A military reading list that surprises me, a Vietnam list, and FP’s list by the big shots

Max Hastings offers up here a list of his five favorite military memoirs. Longtime grasshoppers remember well how much I am a fan of good reading lists, but this was a first for me: Not only have I not read any of them — not one  –but I hadn’t even heard of most of them.

But I’ve heard of and read many of the books on this other list by Hastings.

Meanwhile, while I am slinging reading lists, here is a good one specifically about the Marines and Vietnam.

But wait, there’s more. Call now and you can have for no extra costs FP‘s list of the best books on foreign policy this year-as picked by the people FP picked as the globe’s most influential thinkers. Tomorrow night I am gonna party down with several dozen of them. We’ll see if they can dance as good as they talk.

Finally, proving that there is always one more book to read, I was looking at the unpublished oral history of a Vietnam-era general and he mentioned that in the 1950s, he was fascinated by an Army history of three small unit battles in World War II. “It was the most interesting book I’d ever read,” he recalled. Used copies of the book are not cheap — but here is the whole thing on-line. Personally I can’t stand reading books online. If you can, let me know if I should read it.