quite possibly of interest to no one but me

[truepenny]

Since it has occurred to me that somebody out there may be curious, below is an extremely incomplete list of the nonfiction books I'm currently looking for.

Caveat: Except in exceptional circumstances--such as a gift card--I don't buy books online. When I tell you that the complete (though of course infinitely expanding) list of books I'm looking for--fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama--is 17 pages, 10-point and single spaced, you will perhaps understand that this is an act of mercy upon my bank balance. So please, don't tell me where I can find these books from an online seller. You will only make the baby trellwolves cry.

On the other hand, if you want to recommend other books on these subjects, please feel free!

[ETA: Caveat 2: I'm not actually looking for help in finding these books. I know about libraries and interlibrary loan and all other such marvels. The reason my book posts are always headed UBC (Unread Book Challenge) is because I have MOUNTAINS of unread books in my house--although this doesn't stop me cheerfully going off and buying more books in used bookstores (I almost never buy books new anymore, unless they're written by friends). I get a profound and abiding satisfaction out of trolling used bookstores, a satisfaction which I don't think I can explain. If for some reason I needed one of these books urgently, I would certainly turn to the university libraries. As it is, this list is all about the hunt--and the thrill I get when I capture one of these books in the wild. *ahem* I just realized that my patron saint here is Professor Wormbog. Tra la la lally.]


(AUTO)BIOGRAPHY

• I would love to find a good biography of Kateri Tekawitha. Ditto Shirley Jackson, Anna Pavlova, Florence Nightingale, Sarah Siddons, Bram Stoker, any and all Pre-Raphaelites (men and women), ditto the Golden Dawn.
  
• Bodichon, Barbara. Auguste Rodin.
  
• Carpenter Humphrey, ed. Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien.
  
• Carrington, Charles [Charles Edmonds] A Subaltern's War.
  
• Chevigny, Hector. My Eyes Have A Cold Nose.
  
• Chitty, Susan. The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley.
  
• Israel, Kali. Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture.
  
• Levi, Peter. Edward Lear.
  
• Lutyens, Mary. Millais and the Ruskins.
  
• Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.
  
• Wullschlager, Jackie. Inventing Wonderland.

FEMINIST HISTORY

• Branca, Patricia. Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in Victorian Homes.
  
• Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth Century New England.
  
• Neff, Wanda Fraiken. Victorian Working Women, 1832-1850.
  
• Stacey, Michelle. The Fasting Girl.

WORLD WAR I

• Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture.
  
• Offer, Avner. The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation.
  
• Parker, Peter. The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos.
  
• Winter, Denis. Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War.

WORLD WAR II/NAZIS/THE HOLOCAUST
(as I've said before, these are overlapping but not synonymous subjects)

• Aly, Götz, Peter Chrout, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene.
  
• Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth. Berlin Underground 1930-1945.
  
• Bar-On, Dan. Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich.
  
• Bartov, Omer. The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare.
  
• ---. Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation.
  
• Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943.
  
• Bergen, Doris L. The Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich.
  
• Bessel, Richard, ed. Life in the Third Reich.
  
• ---. Nazism and War.
  
• Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks.
  
• Bridenthal, Renate, Atna Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds. When Biology Becomes Destiny.
  
• Broberg, Gunnar, and Nils Roll-Hansen. Eugenics and the Welfare State.
  
• Browden, George C. Foundations of the Nazi Police State.
  
• Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives.
  
• Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany 1900-1945.
  
• Carter, Erica. Dietrich's Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Films.
  
• Clay, Catrine, and Michael Leapman. Master Race: The Lebensborn Experiment in Nazi Germany.
  
• Cocks, Geoffrey. Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: the Göring Institute.
  
• Cohen, Elie. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camps.
  
• Combs, William L. The Voice of the SS: A History of the SS Journal "Das Schwarze Korps."
  
• Dallin, Alexander. German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd ed.
  
• Dickinson, Edward. The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic.
  
• Eisen, George. Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows.
  
• Eisenberg, Azriel. The Lost Generation: Children in the Holocaust.
  
• Engel, David. In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews 1939-1942.
  
• Engelking-Boni, Barbara. Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and its Consequences.
  
• Fest, Joachim. The Face of the Third Reich.
  
• Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution.
  
• Friedländer, Saul. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death.
  
• Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany.
  
• ---. The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945.
  
• Goodrick-Clark, Nicolas. The Occult Roots of Nazism.
  
• Grudzinska-Gross, Irena, and Jan Tomasz Gross, eds. War Through Children's Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations 1939-1941.
  
• Grunberger, Richard. A Social History of the Third Reich.
  
• Gutman, Yisrael, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.
  
• Harvey, Elizabeth. Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization.
  
• Heck, Alfons. The Burden of Hitler's Legacy.
  
• ---. A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika.
  
• Heer, Friedrich. God's First Love.
  
• Henry, Clarissa, and Marc Hillel. Children of the SS.
  
• Hermand, Jost. A Hitler Youth in Poland: The Nazis' Programme for Evacuating Children during World War II.
  
• Herzstein, Robert Edwin. The War that Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign.
  
• Hirschfield, Gerhard, ed. The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany.
  
• Jäckel, Eberhard. Hitler's Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power.
  
• Johnson, Eric. The Nazi Terror: Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans.
  
• Kamentsky, Christa. Children's Literature in Hitler's Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism.
  
• Kater, Michael. Doctors Under Hitler.
  
• Kent, George O., ed. Archives, Archivists, and Historians: Essays in Modern German History and Archival Policy.
  
• Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation.
  
• ---. Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945.
  
• Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics.
  
• Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook.
  
• Köhler, Joachim. Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple.
  
• Kühl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism.
  
• Kuper, Leo. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century.
  
• Lebert, Stephan, and Norbert Lebert. My Father's Keeper: Children of the Nazi Leaders--an Intimate History of Damage and Denial.
  
• Loewenberg, Peter. Fantasy and Reality in History.
  
• Maier, Charles S., et al. Theh Rise of the Nazi Regime.
  
• Marten, James Alan, ed. Children and War: A HIstorical Anthology.
  
• Maschmann, Melita. Account Rendered: A Dossier of my Former Self.
  
• Mason, Timothy. Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class.
  
• Massaquoi, Hans J. Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany.
  
• McFarland, Icke, Bronwyn. Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History.
  
• Moskovitz, Sarah. Love Despite Hate: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and their Adult Lives.
  
• Mosse, George. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich.
  
• Mulligan, Timothy Patrick. The Politics of Illusion and Empire: German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union 1942-43.
  
• Ofer, Dalia, and Lenore Weitzman, eds. Women in the Holocaust.
  
• Pine, Lisa. Nazi Family Policy 1933-1945.
  
• Proctor, Robert N. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis.
  
• Reitunger, Gerald. The House Built on Sand: The Conflicts of German Policy in Russia 1939-45.
  
• Rempel, Gerhard. Hitler's Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS.
  
• Rhodes, James. The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution.
  
• Rummel, R. J. Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder.
  
• Salisbury, Harrison E. The Nine Hundred Days: The Siege of Leningrad.
  
• Schmitt, Hans A. Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness.
  
• Stephenson, Jill. Women in Nazi Society.
  
• Stoddard, Lothrop. Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940).
  
• Stern, F. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study of the Rise of German Ideology.
  
• Waite, Robert G. L. Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany 1918-1923.
  
• Wistrich, Robert S., ed. Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia.
  
• Ziemer, Gregor Athalwin. Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.

USSR

• Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History.
  
• Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties.
  
• Ginzberg, Yevgenia. Into the Whirlwind.
  
• ---. Within the Whirlwind.
  
• Heller, Mikhail, and Aleksandr Nekrich. Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present.
  
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago vols. 2 & 3.

AMERICAN HISTORY

• Axtell, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America.
  
• ---. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America.
  
• Bourne, Russell. The Red King's Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England 1675-1678.
  
• Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies.
  
• Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymoth Colony.
  
• Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England.
  
• Gragg, Larry. The Salem Witch Crisis.
  
• Hall, David D., ed. Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England, 2nd ed.
  
• ---. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England.
  
• Hoffer, Peter. The Devil's Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials.
  
• ---. The Salem Witchcraft Trials.
  
• Kerr, Howard, and Charles L. Crow, eds. The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives.
  
• LeBeau, Bryan. The Story of the Salem Witch Trials.
  
• Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier.
  
• Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England.
  
• Robinson, Enders A. The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692.
  
• Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692.
  
• Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier.
  
• Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.
  
• Vaughan, Alden T., and Edward W. Clark, eds. Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724.
  
• Vanderbeets, Richard. The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre.
  
• Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth Century Massachusetts.
  
  
  There are dozens more, but I'm giving myself a headache, so I think it's time to stop.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Have you already read Ian Hay's books on WWI? They're first-hand accounts from a junior officer. Also, they're available from Project Gutenberg, which is financially convenient (if you've found any comfortable way to read ebooks; I have several that are great for me, including on my phone).

Here it is: The First Hundred Thousand (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12877).

It's also the source for the "surprise party departnment" and "practical joke department" in Heinlein's Glory Road. (Hay's third one was "round games department", which Heinlein changed to "Surprise Party department" for American consumption).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recommendation!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Oops, got the correspondences messed up. Heinlein's "surprise party" was Hay's "round game".

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

[quietly raids your list]

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Feel free!
:)

(If you're looking for particular subject, I may have more books on the full list--or other books I've read and can recommend.)

[ribby.livejournal.com]

*delurks*

Oooh... interesting list, and I really should keep one for myself like this! Of course, books in Welsh on the Mabinogion and trickster mythology commentaries are a little difficult to find.

Have you ever investigated Bookmooch.com? It's a bookswap site, and the only cost is postage for the sender. I've found lots of interesting things there, and perhaps they might have a few on your list.

(And if you already know Bookmooch, apologies!)

~Kris

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Without a list, I would go mad. Probably in about a week.

[galeni.livejournal.com]

If you have a local college, they may be able to get some/most of these on interlibrary loan. (This is why I love where i work, and am thrilled I will still have privileges here when I retire. Seven stories of university library plus interlibrary loans equals a very happy person.)

Otherwise, sorry. Don't have any of them.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm not actually looking for help in finding them--I have so many unread books that I only look for these when my will power fails me and I go into a used bookstore--but thank you!

[magpie49.livejournal.com]

Do you also have a comprehensive list of works of fiction for which you are hunting?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, although it's actually much shorter--my ongoing difficulties in reading fiction mean that I don't keep that list as obsessively as I do the nonfiction one. But it's the only way to keep track of which Ellery Queens I do and don't have. (Ditto Colin Watson, Emma Lathen, John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout ...)

[tazlet.livejournal.com]

I can offer some suggestions for WWI, particularly Paul Fussell's 'The Great War in Modern Memory."

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. I've read it, and it's brilliant.

[tazlet.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm...it occurs to me that I may have misunderstood your reasons for not buying on line....if it is to protect the bank balance, I will tell you that once upon a time I came back with a list of books from the British Museum's bookstore that I was never going to be able to afford (L50 for Prehistoric Warfare, dammit!) -- each and every one of them appeared at Daedalus Books within the next 2 years at a price I could afford ($12 for Prehistoric Warfare) -- granted, all I have to do was walk across the street, but they do have a website.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The reason I don't buy books online is that once I start, I don't stop.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

I liked this one:

Private demons : the life of Shirley Jackson by Judy Oppenheimer

You should be able to get it through your library.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recommendation!

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

do you have a longer list of biographies? It's recently occurred to me that I should read more of them, but since I've only ever read one or two, I'm not really sure what to look for in one (aside from, say, factual information about the person involved).

Also, if you don't mind my asking, are you attempting to read every book about the Nazis ever written? And if something close to that, why? (I mean, I've seen people read a lot who are interested in the subject, but for a long time I thought "UBC" stood for something in German about books about WWII. :-b)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

1. The biography that convinced me I liked biographies was Quentin Bell's biographyy of Virginia Woolf. I whole-heartedly recommend Ernst Pawel's The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. I also enjoyed The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett by Daniel Karlin; Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose; Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood by Jan Marsh; and Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann. (Obviously, I have a predilection for Victorian biography.) There are a great many other biographies either on my list or still unread on my shelves: Kurt Weill; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Mina Loy; James Tiptree, Jr.; Sarah Bernhardt; Alice James; Helen Keller; Vaslav Nijinsky; Rudolf Nureyev; Beryl Markham; Ada, Countess of Lovelace; Charles Babbage; L. Frank Baum; Arthur Conan Doyle; Elizabeth Gaskell; Frances Hodgson Burnett; Robert Louis Stevenson; Ellen Terry; Henry Irving, Kenneth Grahame; Djuna Barnes; C. S. Lewis . . .

2. I don't know if I'm attempting to read every book about the Nazis ever written. I hope not. My current theory about what's going on in my backbrain is that it wants books about real-world dystopias. The Third Reich was the obvious place to start--but I've noticed myself starting to branch out into Stalinist Russia. But I don't know. I don't know why I'm so obsessively interested or what all the raw material is going to turn into. Mostly, I'm just so grateful that I want to read that I'm not worrying much, in the front office, about what or why. Although periodically I look at my reading and go, Seriously, brain. WTF?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

With regard to the USSR, I recommend a book called "Execution by Hunger", by a guy called Dolot. It's quite interesting. In a bloody hell kind of way.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's on the long version of the list--but thank you for the recommendation! With a list as monstrously large as mine, reinforcement of particular books is always very welcome.

(Most of my reading these days is interesting in a bloody hell kind of way, so it'll fit right in.)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

If I find a good Pavlova biography, I shall certainly alert you. If you're interested in general dance-historical geekery, my teenage obsessive self found Ivor Guest absolutely riveting. I even used him as a jumping-off point in grad school once, when I was writing a paper about the Romantic ballet in terms of what was going on in French lit at the time--you know, Gautier, Giselle, the fantastic, etc., ad nauseam. (My professor tried to tell me that men liked ballerinas because they all had foot fetishes. So I got a B in the class, dammit.)

[megan (from livejournal.com)]

I would love to find a good biography of...any and all Pre-Raphaelites (men and women).

Seconded and thirded. Would be fourthed, but I don't have any more hands to raise. Strangely, the one Pre-Rapahelite (arguably neo-classicist) for whom I could find a decent biography was J. W. Waterhouse, whose personal life (what we know of it) was notoriously boring. But a Marie Spartali Stillman study would make my bookshelf very happy.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

You would probably enjoy Women of the Golden Dawn by Mary K. Greer.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, I probably would. Thank you!

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

One set of books that I found for WWI stuff was Lyn Macdonald's series, which are based on survivor interviews, letters, diaries, and so on.

Bernard DeVoto's Course of Empire might also be of interest, fr earlier American exploration, although I found the verbiage clunky and annoying at times. Also, Francis Parkman's stuff, despite the age of the work, and his highly evident and unabashed prejudices, still retains some usefulness, although it's been replaced as valid history by many other books since they were written.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Do you go to Erasmus Books when you're in the S.B. area? They're really terrific.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I have not, thus far, done any bookstore trolling in South Bend. We have a genius for only being there during snowstorms. *g*

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

Oooh! The entirety of your WWI, WWII/Nazis/Holocaust, and USSR lists is so of interest!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Once one starts compiling a list of WWII/Nazi/Holocaust books, it is exceedingly difficult to stop.

[clhollandwriter]

I totally understand about the trolling used bookstore thing. I love browsing the shelves and stumbling across things I'd never have thought of looking for. It's how I get most of my reference books these days.

Plus I spent ages hearing a friend of mine raving about Melusine, only to spot the hardback in my local second-hand shop - a minor miracle here in the UK. Not so good for your royalties, I know, but it did lead me to go out and get the others as they came out.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, considering how much I love finding something I've been wanting in the used bookstore, how can I possibly be unhappy when someone else has that experience with one of my books? In fact, I'm totally psyched. :)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin by Judith Flanders. It's in my "to read" pile still, so I can't say if it's any good, but it looks very interesting.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I liked Fiona MacCarthy's William Morris very much-- it includes in it all the wonderful little cartoons that Edward Burne-Jones did of Morris over the years, and also the equally technically awesome but rather more malicious ones Rossetti did. Good on Rossetti generally and on Janey Morris, and I'd like to see MacCarthy do a full-length on Burne-Jones. I argue somewhat with MacCarthy's characterization of Morris's extramarital relationships as Platonic And Pure and his wife's as Sexual And Bad, and Janey gets the blame for the marriage not working when insofar as I can tell it worked fine, but honestly this is a fairly minor thing in a book that included so much of the primary material that I was able to draw my own interpretations.

MacCarthy also did a good Eric Gill bio if your interest stretches that late.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Just came across a very strong recommendation for this (http://www.amazon.com/Language-Third-Reich-Philologists-Continuum/dp/0826491308/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263817354&sr=1-3) -- a book on how language changed in Germany during the 3rd Reich.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

*snags the list*

*yoink* :]