Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey, and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them
by Stan Hieronymus
from Brewers Publications
Brew Like a Monk delves into monastic brewing, detailing this rich-flavored region of the beer world. It also examines methods for brewing these unique ales suited to commercial and amateur brewers.
Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible
by John C. McManus
from Wiley
At last, here is a book that tells the full story of the turning point in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge—the story of five crucial days in which small groups of American soldiers, some outnumbered ten to one, slowed the German advance and allowed the Belgian town of Bastogne to be reinforced. Alamo in the Ardennes provides a compelling, day-by-day account of this pivotal moment in America's greatest war.
GERMAN ARMY AT PASSCHENDAELE
by Jack Sheldon
from Pen and Sword
Even after the passage of almost a century, the name Passchendaele has lost none of its power to shock and dismay. Reeling from the huge losses in earlier battles, the German army was in no shape to absorb the impact of the Battle of Messines and the subsequent bitter attritional struggle.
Throughout the fighting on the Somme the German army had always felt that it had the ability to counter Allied thrusts, but following the shock reverses of April and May 1917, much heart searching had led to the urgent introduction of new tactics of flexible defense. When these in turn were found to be wanting, the psychological damage shook the German defenders badly. But, as this book demonstrates, at trench level the individual soldier of the German Army was still capable of fighting extraordinarily hard, despite being outnumbered, outgunned and subjected to relentless, morale-sapping shelling and gas attacks.
The German army drew comfort from the realization that, although it had had to yield ground and had paid a huge price in casualties, its morale was essentially intact and the British were no closer to a breakthrough in Flanders at the end of the battle than they had been many weeks earlier.
REVIEWS
"...A rare look at one of the war's most notable battles from the German side, and even better, an account that includes the perspective of the men in the trenches... an important read for anyone interested in the Great War."NYMAS, Winter 2008
A Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders
by Craig Harline
from Yale University Press
In 1987, Craig Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young University, and Eddy Put, senior assistant at the Belgian National Archives, struck gold. In a dusty Belgian archive, they found a detailed daybook kept by Mathias Hovius, who served as archbishop of Mechelen (part of modern Belgium) from 1596 to 1620. Harline and Put spent the next 13 years turning that daybook into A Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders, an extraordinary work of historical biography.
It would be difficult to overstate the pleasures of this book. Its historical method is unusually accessible and sophisticated. ("In seeking to understand a world long past, we found it highly illuminating to begin with a single human being rather than a large abstraction such as 'society.'") Its style is straightforward and novelistic, with a wealth of detail that humanizes its exotic subjects. (For instance, the archbishop had "no protruding hairs on his upper lip, lest while celebrating Mass he obstruct the blood of Christ.") Even individual sentences often display a stunning, wide-angled perspective on individual events. (An explosion "sent stones rocketing up to two miles away, flattened houses, damaged churches, killed 300 people, wounded 150, and decapitated fish in the river.") And its characters--monks, nuns, millers, peasants, saints, who incidentally illustrate major themes of the Reformation-- are vital and ribald and doomed and striving. Harline and Put say they chose to write about the Reformation because of "its massive rupturing of a seemingly eternal premise of Christianity: that it was one." In an afterword, Harline and Put explain that "Never before had there been such widespread teaching, preaching, and fighting over souls, or such excellent preservation on paper of these efforts. Rich documents are often the fruit of zeal." The authors' own zeal to show readers the world of this bishop has created a very rich book about Reformation Christianity. --Michael Joseph Gross
This absorbing book takes us back to the busy, colorful world of a Netherlandish Catholic bishop and his flock from 1596 to 1620. Based upon the recently discovered daybook of Mathius Hovius, the book focuses not only on his life but also on key events and characters of the period. Episodes in the lives of monks, nuns, pilgrims, peasants, saints, and others bring to life the experience of religion during the Counterreformation.
Corps Commanders of the Bulge: Six American Generals and Victory in the Ardennes (Modern War Studies)
by Harold R. Winton
from University Press of Kansas
If the Battle of the Bulge was Germany's last gasp, it was also America's proving ground-the largest single action fought by the U.S. Army in World War II. Taking a new approach to an old story, Harold Winton widens our field of vision by showing how victory in this legendary campaign was built upon the remarkable resurrection of our truncated interwar army, an overhaul that produced the effective commanders crucial to GI success in beating back the Ardennes counteroffensive launched by Hitler's forces.
Winton's is the first study of the Bulge to examine leadership at the largely neglected level of corps command. Focusing on the decisions and actions of six Army corps commanders-Leonard Gerow, Troy Middleton, Matthew Ridgway, John Millikin, Manton Eddy, and J. Lawton Collins-he recreates their role in this epic struggle through a mosaic of narratives that take the commanders from the pre-war training grounds of America to the crucible of war in the icy-cold killing fields of Belgium and Luxembourg.
Winton introduces the story of each phase of the Bulge with a theater-level overview of the major decisions and events that shaped the corps battles and, for the first time, fully integrates the crucial role of airpower into our understanding of how events unfolded on the ground. Unlike most accounts of the Ardennes that chronicle only the periods of German and American initiative, Winton's study describes an intervening middle phase in which the initiative was fiercely contested by both sides and the outcome uncertain. His inclusion of the principal American and German commanders adds yet another valuable layer to this rich tapestry of narrative and analysis.
Ultimately, Winton argues that the flexibility of the corps structure and the competence of the men who commanded the six American corps that fought in the Bulge contributed significantly to the ultimate victory. Chronicling the human drama of commanding large numbers of soldiers in battle, he has produced an artful blend of combat narrative, collective biography, and institutional history that contributes significantly to the broader understanding of World War II as a whole.
This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.
A Tour of the Bulge Battlefield
by William Cavanagh
from Pen and Sword
In a similar manner to A Tour of the Arnhem Battlefields, this new volume covers in detail the scene of one of the greatest battles of World War II. Maps and then-and-now photographs illustrate the battle itself and offer a detailed guide to touring the area as it is today.
Fort Eben Emael: The Key to Hitler's Victory in the West (Fortress)
by Simon Dunstan
from Osprey Publishing
At the outbreak of World War II, Fort Eben Emael in Belgium was the strongest fortress in the world, and it lay exactly across the German invasion route of Belgium and France. The fort’s elimination was essential for the success of Hitler’s invasion of the West. Deemed impregnable to conventional attack, Hitler himself suggested the means for its capture with the first glider-borne assault in military history. On 10 May 1940, ten gliders carrying just 77 paratroopers landed on top of the fort. Using top-secret hollow-charge weapons for the first time in warfare, the assault pioneers of Sturmgruppe Granit subdued Fort Eben Emael within just 30 minutes, and the fortress surrendered within 30 hours. It remains one of the greatest raids in the annals of Special Forces.
Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years
by Misha Defonseca
from Mt. Ivy Press
Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976
by Piero Gleijeses
from The University of North Carolina Press
This sweeping history of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 is based on unprecedented research in African, Cuban, and American archives. (Among Gleijeses's many sources are Cuban archival materials to which he is the only non-Cuban to ever have access.) Setting his story within the context of U.S. policy toward both Africa and Cuba during the Cold War, Gleijeses challenges the notion that Cuban policy in Africa was directed by the Soviet Union.
A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture)
by Rosalind E. Krauss
from Thames & Hudson
Exploring the nature of the aesthetic medium has been at the heart of much of modern art. For exponents of high modernism, the essence of each medium lay inherently in its own particular material properties. Accordingly, the import of painting was its "flatness," as exemplified by the monochrome canvas. But some artists rejected this description as inadequate. Citing the examples of film, television, and video, they understood and articulated the medium as a complex structure of technical supports and layered conventions distinct from physical properties. Here, Rosalind Krauss positions the work of Marcel Broodthaers within this alternative narrative. Referring to the Belgian artist's films, books, graphic design, and museum "fictions," she presents Broodthaers as standing at, and thus standing for, the "complex" of the self-differing medium.
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