Welcome to my yearly book review of all the books I’ve read in 2022. This is actually inaccurate, as I won’t be reviewing all the books I read this year. I’ve decided to only write about the books which made the biggest impression on me. This post will focus on the 9/11 related material I’ve been reading.

The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden by Peter Bergen: This look at Al Qaeda’s leader fills in a seeming drought of bin Laden biographies. Peter Bergen uses a trove of documents recovered during the 2011 raid to flesh out his subject’s life. Some will snicker at Bin Laden’s eccentricities, such as putting hair dye in his graying beard. More serious readers will grapple with the central contradiction of his life: That a man humble enough to sacrifice his life for god was also a narcissistic media whore. Many myths about bin Laden (some of which were self-perpetuated) are dispelled. His publicly stated strategic rationale for 9/11, to draw the US into an unwinnable war and bankrupt it, was just glossing over a gross miscalculation. Using the Beirut barracks bombing and Black Hawk Down incidents as models, bin Laden believed a large and dramatic atrocity would cause the United States to pull out of the Middle East altogether. Needless to say, it backfired. Bin Laden’s incompetence as a military leader is well documented but his personal bravery in the Soviet-Afghan war was well covered in Arab media and helped lead to a flood of donations to the mujahadeen.

If this book has a theme it’s the power of delusion. Bin Laden had many delusions but his unassailable belief in them enabled him to shape the course of history. He was not the only one. As bin Laden was escaping Tora Bora, General Tommy Franks was briefing Donald Rumsfeld on the Iraq War plans. One flaw of this book is Bergen’s tendency to lapse into the first person when discussing his encounter with bin Laden as part of CNN in the 90’s. It’s a jarring shift in perspective which makes one feel like you’re reading a different book. A single, dedicated chapter would have sufficed. Neither was I convinced by Bergen’s contention that bin Laden’s father influenced his path to Jihad. Bin Laden claimed that his father had said one of his sons would go on to wage Jihad, yet this was said during one of his many self-aggrandizing interviews in the 90s. Further, according to Bergen’s account the two had no real relationship before the elder bin Laden’s death in a plane crash in 1967. Given his penchant for inventing myths and post facto motives for himself this claim feels suspect. No doubt this and other details will be debated for decades to come but overall this is a great book for those looking for a detailed portrait of 9/11’s mastermind.

FBI 9/11 Operation Encore files: This isn’t a book but I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about this. For those who don’t know, the FBI has released thousands of pages of documents about its investigation into Saudi links to 9/11. Most of what’s in them has been known for years but there are some new revelations. In the interest of staying purely historical, I’m going to avoid speculation and stick to what the files do definitively prove. I’m also going to be writing as if you’re already familiar with this topic to save time. Here’s a good primer to catch up.

There are three things these files do prove:

1. Bayoumi was in fact a Saudi spy. He received a stipend from the Saudi GIP.
2. Contrary to his assertions, Bayoumi was an extremist. A witness quotes him as saying the Muslim community needed to ”take action” and was ”at Jihad”. He also had connections to other terrorist elements besides the hijackers.
3. His meeting with the hijackers was not a coincidence. A witness variously named Caisin bin Don/Isamu Dyson/Clayton Morgan says Bayoumi drove to the restaurant, waited by the window for them to arrive, and approached them from such a distance where it would have been impossible for him to have overheard them i.e. it was a planned meeting.

The files go on to say “there’s a 50/50 chance” Bayoumi knew about 9/11 beforehand.

In many ways this is unsatisfying since it still doesn’t definitively answer the big question of if Saudi officials had foreknowledge of 9/11. On the other hand, it only adds to the suspicion and keeps interest in this case alive. I look forward to any new revelations.

I strongly recommend The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which provides a whole new lens for understanding history.

I'm reading "Greek Mythology- A Traveler's Guide from Mount Olympus to Troy" by David Stuttard.

What are some similar books?

I've recently finished David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. It's about the people Kennedy brought into the White House when he won the election in 1960 and they way they handled the Vietnam War. On one hand, it's interesting how so many intelligent and well educated men can be so wrong, but at times it felt like court gossip. I'm don't think any great insights can be gleaned from the childhood of e.g. Robert McNamara. Kind of hard to get through too I felt towards the end.

I'd recommend reading this NYRB review of Graeber's work along with the book. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/

I like Graeber and he has a lot of important ideas that are worth considering and testing, but his history isn't always the best.

I read the Logevall bio of JFK recently and the first couple hundred pages are a slog b/c his childhood just isn't that interesting. Especially compared to his Father's life. I am excited for the next volume of that though, which will cover the presidency. This volume ended with the election.

Finished A Fiery & Furious People: A History of Violence in England by James Sharpe. Fairly long copy and pasted review

>5/5. Excellent, highly recommend if interested in English history or social history.

>Very well written, enjoyable to read with the stories being well told. Good selection of cases used as well as the right amount of statistics to get the point across without being bogged down in them. There is a lot of analysis in each chapter as to the change in the kind of particular kind of violence (murder moving from mostly between male strangers/ acquaintances to being more domestic based over the centuries for example) over time as well as the change in attitudes towards the specific violence (such as views on wife beating or infanticide).

>Part 1 is short and covers the medieval era - general violence but also the big events like the 1381 peasants revolt and the War of the Roses. It also has a bit on the ways that were meant to restrict violence like the Church or the ideal of chivalry and where these did and didn't work.

>Part 2 covers up to the end of Victorians and each chapter covers a specific kind of violence like duelling, crime, domestic etc and how these changed over time. The author argues that violence declined fairly rapidly after the English Civil War. The main reason for this is the emergence of capitalism which led to the growth of a middle class who valued 'respectability' and had more stake in preserving the status quo. Additionally they had different views from other economic groups, for example they believed that domestic violence was something the lower classes did but they also thought the duelling culture of the aristocracy was a bit ridiculous.

>Part 3 covers the 20th and 21st centuries with a similar style of each chapter focusing on a specific kind of crime. Personally my favourite chapter from this part of the book was focused on the depiction of violence in TV and movies (like the movie A Clockwork Orange) and the debates in society about if these contributed to violence in real life (the author argues they didn't/don't). In part 3 the author argues that for a variety of reasons (with an interesting theory that it is down to the deindustrialisation loosening the cohesion of society) violence rose in the 60s to 80s then declined rapidly, but this mainly reflects a decline in violence between strangers and acquaintances rather than a big decline in domestic violence.

>There is a nice further reading list for each chapter but since I read this to clear my British history unread pile I doubt I will read anything on it.

>Only complaint is that I personally found a couple of chapters to be boring (the slander/libel chapter and the historical sport related violence chapters), but that reflects my own interests rather than anything wrong with the book.

Hadn't planned it when I started reading a bit about British historical law and order but I remembered I had Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War by Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson which meant I could combine the law and order and get back to WWI at the same time. Most of the way through it but not enough to give it my longer thoughts, probably going to say a straight 4/5 by the time I'm done.

Hi!

It seems like you are talking about the popular but ultimately flawed and false "winners write history" trope!

While the expression is sometimes true in one sense (we'll get to that in a bit), it is rarely if ever an absolute truth, and particularly not in the way that the concept has found itself commonly expressed in popular history discourse. When discussing history, and why some events have found their way into the history books when others have not, simply dismissing those events as the imposed narrative of 'victors' actually harms our ability to understand history.

You could say that is in fact a somewhat "lazy" way to introduce the concept of bias which this is ultimately about. Because whoever writes history is the one introducing their biases to history.

A somewhat better, but absolutely not perfect, approach that works better than 'winners writing history' is to say 'writers write history'.

This is more useful than it initially seems. Until fairly recently the literate were a minority, and those with enough literary training to actually write historical narratives formed an even smaller and more distinct class within that.

To give a few examples, Genghis Khan must surely go down as one of the great victors in all history, but he is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources, because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes.
Similarly the Norsemen historically have been portrayed as uncivilized barbarians as the people that wrote about them were the "losers" whose monasteries got burned down.

Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
This evaluation is something that is done by historians and part of what makes history and why insights about historical events can shift over time.

This is possibly best exemplified by those examples where victors did unambiguously write the historical sources.

The Spanish absolutely wrote the history of the conquest of Central America from 1532, and the reports and diaries of various conquistadores and priests are still important primary documents for researchers of the period.

But 'victors write the history' presupposes that we still use those histories as they intended, which is simply not the case. It both overlooks the fundamental nature of modern historical methodology, and ignores the fact that, while victors have often proven to be predominant voices, they have rarely proven to be the only voices.

Archaeology, numismatics, works in translation, and other records all allow us at least some insight into the 'losers' viewpoint, as does careful analysis of the 'winner's' records.
We know far more about Rome than we do about Phoenician Carthage. There is still vital research into Carthage, as its being a daily topic of conversation on this subreddit testifies to.

So while it's true that the balance between the voices can be disparate that doesn't mean that the winners are the only voice or even the most interesting.
Which is why stating that history is 'written by the victors' and leaving it at that is harmful to the understanding of history and the process of studying history.

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What style is your book in? Might help guide some suggestions!

According to the cover, the book "takes the reader on a tour of twenty two destinations in Greece and Turkey, recounting the classic tales and the history associated with each".

If you want to read how our policy in Vietnam was carried out read "A Bright Shining Lie " by Neil Sheehan both the 1988 Pulitzer winner in non-fiction and tha National Book award winner.

I finished Eight Days in May by Volker Ullrich. I liked his biographies of Hitler so I thought I'd give this a chance. It's about the 8 days following Hitler's death. It was interesting, especially as a counterpoint to 5 Days in London by John Lukacs. The translator did a good job on this and the it was a quick read. I learned a little bit about Donitz I didn't know, but my overall picture of him as basically uninspired and a mediocre Nazi were confirmed. He was someone who was so surrounded by mediocrity that he didn't realize how mediocre he was himself.

If you want a short book on the last few days of the war in Europe, this would be a good one to pick up. If you're looking for something that would be a nice airplane read, my guess is the book probably takes about 5ish hours total to read at about 270 smallish pages with decent sized borders.

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Already read it, it's great.

Hi, I’m looking for some book recommendations at the moment. Specifically, I’m looking for non-fiction books which look at misconceptions about the past, and inform the reader about what things were actually like. For example, I’ve been looking into books that center around what samurai were actually like, as opposed to all the stories and myths we have about them. At the moment I’m not interested in any particular time period, and am interested in almost anything that fits my criteria.

Looking for a starting point to The German Revolution of 1918-19. The Internet has thrown up a bunch of options, including a book called November 1918 by Robert Gerwarth but I'd like to know which are the books those of you keen on the subject would recommend.

Does anyone have any recommendations for any books about Korea in the second world war? I'd like to know more about life there during the war, and especially about the Allied troops coming in at the end.

I finished two hefty books this week:

The first was Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades. It's an excellent overview of the Crusades, with perspectives from both sides. Perhaps understandably, it focuses in on the Third Crusade as the centrepiece of the narrative, tracking the endeavours of Saladin and the Lionheart closely. It perhaps rushes the later Crusades a bit, but that might have been a necessary editorial step to stop the book becoming too daunting. I've got Dan Jones' book on the Crusades in my to-be-read pile, and I've also got Roger Crowley's Accursed Tower (specifically on the siege of Acre) on my radar too. Someone here mentioned The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, which I might try to pick up too.

The second book I finished this week was The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club by Christopher de Hamel. Not quite narrative history, it tells the story of 12 medieaval manuscript collectors over time, starting with St Anselm, and tracking through to the 20th Century. It's very much a follow-up volume to his excellent Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. The author is an expert in his field, and has some firsthand experience of some of the manuscripts discussed. He imagines meeting each of the twelve collectors, which could sound affecting, but is actually endearing. Thoroughly recommended. The hardback volume of Posthumous Papers is sumptuously illustrated with medieval manuscripts (word of advice: the hardback of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts was also beautifully illustrated, but when it was published in paperback, they apparently dropped most of the colour illustrations. The same might happen to Posthumous Papers...)

You might want to check out The Bright Ages. It's about misconceptions about the Middle Ages/Dark Ages. The authors did an AMA when the book came out. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rko03c/ama_with_dr_matthew_gabriele_and_dr_david_perry/

There's a few books recently about the Battle of Chosen Reservoir. I know Hampton Sides had one a couple years ago.

Also Bruce Cummings has a fairly popular book on it called The Korean War. It's about a decade old. But he did a post on fivebooks.com recommending 5 books on the war. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/bruce-cumings-on-the-korean-war/

I think he's asking during World War 2 ,not after the war , but not sure.

No, you're right now that I read it more carefully.

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If you enjoy Halberstam, you might like his book The Fifties. His main argument is that many of the innovations and changes in society accredited to the 60s actually began in the 50s I think you might find the book enjoyable.

Does anyone have good recommendations for books about the 100 years war?

I also read Asbridge's book earlier this year and thought it was fantastic. Very well written, not too dry and not too 'pop-history' either. I've got another one of his on the backlog: The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal.

By the way, do you not find it fascinating how little movies we've got from the Crusade era? Like the siege of Acre, or the battle of Jaffa. There's so many stories to tell, but all that springs to mind is Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.

Asbridge's biography of Marshall is excellent - it was reading that earlier this year that persuaded me to finally give The Crusades a go.

And yes, the lack of dramatic portrayal of the crusades is interesting to note. Perhaps the depiction of a Them and Us narrative is too problematic these days, even if the actual truth is more nuanced. I think that instead of a movie, a multi season depiction of Outremer would be fascinating.

I don't know if this is the right place for this, but I came across a 1947 North American railway guide. It's basically a comprehensive schedule etc for all the rail lines of the time. I don't want anything for it, but I want to be sure no one wants it before getting rid of it. https://imgur.com/UGny3fO.jpg

Looking for a starting point into the Kamakura Period.

Just finished reading The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris and multiple Heian Era books such as the Tale of Genji, Diary of Lady Murasaki etc.

Looking for books about Sakoku, Japans Isolation period in the 16th century.

And books about japans xenophobic trends.

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Desmond Sewards "100 Years War ;English in France 1337-1453