New History books: Jan-Feb 2016

My primary historic interest is very much the twentieth century, so there is a bias here.
Nonetheless, here are 12 top reads published in January or February 2016…

If you have any suggestions for any additions, let me know.

(Thumbnail click for Amazon).

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B015ZC2MQ2]The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich  Lara Feigel
As the Second World War neared its conclusion, Germany was a nation reduced to rubble: 3.6 million German homes had been destroyed leaving 7.5 million people homeless; an apocalyptic landscape of flattened cities and desolate wastelands.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00N4UYWK2]Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949  David Cesarani
This moving and dramatic account captures the fate of the Jews, the horror and the heroism, in their own words. Resting on decades of scholarship, it is compelling, authoritative, and profoundly disturbing. David Cesarani sadly died in October 2015.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B01136BXW8]The Romanovs: 1613-1918  Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world’s surface. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire? And how did they lose it all?

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B019H5GI2M]Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War  Ian Buruma
A priceless record of an assimilated Jewish family living in England throughout the upheavals of the twentieth century and a moving portrait of a loving couple separated by war. By using their own words, Ian Buruma has created a spellbinding homage to the sustaining power of a family’s love and devotion through very dark days.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00X2FE43O]In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond  Robert D. Kaplan
A riveting journey through one of Europe’s frontier countries—and a potent examination of the forces that will determine Europe’s fate in the postmodern age.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B012UTQ5LQ]The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (hardback only)  Peter H. Wilson
In this strikingly ambitious book, Peter H. Wilson explains how the empire worked. It is not a chronological history, but an attempt to convey to readers the Empire’s unique nature, why it was so important and how it changed over its existence.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B015CQ12QW]1956: The World in Revolt Simon Hall
Vibrantly and sympathetically told, this is the story of one year – a capsule history of exhilarating triumphs and shattering defeats around the world.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B018WYGLY4]The Button Box: Lifting the Lid on Women’s Lives  Lynn Knight
The Button Box traces the story of women at home and in work from pre-First World War domesticity, through the first clerical girls in silk blouses, to the delights of beading and glamour in the thirties to short skirts and sexual liberation in the sixties.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B019T5OL1A]24 Historic Oddities and Strange Events: Collection  Sabine Baring-Gould
This collection presents 24 essays, each of them based on historical evidence, about different events, strange and sometimes unbelievable.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B014RT1LZW]History’s People: Personalities and the Past  Margaret MacMillan
What difference do individuals make to history? Are we all swept up in the great forces like industrialisation or globalisation that change the world? Clearly not: real people-leaders in particular-and the decisions that they make change our lives irrevocably, whether in deciding to go to war or not, decisive tactical choices made in the heat of battle or changing the economic fortunes of countries.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B019B8XHTM]Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers: The history you weren’t taught in school  Dominic Selwood
A brilliantly fun and informative read. Dominic Selwood has taken the juiciest bits of history from the past two thousand years and put them together in one marvellous volume.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B01B3GPD0G]The Morning They Came for Us  Janine di Giovanni
In May 2012, Janine di Giovanni travelled to Syria, marking the beginning of a long relationship with the country, as she began reporting from both sides of the conflict, witnessing its descent into one of the most brutal, internecine conflicts in recent history. Drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught up in the fighting, Syria came to consume her every moment, her every emotion.

See also New Historical Fiction, Jan-Feb 2016.

New Historical Fiction: Jan-Feb 2016

My primary historic interest is very much the twentieth century, so there is a bias here.
Nonetheless, here are 12 top reads published in January or February 2016…

If you have any suggestions for any additions, let me know.

(Thumbnail click for Amazon).

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00ZX99WE8]The Moonlit Garden  Corina Bomann
Lilly Kaiser had come to terms with her solitary, uncomplicated life after becoming a young widow. So when a stranger delivers an old violin to her Berlin antiques shop and tells Lilly it belongs to her, she’s completely bewildered. Why should she be the one to inherit such an exquisite instrument?

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B017SW4ECC]But You Did Not Come Back Marceline Loridan-Iven
In But You Did Not Come Back, Marceline writes a letter to the father she would never know as an adult, to the man whose death enveloped her whole life. Her testimony is a haunting and challenging reminder of one of the worst crimes humanity has ever seen, and an affecting personal story of a woman whose life was shattered and never totally rebuilt.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B015VXKM44]The Noise of Time  Julian Barnes
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00QDGVFRM]The Ballroom Anna Hope
Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, THE BALLROOM is a tale of unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00X8ZPXWE]The North Water Ian McGuire
A 19th-century whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard in this dark, sharp and highly original tale that grips like a thriller.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B014VP0CRK]If I Could Tell You Elizabeth Wilhide
Suffolk, 1939: Julia Compton has a beautifully well-ordered life. Once a promising musician, she now has a handsome husband who pays the bills, a young son she adores and a housekeeper who takes care of her comfortable home. Then on the eve of war something unexpected happens. She falls in love.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B01BUKCITY]Colours Other Than Blue Anthony Glavin
A canny, captivating, humorous portrayal of a Boston-Irish woman’s struggle to find her feet, love, and a quotient of tranquillity in 1980s dirty ol’ Dublin.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00XU115MI]The Yid: A Novel  Paul Goldberg
A debut novel of daring originality, The Yid guarantees that you will never think of Stalinist Russia, Shakespeare, theatre, Yiddish or history the same way again.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B0122VFGJY]What Lies Between Us  Nayomi Munaweera
In the idyllic hill country of Sri Lanka, a young girl grows up with her loving family; but even in the midst of this paradise, terror lurks in the shadows. When tragedy strikes, she and her mother must seek safety by immigrating to America.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00X9UO7H0]Toward the Sea of Freedom  Sarah Lack
In mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, charming Kathleen and dashing Michael harbor secrets and dreams. Imagining a life beyond the kitchen and fields of the wealthy family they both work for, they plot to leave their homeland, marry, and raise the child Kathleen is secretly carrying. The luck of the Irish, however, is not on their side.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B0198VHPHW]Midnight in Berlin James MacManus
Berlin, 1938. Newly-appointed military attaché Noel Macrae and his extrovert wife Primrose arrive at the British Embassy. Prime Minister Chamberlain is intent on placating Nazi Germany, but Macrae is less so. Convinced Hitler can be stopped by other means than appeasement, he soon discovers he is not the only dissenting voice in the Embassy and finds that some senior officers in the German military are prepared to turn against the Fuhrer.

[amazon template=thumbnail&asin=B00U7LG76I]The Edge of Lost  Kristina McMorris
On a cold night in October 1937, searchlights cut through the darkness around Alcatraz. A prison guard’s only daughter–one of the youngest civilians who lives on the island–has gone missing. Tending the warden’s greenhouse, convicted bank robber Tommy Capello waits anxiously. Only he knows the truth about the little girl’s whereabouts, and that both of their lives depend on the search’s outcome.

See also list of new history non-fiction, Jan-Feb 2016.