Every now and then I fall into one of the hazards of buying books about the more obscure subjects of military history. You may have fallen into this trap yourself. It is the PhD dissertation or Master's thesis disguised as a book. Some eras and conflicts have so little written on them that publishers grab these tomes and slap them into hard covers. If you order your books by mail, you may get a surprise. Another form "turkey books" take is the collection of academic papers, usually given at some event honoring a dead professor. Why are these academic papers bad books? They have almost no illustrations whatsoever. Maybe a few tables, but almost no maps, orders of battle, or contemporary photos or paintings. Just pages and pages of dense text. And most of the text is worthless. The author will go on and on in detail about how much the average soldier was paid per week (two kroners, three farthings, a loaf of bread, and some salt) or document with painful accuracy just how much grain was shipped out of Antwerp in 1635 and how that affected the continental politics of the time which then had such and such an effect on the armies. One way to avoid these doorstops is took look at the illustration and map count in the advertisement for the book Good book sellers will list these. Avoid ones with low numbers or no such numbers. Another clue to look for is that the publisher is a university, or the author is a Dr. or a PhD. The Renaissance era is still a little short of popular reading material, and here are some specific books to watch out for: "Sweden and Muscovy in the Thirty Years War" $65 "Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe" $18 "The Art of War in Italy, 1494 - 1529" (out of print) I am sure you can think of some others. For a good overview of Renaissance Warfare, try "The Renaissance at War" by Arnold. It is part of the new Cassin military history series. I thought I should give three examples of VERY GOOD books. Must haves. 1. "The Battles of the Thirty Years War" by William P. Guthrie Reading the two line description in the book catalog, I could not see whether I would want this book or not, but thumbing through it at the dealer's Historicon booth, I thought I would faint. This book has got orders of battle and maps for every significant battle of this war. This is unprecedented! Almost every book just covers the few biggest battles and gives just a paragraph or so to anything else. Have you heard of the Battle of Oldenburg? It's here; map and OBs. Too many books just give the infantry and cavalry totals on each side, maybe separating out different armies and nationalities. This book has every unit, by name or commander. It often has the year the unit was raised, and its strength down to the man! Even if it is a Danish unit in one of the two battles that bounced King Christian out of the war. Too many books simply reprint contemporary or older maps, packed with too much terrain detail and longhand notes -- extremely difficult to read. This book uses modern maps, with clear symbols and simplified terrain. Ready to go straight to the table. And all of this is held together with a clear narrative. The only catch is, you will have to pay through the nose for this one -- $73. 2. "1815, The Waterloo Campaign" Vol 1 & 2 by Peter Hofschroer There are two types of books about Waterloo: popular books, with lots of pictures and a good discussion of the highlights of the campaign and the final battle; and scholarly books, designed to cover all the details of everything that happened during the whole campaign, and to be as accurate as possible; negligible graphics. Hofschroer's book falls into the second category, which is very, very empty. For a long time, Capt. Siborne's book written shortly after the Wars ended was considered the final word on this subject. Only small advances on this subject have been made since then. However, Hofschroer, who is a Brit of German descent, not only went back to the original source material (dispatches, mostly) and spent months in the British Museum library, he also read all the German sources on this campaign. This pair of books is a major advance on the subject of Waterloo and may not be equaled in our lifetime. First, it overcomes the Anglocentric view of most of the books in English ("We had the most difficult and critical battle at Quatre Bras. We heard the Prussians fought the French too, somewhere"). He reports "all" aspects of the campaign from "all" points of view. Second, he goes into great detail on the events leading up to the major battles as well as the French retreat back to Paris. (Did you know about the battle of Gilly, where a Prussian rear guard brigade fought off a French corps? Did you know that Thielmann's III Corps was smaller than the other Prussian corps because many of its regiments were Saxon, and many of the Saxons deserted rather than be forced to become part of Prussia?) Third, Hofschroer does not take any one's word for anything or let any of the previous conclusions stand. He re-examines everything. He gets to the bottom of why certain events happened. Often, something was covered up or glossed over because it made the British look bad. In addition, this book pair uses modern, easy to read maps, and gives complete orders of battle, down to the number of men in each regiment or battalion. Full price $50 each. Discount, $35 each. 3. "The Rommel Papers" by B. H. Liddell Hart After reading several popular books about Rommel, I got sick of constantly getting only small scraps of direct information (as opposed to opinion or speculation) and seeing many footnotes for that information referring the The Rommel Papers. So I went and got TRP. This is an excellent collection of primary source material -- the general's own words, in letters, reports, notes, and anything else that was available, including sketch maps. All this comes with a lot of analysis and commentary by a well-known British military historian. Although this book does not have all of the maps and unit lists that you would need to create a wargame scenario, if does have some hard facts; what happened, when, and why. And you get a high level point of view of almost everything. For the British equivalent, since they changed generals a number of times, the best book would be "The Desert Generals", by Corelli Barnett. $14 for a very large paperback. Back to MWAN # 126 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2004 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com