I'm interested in medieval period, but since WW2 and 20th century is what actually pushed me in history i would like to get more information about it. My interest are:
a) Books about this period written by historians, I would prefer recent but some older that are still considered to be important is also welcome — and I would love some books that go "wider" than just telling about events, for example dealing with questions like "Why did Hitler come to power?", or something like that
b) Books written during that period, by people living in that period. Something like "Tigers in the mud" by Otto Carius, first-person view on that period — and it would be great if there is someone that is actual historian and have some kind of memoirs from that period (if there are cases like that)
And I'm especially interested to know more about year 1918/1919/1920 in Eastern Europe, whole "Red Army — White Army — free Baltic states movement — Freikorps etc." war in that area, fight for monarchism, for republic, and for free-states of ex-Russian Empire (with special interest in Polish-Soviet war/Estonian-Soviet war... I always admired Polish and Estonian defense against red army).
I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for but for what it’s worth I just read Hiroshima by John Hersey, and I think it was incredible.
It’s comprised of survivor accounts of what happened when and after the bomb fell on hiroshima on august 6th 1945.
I thought it was incredibly interesting, so if you’re at all interested in that I would recommend.
Hi there, those interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a recommendation to make to OP, this is still a thread on AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.