Two general histories of the twentieth century are J. M. Roberts’s thoughtful Twentieth Century: the History of the World, 1901 to 2000; and Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: the World from the Twenties to the Nineties (1991), which is rich in piquant details.
Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–49 (1962) is splendid, nearly as good as her The Reason Why. The same writer’s Florence Nightingale 1820–1910 (1951) tells how one extraordinary woman changed the medical profession. Microbe Hunters (1926), by Paul de Kruif, tells about early discoveries of the causes and cures of diseases.
Man on the Move: The Story of Transportation (1967), by tire maker Harvey S. Firestone Jr., is a breezy overview. A book to browse in, not as heavy as its title, is James E. Vance’s Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation Since the Transportation Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (1986). The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1977), by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, is a readable academic book.
Chapter 17 We wage a war to end war.
In The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I (1965), Laurence Lafore engagingly discusses the big question. Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962) describes the outbreak of the war; it won a Pulitzer Prize. Illustrated History of the First World War (1964), by A. J. P. Taylor, tells the story briefly, and so does Cyril Falls’s opinionated The Great War (1959). Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli (1956), describes the Dardanelles campaign.
Good-bye to All That (1929) is a moving memoir by Robert Graves, who served in the war as a British army officer.
Chapter 18 A utopia becomes a nightmare.
On Marx, Engels, and others see Robert L. Heilbroner’s highly readable The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953); and Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940).
Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution (1958) is good reading. In Nicholas and Alexandra (1967), Robert K. Massie writes vividly about the tsar, his silly wife, and the Russian Revolution. Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years (1994) is short and slashing. For an eyewitness look at Russia under Stalin see John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (1942).
In The Anatomy of Revolutions (1965), Crane Brinton finds similarities between the English civil wars in the 1600s, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution.
Chapter 19 A leader tries to shape a master race.
According to his biographer, Ian Kershaw, Hitler is now the subject of 120,000 articles and books. Kershaw’s Hitler (2001) is short, dry, and up to date. I prefer Alan Bullock’s older Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (abridged, 1971). After World War II, Milton Mayer interviewed ten German friends, and wrote a fine book with a revealing title: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–45 (1955).
On Hitler’s Italian friend, see Paolo Monelli’s Mussolini: an Intimate Life (trans. Brigid Maxwell, 1953).
Chapter 20 We wage a wider, crueler war.
In The Origins of the Second World War (1961), A. J. P. Taylor argues that the outbreak of war in Europe resulted from blunders by both Hitler and his enemies. John Keegan’s military history, The Second World War (1989), is crisp and interesting. Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 (1959) describes the Normandy invasion. Two of my former University of Pennsylvania colleagues have written readably about American airmen and airborne: Thomas Childers, Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II (1995); and Martin Wolfe, Green Light! Men of the 81st Troop Carrier Squadron Tell Their Story (1989). H. Trevor Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1962) tells what happened in the bunker as the Russians neared.
On the physics that led to the nuclear bomb, C. P. Snow, The Physicists (1981), is short and easy reading. Richard Rhodes won major prizes for The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), which is very long. John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) tells briefly of life and death in that city just before and after the bomb was dropped.
The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide, by Wolfgang Benz (trans. Jane Sydenham-Kwiet, 1999), is short and factual. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition (trans. Susan Massotty, 1991) is unforgettable, and so are Primo Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (trans. Stuart Woolf, 1959); and Thomas Keneally’s documentary novel, Schindler’s List (1982).
Chapter 21 The Asian giants try to feed their poor.
Jonathan D. Spence, Mao Zedong (1999) is a very short biography which is also a history of the Chinese Revolution. Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (1986) is a Chinese woman’s harrowing account of how she survived the Cultural Revolution. Two reporters, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, wrote China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994), a lively, anecdotal book.
Mohandas Gandhi is the subject of well over 500 biographies. Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (1976) is more a portrait than a biography. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, in Freedom at Midnight (1975), tell the dramatic story of the end of British rule and the birth of India and Pakistan. The Nobel Prize–winning writer V. S. Naipaul wrote India: A Wounded Civilization (1976). Shashi Tharoor describes his India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997) as a “subjective account.”
Chapter 22 Some of us do well.
These are readable books on matters touched on in this chapter: Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), on globalism; Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria (2000); George Monbiot, Amazon Watershed: The New Environmental Investigation (1991); and Gale E. Christianson, Greenhouse: The 200 — Year Story of Global Warming (1999).
Ray Kroc, organizer of the famous eateries, serves it up in Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s (1977).
Nigel Barley, Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut (1983), is a captivating book on village Africa.
Chapter 23 We walk along the brink.
Books in English on the Cold War always stress the U.S. role. For an overview of the age see Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1990 (9th ed., 2002). George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: the United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (3rd ed., 1996) is critical of America’s role. In Tet! (1971), Don Oberdorfer tells the story of the biggest battle of the Vietnam War.
Two good books on Russia in decline are Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (2001); and Grigori Medvedev, The Truth about Chernobyl (trans. Evelyn Rossiter, 1991). The latter tells of incompetence in Russia’s nuclear disaster.
Avi Shlaim’s pithy War and Peace in the Middle East: a Concise History (1994) covers 1914–1994. Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, in Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (1991), and Peter L. Bergen, in Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2001), introduce these two incendiaries.
Chapter 24 We do the unbelievable.
Harry Wulforst’s short Breakthrough to the Computer Age (1982) tells about the making of the first computers. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (1996), is the most readable overall account. Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web) wrote Weaving the Web: the Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (1999), which is short and useful but somewhat technical.
James Watson has a lighter touch than Berners-Lee. His The Double Helix: Being a Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1977) is funny and absorbing. Most other books about genetics deal with science and morality, not the way things happened.
Walter A. McDougall, …The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1997) is a splendid book which won a Pulitzer Prize. In The Right Stuff (1979) Tom Wolfe tells the story of the astronauts in the age of discovery. In his entrancing Rocket Boys: A Memoir (1998), Homer H. Hickam (a NASA engineer) relates how in his youth he and other boys made rockets.
This delightful book doesn’t quite
fit the subject of this chapter: Nobel Prize–winner (in physics) Richard P. Feynman with Ralph Leighton, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character (1984).
About the Author
James C. Davis taught history at the University of Pennsylvania for thirty-four years. He is the author of four other books. These deal with Venice, the early history of European nations, and the lives of peasants and blue collar workers.
Don’t miss the next book by your favorite author! Sign up now for Author Tracker at www.authortracker.com.
The Human Story Page 49
