Paul K. Saint-Amour. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. One of those books that does that worthwhile thing of looking at familiar works in unfamiliar ways. For most readers that will probably mean Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but in my case it's more the airpower prophets I studied for my PhD/book. I'm not persuaded by the reading of L. E. O. Charlton's books about the knock-out blow in the 1930s as being a betrayal of the humanitarian conscience he displayed over civilian casualties of air control in the 1920s; for me, they are cut from the same cloth. But I look forward to reading Saint-Amour's analysis of Charlton anyway, and of other unexpected gems such as Getrude Bell's description of a Hendon-style mock combat put on by the RAF in Iraq in 1924!

Daniel Todman. Britain's War: Into Battle, 1937-1941. Allen Lane, 2016. Just from reading Dan's (lamented) blog, Trench Fever, as well as his occasional comments here at Airminded over the years, I know that this is also going to be an original version of a supposedly familiar story. Even the periodisation is intriguing, and the second volume will complete the story up to Indian independence in 1947. As this one is more than 800 pages, I'd better get cracking...

Statistically, this was probably bound to happen eventually...

Jeremy Black. Air Power: A Global History. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. The indefatigable Jeremy Black has produced a small but useful library of short, accessible surveys of sometimes neglected areas of military history. On my own shelves I already have Avoiding Armageddon (2012) on the interwar period, and The Cold War (2015), and now they are joined by this volume on a topic even closer to my heart. All the things you'd expect in such a survey are pretty much here, and he does attempt to look at airpower around the world. Inevitably it's still mostly a Western view. Still, there are a couple of pages on the Iran-Iraq war, for example, a bit over a page on China in the 1930s; but only a couple of sentences on the Chaco War (but what are ya gonna do).

Jeremy Black. Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. The indefatigable Jeremy Black has also produced a small but useful library of short, accessible historiographical works. I've got Rethinking Military History (2004) and I did have the previous edition of this book, What If? (2008) -- I'm not sure how they differ, precisely, but the new version is about 20 pages longer and the chapter on counterfactualism in military history, at least, seems to have been largely rewritten. Black thinks that counterfactuals do have value for historians, so it's a good addition to the pile.

Kristen Alexander. Taking Flight: Lores Bonney's Extraordinary Flying Career. Canberra: NLA Publishing, 2016. If Australia had an equivalent to Amy Johnson, Jean Batten, and Amelia Earhart, it was Lores Bonney: the first woman to fly around Australia (1932), the first woman to fly from Australia to England (1933), the first person to fly from Australia to South Africa (1937). But she's not very well-known. This might do something to change that. Looks like a nice companion piece to Michael Molkentin's Flying the Southern Cross, also published by the NLA.

James Harris. The Great Fear: Stalin's Terror of the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. A short book making a big claim: that the purges were the result of the belief that the Soviet Union was under imminent threat by internal conspiracy and external attack. It wasn't, but in this case perception mattered more than reality. Hmm, that idea sounds familiar somehow...

I walked into the local secondhand bookshop thinking I should try to buy something to support them; and of course then walked out with an armful, including:

P. M. S. Blackett. Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy. London: Turnstile Press, 1948. Blackett was a bit of an overachiever: the Tizard Committee, the Royal Aircraft Establishment, director of operational research for the Admiralty, the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on antimatter, later MinTech. He even fought at Jutland. Here he grapples with the problem of nuclear weapons (he had been on the MAUD Committee which first investigated the feasibility of a fission weapon), starting with an analysis of the effects of strategic bombing in the late war (he was a sceptic, as he had been at the time) and ending with -- well, by his own admission, not very much by way of a solution, for which he blames the state of the world. Fair enough!

Nigel Calder. Nuclear Nightmares: An Investigation into Possible Wars. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1979. The companion to a BBC documentary narrated by Peter Ustinov, of all people. The nuclear nightmares considered are: escalation, proliferation, decapitation, counterforce. So much for détente.

Martin Ceadel. Thinking About Peace and War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. A fairly persuasive attempt to classify peace movements on the basis of ideology, by one of the most influential British peace historians; but I do wish he'd come up with a less ugly formulation than 'pacific-ism' (sic) to differentiate absolute pacifists from those who accept that war is sometimes necessary.

I. F. Clarke. The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001. London: Book Club Associates, 1979. Clarke's other defining work on predictive fiction, this time on future histories more generally, as opposed to just the military ones. I don't know it as well as Voices Prophesying War, because the uni library had in storage and it was a pain to get out. So my eyes lit up when I found this.

Jeremy Black. What If? Counterfactualism and the Problem of History. London: Social Affairs Unit, 2008. What if I confused this book with an expanded edition under a different title? I'd probably end up ordering that edition too.

John Connor, Peter Stanley and Peter Yule. The War at Home. The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, volume 4. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015. It's possible that I bought this in part because I (or my ego) wanted to see if it cited me. But only in part. With sections covering politics, society and economy, there's something here for everyone [who is interested in the Australian home front in the First World War].

Leigh Edmonds. Australia Takes Wing 1900-1939. Flight in Australia, volume 1. Ballarat: BHS Publishing, 2015. I actually bought this last year, but forgot to list it here, I think because it's an ebook. The focus is very much on civil aviation, which Leigh argues has been (and is) more important here than in other countries with similar-sized populations and economies, by virtue of the practically unique geographical problems encountered in Australia. I'm looking forward to the next volume; you can buy this one here.

Jeremy Black. The Cold War: A Military History. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. I already have a book with this title (by David Miller) but that was published in 1999, and another half-generation's distant might lend some valuable perspective. The indefatigable Black traces the Cold War all the way back to 1917, perhaps the drawing on the research for his recent book on the interwar period, Avoiding Armageddon (2012).

Michael Bryant. A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. China and India appear a couple of dozen times each in the index, so this is a fair attempt at a world history; but inevitably it's dominated by the evolution of war crimes (and of course the legal systems which defined war crimes) in Europe and its sphere of influence.

T.M. Devine. The Scottish Nation: A Modern History. London: Penguin, 2012. A subject I should know more about (among many others).

Lindsey A. Freeman. Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Part history, part sociology of Atomic City -- Oak Ridge, the site of the world's second self-sustaining nuclear reactor as well as the focus of American postwar nuclear utopianism as well as disillusionment. All of that spells: fun!

Terry Moyle. Art Deco Airports: Dream Designs of the 1920s & 1930s.. London, Chatswood and Auckland: New Holland, 2015. Airports and Art Deco grew up together, so it's no surprise that there are Art Deco airports. Quite a few of them, in fact, from Le Bourget at Paris to Shushan at New Orleans. This is a very attractive, well-illustrated book, but while it's not quite an academic work it is more than a coffee table book, and it has a decent bibliography and endnotes section as well.

Robert M. Neer. Napalm: An American Biography. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press, 2013. If you buy only one book on napalm, this is the one you want (and maybe the only one there is). We tend to associate napalm with Vietnam and maybe Korea, but of course it was born in the Second World War, where it would have incinerated more Japanese than the atomic bombs did.

Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1944-45: Victory in the Pacific. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Having devoured Australia 1942 and Australia 1943, I was disappointed when Australia 1944 didn't appear. This explains why! As with the previous volumes, this is an Australian perspective on the war, although there is a chapter on the Japanese Army in the areas facing the Australians. There's a cast of thousands (well, seventeen) in the 'Contributors' section, including Joan Beaumont, Rhys Crawley, Lachlan Grant, David Horner, Karl James, Michael McKernan, Michael Molkentin (branching out here – his topic is the home front rather than aviation), and Peter Stanley. There are chapters on POWs, jungle warfare, special operations and intelligence, as well as two on the end of the fighting in New Guinea and four on the controversial Borneo campaign. Once again the chapter on the RAAF seems somewhat out of tune with the rest of the book, but overall this looks like an excellent conclusion to an excellent series.

Frederick Taylor. Coventry: Thursday, 14 November 1940. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Taylor's Dresden (2004) is near-definitive, so I have high hopes for this. There's an interesting discussion of the question of whether Coventry (and other blitzes) led to a desire for reprisals on the part of the British public; although Tom Harrisson is misleading on this topic, and the opinion polls need careful interpretation, Taylor is probably right to conclude that reprisals were not uppermost in the minds of most people. Still, I think the Blitz spirit was not as stoicly passive as legend (or myth) has it.

Ian Castle. The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War. Oxford and New York: Osprey, 2015. As seen on the Internet! I already own the two books which this combines. But they were review copies so I didn't pay for them; it seems fair enough to support the author more concretely this time.

Robert Loeffel. The Fifth Column in World War II: Suspected Subversives in the Pacific War and Australia. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Depressingly timely in the current situation. While on the question of titles, I think most people would assume that a book called The Fifth Column in World War II was about Europe, or perhaps the United States -- definitely not Australia. But this does at least look briefly at the origins of the fifth column fear in Europe, as well as how it was imported into the Australian context. (Spoiler: there was no fifth column, as such.) I'd love to see something this thorough for the British case, for that matter. As a bonus, my article about the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane episode is cited, a clear sign of quality :)

Neil R. Storey. Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain during the First World War. Stroud: History Press, 2015. As with The First Blitz, I've discussed this book here recently, sight unseen, so I should probably actually buy it instead of just talking about it. It's a very solid and well-illustrated text, and looks like a fairly comprehensive guide to the Zeppelin raids on Britain (and it even discusses the prewar phantom airships, though without giving sources). However, by only including airship raids it provides a distorted picture of the campaign (and the Gotha raids of 1917 and 1918 were the most 'Blitzy' of the war, if you're going to go down that path); and its claim to originality is undermined by the failure to cite Christopher Cole and E. F. Cheesman's The Air Defence of Britain 1914-1918 (1984), which is still the definitive account of the operational aspects of the raids and is pretty clearly also based on the GHQ summaries (among other sources), even if their own refusal to actually cite anything is irritating.

Alan Allport. Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939-1945. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Alan's –– since he's a longtime friend of this blog I feel justified in the slight informality -- last book looked at what happened to the British soldier when he went home after the Second World War ended. This is much more ambitious in that it's about everything that happened to the British soldier before Demobbed. Hopefully Alan will write a social history of the RAF next. (Well, I can dream, can't I?) In any case, he will no doubt be pleased to learn that it's on sale in Australian bookshops, since that's where I found it; and that I showed both Browned Off and Demobbed to a colleague who promptly decided to buy his own copies for his current research. That's outreach and impact, right there.

Anne Witchard. England's Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War. Melbourne: Penguin, 2014. A very cute little (less than a hundred pages) book and a useful parallel to the Germanophibia with which I am better acquainted. Witchard argues that the casualties of the First World War led to fears of racial decline and hence the identification of the Chinese as a racial enemy. I know what you're thinking -- didn't M. P. Shiel, Jack London, and for that matter Sax Rohmer himself all write about the Yellow Peril before 1914? Well, yes. That's a good point. Hopefully Witchard will address it.