Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Ideas for the Hard-to-Buy-for Historian #17

Military historian Ken Reynolds of Ottawa, who blogs on military history here and here too, has 1200 engrossing pages for the historian on your list:
I would suggest the two volumes published in the last year by Tim Cook on Canada and the First World War (no surprise, I went with a military history suggestion): At the Sharp End and Shock Troops. These are well on their way to becoming the new standard overviews of the men who fought in the Canadian Corps during the war. Even at a combined length of more than 1,200 pages they are very readable as the author is an excellent writer and storyteller. Both volumes are currently for sale in major bookstores at a quite reasonable price for hardcover volumes of this size. Highly recommended.

Ken Reynolds is an unusual blogger in that his blogs are hardly about himself at all, but he does note in one of them that he has just returned from deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan, as an official military historian -- part of a long tradition of Canadian military historians going to the front to cover the story and assemble the records.
 
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