Vortex: The Inter-War Years
Explore the turbulent inter-war years through Vortex: a curated reading list featuring John Toland's The Rising Sun, Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, and compelling biographies of Mussolini and Lindbergh—essential history, biography, and military reads.
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Mussolini
by Jasper. Ridley
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was the founder of Fascism and iron-fisted ruler of Italy for two decades. He was also an extremely able politician who won the esteem of many statesmen--including Winston Churchill and influential persons in the United States. This biography describes Mussolini's childhood; his education (including his suspension from school for attacking other boys with knives); his World War I experiences and severe wounding; his involvement in, and eventual expulsion from the revolutionary Italian Socialist Party; his numerous love affairs, his early career as a journalist and his rise to power and brutal rule.
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Lindbergh
by A. Scott Berg
Even after twenty years, A. Scott Berg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Charles Lindberg remains “the definitive account” of one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary figures. Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh—renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America's entry into World War II. Lindbergh's is “a dramatic and disturbing American story,” says the *Los Angeles Times Book Review, and this biography—the first to be written with unrestricted access to the Lindbergh archives and extensive interviews of his friends, colleagues, and close family members—is “a thorough, level-headed evaluation of the glories, tragedies, and often infuriating complexities of this extraordinary life” (Newsday).
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The Rising Sun
by John Toland
“[The Rising Sun] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”—Chicago Sun-Times This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.” In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” “Unbelievably rich . . . readable and exciting . . .The best parts of [Toland’s] book are not the battle scenes but the intimate view he gives of the highest reaches of Tokyo politics.”—Newsweek
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The Rape of Nanking
by Iris Chang
Attempts to analyze the degree to which the Japanese imperial government and its militaristic culture fostered in the Japanese soldier a total disregard for human life.
