Acquisitions

•

Sarah Caro. How to Publish Your PhD. London: SAGE Publications, 2009. Might come in handy one day.

P. D. Smith. Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon. London: Penguin, 2008. Nice to see I'm not the only one with such dreams. NB: the author has a blog which often contains items of interest.

• 2 Comments

•

Kate Darian-Smith. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime: 1939-1945. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2009. 2nd edition. Actually, I bought this last week but I don't suppose anybody cares but me! An excellent survey of life in wartime Melbourne -- the phoney war period, the fear of invasion and bombing in early 1942, the arrival of the Americans, rationing, moral panics about resident aliens and promiscuous women. It could almost be contemporary London.

•

Richard Overy. The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars London: Allen Lane, 2009. One I've been looking forward to getting my hands on! It's not a general history of the 1920s and 1930s, but more a history of ideas, with a particular focus on (as the title suggests) pessimistic ones. There are a couple of chapters on pacifism which look especially interesting. And while it's not profusely illustrated, the pictures are well-chosen: the one on the back cover of the Southwark Spain Shop ('Buy a tin of food! We will send it to Spain') is worth at least a thousand words.

• 2 Comments

•

The Duke of Bedford. Total Disarmament or an International Police Force? Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1944. Or false a dichotomy? Bedford was a pacifist and (maybe) a fascist. Here he is the author of a twelve-page pamphlet which originally sold for 2d. and which I bought for ... much more than 2d.! If I'd known I could have ILLed it instead.

Adrian Gregory. The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Took a little while to get out here; looks like it was worth the wait.

•

Oliver Stewart. Air Power and the Expanding Community. London: George Newnes, 1944. Thanks to Chris for pointing this one out to me. Looks forward to the post-war period and argues that the airpower (both military and civil) will be fundamental to the power blocs which will emerge, and that armed forces should combine all three arms, of equal status under a unified war ministry.

• 4 Comments

•

Joseph Miranda. First Battle of Britain. Decision Games, 2009. A wargame, not a book, included with Strategy & Tactics 255. The German air offensive against Britain in 1917 and 1918. The German player raids British cities and tries to damage civilian morale; the British player tries to intercept the raiders and bomb their aerodromes. It's a long, long time since I've bought a copy of S&T, and I try to avoid buying wargames because I never seem to actually play them, but I couldn't resist in this case, given the subject matter!

Robin Prior. Gallipoli: The End of the Myth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009. As noted in comments! I doubt it will actually end the myth, as far as Australia is concerned, because it doesn't seemed to be aimed at the Gallipoli story as Australians understand it. Rather, it's aimed at other historians who have argued that the Dardanelles campaign was a good idea badly executed.

Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History. New York and London: The New Press, 2009. A collection of essays on subjects ranging from British air control in Iraq to the present-day legal questions surrounding the bombing of civilians. Most interesting to me is probably the one by Tetsuo Maeda on the bombing of Chungking (Chongqing) between 1938 and 1943, since it's hard to find much in English on strategic bombing by Japan. I think I actually did a double-take when I turned to the list of contributors and saw that three of them were people from my own university I'd never heard of! That they're philosophers and lawyers only partly excuses this ...

• 2 Comments

•

Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko. The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Talks a bit about the Baruch plan, which seems (perhaps naively) to me to be a close relative of the pre-war proposals for an international air force and the international control of civil aviation.

•

David Faber. Munich: The 1938 Appeasement Crisis. London: Simon & Schuster, 2008. A much-needed narrative history, though I'm sure it won't quite satisfy me! Mostly political and diplomatic, and mostly from the British point of view. Also some of the street-level stuff -- calls ARP Sunday gas mask Sunday.

Matthew J. Flynn. First Strike: Preemptive War in Modern History. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. From 1805 to 2003. Only looks at actual instances of preemptive war, so no knock-out blow or nuclear strategy.