly with logistics and tactics rather than fleshing out what it was like for the boots on the ground. Walter Lord's Day of Infamy: The Bombing of Pearl Harbor was a decent book. It's filled mostly with anecdotes of peoples' experiences, but there's little cogency. One minute you're on the deck of the U.S.S. Arizona, then you're at Hickam Field, and then you're in the pilot seat of a Japanese dive bomber. It gets confusing. Adam Makos' A Higher Call and Spearhead were both excellent books, the first dealing mainly with the air war over Germany from the German point-of-view, and the latter following an American tank company in Germany.