Hendrix's Eccentric Commentary

1. John A. Lynn, _Battle:  A History of Combat and Culture_. Quite simply a brilliant statement of the cultural approach to military history.  Chapter Four’s footnote 7 is also very important.
2. Andrew Gordon, _The Rules of the Game:  Jutland and British Naval Command_. In my experience, the best practical example of using a cultural approach to explain the conduct of a battle.
3. James McPherson, _Battle Cry of Freedom_. An entire war laid out lucidly and very readably in one, Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
4. Dennis Showalter,  _Hitler’s Panzers:  The Lightening Attacks that Revolutionized History_. Intended to be a popular history, (I.e. no footnotes) it is in fact the best one-volume treatment of the subject.
5. David C. Evans and  David Beattie, _Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941_. A great use of technological history to explain, at the title describes, the strategy and tactics of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
6. John Keegan, _The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme_. Still a classic after a half-century, Keegan revolutionized the field of military history.  The introductory essay is perhaps more important than the study of the battles which follows.
7. Max Hastings, a tossup between _Bomber Command_ and _Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy_. Hastings combines very highly readable narrative history, accessible to the layman with very good insights and analysis.
8. Christopher Duffy, _The Army of Frederick the Great: Second Edition_. A great work summing up the nuts and bolts of a military system in one volume and in the process introducing eighteenth-century warfare to the uninitiated.  The first volume of this work is what introduced me to serious military history and directed my attention to the military world of the eighteenth-century.
9. Robert Citino, _The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich_. Yes, there really are national ways of war, and Citino makes a strong case for a specifically German one.  Robert Citino and I also grew up two blocks and one year apart and never knew each other until meeting at a SMH Conference.
10. Alastair Horne, _The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916_. Another strong narrative history, perhaps going a bit far into the “blood, mud, and futility” genre of Great War writing ,but it leaves the reader with an understanding of the impact of Verdun on the French memory of World War I.  This work might be especially import for an anglophone audience.

Needles to say all these authors have published numerous other important works.  It is probably no coincidence that all of these works are still available in either ebook or paper formats, usually both.