If this belongs more in Cafe Society, I apologize and a mod is welcome to move it there. I was asking for opinions/recommendations, so I thought it might fit here.
I don’t post a lot, but I thought this would be the best place to look for recommendations, as opposed to weeding through pages of sloppy Amazon reviews.
I’ve been on a kick lately, reading a lot of books about World War II, particularly the German concentration/extermination camps and Japanese biological and chemical research/experimentation (Unit 731, et cetera).
There are so many books, though, many of them on the fairly expensive side, and in all different types and styles of writing (scholarly, textbook-like, survivor accounts, et cetera), that I thought I would try and boil it down a bit.
The list below is what I have picked up so far, and some brief thoughts on the ones I have read, in case it helps with recommending. I’m not terribly picky, fortunately, and I like textbook-like writing just as much as more personal accounts or novel-like writing. I like a variety. What I do like, though, is detail. I’m not looking for a WW2 overview, or historical overviews of events. Specifics are best.
Purchased and read:
Gold, Hal - Unit 731 Testimony
— In progress on this one, and it’s okay. I don’t have anything spectacular to say about it, but it’s pretty solid so far. I’m hoping it will be a little more specific once I get past the ‘overviews’.
Harris, Sheldon M - Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up
— This was the first book I read. It’s quite objective (I think) and refers to lots and lots of source research material. It reads more like a textbook than anything else, and was incredibly expensive. It was a dry read, not necessarily ‘pleasure reading’, but very interesting and full of a lot of good specific details among the overviews.
Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara - Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land
— Possibly my favorite of the books I have read so far. The writing style just really grabbed me, and it’s full of lots of personal touches and detail. It’s very lively writing. It details just how amazingly people can adapt to terrible situations and survive them.
Spitz, Vivien - Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans
— I saw a bunch of reviews complaining about the author’s personal information included in the book, in-between transcripts from the Nuremberg trials, but I enjoyed the whole thing. The transcripts were the real gems, but I liked it as a whole, even with the author’s extra icing on top.
Purchased, not yet read:
Barenblatt, Daniel - A Plague Upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan’s Biological Warfare Program
**Muller, Filip - Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers **
Posner, Gerald (& Ware, John) - Mengele: The Complete Story
Tanaka, Yuki - Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes In World War II (Transitions–Asia and Asian America)
I seem to be going through a book or so a week or so, depending on the difficulty of the subject matter and the writing style, so it’s not taking me long to plow through them. Even Harris’ book, which was stylistically the most difficult of the bunch to me, only took me about a week and a half or so. I’d like to buy some more so I won’t have to wait for more to ship once I finish the rest.
Anything good about the ‘Rape of Nanking/Nanking Massacre’ incident or the Bataan Death March would also be of interest to me. Or the aftermath of the atomic bomb drops on Japan. More suggestions are welcome, if I haven’t thought of or missed other tangentially-related things you’d like to recommend.
I’m not squeamish, so gory details don’t bother me. Well, they do bother me in the sense that the whole issue is definitely one that weighs heavily on people, but I’m not squicked out by descriptions of experiments or executions. As messed up and horrifying as it all is, it’s also a really interesting subject from lots of angles.
I’m not looking for material that is particularly sensationalist or excessively political in nature, though I know that sort of stuff is inevitably included in most writings. At least moderately-objective researched stuff or personal witness / survivor accounts are best, for me.
This might SEEM really picky even though I said I wasn’t, but I’ll really take a crack at almost anything.
I hope I don’t come off like some crazy psychopath. Amazon’s starting to recommend me weird things…
Sorry for the wordy topic!
