War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres

This is the memoir of basically a fairly normal journalist who seems to have kind of accidentally agreed to be an embedded journalist in the 2003 Iraq invasion. He's funny - mainly self-deprecating - and his view on things is a different perspective compared to war correspondents. The book's not just about that time, either. He talks about things that led towards the experience - his history as a journalist and his experience in New York when the World Trade Centre attacks occurred, mainly.

If A Pirate I Must Be... by Richard Sanders

This is a biography of the infamous pirate Bartholomew Roberts. In fact, it's a bit more general than that, as Sanders goes off on various tangents regarding pirate culture, the slave trade, and so on. Roberts' career as a pirate is a pretty good framework for this. Interesting, but mainly for anecdotal stuff (Sanders goes to many primary sources).

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

An interesting look at (some of) the people on the front lines in the American military. Wright was an embedded journalist with the Marine First Recon Battalion, and the book recounts what he saw and heard in the invasion of Iraq. It's fairly hostile to the higher ranked officers (perhaps unfairly - via wikipedia I found a rebuttal to the book, with differing accounts on many of the events in the book). This seems likely to be because Wright was with the same small group of mainly enlisted men. In any case, it's still a great read, especially for the portraits he paints of some of the soldiers.

Solving Stonehenge by Anthony Johnson

The first half of this is a history of the study of Stonehenge, which is fairly interesting.

The second half is really interesting. Johnson decided to work out how the builders designed Stonehenge, and this book describes his attempts to work out how the various parts were positioned, using only techniques that would have been available at the time (i.e. pegs and ropes). Pretty cool stuff.

On top of that, it's a coffee table book with lots of nice pictures.

A History of Japan by Kenneth Henshall

A fairly shallow, yet still very interesting, history of Japan. Recommended if, like me, you have only the broadest ideas of Japanese history.

Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Simon Baker

This book is companion to a BBC series, and takes portraits of seven people as a way to get at the Roman empire's history. Most are people who I already knew a fair bit about, but the way that Baker draws ideas from the individual lives to the bigger story of Rome is good. Plus, there are a few who I hadn't come across before, such as Alaric (he's in there as the Goth king who finally disestablished the western emperor).

The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger

A light, but enjoyable read. Taking a 1020 calendar to give it some structure, the authors take us through the life in eleventh century Britain month by month. There's a lot of good stuff in there, although the fact that the authors are journalists rather than historians shows.

The First World War by John Keegan

Very good history of the war. Keegan has a great writing style, so that the book is compelling to read (very rare in histories!). It is also, inevitably, sobering and depressing due to the subject. Keegan makes a point of exploring the lead up to the war, the decisions that triggered it, and (briefly) the consequences.

Exploring Prehistoric Europe by Chris Scarre

Half coffee table book, half travel book. It covers fifteen important prehistoric sites in Europe, with a good discussion of why they are important and review of what is known about them.

The Quest for Origins by K R Howe

A good overview of what the current opinions are on the way the Polynesians colonized the Pacific Ocean. Howe also covers historical and alternative (i.e. crazy) opinions on the same topic. The book is an easy and short read, and packs a lot of information in there. There's a little bit of a New Zealand focus (probably as Howe is a New Zealander, plus he mentions it as especially interesting in that it's the most recently inhabited piece of the world).

69 A.D. : The Year of Four Emperors by Gwyn Morgan

Fairly dense history of the civil war that the title implies. Morgan is attempting to take the few but disparate sources and work out what was most likely to have actually happened. The paucity of material means that a lot of this is fairly speculative (or relies on just one original author). On top of this, the number of people and legions involved means that just keeping track of those is hard work in itself.

The Indian Mutiny by Saul David

A good history of the events. It suffers a little from being predominantly from the British point of view, but I got the feeling that this was due to few Indian accounts existing.

An Ocean of Air by Gabrielle Walker

A history of our understanding of the atmosphere. It's told from the ground up, with a chapter on each major discovery and the people involved. Plenty of good anecdotes, on top of the science.

My Tank Is Fight! by Zack Parsons

This is a book about the craziest inventions that didn't quite happen in the Second World War. It's based on a series of columns Parsons' wrote at Something Awful a year or three ago.

It's a fun read, with a good selection of crazy ideas. For each one, there are a few pictures (including some nice colour plates), a description of the actual history, a discussion of the technical aspects and how well it might have worked, and finally a hypothetical history if the invention had gone ahead and fictional vignette about that.

Parsons' writing is good, although he often drops into an over the top style that will be familiar to Something Awful readers. In some places, this seems inappropriate to the material. The fictional vignettes are also somewhat redundant - I feel like more attention to the analysis of the inventions and hypothetical histories would have been more rewarding to read.

All that said, overall it's great fun - covering everything from Nazi nukes to personal backpack helicopters and 2000 ton tanks.

Espionage by Ernest Volkman

Subtitled "The Greatest Spy Operations of the 20th Century," which pretty much sums up the book.

Volkman has selected 22 cases, and devotes a good chapter to each. He covers how the operations began, their objectives and their effects on history. His writing is good, making even a few of the more dry cases interesting. Most of them don't need this, as they're pretty exciting. There's also a large number that I knew nothing or very little about.

He rounds it off with perhaps the most ludicrous operation ever, an attempt in 1945 to reduce German morale using forged postage stamps with subversive messages on them. Yes, really. (Spoiler: it had absolutely no effect on German morale).

Britain AD by Francis Pryor

This is another of Pryor's companions to his documentaries on the history of Britain.

It focuses chiefly on two areas in which he argues the received view is mistaken (and I get the impression his position is becoming more widely held). These are:

1. That the end of Roman rule in Britain did not lead to any sort of widespread collapse, but rather just changes in the way that society was run

2. There were no large scale Anglo-Saxon invasions rebuilding England after any anarchic Dark Age.

Instead, he present evidence that the end of Roman rule was just a part of a general change in the patterns of life and that the Anglo-Saxon artifacts and traditions of these times were more likely imported by an existing population rather than imposed by conquerors.

That all seems fair enough to me, but I found that the book's focus on this argument detracted from it a little. The other two books contained more interesting stories (either directly, about archaeological digs and research, or speculative ones about how people could have lived).

Britain BC by Francis Pryor

Very good, easy to read book on all human prehistory in Britain. I learned a lot of things that I didn't know previously, and his speculative takes on why people built things like henges are interesting too.

Light Dragoons by Allan Mallinson

This is not a further Matthew Hervey novel but a history of the British Light Dragoons Regiment (really more about it's antecedents, as it was formed in 1992).

It's an entertaining read, following the various postings and actions of the units concerned from the earliest forerunners in the 17th century. Anecdotes, regimental legends and the letters and journals of soldiers are scattered through as well.

Medieval Lives by Terry Jones & Alan Ereira

A nice, quirky history book. It looks at people in medieval times and attempts to show how they were basically just like us in most ways. The authors also want to show us that the received view of the middle ages is not really representative of any time or place in history, and that things kept changing all through those centuries.

Each chapter picks a type of person and goes over their lives, illustrated with interesting individuals and events. The discussion generally also roams over various other topics related to monks, peasants (or whoever the chapter is about).

The book is companion to a TV series, which I may also have to look out for.

Britain in the Middle Ages by Francis Pryor

A nice, somewhat idiosyncratic, history book. The author focuses on the things that he personally is most interested in, which gives a different take than a typical book about the middle ages. He talks a lot about daily life and the things we know about that, in particular. On top of that, his style is very good.

His general theme, to the extent that the book has one, is mainly that the middle ages weren't quite as barbaric as they are generally made out to be, and I think he argues that case pretty well.

He also has a fair bit to say, in asides, about the conduct of archaeology in Britain today. This is not something I really care much about, but had some interesting tidbits in there.