Bookplanet: great books on war

War: A Reader’s Guide
Theorists, novelists and partisans of all stripes have written on war. The Book Review asked a range of writers to recommend titles they find particularly illuminating.
By Rachel Donadio/NY Times Book Review


FOUAD AJAMI, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of “The Foreigner’s Gift.”
Paul Fussell, “The Great War and Modern Memory” (1975). Fussell shows how World War I was “remembered, conventionalized and mythologized” by its three great memoirists — Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden — and how the dream of progress perished in the trenches of the Western Front.
T. E. Lawrence, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (1926). The book lives on for its lyricism and its depiction of the outsider who “adopts” the cause of the Arabs, then laments that the Powers betrayed them, and compromised him.

ELIOT A. COHEN, professor of strategic studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Karl von Clausewitz, “On War” (1832). Incomplete, turgid, seemingly obvious in places, but still the greatest book on war, and possibly the most disturbing. If war is really a continuation of politics by other means, one cannot speak of it as a failure of policy, a last resort or an accident.
Michael Shaara, “The Killer Angels” (1974). This carefully crafted novel offers Robert E. Lee’s dark insight: “To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. ... That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.”

BARBARA EHRENREICH, author of “Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.”
Robert L. O’Connell, “Of Arms and Men” (1989). O’Connell starts with sticks and stones and winds up with nuclear weapons, showing how gun-based warfare redefined masculine courage, from slashing around in the “Iliad” to cold, emotionless precision-killing.
William H. McNeill, “The Pursuit of Power” (1982). The gold standard of military, economic and social history. My copy bristles with Post-its marking, for example, his argument on how guns required that an army become “an articulated organism with a central nervous system.”

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN, professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago and author of “Just War Against Terror.”
Thucydides, “History of the Peloponnesian War.” This remains the locus classicus of the tradition of “realism” in international politics.
Erich Maria Remarque, “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1929). In the inability of young soldiers to find language appropriate to their appalling experiences, this novel captures a universal dimension of war.

NIALL FERGUSON, professor of history at Harvard and author of “The War of the World.”
Vasily Grossman, “Life and Fate: A Novel” (1980). World War II’s “War and Peace.” Written (mainly) from the vantage point of a Soviet Jew, this masterpiece was judged far too ambivalent in its treatment of the “Great Patriotic War” to be published in the author’s lifetime.
Gert Ledig, “Payback” (1956). This harrowing journey to the end of the Third Reich’s night is a kind of antithesis to Evelyn Waugh’s wonderfully ironic “Sword of Honor” trilogy. It is as if Waugh had fought in a completely different war in a completely different century.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and author of “A War Like No Other.”
William Tecumseh Sherman, “Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman” (1875). While Sherman is often castigated as a terrorist and butcher, these memoirs show otherwise. He possessed an eerie grasp of how primordial emotions spark wars, and how true morality is found in ending them as quickly as possible.
Gerhard Weinberg, “A World at Arms” (1994). The best one-volume history of World War II. With remarkable erudition, wit and irony, Weinberg shows how dozens of seemingly unconnected wars in Europe, North Africa, the Pacific, China and Russia coalesced into one global conflagration.

TONY JUDT, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University , author of “Postwar.”
Vera Brittain, “Testament of Youth” (1933). A poignant account of the shattering impact of war and loss by a young upper-middle-class Englishwoman, unusual for its “home front” perspective and as moving today as it was when published.
Milovan Djilas, “Wartime” (1977). Djilas fought at Tito’s side during World War II, before breaking with the Communist leader in peacetime and being imprisoned for his dissent. His memoir captures better than any other single book I know the historical background to the tragedy of modern Yugoslavia.

RASHID KHALIDI, professor of Arab studies at Columbia and author of “The Iron Cage.”
Elias Khoury, “Gate of the Sun” (1998). This illuminating and deeply human novel tells the story of Palestinians displaced by the creation of the state of Israel.
Suad Amiry, “Sharon and My Mother-in-Law” (2005). Despite its light tone, this memoir about the 2002 Israeli reoccupation of Ramallah conveys the daily absurdities brought about by a military occupation — a form of attenuated war — now in its 40th year.

ANTHONY SWOFFORD, author of “Jarhead.”
Philip Caputo, “A Rumor of War” (1977). Caputo captures the day-to-day dread and exhilaration of combat. His portraits are as fresh today as when he first stepped into Vietnam as a Marine infantry officer in 1965.
Jonathan Shay, “Odysseus in America” (2002). For a glimpse of what the returning combat soldier faces, look no further than this study of Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and author of “A New World Order.”
Michael Herr, “Dispatches” (1977). With intensity so strong I can almost smell and feel the jungles of Vietnam, Herr chronicles the brutality and boredom of war without intermediation, redeeming glory, medals or even a belief in a cause.
Margaret Mitchell, “Gone With the Wind” (1936). With its racism and distorted view of history, it captures the hold of the Confederate cause better than any academic study. In her choosing between ruthlessness and defeat, Scarlett O’Hara’s brutalization is far more subtle than what happens to soldiers, but no less enduring.

MICHAEL WALZER, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and author of “Just and Unjust Wars.”
J. Glenn Gray, “The Warriors” (1959). A brilliant philosophical reflection on combat. Gray writes especially well about two seemingly contradictory subjects: the enduring appeal of combat and the guilt soldiers feel for the injuries they inflict.
Geoffrey Blainey, “The Causes of War” (1973). A fine piece of historical analysis, which tries to explain how and why wars begin — and why, sometimes, they don’t.