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Military & Conflict History

War, its causes and its human cost. Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August and Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers explain how Europe stumbled into the First World War. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee tells the wars against Native Americans from the side of those who lost them. Lindsey Fitzharris's The Facemaker follows the surgeons who rebuilt soldiers' faces, The Monuments Men the rescue of Europe's art, Tom Reiss's The Black Count the life of General Alexandre Dumas, and Maaza Mengiste's novel The Shadow King the women who fought Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. History that stays close to the people involved.

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Military & Conflict History

Wars & Campaigns

Histories of particular wars, from the decisions that started them to the campaigns that decided them. Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers explains how the leaders of Europe, none of them wanting a world war, walked step by step into the First World War in 1914. Barbara W. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August then follows the war's first month, as the great war plans met reality. Read together, they give a full picture of how the First World War began. See Military & Conflict History for more.

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Military & Conflict History

Military Institutions & Strategy

How armies plan, decide and fail. Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, recounts the first month of the First World War in 1914: the war plans prepared for years, the generals and governments who carried them out and the misjudgements that turned a quick war into four years of slaughter. A masterpiece of narrative history, famously read by President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. More books on military strategy will join this shelf; see Military & Conflict History for more.

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Military & Conflict History

War & Society

What war does to the people and societies caught up in it. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee tells the destruction of Native American nations in the American West. Lindsey Fitzharris's The Facemaker follows the doctors who treated the terrible facial wounds of the First World War, and The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel follows the effort to save Europe's art from the Nazis. Maaza Mengiste's novel The Shadow King imagines the Ethiopian women who fought against Mussolini's invasion. Moving, often hard reading about war beyond the battlefield.

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The Black Count

Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

By Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss reconstructs the life of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of novelist Alexandre Dumas and one of the most remarkable military figures of Revolutionary France. Born in colonial Saint-Domingue to an enslaved Black woman and a French nobleman, Dumas traveled to France, enlisted as an ordinary cavalryman, and rose to the rank of general during a brief revolutionary period of expanded opportunity for men of color. His campaigns in the Alps, Italy, and Egypt established his reputation for courage, physical power, and independence. Those same qualities eventually brought him into conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte. Capture, imprisonment, political abandonment, and the restoration of racial discrimination transformed his final years. Reiss connects this history to the fiction of Dumas’s celebrated son, showing how the general’s heroism, captivity, betrayal, and longing for justice helped shape works including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. The result is simultan…

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