Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI 5

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By Christopher Andrew

Commissioned by Britain's Security Service, the formal name of MI5, this history unrolls under the reputable authorship of a veteran scholar on intelligence. Two motifs dominate Andrew's work: specific domestic security investigations and MI5's organizational evolution in terms of personnel and leadership. Headed for its first three decades by its founder, Vernon Kell, MI5 earned its spurs in World War I by detecting German spies. The interwar years, Andrew recounts, were not MI5's best; failing to identify Soviet agents who penetrated MI5 itself, it suffered disruptive internal investigations until the 1970s. However, its successes against Nazi spies in World War II raised its reputation, which has generally remained high ever since with British prime ministers, except for the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson, who suspected MI5 of connivance against their administrations. Acquitting MI5 from accusations of domestic political interference, Andrew concludes with accounts of recent decades' cases of counter subversion, counterespionage, and counter terrorism. An important publication, this history will become part of the foundation of any collection on the history of intelligence agencies.

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FRANKLIN PIERCE

By Michael F. Holt


Pierce deserves his low ranking by historians, but not, Holt argues, because he was a bad man or politician. Handsome and athletic, he'd been a state representative at 24, a congressman at 29, a one-term U.S. senator at 34, and was New Hampshire's leading Democrat when he became the first dark-horse candidate to secure the presidency in 1852. With congressional, state-legislative, and governorship majorities, the Democrats were riding high, and Pierce aimed to keep it that way. He chose cabinet members to represent the party's factions and crafted his domestic policy to quash divisive squabbles. But his era's big issue was slavery. He backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, arguing that it nullified all previous limitations on the extension of slavery, and stood by during subsequent terrorism in Kansas on the grounds that the Constitution barred the president from intervening. Despite foreign-policy successes and a squeaky-clean administration, he wasn't nominated for a second term because Kansas-Nebraska, foreboding all too well what lay ahead, fractured his beloved party. Another excellent American Presidents series volume.

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The Enemy in Our Hands: America's Treatment of Enemy Prisoners of War from the Revolution to the War on Terror

By Robert C. Doyle

Casting a wide net, this book delivers a scholarly, lucid overview of America's handling of POWs of all stripes: military, civilian, and irregular. Historian Doyle (A Prisoner's Duty) emphasizes that uniformed foreign soldiers received humane treatment from the Revolution through the Iraq invasion, peaking during WWII when hundreds of thousands of German troops brought to the U.S. received "relatively benign" treatment. Prisoners fared worse when Americans fought Americans. Loyalists during the Revolution were abused and often killed. Both sides during the Civil War neglected prisoners disgracefully. Historically, irregular fighters enjoyed no protection, but while soldiers rarely objected to mistreating opponents who didn't play fair, civilians were often outraged. In Korea, the screening of prisoners to separate combatants from noncombatants, and their future repatriation, led to prisoner uprisings. No ideologue, Doyle explains that sometimes abuse is unavoidable; at other times it's ineffective, infuriates world opinion, and puts American soldiers at risk for reprisals. Doyle delves deeply, and military buffs will consider it the definitive treatment.

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Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918

By Grigoris Balakian

Immediately after World War I, Grigoris Balakian, a prelate of the Armenian Apostolic Church, set down this account of the massacres of Armenians instigated by the Ottoman government during that conflict, telling his personal story of endurance and commemorating the sufferings of named companions as well as the Armenian nation. Crediting his religious faith for his survival to bear witness, he could also have credited his proficiency in German, which rescued him from tight spots during his ordeal, which started with the opening move of arresting Armenian leaders. Those not killed were force-marched through the desert to Syria—if they lived. Balakian fills the framework afforded by that procedure with painfully observant descriptions of cruelty, expressions of gratitude to German railroad officials and fellow Armenians who concealed him, and detached recording of the magnitude of the crime perpetrated against the Armenians. At present, when denial of this crime is still heard, Balakian's testimony stands as vital refutation.

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They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq

By Kelly Kennedy

A superior, blow-by-blow account of a courageous and embattled infantry company.Times News Service reporter Kennedy was embedded in Charlie Company, 26th battalion, 101st Airborne Division during its 2006-07 effort to pacify a nondescript Baghdad neighborhood. Although professionals, many with previous tours, most soldiers accepted the radical new rules of counterinsurgency. As the company commander explains, 400,000 people under their protection want to get on with their lives except for 4,000 insurgents, who look identical: "You will have to assume they want to hurt you while you treat them as neighbors." Embedded reporters tend to bond with their subjects, and Kennedy is no exception, delivering admiring portraits of dozens of officers and men. She vividly communicates their intense love for each other; none pretend to fight for anything but comradeship and pride in their profession. To these men, insurgents are a murderous, shadowy army that fights dirty, hiding in mosques and paying boys $50 to throw a grenade at passing patrols. Their increasingly powerful roadside bombs produce most American casualties in Iraq, including those in this book. Many chapters begin with portraits of soldiers who, readers quickly realize to their distress, will die or suffer crippling injuries. At the end of a 15-month tour, their area showed modest reductions in violence, but the soldiers were consuming sleeping pills daily, obsessing over lost friends and undergoing counseling. Few felt that they struck a significant blow against world terrorism. Small-unit heroics in Iraq, engrossing despite eschewing the traditional optimistic outcome.

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The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History

By Paul Clark

The Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, conventionally dated 1966-1976, has generally been studied narrowly as a political event. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals's Mao's Last Revolution (2006) is probably the best political history of these years. Yet the movement was also an attempt to create a modern socialist culture. Clark (Univ. of Auckland), author of two highly regarded studies of Chinese cinema, has put culture back into the Cultural Revolution. Here he focuses on opera, film, dance, music, fine arts, architecture, and literature of the period, examining audience response as well as the work of artists, performers, and writers. The culture of this period was highly politicized, of course, subjected to obsessive standards of ideological correctness or heresy. Those who took risks and failed suffered greatly, and the range of works approved for public consumption--"eight hundred million people watching eight shows"--was limited indeed. But cultural production in the Cultural Revolution also drew upon decades of experimentation and shaped the development of Chinese culture after the 1970s. Clark's work is an important contribution to scholarship on the Cultural Revolution.

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Abundance of Valor: Resistance, Survival, and Liberation: 1944-45

By Will Irwin

A thoroughly enthralling book for serious students of World War II, this is the labor of love of a Special Forces veteran with a rare talent for writing and research. He tells the story of the handful of small Jedburgh Teams dropped into the Netherlands to lead local resistance groups in offensive action. They immediately got sucked into the disastrous failure of Operation Market Garden, better known as the Arnhem operation (see Cornelius Ryan's classic A Bridge Too Far, 1974). After that mismanaged affair crumbled, they faced survival against long odds in the ranks of the hard-pressed Dutch Resistance, death at the hands of the still resilient German occupation troops, and in one case survival by a hair's breadth as a POW endured not only confinement but also grueling marches from east to west ahead of the advancing Russians. For exhaustive studies of little-known episodes that add much to general WWII knowledge as well as provide enthralling reading, this book is hard to beat.

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The Long Way Home: An American Journey From Ellis Island to the Great War

By David Laskin

This is an engrossing and moving story of 12 men, all of them immigrants to the U.S., who were transformed by their brief but intense experiences as soldiers in WWI. They included Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Slovaks, Jews, and Irishmen. Most of them did not relish military service, and some of them fled their homelands to avoid conscription. Before they were drafted or enlisted in the U.S. military, few of them understood or cared about the issues that had torn apart a Europe that they had left behind. These men were not atypical, since an estimated 20 percent of U.S. military draftees were foreign born. Laskin tells their individual stories with eloquence and feeling while avoiding cheap sentimentality As he traces their paths from bootcamp to combat in France, one can see their gradual merging with their fellow soldiers into a true "band of brothers." This is a superb chronicle that illustrates how some young men were transformed into Americans.

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The Long Way Home: An American Journey From Ellis Island to the Great War

By David Laskin



This is an engrossing and moving story of 12 men, all of them immigrants to the U.S., who were transformed by their brief but intense experiences as soldiers in WWI. They included Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Slovaks, Jews, and Irishmen. Most of them did not relish military service, and some of them fled their homelands to avoid conscription. Before they were drafted or enlisted in the U.S. military, few of them understood or cared about the issues that had torn apart a Europe that they had left behind. These men were not atypical, since an estimated 20 percent of U.S. military draftees were foreign born. Laskin tells their individual stories with eloquence and feeling while avoiding cheap sentimentality As he traces their paths from bootcamp to combat in France, one can see their gradual merging with their fellow soldiers into a true "band of brothers." This is a superb chronicle that illustrates how some young men were transformed into Americans.

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