Howling Frog Books

I don't know why the image comes out with red.  It's bright Penguin orange.  The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans It took me a good six weeks, but I did it!  I finished the Evans trilogy.  This is a huge book, 760 pages without all the notes and such, and I tried to read one sub-section per day.  I actually finished it a couple of weeks ago, but have had trouble getting around to writing it up, and now we're seeing Putin try to pull some of the same moves that are chronicled at the start of this book.  So I guess it's appropriate. Evans offers a solid analysis of everything Germany did, with (I think) something of an emphasis on atrocities and the Eastern front.  There is not quite as much about the Western side of the war, possibly because most people already know more about that, while the eastern side has been less known until pretty recently.  We don't see much of the US part of the war, and there's nothing about the Pacific arena since...

 A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist With the Red Army, 1941 - 1945, by Vasily Grossman, edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova Wow, this book packs a whole lot into what looks like a medium paperback.  It took me much longer to read than I thought it would! Over a year ago, I read a biography of the writer and journalist Vasily Grossman , and this was next on the list of his works that I want to read.   Grossman was attached to the Red Army as a journalist throughout World War II, and he always wanted to be on the front lines.  He was present for the early days of the invasion, the Battle of Moscow, most of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and for much of the Soviet advance through Germany and Berlin.   This book collects Grossman's notes taken down in real time; it does not reprint the articles he wrote for the Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) newspaper.  The editors give context to the notes, telling us what's going on and who e...

  Last Hope Island: Briain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War, by Lynne Olson In 1939 and '40, as Germany was burning its way across Europe, a lot of people washed up on the shores of the UK.  Escaped soldiers and pilots, exiled government officials, and several royal personages arrived, desperate to continue fighting the Nazis.  Britain became the base of operations for their governments in exile, their efforts to rally their compatriots at home, and their resistance units.  Lynne Olson collects a whole bunch of these stories -- mostly about Norwegians, Czechs, Poles, French, Dutch, and Belgians -- and presents them in chronological order, telling us how these disparate, and often mutually suspicious, people found ways to work together to win the war.  The result is a fascinating narrative. What's really interesting about this book is that Olson, while fair, does not elide over British mistakes.  She is entirely clear th...

 The Third Reich in Power: 1933 - 1939, by Richard J. Evans For my summer reading, I wanted to choose one heavy-duty WWII book per month.  This history, which I got sort of accidentally by asking the public library to purchase it and instead they sent me a Zip copy (which is like ILL without a due date), has 28 chapters, and so I set a goal of at least one chapter per day.  Since it's a good 700 pages, that was still on the ambitious side! Evans continues his saga that I started with The Coming of the Third Reich .  Hitler is now in power and in a matter of months, he and his buddies seized a lot of power that they didn't have a right to -- but nobody stopped them, either.  The Nazis made it very clear that they had no respect for the law or for human rights; might made right.  Over the next six years, they:  turned Germany into a police state  used terror on a massive scale to influence elections co-opted nearly all private organizations  pe...

  The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures From the Nazis: The True Story of the Paper Brigade of Vilna, by David E. Fishman Vilna, in Lithuania, was once "the Jerusalem of Europe" -- the intellectual and cultural hub of European Judaism.   The Nazis tried to destroy it -- not entirely successfully -- and the Soviets just about finished the job.  Fishman gives us a detailed and fascinating history of the Jewish writers, rabbis, and librarians who generated and took care of the books and cultural materials and were then forced to cull through them and decide what should be shipped out and what should be destroyed. Fishman gives us an entire cast of characters, most memorably a duo of poets, Shmerke and Sutzkever, situated in a detailed context of pre-war Vilna.  Communism, fascism, and Zionism are all in the air.  At invasion, the Nazis establish two small ghettos for Vilna's large Jewish population, and choose workers to sort t...

 Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya  After I read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , my brother informed me of the existence of this book, so I borrowed it.  While I love reading history, and I'm fascinated by lots of things around war, I'm not much on reading the actual military war part with battles and weapons.  As a result, I'm somewhat ignorant; I've hardly ever heard of famous war books like Thirty Seconds , or this one, and a month ago I could not have told you about the importance of the Battle of Midway.  Which was pivotal! Mitsuo Fuchida, the main author, explains himself as a naval aviator.  After being badly injured at Midway, he went to teach at the Japanese naval academy and was asked to write up an analysis of the battle for his superiors -- the truth of which had been covered up in Japan.  He was given access to secret documents, wrote the analysis, and the copies were sent off.  In the Japanese ...

 Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, by Alison Owings We all owe Alison Owings a debt of gratitude for the work she did.  In the mid-80s, she realized that there were all these elderly German ladies, and nobody had ever really asked them about their experiences in World War II.  People interviewed German men, and survivors, but what about the women who had lived through the war, who had experienced life under the Third Reich?  What had they thought, done, believed?  Owings spent several years finding and interviewing an enormous variety of women, and put 27 of those interviews together into this book.  That generation is gone now, and I hope other people thought of asking them about their experiences too. Each lady gets a chapter, and tells her story, partly in her own words and partly through Owings' eyes, as she observes tone, body language, and so on.  Sometimes there is a sister or daughter to supplement, sometimes even a gathering of wome...

 The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans I figured I ought to kick off the WWII Reading Challenge right, with a big fat Serious History Tome that has been sitting around and waiting for me for too long.  And, this is a really great work of history, and the perfect book to start with. Most readers probably know that this is the first book in a three-volume work that covers the entire Nazi regime.  Evans' goal was to produce a solid, detailed history for the layperson that would give an overview of the whole thing.  He wanted it to feel immediate and relatable, so many terms that would usually stay safely foreign in German, such as Führer or Gauleiter, are instead rendered in English.* This first volume deals mainly with a lot of background, and the development of the Nazi Party.  It ends in mid-1933, once Nazi power is consolidated.  This means that Evans actually starts -- pretty much -- with Bismarck, filling us in on such events as 1848 attempt...