Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2025)
In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scor...
19 Aug 20251h 4min
Reid B. C. Pauly, "The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Dr. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In ...
18 Aug 202559min
Mark Braude, "The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile" (Penguin Press, 2018)
I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more abo...
17 Aug 20251h 2min
W. Henry Sledge, "The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed" (Knox Press, 2025)
Because events like D-Day and the Battle of Okinawa took place an entire lifetime ago, it is rare to find any new accounts and memories from veterans. Thankfully, forty years after the publication of ...
14 Aug 20251h 2min
Michael Jabara Carley, "Stalin's Great Game: War and Neutrality, 1939-1941" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
The period from September 1939 to early 1942 was crucial for Soviet foreign policy and coincided with the early stages of the Second World War, including the Great Patriotic War. In Stalin's Great Gam...
13 Aug 20251h 29min
Garrett M. Graff, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied n...
13 Aug 202554min
Michael Geheran, "Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler" (Cornell UP, 2020)
What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experien...
13 Aug 20251h 13min
Yorai Linenberg, "Jewish Soldiers in Nazi Captivity: American and British Prisoners of War During the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2024)
This book explores the extraordinary story of Jewish POWs in German captivity during the Second World War - extraordinary because of the contrast between Germany's genocidal policy towards Jews on one...
12 Aug 20251h 27min
