the year in books [XV]

These books of history include both 'popular histories' and memoirs. Max Hastings' Inferno is an excellent treatment of World War Two from beginning to end; Wolfgang Faust's The Last Panther pretends to be a memoir of a tank company from the tail-end of the German war against the Russians, but it's actually fiction (despite being highly-praised). Richard Tregaskis' Guadalcanal Diary is a true account of the Guadalcanal campaign from the perspective of a reporter. William Craig's The Fall of Japan looks at the final weeks of the war against Japan, including the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Japanese maneuvers to sue for peace. Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War is a memoir of an infantryman in Vietnam and is one of the best I've read; Matt Gallagher's Kaboom! is a memoir of an infantryman in the Iraq War in the early 2000s. It, too, was an engaging and enlightening read.