Absolutely no technical history books. I don’t remember finishing a single technical history book, and it’s just utter drudgery to try and keep up with all the names, minor events and stuff.
I find that I’m more able to retain the facts of a historical event when I read stories of the characters involved related in a more “humanized” fashion and where they are painted as actual living multidimensional people rather than as automatic and shapeless chess pieces who did this or that thing. I’m looking for something that also shows the personal side of history while still keeping the reader aware of some of its technicalities as well as the politics. It could be a collection of short accounts of people who personally met and worked with a prominent military or political figure, telling us their own experiences while still being sufficiently informative, or a memoir written by some Soviet or Japanese scientist who participated in a research program or something like that.
The closest example of such book I can think of is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. The only issue I have with this book is that it’s kind of ignorant to the war’s dynamics, which is understandable because he (Frankl) was a camp prisoner and so couldn’t share much about what happened beyond the camp. However, I really like the way he gives us a multifaceted look inside the camp, describing the different hopes, coping mechanisms, and even the emotional/existential stages that prisoners tended to go through rather than simply telling us horror story after horror story of murder and abuse. Anne Frank’s Diary is also a good one, but it falls short in the same aspect I just mentioned, as both authors were victims who spent the better part of the war incarcerated and separated from the rest of the world.
I avoid books like: Gulag by Applebaum, Tuchman’s The Guns of August, and The Cold War by John Gaddis.
Sorry if this is extremely specific. I’ve always wanted to learn more about 20th century history but just can’t find the right book—every one that I’ve so far picked up has always been either too condensed and technical or too insular.
TL;DR: Looking for a non-fiction book on WW1 and beyond (basically the 20th century) that is less of a technical account of the events and wars than an illustration of a unique human life and how it operated, interacted, and contributed to that time.
by pnkzkt