Your Library III: Your 5 Favorite History/Political/Current Events Books?

[Zomby Woof]

In no order:

1. History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 1801-1809 - Henry Adams
2. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong - James Loewen
3. The Franco Years: The Untold Human Story of Life Under Spanish Fascism - Jose Yglesias
4. Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
5. I Love Paul Revere Whether He Rode or Not - Richard Shenkman

[MrCoffee]

1. If we must...

What Kind of Nation – James F. Simon
The Civilization of the Middle Ages – Norman F. Cantor
Reason – Robert Reich
Memory and the Mediterranean – Fernand Braudel
The Story of Civilization series – Will and Ariel Durant

[TheCentepedeShoes]

7. I've got Cantor's book

also. Memory and the Mediterranean sounds interesting.

[MrCoffee]

8. Memory is a wonderful book

I picked it up for practically nothing at Half-Price, and fell in love with Braudel's storytelling. The translator did an amazing job. I've read it at least a dozen times.

[LSK]

2. ok

:bluebox: 1776 by David McCullough

:bluebox: Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer

:bluebox: Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget by Tim Weiner

:bluebox: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul R. Krugman

:bluebox: Road To Air America: Breaking The Right Wing Stranglehold On Our Nation's Airwaves by Sheldon Drobny

[nosillies]

3. so so hard

1. power money fame sex: A User's Guide -- Gretchen Rubin
2. London: A Biography -- Peter Ackroyd
3. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics -- Iain McLean and Alistair McMillian
4. The Lady and the Panda -- Vicki Croke
5. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test -- Tom Wolfe

and most anything about Jack the Ripper

[sir_captain]

4. I pretty much covered this already

in my non-fiction choices, but I can throw out a few more

1) The Road to Wigan Pier -- George Orwell
2) The Seventies -- Bruce Schulman
3) A Democracy at War -- John O'Neill
4) The Federalist Papers -- Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, et al
5) Democracy in America -- Alexis de Tocqueville

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. Mine:

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson
Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill
Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond (history, of a sort)
The Art of War, Sun-Tzu


That's six, but five was too few (and I could add a couple of more to those, too).

[MrCoffee]

10. Gibbon is a scandal-monger

Decline and Fall is a dirty tell-all rag.

[Lisa]

6. A Short History of Progress -- Ronald Wright

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves -- Adam Hochschild (about the activists who ended slavery in the British Empire)
Catastrophe -- David Keys (how climate disruption contributed to the collapse of Rome)
Empire Rising -- David Horsey (a cartoon history of the Bush Administration)
The Unconscious Civilization -- John Ralston Saul (I also like "Reflections of a Siamese Twin", but that's about Canadian history and culture, which a lot of Americans might find boring!)

[ulysses]

9. hmm.

1. Political Fictions, Joan Didion
2. Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Gould
3. all of Lyn MacDonald's oral histories of WWI
4. People's History, Howard Zinn
5. History of God, Karen Armstrong

[Arkham House]

11. As usual, picking just five is a bitch...

...but what the hell...

1. Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum
2. Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer
3. Clarendon's History of the English Civil War
4. War for the World, Gerhard Weinberg
5. The Last European War, John Lukacs

[YankeyMCC]

12. 1. A People's History of the United States - Zinn

2. Lies My Teach Told Me - Loewen
3. The Divided Ground : Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution
4. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory - David W. Blight
5. The Death Penalty: An American History - Stuart Banner

Honorable Mention:
Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller
and

Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation by Rhys Isaac

Oh man I need to metion "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse" by Diamond

[ulysses]

13. Diamond is great.

I've just scratched "Collapse", but "Guns..." was excellent.