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  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    Can anyone recommend a book on the 30 years war? I remember reading a review in the Times culture supplement a few months ago but I cannot think of the name of it. If anyone knows the name, please let me know. Failing that, any good book on the 30 years war would be fine. Thanks.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,844 ✭✭✭pavb2


    Thirty Years War 1618- 1648 (Essential Histories) - Richard Bonney

    I've got this on Amazon wish list seems to have reasonable reviews it's one of the Osprey type military books but fine for me as I'm only looking for introduction/overview.

    Hope this helps


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 6,093 ✭✭✭Amtmann


    #15 wrote: »
    Can anyone recommend a book on the 30 years war? I remember reading a review in the Times culture supplement a few months ago but I cannot think of the name of it. If anyone knows the name, please let me know. Failing that, any good book on the 30 years war would be fine. Thanks.

    Geoffrey Parker has a great book on it.


  • Registered Users Posts: 7 ukulelvis


    Also there's the new(ish) "Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War" by Peter Wilson. Am about to tackle into that myself.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 6,093 ✭✭✭Amtmann


    pavb2 wrote: »
    Thirty Years War 1618- 1648 (Essential Histories) - Richard Bonney

    I've got this on Amazon wish list seems to have reasonable reviews it's one of the Osprey type military books but fine for me as I'm only looking for introduction/overview.

    Hope this helps

    I actually bought that one very recently. To be honest I was very disappointed. For the price you're better of getting a proper history, such as Parker's. That's just my opinion though!


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  • Registered Users Posts: 3,745 ✭✭✭Eliot Rosewater


    I wonder could anyone recommend a good introduction to the Spanish Civil War. I have only previously read Orwells book.

    Im stuck between: With so many reviews of each on Amazon.co.uk, each book is labeled biased at least a few times. Thoughts?

    :)


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 25 sparkfire


    The Prince by Machiavelli is an interesting text even it does have a cynical view of humanity. Candide is also an entertaining satire of 18th century society written by the philosopher Voltaire.


  • Registered Users Posts: 282 ✭✭patsman07


    World War two An Autobiography. Nearly finished it. Very good read. Taken from many personal accounts of the whole war.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    Anyone know a good book on Nazi Racial Theory? Or any material relating to it? Particularly in relation to Ireland, Britain and/or the Celts.

    Even conference documents, anything really....!

    Thanks.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 6,556 ✭✭✭the_monkey


    Right now I am reading The Rise and fall of the third reich by William L Shirer, excellent account of events in Germany from 1920 - 1945...


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 588 ✭✭✭R.Dub.Fusilier


    #15 wrote: »
    Anyone know a good book on Nazi Racial Theory? Or any material relating to it? Particularly in relation to Ireland, Britain and/or the Celts.

    Even conference documents, anything really....!

    Thanks.

    try "Ireland Germany and the Nazis" from 4 courts press. sorry cant remember the author. i have it around somewhere and dipped in and out of it but havent read it in full but its ok.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    Thanks fellas but I'm really looking for something more specific. I have an interest in Nazi policy towards people of Irish ethnicity.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 16,165 ✭✭✭✭brianthebard


    #15 wrote: »
    Anyone know a good book on Nazi Racial Theory? Or any material relating to it? Particularly in relation to Ireland, Britain and/or the Celts.

    Even conference documents, anything really....!

    Thanks.

    Most/All of Nazi racial theory is based on concepts which were well established in the German psyche long before Hitler came to power. As such I'm not sure there is a lot written on the topic by the Nazis, certainly not about Irish people. I don't think they were bothered tbh.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    Most/All of Nazi racial theory is based on concepts which were well established in the German psyche long before Hitler came to power. As such I'm not sure there is a lot written on the topic by the Nazis, certainly not about Irish people. I don't think they were bothered tbh.

    Thanks. What is the best source of info for Nazi plans on post-war Europe. Most books mention it, obviously. But were there concrete plans for every part of Europe beyond lebensraum and if so, where would I get a book on such a topic?
    Long shot, I know!


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 16,165 ✭✭✭✭brianthebard


    lebensraum didn't apply to the whole of Europe. Just start with a basic history book on the Nazi Party or Nazi Germany and progress from there based on interesting topics in the book and its bibliography.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    lebensraum didn't apply to the whole of Europe. Just start with a basic history book on the Nazi Party or Nazi Germany and progress from there based on interesting topics in the book and its bibliography.

    I've read a decent amount on Nazi Germany, going back to my university days. Bit tired of general histories at the minute.
    I will have a look at the bibliographies, never thought of that. Thanks.

    I'm kinda looking for a topic for a masters too, hence the obscure nature of the request!


  • Registered Users Posts: 130 ✭✭Psychedelia


    i was wondering could anyone recommend a book/books regarding history of ireland in the (18th) 19thy and early 20th century?

    i was looking for a fair but no overly comprehensive account.
    Its for myself in that i want to improve my knowledge of history but also this is a request from a friend who is not irish therefore i didn't want to recommend a whole library of books to them!

    hlep much appreciated!


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    i was wondering could anyone recommend a book/books regarding history of ireland in the (18th) 19thy and early 20th century?

    i was looking for a fair but no overly comprehensive account.
    Its for myself in that i want to improve my knowledge of history but also this is a request from a friend who is not irish therefore i didn't want to recommend a whole library of books to them!

    hlep much appreciated!

    Moody and Martin might be a decent starting point. See what interests you in it and then take it from there.

    It is very good for someone getting to grips with Irish history IMO.

    I really like Joe Lee's book, but it only covers the 20th century.
    Roy Foster has one too, I think he covers from c1600-1970.

    I'm sure Brianthebard or someone could give you a better idea, but there's a few to start you off.

    The Course of Irish History would be my pick.
    http://www.amazon.com/Course-Irish-History-T-Moody/dp/1570980152

    http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Ireland-1600-1972-Penguin-history/dp/0140132503/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276637796&sr=1-1

    http://www.amazon.com/Ireland-1912-1985-Politics-Joseph-Lee/dp/0521377412/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276637817&sr=1-1


  • Registered Users Posts: 130 ✭✭Psychedelia


    thanks a million!


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    Can anyone recommend a good general history of Europe?

    I'm about to buy Norman Davies' Europe: A History. Just wondering if a better book is available?


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 16,165 ✭✭✭✭brianthebard


    What years? The wider the timeline the less detailed and informative the book will be.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    What years? The wider the timeline the less detailed and informative the book will be.

    I'm looking for something in that mould. Similar to Davies - a wide sweep of European History. Prehistory to 20th C.


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,371 ✭✭✭Fuinseog


    am reading "Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944-1945". it gives adifferent perspective on D Day.

    In recent times, the world has become more sensitive than once it was about so-called “collateral damage” - the injury or killing of bystanders in the course of mankind's wars. In 1944-45, however, while the allied liberators of Europe did their utmost to spare the innocent and succour the afflicted, civilians suffered appallingly for their deliverance from tyranny.
    Guilt for abuses was certainly not evenly shared. The Russians behaved vastly worse than the Anglo-American armies. But William Hitchcock writes: “Liberated civilians viewed their liberators with anxiety and even, at times, fear...The young American, British or Russian soldiers who defeated the Germans were seldom as virtuous in their behaviour as the cause for which they fought. They frequently abused their power and authority.”
    Hitchcock, an American college professor, has produced the first book I have read that explicitly addresses the plight of civilians during the “crusade for Europe”. He begins with the experiences of the population of Normandy in the summer of 1944, which go far to explain the bitterness with which many greeted their disappointed “saviours”.
    Some 3,000 French people died on D-day - about the same number as allied deaths on the same day - amid the storm of bombs and shells that accompanied the assault. In all, nearly 20,000 civilians perished during the campaign. Great areas of the region were laid waste by the allies: nearly 800 civilians died in the beautiful cathedral town of Lisieux alone. “Words can't describe the destruction,” said one witness. “Coventry and London are nothing compared to this...If a bomb had been placed in every house the damage could not have been greater.”
    Beyond deaths, many households within reach of the battlefield suffered pillage. My own father wrote an account of encountering a flock of geese in a Norman farmyard under fire, which with some difficulty he caught and killed with a penknife, before returning to his delighted messmates with a laden Jeep. No more than thousands of other British and American soldiers did he stop to think that livestock represented the livelihoods of local farmers. Hitchcock says that the theft and looting began almost immediately after D-Day: in Colombières, just a few miles from the landing beaches, one woman had her house ransacked by Canadians: “It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows and trucks, the men stole, pillaged, sacked everything... clothing, boots, provisions, even money from our strong box.” Many French people later asserted that the allies were less respectful of property than the Germans were.



    From the autumn of 1944 until the end of the war, Belgians also complained bitterly about American troops systematically looting furniture and household possessions. The Liège press started using the term “gangsters” about US soldiers, and there were reports of armed hold-ups and the theft of valuables from passers-by. American official hypocrisy in refusing to regulate brothels also ensured that the armies carried venereal disease everywhere they went (by the end of the war, helped partly by a shortage of condoms, 14% of American troops were estimated to have the disease). A recent French film seeks to glamorise the wartime contribution of French colonial troops, yet in truth their units were notorious for rape and murder.
    Hitchcock, whose study of military behaviour focuses chiefly on the US Army, notes that while only 15 white American soldiers were executed for crimes in Europe during 1944-45, 55 black Americans were hanged for rape or murder. This almost certainly represented the harsher attitude adopted by the American high command towards black offenders. Many men guilty of grievous mistreatment of civilians were lightly treated. The author writes: “The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.” With the American entry into Germany, the situation seems to have have become even worse, with the army's Judge Advocate General reporting “an avalanche” of new cases. When a Stars and Stripes reporter tried to file a story in March 1945 about the widespread prevalence of rape in the Rhineland, it was suppressed by army censors.
    The British Army was by no means blameless. Yvette Levy, a concentration-camp victim who was liberated in 1945, experienced terrible cruelties at the hands of the Red Army, which was as ready to beat and rape Hitler's victims as his people. But, when at last she and some of her companions reached the western zone, they met British soldiers demanding sex in exchange for food. “A man in uniform loses all his dignity,” she said bitterly. “I don't know what these men thought of us - they must have taken us for wild animals.”
    There were an estimated 5.7m foreign civilians in Germany, a mixture of prisoners and forced labourers, all in desperate circumstances. Most became DPs (displaced persons), herded into allied camps where some remained for years. The unlucky were repatriated eastward, to face Stalin's savage vengeance against even those of his citizens who had been captured fighting bravely, as well as those who had chosen to serve the Germans. Hitchcock omits a significant, oft-missed nuance about the Cossacks returned to the Soviet Union. It is mistaken to perceive them all as innocents. In German uniform, many had been involved in frightful atrocities against Yugoslavs and north Italians.
    The author, though, tells extremely well the story of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the newly created organisation that sought to relieve the plight of millions. It suffered, he says, “from a good deal of reckless amateurism, poor planning and just plain naivety. Its well-meaning but overmatched staff sometimes seemed like playground matrons trying to keep order in a nasty world of knife fights and street brawls”. But he concludes, surely rightly, that given the colossal scale of the problems that UNRRA faced, running camps and shipping $4 billion of food and medical aid across Europe and Asia amid constant friction with the military authorities, it did as well as anybody could have expected.
    Some of the book's most striking passages address the liberation of the concentration camps. Most histories record the outpouring of compassion by men and women of the allied forces towards the human skeletons they found huddled behind the wire. Yet instead, says Hitchcock, the overwhelming sentiment among soldiers and reporters was “physical repulsion and disgust...It is not the closeness but the distance between the liberators and liberated that stands out”.
    The incomers tried to do the right thing, sure enough, but it was hard for them to grasp the nature of the unspeakable experience that the prisoners had endured. There was a tendency to treat all as a common herd, and an impatience towards Jews who sought recognition of the unique nightmare for which their people had been chosen.
    A British general objected to the appointment of a Jewish chaplain as liaison officer between Jewish DPs and the army, writing that this would “involve the creation of special preferential treatment for the benefit of a particular religious sect, and therefore [be] unacceptable”. At the end of 1945, a British Control Commission official wrote complaining that “Jews seem to be using Belsen as a focal point for world agitation to emigrate to Palestine”.
    Extraordinary though it may seem to a modern generation, it should be acknowledged that even after the revelation of Hitler's death camps, residual anti-semitism lingered in British and American societies. Hitchcock notes that at no stage of the war was the allied campaign to liberate Europe portrayed as a crusade to deliver the Jews: “That may help to explain why American and British officers and soldiers in Germany at the end of the war had little knowledge of the plight of the Jews, and failed to treat the survivors they found...with anything like the sensitivity or sympathy they deserved.” It was a notable irony, remarked upon by the author, that despite the initial “nonfraternisation order” issued to Eisenhower's armies, British and American soldiers soon found the clean, obedient, eager-to-please Germans more sympathetic than the filthy, broken, mutinous inhabitants of DP camps.
    Hitchcock's narrative sometimes loses coherence by straying into accounts of battlefield experience. But he has performed an important service by focusing attention on a neglected aspect of the war and its aftermath. Armed conflict is an inherently inhumane activity, from which misery must derive. The western allies tried hard to do the right thing in Europe in 1944-45, and their failures are less surprising than their relative success. But this tale vividly demonstrates that there was no cause for triumphalism in the condition of Europe following the defeat of Hitler.
    Liberation by William Hitchcock


  • Registered Users Posts: 274 ✭✭rcs


    Has anyone read this book yet? Released this year by Thomas Bartlett:

    Ireland: A History - Thomas Bartlett

    Heard about it on the radio & seems interesting... Covers Irish History from 431 CE to the present day..

    Anyone read it or read anything else by the author before?


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,784 ✭✭✭#15


    rcs wrote: »
    Has anyone read this book yet? Released this year by Thomas Bartlett:

    Ireland: A History - Thomas Bartlett

    Heard about it on the radio & seems interesting... Covers Irish History from 431 CE to the present day..

    Anyone read it or read anything else by the author before?

    I took some of his courses in university, I thought he was excellent.

    I have read one or two other pieces that he published, again I thought they were very good.

    I had a look at this book the other day, I haven't bought it yet but I intend to buy it soon.


  • Registered Users Posts: 102 ✭✭lebowski11


    #15 wrote: »
    I took some of his courses in university, I thought he was excellent.

    I have read one or two other pieces that he published, again I thought they were very good.

    I had a look at this book the other day, I haven't bought it yet but I intend to buy it soon.

    Really like what I've read of Bartlett's work. His 'Military History of Ireland' is well worth reading. 'The Irish Rebellion of 1798' is also quite good. Neither book goes into a huge amount of detail but both give a pretty good scope of the topics covered. I'll definitely pick up his new publication.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 6,488 ✭✭✭Denerick


    rcs wrote: »
    Has anyone read this book yet? Released this year by Thomas Bartlett:

    Ireland: A History - Thomas Bartlett

    Heard about it on the radio & seems interesting... Covers Irish History from 431 CE to the present day..

    Anyone read it or read anything else by the author before?

    I've read a few of Bartlett's books and I found him very insightful. 'The fall and Rise of the Irish nation' should be required reading for all those interested in late 18th and early 19th century Ireland.


  • Registered Users Posts: 102 ✭✭lebowski11


    Can anyone recommend a book on the American Civil war? Need a book with a good general history of the event as a starting point for further study. Any advice appreciated, thanks.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,677 ✭✭✭deise go deo


    Prussia:
    Iron Kingdom. Deals with the history of the Hohenzolleren monarchy from Brandenburg, to Prussia, to German Empire, under a numer of diferent topics, very readable.

    WWII.
    Through Hell For Hitler. by Henri Mettalman. Tells his story of his time in the german army. My favorite book on the time. Very good story. He makes the point that the main reason he survived the war was because he was a coward. Gives a great insight on the day to day life of a german soldier dureing and just after the war.

    War of indepandance:
    Rebel Hart,
    George Lennon, Flying column commander. Tells the story of the life of George lennon. comander of the west Waterford flying column.
    A good addition if reading about Tom Barry to compare a less active brigade area and the struggel to keep the war going and take the pressure of the more active areas.

    British Voices.
    A very interesting book with accounts from British officers and their experiences in Ireland. Including talks given by major Percival, Tom Barrys 'nemisis'.

    Our Struggel for Indepandance. by Terence O'Reilly
    A collection of accounts of various ambushes and raids that were printed in the Defence Forces mag An Cosantoir in 1940s.

    Raids and Rallies by Ernie O'Mally
    Accounts af ambushes he took part in dureing the war.

    My Father, The General. by Risteárd Mulcahy.
    An indepth study of Richard Mulcahy's life written by his son.
    Deals with his time in the IRA and as a polition later on.

    The Fighting story series has books on:
    Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Dublin


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  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 6,488 ✭✭✭Denerick


    My Father, The General. by Risteárd Mulcahy.
    An indepth study of Richard Mulcahy's life written by his son.
    Deals with his time in the IRA and as a polition later on.

    I have that book sitting at home, would you recommend it? I've read the Vauliulus biography on Mulcahy but this book by his son does seem very interesting.


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