Books
This section aims to provide an overview of books that may, in addition to textbooks, add to secondary students’ understanding of different history topics.
This list is by no means exhaustive. It consists of books I have read and consider useful for secondary school history teaching, including novels, memoirs, biographies, non-fiction books, and comic books/graphic novels.
Teachers may want to create reading assignment consisting of only a few pages or perhaps a chapter or two from these books.
Entire books could be assigned to students in Years 12 and 13 or their equivalent, or one can suggest books to students who are interested in reading more about a topic in their spare time.
The books are discussed according to topic.
Content
1. The Middle Ages in Europe
2. World War I
3. The Interwar Years
4. The Holocaust
5. Communism and Stalinism
6. Post-1945 history
7. 20th-cent. US history/the Civil Rights Movement
8. Vietnamese History
9. The American Vietnam War
10. General History
11. Current History and Politics
12. Historical Fiction
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The Middle Ages in Europe
Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne (2008; individual texts c.817 CE and after, and c.883–887 CE)
Background/Context
Many consider Charlemagne (748–814 CE) “the father of Europe”, as he united most of central and western Europe during his reign. He was crowned King of the Franks in 768 CE, King of the Lombards in 774 CE, and finally Emperor of the Romans in 800 CE. Being crowned emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day of that year, Charlemagne was the first emperor ruling from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire 300 years prior.
He founded the Carolingian Empire (called empire of the romans and the franks by contemporaries), which at its height would stretch, including tributary states, from west of the Pyrenees to areas in modern-day Easter Europe, and included all of modern-day France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern Italy.
Charlemagne was a talented warrior and ruler. He welcomed different scholars at his court and supported their work. He is thus credited with having started the Carolingian Renaissance, a period that yielded new art and scholarship. He was also responsible for several massacres and had many illegitimate children.
Einhard, a friend of Charlemagne’s and a member of his court, wrote his biographical account of Charlemagne a few years after the emperor’s death. Notker wrote his texts about Charlemagne’s life a number of decades later, based on anecdotes.
Using it in history class
This book offers a great opportunity for teachers to have students compare and contrast two different sources about the same subject, one written by someone who knew Charlemagne well, the other written by a stranger decades after the emperor’s death. Teachers could assign a small number of passages from both texts that address the same issues and have students investigate how and why the two authors portray these issues differently.
World War I
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues, 1928, German original; 1929, first English translation)
Background/Content
This classic World War I novel is based on the German author’s own trench warfare experience on the Western Front. Remarque was born Erich Paul Remark, but changed his name to Remarque, the spelling used by his French ancestors on his father’s side.
He later also changed his middle name to Maria. Remarque scholars have speculated that he changed his name in honor of his French ancestry and used it, especially after the war, to express his solidarity with the French soldiers he was forced to fight and kill.
The protagonist in the novel is named Paul Bäumer—Remarque’s original middle name and the maiden name of his grandmother on his mother’s side.
Using it in history class
This book is particularly well-suited for teaching World War I. The English translation uses language as straight forward as the German original does and should thus be accessible even to younger students.
Moreover, each chapter focuses more or less on a different key experience in trench warfare or on specific aspects of German war propaganda and the militarization of German society.
Therefore, teachers can easily assign just a few pages or one chapter to help students better understand World War I.
Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1920, German original; 1929, first English translation)
Background/Content
Jünger’s book is not a novel, but a memoir of his time first as a private and later a Lieutenant in the German Army in World War I. The original version of the book was his unedited diary. Jünger edited the book several times and removed some of the more gruesome descriptions of violence in later versions.
Jünger’s long life is fascinating in its own right. He was born in 1895 and died at the age of 102 in 1998. The highly decorated Word War I veteran also fought in World War II but remained an anti-Nazi conservative and refused to participate in the propaganda machinery of Joseph Goebbels. He never swore an oath to Hitler, and he and his brother quit their veterans’ organization when Jews were excluded from it.
Jünger spent most of World War II as an intelligence officer in Paris where he would at times inform Jews of upcoming transports to camps, thus saving some of their lives. He was also marginally involved in the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler.
Although, as a conservative nationalist (and arguably somewhat of Nietzschean proto-fascist), Jünger remained suspect in the eyes of the Allied authorities after the war, he was never arrested, and after being temporarily banned from publishing, continued his writing career.
Jünger also experimented with drugs all his life. He and the inventor of LSD and Jünger’s long-time friend, the Swiss scientists Albert Hofmann, took LSD several times in each other’s company.
Using it in history class
I would be rather hesitant to assign the book in class.
While it is undoubtedly a valuable primary source, it also describes war as an exciting, life-affirming experience. Given that Jünger genuinely seems to have felt that way about World War I, and studies have shown that he was not the only one*, historians must not dismiss his writings as simply a “bad point of view”. Historians, history teachers, and students in history classes must try to understand a wide range of human emotions, even proto-fascist ones.
Nevertheless, younger students may lack the intellectual maturity to engage with Jünger’s writings in a productive way. The book may thus be more appropriate for students in Year 12 and 13.
Jünger’s writing are particularly useful if one seeks to create an assignment where students have to compare and contrast different points of view. A potentially fruitful exercise could therefore be to give students pertinent pages from both Jünger and Remarque, have them compare and contrast the writings, and figure out how and why two men fighting in the same war on the same side could have had such opposing views of the conflict and of war in general.
*See for example, Joanna Burke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999)
The Interwar Years
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Background/Content
The book describes Orwell’s experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Orwell was among the outsiders who went to Spain in 1936 to fight against the country being taken over by Francisco Franco’s fascist armies which were supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Orwell joined the fighters of the communist but anti-Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Spanish: Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM), one of the leftist factions fighting against Franco. The POUM and other non-Stalinist groups were eventually repressed and betrayed by the Spanish Communist Party which received aid and arms from the Soviet Union. Orwell escaped back to England, and the Spanish Republic fell to Franco’s forces.
Using it in history class
The issues addressed in this book may be too complex for younger students. But if one studies the interwar years and especially the Spanish Civil War with Year 12 or 13 students, one may want to assign at least parts of this book.
Aside from being wonderfully written, the book provides a first-hand account of perhaps naïve but sincere and dedicated democratic socialists being betrayed by Stalinists. Throughout Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s genuine admiration and love for the people of Catalonia who fought fascism is readily apparent.
Older students may learn from this book how in Spain and elsewhere in Europe the fragmentation of the left in the 1930s contributed to the rise of fascism.
The Holocaust
General Background/Content
The Holocaust is a most difficult topic to teach in secondary school. Yet, as one of the biggest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated, its history must be taught continuously, and it must be taught well.
To be able to put the Holocaust in its proper historical context, students must learn about the history of anti-Semitism prior to the existence of Nazi Germany, before they study how the Nazi regime, starting in 1933, gradually increased its discrimination of and attacks on German Jews.
Students must understand that the Holocaust was the intentional and meticulously planned and executed industrial mass murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany with the help of its allies.
It is also important to recognize that, while there were many concentration camps for political prisoners in Nazi Germany before the war in which some Jews and other “undesirables” were imprisoned and murdered, the Nazis’ large-scale murder operations became possible only during World War II.
They started in 1939 in Poland with mass shootings conducted by SS Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”—a euphemism for death squads) which continued in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union throughout the war. Jewish populations in all the German-occupied countries were imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettoes. Starting in December 1941, the Nazis gassed Jews and Roma in the Chelmo death camp in Poland.
The Nazis subsequently built five more extermination camps in Poland (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek) specifically designed for the mass murder of mostly Jews, but also of homosexuals, communists, Slavs, and Sinti and Roma, who were transported to Poland from all over Nazi-occupied Europe and the conquered parts of the Soviet Union.
Many Jews and others were also murdered in concentration camps that were not specifically designated death camps but were often almost as lethal, including Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in Germany; Mauthausen in Austria; and Natzweiler-Struthof in France. There were also camps in other Nazi-occupied or Nazi-allied countries.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (1947) & Elie Wiesel, Night (1960)
Background/Content
Levi was an Italian chemist and anti-Fascist partisan who was arrested by the Fascist Militia in 1943 and transported to Auschwitz by the Nazis in 1944 because he was Jewish. One of the reasons he survived was that, as a chemist, the Nazis had him work mostly indoors. Levi had a career as a writer after the war.
Wiesel was born into a Jewish family in Romania in 1928. The family was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944, where Wiesel’s mother and sister were murdered. Wiesel and his father were later moved to Buchenwald, where his father was also murdered. After the war, Wiesel became a US citizen and worked as writer, political activist and teacher. He received numerous prestigious rewards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
Using the books history class
Among the many books on the Holocaust and accounts written by survivors, Levi’s and Wiesel’s works still remain among the most important.
Nevertheless, I would not assign either book in its entirety in secondary school, except as part of a, say, semester-long study project. These texts are too important to be discussed in their entirety without having been put in a lot of context first.
They also include many gruesome facts, which on the one hand are important to get students to understand the Holocaust’s horrific dimensions, but on the other hand might be too much for some, especially younger, students.
Arguably, Night is more disturbing than Survival in Auschwitz—if one can possibly even make such a comparison between two text written about surviving hell on Earth. In either case, I would recommend only assigning individual key passage from either book and only after preparing students accordingly.
Art Spiegelman, Maus I & II (1991; serialized publication from 1980–1991)
Background/Content
This graphic novel—to this day the only graphic novel to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize—shows Spiegelman interviewing his father, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, about the Holocaust and then illustrates those recollections as well. Spiegelman depicts Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, and Poles as pigs.
Using the book in history class
This work would also have to be discussed in depth if it were used as a whole in class. However, one could certainly assign just a number or pages or panels. Although such an assignment, too, would have to be contextualized properly. How and why a number of critics have disapproved of Spiegelman’s technique of using mice, cats, and pigs to portray Jews, Nazis, and Poles, respectively, would also have to be discussed in class.
One should note, however, that Maus is not any less effective than other survivor memoirs because it is a graphic novel. I once felt as punched in the gut by two pages in Maus, as I felt after having read certain pages in Night. The point of Maus is not to explain the Holocaust to younger students by presenting it in comic-book form. Indeed, as scholar Paul Shute has pointed out,
“More than a few readers have described [Maus] as the most compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason.”*
*Quoted in Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 (1986)
Background/content
Margolius Kovály was born Heda Bloch to a Jewish family in Prague in 1919. She and her husband, Rudolf Margolius both survived the Holocaust. Remarkably, Margolius Kovály managed to escape during a death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen and return to Prague. She was later reunited with her husband who after the war became Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade in communist Czechoslovakia—only to be found guilty of treason during the infamous 1952 Slánský show trial and hanged. Heda remarried Paul Kovály and the couple fled to the United States in 1968.
Using the book in history class
If nothing else, any history class that studies Europe in the twentieth century would benefit from reading a few pages from a book that recounts not only the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, but also tells the story of one of the most remarkable lives of the twentieth century.
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992)
Background/Content
Browning’s seminal work shows how even middle-aged German police officers from Hamburg (one of the least pro-Nazi cities in Nazi Germany) who did not spend the formative years of their lives being indoctrinated by the Nazis could willingly participate in the mass murder perpetrated by the SS Einsatzgruppen (death squads)—even without the threat of punishment if they refused.
Using it in class
While the whole book will most likely be far too challenging for most secondary students, one may be able to assign relevant passages in Years 12 and 13 to address one of the most important questions regarding the Holocaust: Are all people capable of such cruel and inhuman behavior under certain circumstances? Browning’s book suggests that they very well might be.
This realization could help students recognize the complexities of human behavior and realize that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not simply “evil monsters” or people “who were essentially victims, too—if they had not participated, they would have been killed as well,” but human beings who for the most part made conscious decisions to participate in mass murder, many without the threat of punishment.
I often tell my students that “evil” is not a category of historical analysis. I hope most people would agree that what the Nazis (or transatlantic slave traders or King Leopold II) did was evil, and that their actions were certainly monstrous. But if we simply label the Nazis and other genocidal criminals “evil”, the discussion stops there, and we learn nothing.
Students need to comprehend that, in order to understand why and how a genocide too place, we need to go beyond calling the culprits “evil” and try to analyze why they did what they did.
This never means that one excuses or approves of what they did—much to the contrary. If we analyze the societal and political dynamics that make genocide possible (e.g. us v. them thinking; unquestioning submission to authority; demonizing the Other, etc.) we are better equipped to prevent it from happening in the future, not in the same, but perhaps in a similar way. However, if we simply call an event “evil” and never ask why and how exactly it happened, it may happen again—and more easily the next time around because we were not aware of the underlying forces at work that made it possible the last time.
Communism and Stalinism
Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 (1986)
See above.
George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
Background/Content/Using it in class
George Orwell’s classic allegory about the threat of Stalinism in which animals take over a poorly-run farm, but some of the pigs soon become “more equal than others” and finally indistinguishable from abusive humans could be assigned in any class learning about communism. It is relatively short and quite accessible.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)
Background/Content
The main protagonist of Darkness at Noon is a fictional character named Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov who is based on one of the Bolshevik leaders who were put on show trials, convicted, and put to death during Stalin’s 1938 purges. Koestler, a Hungarian-born British author and one-time member of the Communist Party of Germany, knew some of these men personally.
The novel describes Rubashov’s memories of his life before being imprisoned, his arrest and imprisonment, life in his cell, repeated interrogations, and perhaps most importantly, his thought processes.
Using it in class
This book will most likely be too challenging for students below Years 12 and 13. But A-Level students (or their equivalent) studying Soviet history may find the entire book or some passage helpful, as Koestler masterfully illustrates how Stalinist logic can take over the mind.
Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953)
Background/Content
In 1951, the Polish intellectual Czesław Miłosz, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, fled from communist Poland first to France and then to the United States. In The Captive Mind he describes in beautiful prose how many Polish intellectuals could not resist the allure of Stalinism because it seemed to make logical sense and thus kept their minds captive.
Using it in class
Similar to Darkness at Noon, passages from this book could be used in an A-Level class studying Soviet history to help students understand Stalinist logic.
Post-1945 History
John Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997)
Background/Content
Anderson wrote this detailed and definite biography of one of the most iconic figures of the second half of the twentieth century with full access to relevant Cuban government archives and Che’s personal papers. He interviewed his widow, his former comrades, and CIA agents and Bolivian officers who hunted Che in Bolivia. Due to Anderson’s research, Che’s remains were located in Bolivia and brought to Cuba where they received a state funeral.
Using it in class
If one teaches communism, the Cold War, the twentieth century, Latin American history or even Cuban history to A-Level students, assigning a number of pages from this work could be instructive, especially because Anderson’s book is not a hagiography but describes many different aspects of Che’s life and personality.
Henri Alleg, The Question (La Question, 1958, French original; English translation, 1958, 2006)
Background/Content
Henri Alleg was a French journalist who supported the independence of Algeria from France during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). He was arrested by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers (1956-1957) and tortured for one month but eventually released. In The Question he described his ordeal in detail.
In the first month after its publication, the book sold 60’000 copies, before becoming the first book since the eighteenth century to be banned by the French government for political reasons. But several publishers refused to follow government orders, and by the end of the year, 162’000 copies had been sold. The book revealed to the French public the extent of the use of torture by the French military in Algeria.
Using it in class
Secondary school students in the English-speaking world are neither likely to study the Algerian War of Independence nor twentieth-century decolonization in general. However, given that the US military used some of the same torture techniques during the Iraq War and torture has been used throughout human history and is still used today, Alleg’s short and concise book needs to be read by as many students as possible. The 2006 US edition is excellent.
Ingo Hasselbach, Führer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi (1996)
Background/Content
Ingo Hasselbach was born in East Berlin in 1967. As he got older, he learned to hate the communist state, in an act of rebellion became a neo-Nazi, and soon turn into the leading figure of neo-Nazism in East Berlin. He established contacts with West German neo-Nazis, and after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, Hasselbach became one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi movement in Germany and maintained contacts with neo-Nazis in other countries, including in the United States.
Eventually, Hasselbach befriended a filmmaker who was shooting a documentary about neo-Nazism. Due to this friendship, Hasselbach slowly began to change his views, finally left the movement, and wrote a book about his life as a neo-Nazi, Die Abrechnung – ein Neonazi steigt aus (“The Reckoning: a neo-Nazi gets out”). Führer-Ex is not simply a translation of this book, but also chronicles in its final pages what happened after Hasselbach published the German version, including death threats and a letter bomb, which fortunately did not explode, being sent to his mother’s apartment. Since leaving the movement, Hasselbach has worked as a journalist, lectured on extremism, and co-founded Exit Germany, which helps young people leave neo-Nazism.
Using it in class
The book has been out of print for a long time, but used copies are available online. It is written in very accessible language, and one could easily assign chapters even to Year 10 and Year 11 students, if a class studies twentieth-century German history, the history of the GDR, German reunification, or neo-Nazism in particular.
Since, to my knowledge, none of the British or international exam boards offers topics focusing specifically on neo-Nazism, the book can also be used to discuss the phenomenon of political extremism in general, whether it’s right-wing, left-wing, or religious extremism. The dynamics are similar: indoctrination and brainwashing; a belief that only the views of those dedicated to the movement are correct, and everybody else is an enemy; believing in conspiracy theories; violence as an inevitable necessity or a good in itself, etc.
20th-cent. US/Civil Rights
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1988)
Background/Content
When the FBI’s covert and illegal COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram, 1956–1979 and after) began to be successful in undermining the Black Panther Party, some of its members went underground and founded the Black Liberation Army (BLA) whose goal it was to wage war against the US government through killings of police officers, bombings, prison breaks, and robberies. They also killed drug dealers.
Assata Shakur (born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947) was one of the leaders of the BLA. In 1977, she was convicted of the murder of a police officer during a shootout in New Jersey and sentenced to life in prison. Her lawyers and supporters maintain to this day that the evidence against Shakur had been conflicting and unreliable. Since Shakur was shot several times herself before she supposedly shot and killed the officer, medical evidence indicated that it was impossible for her to have shot him.
Civil rights activist Angela Davis considered Shakur a political prisoner, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights deemed her a victim of the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO operations and concluded that her solitary confinement was completely inappropriate for any inmate.
In 1979, members of the BLA broke Shakur out of prison and she went underground. She reappeared in 1984 in Cuba, where she received political asylum and has lived ever since.
Using it in class
Most textbooks about the Civil Rights movement will include such primary sources as excerpts from speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, or the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program. But none that I have seen focus on COINTELPRO or the Black Liberation Army. Excerpts from Shakur’s book might thus nicely complement the information provided in textbooks.
Vietnamese History
General Background/Content
Unfortunately, Vietnamese history is usually only taught at the secondary level as the history of the American and sometimes also the French Vietnam War. Please not that I prefer not to call the American Vietnam War simply “the Vietnam War.” The Vietnamese fought many wars before and some after the US military presence in Vietnam. And as traumatizing as the war was for US GIs, it was much worse for the Vietnamese population. It was their country that was invaded and destroyed and their people who were massacred.
It is essential that students learn about Vietnamese history from Vietnamese writers.
Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (1999)
Background/Content
As the title indicates, this book traces the history of Elliott’s family in Vietnam from the lives of her great-grandparents to the escape of many of her family members to the United States after the North Vietnamese took over Saigon in 1975. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Using it in class
Teachers could assign any chapters in this book to Year 12 and Year 13 students studying Vietnamese history. Given that it is 474 pages long, the entire book would only be suitable for university students.
The American Vietnam War
Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989)
Background/Content
Hayslip was born Phùng Thị Lệ Lý in a farmers’ village in central Vietnam in 1949. The book recounts her childhood as well as the most harrowing period of her life as a young woman before and during the American war; she was raped, tortured, and nearly starved to death. Hayslip and her mother had to flee several times and barely survived in the war-torn country. Hayslip was married to two different Americans, the first of whom she followed to the United States, where he later died of emphysema. Her second husband was physically abusive and eventually committed suicide.
Hayslip’s work is a tale of survival against all odds. Due to her business acumen and her resolve, Hayslip was eventually able to establish the East Meets West Foundation, an international NGO supporting the lives of Vietnamese people. Her organization has since turned into the Thrives Networks and has offices in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, India, Uganda, and the United States.
Using it in class
Several passages from the book could be assigned to provide students with a female Vietnamese perspective of the American War.
Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War (1990; first English edition 1993)
Background/Content
Like All Quiet on the Western Front is based on Remarque’s experiences in World War I, Bao Ninh’s novel is based on his time as a soldier in the North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) fighting the US and the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) from 1969 to 1975. Bao Ninh was one of ten survivors of the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade.
Using it in class
Any teacher who assigns the recollections of US Vietnam War veterans should also assign readings from this book. In fact, the English translation is very readable and some students may ask to read the whole book. It is that good.
Three American books about the American Vietnam War
The following are in my opinion the three best books written by Americans about the American War in Vietnam. Reading excerpts from all of them would greatly contribute to students’ understanding of the war.
Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977)
Herr reported on the war for Esquire magazine and the book describes this work as a war reporter and the experiences of US soldiers on the ground. Herr has admitted that not all of the stories he relates are factual in the sense that they literally took place the way he describes them—there as some composite characters; some of the first-hand accounts, he actually heard from others; etc.—but everything in the book reflects the reality of the American War in Vietnam. Nothing is literally made up. Many still consider this book the best ever written by an American on the war.
Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn (2010)
Marlantes’s work is another novel based on the author’s actual experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. Marlantes masterfully describes the cruelty of the conflict, the senselessness of it all, and the overwhelming fear the soldiers felt. Particularly revealing is his description of the “high body count equals winning” equation that took hold of the US military in Vietnam: Since nobody really knew why they were fighting in Vietnam (other than a vague notion of defeating communism), and nobody was able to explain what exactly would have had to happen for a US victory to have been achieved, success was often measured in how many enemy soldiers had been killed. This led to the murder of countless innocent civilians.
Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013)
Journalist Nick Turse’s detailed study of the war exposes it as essentially a form of genocide. Because of the high body count equals winning equation mentioned above, GIs were often given the order to “kill anything that moves”, and any dead Vietnamese—men, women, children, old people, whether shot on purpose or accidentally—were simply recorded as dead PAVN or National Liberation Front (labeled “Viet Cong”—“Vietnamese Commies” by the South Vietnamese Dictator Ngô Đình Diệm) fighters. In addition to this murderous phenomenon, the heat; the GIs’ frustrating inability to differentiate between civilians and actual NLF fighters, who often seemed invisible; and rampant heroin addiction among US soldiers led to countless massacres of civilians, including the most infamous one (at least the worst one to be reported; clearly, there were many others) at My Lai.
General History
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Harari’s books are brilliant. They will most likely be too challenging for students below Years 12 and 13, and, given that few schools teach world history in the manner in which Harari approaches it, the books may not be that useful for secondary school history classes. Nevertheless, one may be able to assign especially sections from the beginning of the book about the reasons for the rise of Homo sapiens, the development of writing systems, currencies, etc. for an excellent overview of the beginning of human history. Any history teacher should most certainly read all of Harari’s books.
Current History and Politics
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010)
This political testament of one of the greatest historians of the second half of the twentieth century outlines the policies that led to the economic collapse of 2008 and offers insights into what possible alternatives to the destructive neoliberal ideology of people like Thatcher and Reagan might look like in the twenty-first century. It should be read by every historian and history teacher.
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2015)
This book puts the present and possible futures of humankind into the proper historical context, and while possibly too challenging for most secondary school students below Year 12, should really be read not only by all history teachers, but by everybody.
Yuval Noah Harari, Twenty-one Lessons for the Twenty-first Century (2018)
Harari uses his exceptional insight into human society to focus on the most pressing problems of the present. The recommendations for Homo Deus apply to this book as well.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)
Yale University historian Timothy Snyder’s book is an excellent guide to what kinds of developments and phenomena one should look out for if one is interested in preventing the rise of new tyrannical governments, written by an expert on Nazism, Stalinism, and Easter European history. The book is relatively short, written for a general audience, and should be read by everyone and be taught at secondary schools around the world.
Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism (2017)
The brilliant economist explains in straight-forward language how capitalism and particularly its neoliberal version works—or does not work for most people. A must-read for anyone.
Historical Fiction
Normally I would not recommend assigning excerpts from historical fiction in a history class. But there are two exceptions: Life after Life (2013) and A God in Ruins (2015) by the great Kate Atkinson.
Both books are not only historical fiction, they are very creative historical fiction. The protagonist in Life after Life keeps dying and reliving different versions of her life. In A God in Ruins, her brother experiences and remembers his life in similarly unorthodox ways.
As such, these books, while brilliant fiction, do not fit into a history class, except for two reasons:
For Life after Life, Atkinson thoroughly researched the Blitz during World War II, and I have never read a better description of what it must have been like to live through it.
For A God in Ruins, Atkinson conducted research about Allied World War II bombers and the experiences of their crews, resulting again in an excellent description of what it was like to participate in Allied bombing missions.
Teachers could thus easily assign excerpts from the two books in a class covering World War II in Britain.