1 comments about The Autobiography of General Ulysses S Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War.

1. General Grant's firsthand accounts of the campaigns that won the Civil War. Grant discusses his strategy and tactics, accompanied by maps and detailed descriptions of his actions. An indispensable source for anyone who is interested in the history of the Civil War.

No comments about Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series: The 17th President, 1865-1869 (The American Presidents).

2 comments about Journal, 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War.

1. There are a few important works on the Algerian Civil War available for the English reader. Franz Fannon, Alistair Horne's history, the film "Battle of Algiers, and recently Feraoun's diary are the ones that readily come to mind. Feraoun was a western educated Algerian and well accquainted with the French. His desire for an independent Algeria was strong, but tempered by a strong sense of historical reality. He reveals the day to day impact of the violence. It is in this respect that the work is most moving, and reveals the senselessness and degradation that occurs to all people involved, Feraoun eventually a victim himself. An essential view of the psychological costs of guerrilla and anti-colonial war.



2. First, I will comment on the book itself from an American point of view. The book is not easy to read because it is not a book: it is the author's journal he kept during the French Algerian War. Knowing that still, his journal entries, which at the beginning were frequent and detailed, were focused on keeping track of who was killed, tortured or who was doing the killings. It was as if the author, Mr. F.(his notation of using people's initials to hide their identity from I suppose the French secret police), was keeping a testimony of the murders occurring all around him as evidence. This makes for dull reading; however, given the events of 9-11, I made a valiant effort to immerse myself into the author's mind and try to understand this incredibly brutal civil war.

   (...)

5 comments about Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich.

1. While not as thorough as Anton Joachimstahler's or James P. O'Donnell's works on Hitler's last days, Fest provides a good introduction to the last month of Hitler and Nazi Germany's lives. The book somewhat bounces around between Hitler, the Soviet onslaught, and conditions in Berlin, but Fest does a pretty good job of balancing these and writing a readable book. Again, not the most detailed of accounts, but a good intro.



2. I wish that I had read the negative reviews of this book and avoided it. This is a very poorly done account of Hitler's final days in the bunker. The book is poorly written, lacks linear progression, and provides an erratic treatment of the subject. The text itself is cobbled together in piecemeal fashion from other books on the subject - there seems little original here. Quotes about Hitler are often made without attribution leaving the reader to wonder whose opinion was being posited. Fest writes pages and pages of filler material consisting of his own amateur psychoanalysis of Hitler which adds nothing to the record and further sidetracks this work.
   
   If you wish to read an engaging and informative account of Hitler's final days, skip Fest's book and read instead the book written by Hitler's secretary Traudle Junge's or Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting's book The Women Who Knew Hitler which chronicles Hitler's last days extremely well.



3. Fest's haunting description of the last days of the Third Reich is a magnificent accomplishment. Despite its brevity, Fest manages to weave larger historical issues into a narrative full of surreal, compelling details about the Nazis' end. There are the evocative stories of Berlin in turmoil: SS patrols summarily hanging whoever they felt was a shirker, citizens struggling to survive in the shelled-out ruin of a city, the Soviet encirclement growing ever closer. Meanwhile, inside the Hitler's bunker, the story of delusion and denial grew ever more fantastical -- Hitler commanding generals to counterattack the Russians with army units existing in his imagination, and growing more and more furious with their "betrayals" as the Russian advance still came on.
   
   The story arrives ultimately at the Russian approach to the bunker and the suicides of Hitler, Eva Braun, and the inner circle. Their grimly nihilistic end, burned in a trashheap, paralleled their desire for the same fate for Germany. Hitler wanted Germany to go down with him. That so many in Berlin actually did follow him in suicide, or fighting the Russians to the end against suicidal odds, seems now almost too bewildering to believe. Fest's book is bleak, but in a straightforward journalistic style argues why the end in the bunker was the culmination of Hitler's theatrical, nihilistic vision.



4. James O'Donnell's "Bunker" is the authoritative history of the Fuhrerbunker. Even Mr. Fest acknowledges that in his Bibliography notes. "Inside Hitler's Bunker" is cursory, superficial and unoriginal and it escapes me that there can be any reason this book was written except to make a quick buck off of unwary readers. It's a joke. Avoid it at all costs.



5. Inside Hitler's Bunker is a good introduction to the final days of the Second World War from the Nazi perspective - a horrific denoument to a great crisis in world history as Hitler and his cohorts, realising defeat was inveitable, still pursued a grand Wagnerian ending until the last. Berlin was in ruins, thousands were dying by the day, the Red Army were marauding in from the East. And Hitler, a 'cake gobbling wreck', shattered by events, bloodily ended it all along with his wife.
   
   This is a short, journalistic history, mainly from secondary sources, with a good deal of speculative rumination. It is not a deep scholarly book. It will appeal as an introduction to the topic, interspersed with some interesting pictures of the war ravaged Berlin, and inside the Bunker itself.

2 comments about Abraham Lincoln: The Observations of John G. Nicolay and John Hay.

1. A book for the person with an existing fair understanding of the White House years of Abraham Lincoln.
   
   Professor Burlingame provides a great service to those of us who are keenly interested in this great president, but who do not have the time to read the imposing and very dated ten-volume history produced by his two close aides, Nicolay and Hay. This book fills a specific void; it certainly should not be confused with a full biography.
   
   While it is surprising that so little was directly said by Nicolay and Hay about their chief in their history, I am happy that Professor Burlingame did the hard work of mining its ten volumes for the benefit of lazy readers like me.



2. The book was very short and only covered areas of limited interest on Lincoln's Presidency. Beside other titles on Lincoln that I have bought this was a major disappointement. There was no flow of quality prose to create interest in specific story lines which were too sketchy. The book's objectives were too limited from the outset and it's main merits are that it may serve as a useful reference book for later purchases. It will do little to add or detract to the legacy of Lincoln.
   Lorenzo
   Ireland

5 comments about Few Returned: Twenty-Eight Days on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-1943.

1. Above all, this book is a record of one man's experience as an Italian soldier fighting on the Eastern Front during World War II against Russia. More specifically, it is about a few horrible weeks of fighting and retreating. It is *not* a story or novel, really, but almost like an after action report. The book contains the author's feelings and some of what he saw, but you get the distinct sense while reading this book that he wrote it as a record of what he saw and did, and as an homage to his friends who never made it out of Russia, but not as an attempt to write a story. The author never really tries tying the events into a broader context or explaining the full experiences he had on the Eastern front; it is just a snap shot of a limited time frame, and only limited snapshots even within that time frame.

   This book is not a blow by blow recitation of combat. While the author is clearly involved in a number of intense fights, both before and during the period covered in the book, we never really hear about it. It's almost as if he is trying NOT to make this a book about combat. If there is an engagement we hear of the troops forming up for it, a sentence or two about the fight, and then more pages about the aftermath - the wounds, the dead.

   The most insightful and remarkable aspects of this book to me are: 1) the ability of the author to show us the horrors of war; 2) the brutality on both sides; and 3) how horrible the Nazis were even to their allies. I take each in turn.

   1) This book makes very clear how much human suffering war brings with it. Through its dry, almost camera-like recitation of horror after horror (friends freezing to death in front of him, morter shells cutting people in two) we can almost imagine what it must be like to be walking through a combat zone strewn with bodies and wounded men and animals. We also see how war turns honorable, good men into self-interested beings centered only on survival. The author, for example, is clearly a brave, honorable, educated man and officer. We watch as his pride in being an officer and an Italian soldier slowly gives way to self-survival. We also watch as this man with deep loyalty to his unit and his friends gives way (as we all would, I'm sure) to self-interest. Fascinating.

   2) Suffice it to say that the book makes clear how brutal all sides were in this war: Soviets and Nazis alike commit brutal, heartless acts.

   3) The savagery and callousness of the Nazis towards their allies is stunning. While paying homage to the combat skills of the Nazis, the author shows clearly how the Nazies treated the Italians serving and dying in their cause only slightly better than their hated enemy the Soviets. For example, we read of a time when, during the retreat, the Nazis held up thousands of Italians, subjecting them to withering small arms and artillery fire from the Russians for hours, in order to clear mud off of German trucks. We see how Nazis failed to share food, information or shelter with their "allies." We see Germans shooting at wounded Italians (their allies, remember!) who dared to try and get a ride on a German vehicle.

   This book is somewhat dry, somewhat repetititious, but worth a read for those wanting a sense of what the winter retreat was like for an Italian soldier serving in WW2's horribly grueling East Front.




2. .. I think that one of the "soldier view" of the whole Eastern Front history from axis side is "The Sergeant In The Snow" by Mario Rigoni Stern.



3. This book is different from others in that it does not glorify War,it does not tend to over exaggerate what happened in battle, it does'nt even try to blow up the truth with nonsensical war heroics recounted ( like many german or British books, dare I say).
   Its a straight forward recount in diary form of how onw Italian officer and his brave troops dared all to fight back the Russians, the bitter cold and the odds of making it back on foot without decent rations , heavyweapons or transportation which were rendered useless in battle or just plainly nevr had their ammo resupplied by the faster retreating better equiped self serving Nazis.
   It si common for the uneducated armchair historian or plainly ignorant war hobbyist to brand the Italians as cowards, however when one delves deeper into the actualities of WW2 and gets to the events as they really happened unaltered by propaganda and rascist reporting then we really see that the Italians which were up against it from the start, put in as brave a performance as any fighting man could and beyond that in many a case.

   I recommend this book to all for the honesty and open portrayal of the horrors of War and the true nature of men when faced with the harshness and desperation of survival.
   Its not a novel as anyone who's half literate can plainly see, but a diary of man brave man and his troops that fought their way thru the russians, the elements and evn the Nazis cruelty to survive!
   Enjoy the read! A must have for the war historian at heart.




4. I have always been interested in the Second World War and especially the little known battles and actions of that war.
   Lately; I have delved into the Italian part in this conflict and the tragic consequences to their brave soldiers.
   "Few Returned", gives you a first hand glimpse of what it was like for man, pack animals and equipment, fighting and struggling to survive on the Eastern Front.
   You will wonder how anyone returned from that winter retreat.
   The author Eugenio Corti also gives the reader a good feel for the national differences between the Italians, Germans and Russians.
   Combat is sporadic throughout the retreat, but again Corti gives you a good feel of how it was for all sides.



5. Corti who was a twenty-one year old artillery officer on the Stalingrad front, was part of the Eighth Italian Army that was cut off when Zhukov sent in the pincers that surrounded the Sixth German Army. His group was in a pocket northeast of Stalingrad that was made up of Italian and German soldiers.
   
   Out of the 30 thousand Italians who held the front at the Don north of Stalingrad, less than four thousand made it out of the pocket and up to one thousand of those died from their wounds and exposure. Corti doesn't pull any punches as to what happened in the pocket or who was to blame.
   
   Many of the Italians had just come to the front over the last two weeks. They were totally unprepared for what was going to become a retreat over one hundred kilometers while constantly under Russian fire. They had to walk most of the way in inadequate uniforms and boots while the Germans requestioned horse and mules and sleds for their own use.
   
   Corti speaks of how the Germans were much better organized and kept their military lines-or-command intact, whereas the Italians in many cases became a mob without any reason or understanding of the situation. At times no one was in charge of taking care of the wounded or giving out provisions. While the German Luftwaffe dropped food and ammunition by parachute, the Italian Air Force was conspicuous by their absence.
   
   The story is straight forward and brutal. Corti does not try to make excuses for anyone (including himself) in the treatment of fellow soldiers or of civilians. It was survive at any cost.
   
   Zeb Kantrowitz

1 comments about Recollections and Letters of General Robert E Lee.

1. This is an interesting book. Not really a biography, it consists mostly of a large number of letters written by Robert E Lee to various people throughout his life, connected by his son's description of events in Lee's life. Those who are looking for detailed descriptions of Civil War battles will be disappointed -- the book focuses mostly on Robert E Lee as a person. Lee was a complex and sometimes contradictory person -- for instance, he was opposed to secession, but he agreed to lead the Army of Northern Virginia when he was asked. If you are interested in Lee just as a General, this book probably isn't what you're looking for. But if you're interested in Lee as a person, this is a fascinating description, largely in his own words.

5 comments about Rebel Private: Front and Rear: Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier.

1. This is a good, first hand account of the life of a Confederate soldier. Fletcher writes of only what he seen during the war. The only judgement he cast is upon his leaders actions at Gettysburg. This book will definitely change your perspective on the life of a common soldier.



2. Excellent, first had observations made by a common private in during the Civil War. The author IS NOT a professional writer. This makes it all the more valuable. The author is not writing the book to entertain, or to pass along old, gory war stories. This is a story by a simple man trying to tell us his point of view, simple as that. This account is quite valuable to anyone interested in the study of this horrible conflict. Recommend it's reading and recommend you add it to your collection. I do wish there had been more like this one.



3. Perhaps if the writer had put his thoughts to paper soon after the events described he might have remembered a few details! We barely find out anything about his weapons, his leaders, his thoughts on seccession etc... While the small details of camp life and escaping are interesting a better book on that subject is Prison Pen.



4. An outstanding view of the War Between the States from the point of view of an "ordinary" soldier.



5. This book is a very enjoyable and powerful read. The "War of Northern Aggression" has never seemed such a real happening to me before. It makes well-known battlefield names come alive. Fletcher was a very practical, down-to-earth man and the reader is exposed to the practical everyday concerns of a Confederate soldier. The plight of the wounded is nearly felt by the reader. Fletcher candidly discusses taking food from women and children in Union territory and scavenging the dying. He even expresses regret that he had refrained from shooting an enemy soldier because he appeared very young and he wonders if it hurt his nation's cause. There are very exciting stories about being captured and escaping from a moving prison train. After the war, he heard a North Carolina soldier ask Fletcher's Texas cavalry unit if they had any bacon. When one answered yes, the man said "Grease and slide back into the Union." After thinking about it a while, Fletcher saw the wisdom in that statement and did just that. He became a highly successful lumber entrepreneur. I highly recommend for students of military or Southern history or anyone who likes true adventures.

No comments about "The Devil's to pay", General John Buford, USA.

5 comments about Witness to Nuremberg.

1. Barbara Schlang's review.....Richard W. Sonnenfeldt's just published book (Witness to Nuremberg) reveals personal conversations with the top Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials, shedding a merciless light on their criminality, but it is also a tale of adventure never told before. He was just twenty-two when he became Chief Interpreter for the American prosecution at the War Crimes trials of 1945-46.
   Born into a Jewish family in Germany, he fled to attend school in England in 1938, to escape the Nazi terror. But when the Germans conquered France two years later, his erstwhile hosts interned him as a German national and deported him in a prison ship, that was torpedoed by a German U-boat, but made it to Australia. The British then realized their mistake and ordered him back to England to be freed, but now his boat was diverted to in Bombay, India. Instead of returning to England he managed to go to the United States, all solo, at age seventeen. On arrival in New York he became a media celebrity in April 1941. Two and a half years later he was an American citizen and combat soldier who fought in France, Germany and Austria. He was one of the first to see the concentration camp of Dachau and its prisoners, too stunned amid mountains of corpses to grasp that freedom was theirs.
   
   General "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of OSS (predecessor to the CIA) who was organizing the American prosecution for the Nuremberg trial then picked up him as his interpreter.
   At Nuremberg, directing a staff of fifty, he produced over 10,000 pages of sworn testimony, interpreting and later himself conducting interrogations of the twenty top surviving Nazis. He had Goering, the No.2 Nazi, acknowledge his signature on the order of July 1941 to organize the holocaust. He extracted from Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, a detailed statement how three and one half hapless victims were exterminated at Auschwitz, at a rate over 20,000 a day.
   After the verdicts, which punished ten of the defendants by hanging them, he returned to America, served on the team that created color TV and became a noted executive. To celebrate his fiftieth year in business he crossed the Atlantic in his sailboat, also celebrating his 75th birthday.
   He was invited to return to the small German town where he grew up and his reports of interaction with the citizens there are no less interesting than his recollections of Nuremberg. He was then invited to speak at a principal cathedral in Berlin, and at Hitler's erstwhile Nazi headquarters in Nuremberg. Soon he was feted by the German national press and became a sought after personality on German television and radio.
   His book "Witness to Nuremberg" published by Arcade Press, follows his German bestseller "Mehr als ein Leben." I could not put the book down. It is full of many thrilling and some dangerous adventures, but most of all it is a tale of the zest of life and it is all true!



2. During 1945-46, Richard Sonnenfeldt, age 22, was the chief interpreter on the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg. In this role, he served U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor, and his interrogation team as the lead interpreter in the pre-indictment interrogations of many imprisoned Nazis, including all 22 who became Nuremberg defendants.
   
   Sonnenfeldt actually was much more than the U.S. prosecution's lead interpreter at Nuremberg. Because of his German and English language skills, his smarts and maturity, and his surprising rapport with and control over many of the prisoners, Sonnenfeldt actually became a de facto senior interrogator. His work and successes as interpreter and interrogator are recorded in the many thousands of pages of interrogation reports that are central parts of the Nuremberg trial and historical record. At the end of the Nuremberg trial year, Justice Jackson saw to it personally that Sonnenfeldt received a military decoration for his work.
   
   But that's actually not the half of it. In outline form, this is Richard Sonnenfeldt's quite amazing life story:
   * born Jewish, son of two physicians, in Gardelegen, a town in north central Germany, in 1923;
   * happy, assimilated boyhood until Nazism and Nuremberg laws change everything, including shutting down his parents' work;
   * getting out of Germany, along with his younger brother, to a boarding school in England;
   * being interned in England as an enemy alien once active war with Germany started in 1940;
   * being shipped with other internees and German POWs from England to Australia;
   * being paroled from Australia to India, and making it on his own there;
   * getting passage from India to the U.S. (His parents, in a separate miracle, had made it from Germany to Sweden and from there to Baltimore);
   * becoming, as his ship docked in New York, a media event because he was an unsupervised boy who had survived all of these "adventures";
   * working, while still a teenager, as an electrician in Baltimore and entering Johns Hopkins night college;
   * being drafted into the U.S. Army, becoming a U.S. citizen, and fighting in Europe as a combat soldier;
   * entering the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945;
   * in May 1945, being called out of a motor pool in Austria, because of his bilingual skills, to serve as General William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan's OSS interpreter;
   * moving with Donovan into the Justice Jackson/war crimes project that became Nuremberg;
   * serving as the principal and preferred interpreter of each prisoner, including Hermann Goering;
   * playing a significant role in interrogating and studying each of them;
   * being half of the 2-man team that served the October 1945 indictment on each Nuremberg defendant;
   * working for the U.S. prosecution throughout the trial;
   * returning to Baltimore and succeeding as a Johns Hopkins engineering student;
   * becoming a distinguished engineer with RCA, where he was part of the team that invented color television;
   * working on NASA projects;
   * working as an executive at NBC;
   * obtaining patents on numerous inventions;
   * becoming a husband and very proud father;
   * sailing three times across the Atlantic; and
   * never talking much about his past until his grandchildren started to interview him for school projects and papers.
   
   Richard Sonnenfeldt's life is an extraordinary true story, and he has written it modestly and well. His book deserves to reach a very large general audience, and I am confident that any reader, from children through seniors, will find it to be relevant, exciting and inspiring.



3. I bought Witness to Nuremberg after reading the other "Amazon" reviews and I was not disappointed. I could not put the book down! I want to comment on the writing. Sonnenfeldt's story of incredible adventure is told in a most captivating way with flashes of humor and never a boring moment!
   
   There emerges a teen and later, a man who turns adversity to his advantage, who always looks forward. Just 22 at Nuremberg, after a solo trek through five continents, he is the chief interpreter for the American prosecution who becomes a star interrogator to unmask the groveling and miserable personalities of the Nazi defendants. He tells us who ordered the Holocaust and why we did not know its true dimension until eleven months after the war ended. Even more remarkable is his return to Germany, fifty years after the Nuremberg trials, where he became a media celebrity as he related his conversations with the Nazis. This book is a worthy companion to the many books of Holocaust survivors. You must read it.



4. This is an interesting and well-written account of the young man who was the Chief Interpreter at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis.
   
   But the aforementioned is only half the story, because the author also tells us about his life in Germany both before the Nazis too power and after. His tales of escape from Germany are so amazing and remind me of a children's book I read as a child called "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" a fictional account of becoming a Jewish refugee in the 1940's. Who knew that fiction could be beaten by true-life!
   
   I found this book very compelling and a great yarn. Truly, after seeing the author on Charlie Rose I became interested in reading the book. I was not disappointed. I am sure you won't be either.
   
   By the way, his accounts of the Nazis he interviews are very compelling! Truly, as has been said before that evil is so often banal!
   
   When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit



5. I saw Mr. Sonnenfeld interviewed on Charlie Rose last year and had this book on my wish list. I finally got around to ordering it and dived into it the day it arrived. I was disappointed to find that only the first quarter of the book (if even that) dealt with Mr. Sonnenfeld's translating work at the Nuremberg Trials, i.e. "Witness to Nuremberg". The remainder of the book is autobiography, from childhood to the present. Granted, it is an interesting life to read about, but for those seeking a book dedicated to the "Nuremberg experience" you will be disappointed, as I was. I could have gone on reading more about Nuremberg. Nonetheless, it is a well written interesting read.