Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/July 2014/Book reviews


 * By Jonas Vinther

Laurence Rees, a highly respected BAFTA-winning British historian, is author of several books about Adolf Hitler, World War II, the Nazi era, and the Holocaust. He also served as producer, co-writer, and creator of many BBC history documentaries. But in May 2010, Rees decided to "get modern", and created the multimedia website WW2history.com.

The website features black-and-white and colour footage, testimonies, interviews with leading world experts, and long and very professional articles on key moments in World War II, covering political and military factors regarding each year in the war, the consequences of the war, and the Holocaust. The website's professionalism is profound, and holds a neutral point of view, which makes it very readable for Wikipedians. The website only uses reliable, trusted sources, and all those can be viewed on the website. It should be very useful tool for proper citing and general use on Wikipedia in the future. Rees says he created the website because he wanted to "provide an accessible and authoritative multimedia history of World War II for the web." Ian Kershaw, from Sheffield University, calls the website, "A brilliant and highly original website. It offers a splendid, new and stimulating way of exploring the most terrible war in history." Akira Iriye, from Harvard University, describes the website as, "An innovative, exciting and extremely valuable resource."

The website holds a series of prestigious awards: in 2010, it won an PPA award, for best independent publisher. In 2011, it won an IMA award for best education and reference in class. It was shortlisted and highly recommended by Econsultancy Innovation and Digital Entrepreneur. All in all, the website is a priceless learning site, written in collaboration by professional historians.


 * By Nick-D

The prolific British firm Osprey Publishing recently re-issued all of the books in its somewhat worthy-but-dull Essential Histories series as e-books for the bargain basement price of 99 pence or $US 1.40. Re-badged as the Guide To... series, these books provide short (96-page) overviews of a wide range of military history and are aimed at readers looking for an introduction on the topic. To test the concept out, I purchased John A. Lynn's volume The French Wars 1667–1714. The book covers the series of wars fought, and in most cases initiated, by Louis XIV of France during his 50 years on the throne. I knew next to nothing about these wars, and was hopeful that the book would introduce me to the topic.

Overall, The French Wars 1667–1714 achieves its goals handily. In common with the other books in this series, the volume is structured into chapters on the background to the war, the warring sides, the conduct of the fighting, thematic chapters on the experiences of soldiers and civilians, and how the war ended. This worked pretty well, with the chapters on the background to the war and the various factions being particularly successful. The chapter on the wars was somewhat rushed, but was also pretty successful. Notably, Lynn managed to fit useful coverage of the logistical effort which sustained the wars into the chapter, which was no mean feat given that he also describes nine large-sized conflicts!

I felt that the thematic chapters were less successful, and the Osprey-imposed topics of 'portrait of a soldier' and 'portrait of a civilian' were rather inefficient ways of illustrating these topics. The chapter on the 'world around the war' was very good though, with Lynn choosing to focus on the impact which the various armies attempts to live off the land had on civilians. Unusually for an Osprey product the book was rather under-illustrated, containing only a handful of maps. To make matters worse these maps generally aren't well aligned with the book's narrative, and appear several pages too late.

That said, for the price this book was a real bargain and I'd strongly recommend it. It would be very useful as a reference for high-level Wikipedia articles on this topic, and I found that it was successful in providing an introduction to these wars.