Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Art of War

by Thomas Cleary, John Minford, Ralph D. Sawyer, Khoo Keng-hor, James Gimian, Samuel B. Griffith, Sun Tzu, Mei-chun Sawyer, Stefan Rudnicki

The Art of War is one of the oldest books on military strategy in the world. It is also one of the most famous studies of strategy and has had a huge influence on Eastern and Western military planning, business tactics, and beyond. First translated into a European language in 1782 by French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, and had possibly influenced Napoleon, and even the planning of Operation Desert Storm.... (more)

Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

by Mark Bowden

The acclaimed New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down is "a shocking account of modern warfare . . . gripping and horrifying" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) Destined to become a classic of war reporting, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden's brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3rd, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped... (more)

Band of Brothers : E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest

Band of Brothers : E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest

by Stephen Ambrose

As good a rifle company as any in the world, Easy Company, 506th Airborne Division, U.S. Army, kept getting the tough assignments -- responsible for everything from parachuting into France early D-Day morning to the capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden. In Band of Brothers, Ambrose tells of the men in this brave unit who fought, went hungry, froze, and died, a company that took 150 percent... (more)

Citizen Soldiers : The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany - June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945 (abridged: audio)

Citizen Soldiers : The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany - June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945 (abridged: audio)

by Stephen Ambrose

In this riveting account, historian Stephen Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war, from the high command down to the ordinary soldier, drawing on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany,... (more)

D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II

D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II

by Stephen Ambrose

Stephen E. Ambrose draws from more than 1,400 interviews with American, British, Canadian, French, and German veterans to create the preeminent chronicle of the most important day in the twentieth century. Ambrose reveals how the original plans for the invasion were abandoned, and how ordinary soldiers and officers acted on their own initiative. D-Day is above all the epic story of men at the most demanding... (more)

The Guns of August

by Barbara Tuchman

"More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research." CHICAGO TRIBUNE Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense... (more)

The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the... (more)

Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

by William L. Shirer

Since its publication in 1960, William L. Shirer's monumental study of Hitler's German Empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of this century's blackest hours. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. With millions of copies in print around the globe, it has attained the status of... (more)

Stalingrad

The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

by Antony Beevor

This gripping history is the definitive account of the battle that shifted the tide of World War II. Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold... (more)

The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme

The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme

by John Keegan

Although he has never fought in a war the author creates a realistic picture of the fears, pressures, and mechanics of fighting a battle, emphasizing three particular campaigns.

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

by Marcus Luttrell

Four US Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July, 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Their task was to document the activity of an al Qaeda leader rumored to be very close to Bin Laden with a small army in a Taliban stronghold. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS made it out alive. This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, SEAL... (more)

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

by Rick Atkinson

In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy In An Army at Dawn —winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle , he follows the strengthening American and British... (more)

Liberation Trilogy: Book 1

An Army at Dawn

The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

by Rick Atkinson

In the first volume of his monumental trilogy about the liberation of Europe in WW II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the riveting story of the war in North Africa The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can... (more)

The First World War

by John Keegan

The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and... (more)

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution of the... (more)

Ghost Soldiers

by Hampton Sides

On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. A recent prison massacre by Japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and left little time to plan the complex operation. In... (more)

Flyboys

by James Bradley

This acclaimed bestseller brilliantly illuminates a hidden piece of World War II history as it tells the harrowing true story of nine American airmen shot down in the Pacific. One of them, George H. W. Bush, was miraculously rescued. The fate of the others-an explosive 60-year-old secret-is revealed for the first time in FLYBOYS.

The Wild Blue : The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45

The Wild Blue : The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45

by Stephen Ambrose

Stephen Ambrose is the acknowledged dean of the historians of World War II in Europe. In three highly acclaimed, bestselling volumes, he has told the story of the bravery, steadfastness, and ingenuity of the ordinary young men, the citizen soldiers, who fought the enemy to a standstill -- the band of brothers who endured together. The very young men who flew the B-24s over Germany in World War II against... (more)

Battle Cry of Freedom

The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Now featuring a new Afterword by the author, this handy paperback edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom is without question the definitive one-volume history of the Civil War. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with... (more)

Mein Kampf

by Ralph Manhein, Adolf Hitler

After 1944, Hitler's notorious book was not widely available until the hardback edition of this version appeared in 1969. This paperback edition is intended primarily for students of 20th century German history seeking to gain insight into its dominant figure from reading his own words. Ostensibly an autobiography, the work comprises a melange of Hitler's political and racial ideas over two volumes, "A Reckoning"... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: military history

by Thomas Cleary, John Minford, Ralph D. Sawyer, Khoo Keng-hor, James Gimian, Samuel B. Griffith, Sun Tzu, Mei-chun Sawyer, Stefan Rudnicki

by Mark Bowden

by Stephen Ambrose

by Stephen Ambrose

by Stephen Ambrose

by Barbara Tuchman

by Tim O'Brien

by William L. Shirer

The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

by Antony Beevor

by John Keegan

by Marcus Luttrell

by Rick Atkinson

The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

by Rick Atkinson

by John Keegan

by Thomas E. Ricks

by Hampton Sides

by James Bradley

by Stephen Ambrose

The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

by Ralph Manhein, Adolf Hitler