The Proud Tower and The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

$55.00 NZD

Category: History | Reading Level: very good

Make Her Praises Heard Afar: The Untold story of New Zealand Women in WW1 by Jane Tolerton

$25.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: very good

The history books tell us that about 550 New Zealand nurses went to World War One while other women stayed home, knitting, fundraising and looking after families and farms while the men were away. But many women went too, as doctors and ambulance drivers, munitions workers and mathematicians, civil serv ants and servicewomen in British units, and in many other roles. They mainly paid their own fares and worked for very little. Some provided amenities for soldiers and others, and these have often been attributed to the military or men’s groups. Make her Praises Heard Afar introduces women whose contribution to the war effort has been overlooked, telling an astonishing story with extraordinary range and depth of research. The title’s use of a phrase from the national anthem invites New Zealand women to recognise that they were us, 100 years ago. New Zealand women who have read World War One books by men and about men are ready to appreciate that women were there too. This book will appeal to a wide range of women particularly those interested in women’s history, feminism and World War One. There is much interest from family members of these women and from young women. The book is written for a wide readership in simple, accessible prose. Jane is the author of a New Zealand Book Award winning biography of Ettie Rout, the New Zealand woman most associated in the public mind with World War One. She wrote a second book on Ettie in 2014, focussing on her wartime safe sex campaign, Ettie Rout: New Zealand’s safer sex pioneer. She was co-director of the World War One Oral History Archive, and interviewed 85 veterans. She produced In the Shadow of War, with Nicholas Boyack, and in 2013 listened to the whole archive to produce An Awfully Big Adventure, telling the story of the war in the men’s words, chronologically. She uses the chronological format for Make Her Praises Heard Afar, telling stories of individuals and groups through the war, using extended quotes when appropriate. There is expected to be wide interest in the book from the media as it upsets the generally accepted story and shows that New Zealand women have been left out of the national narrative of the war.  ...Show more

Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 by Max Hastings

$18.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

From the acclaimed military historian, a history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles--the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg--that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches. In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud and futility. He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also re-creates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas. As he has done in his celebrated, award-winning works on World War II, Hastings gives us frank assessments of generals and political leaders and masterly analyses of the political currents that led the continent to war. He argues passionately against the contention that the war was not worth the cost, maintaining that Germany's defeat was vital to the freedom of Europe. Throughout we encounter statesmen, generals, peasants, housewives and private soldiers of seven nations in Hastings's accustomed blend of top-down and bottom-up accounts: generals dismounting to lead troops in bayonet charges over 1,500 feet of open ground; farmers who at first decried the requisition of their horses; infantry men engaged in a haggard retreat, sleeping four hours a night in their haste. This is a vivid new portrait of how a continent became embroiled in war and what befell millions of men and women in a conflict that would change everything. ...Show more

New Zealand and the First World War 1914-1919 by Damien Fenton

$40.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand

The first of its kind for New Zealand - a lavish, landmark production - New Zealand and the First World War dynamically illustrates 50 key episodes of our wartime life. Featuring over 500 images, many previously unpublished, the book comes with a host of memorabilia including fold-out maps, posters, boo klets, letters, and postcards. The complete story of New Zealand's war is brought to life in dramatic detail - our front-line experiences overseas as well as those on the home front, from the outbreak in 1914 to demobilisation in 1919. This terrible conflict was not restricted to faraway battlefields like Gallipoli and Passchendaele - it had an unparalleled impact on New Zealand society, touching nearly every family, every street and every community. Until now, no single history has explored New Zealand's role in the First World War with such breadth and colour. A defining history for a new generation. ...Show more

The Siege: The forgotten siege of Kut El Amarah, Mesopotamia 1916 - A saga of Heroism and Military Blunder, the greatest humiliation suffered by British arms between Balaklava and Singapore by Russell Braddon

$30.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

1914: Fight the Good Fight: Britain, the Army and the Coming of the First World War by Allan Mallinson

$25.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

'No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening', wrote Churchill. 'The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed...In fact the War wa s decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of fate. 'One of Britain's foremost military historians has written a significant new history of the origins - and the opening first few weeks fighting - of what would become known as 'the war to end all wars'. Intensely researched and convincingly argued, Allan Mallinson explores and explains the grand strategic shift that occurred in the century before the war, the British Army's regeneration after its drubbings in its fight against the Boer, its almost calamitous experience of the first twenty days' fighting in Flanders, and the point at which the British Expeditionary Force - the 'Old Contemptibles' - took up the pick and the spade in the middle of September 1914, changing the war from one of movement into the now familiar image of the trenches and the coming of the Territorials, Kitchener's 'Pals', and ultimately the conscripts - and of course the poets. And with them, at sense of pity and of futility. An ex-infantry and -cavalry officer, Mallinson brings his experience as a professional soldier to bear on the individuals, circumstances and events and the result is a vivid, compelling new history of the beginnings of the conflict - and one that speculates - tantalizingly - on what might have been... ...Show more

Harry's War by Harry Drinkwater

$12.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

'I saw several fellows fall, one fellow coughing up blood and all the time, bullets were hacking about me. I ran for about 70 yards carrying with me all the Lewis gun things I had brought up and dropped breathless into a shell hole headlong onto a German who had been dead for months.' Harold Drinkwater was not supposed to go to war. He was told he was half an inch too short. But, determined to fight for king and country, he found a battalion that would take him and was soon on his way to the trenches of the Somme. As the war dragged on, Harry saw most of the men he joined up with killed around him. But, somehow, he survived. Soldiers were forbidden from keeping a diary so Harry wrote his in secret, recording the horrendous conditions and constant fear, as well as his pleasure at receiving his officer's commission, the joy of his men when they escaped the trenches for the Italian Front and the trench raid for which he was awarded the Military Cross. Harry writes with such immediacy it is easy to forget that a hundred years have passed. He is by turns wry, exhausted, annoyed, resigned and often amazed to be alive. Never before published, Harry's War is a moving testament to one man's struggle to keep his humanity in the face of unimaginable violence. ...Show more

The Forgotten General: New Zealand's World War I Commander Major-General Sir Andrew Russell by Jock Vennell

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: good

The Forgotten General highlights the courage, intelligence and determination of an exceptional New Zealander. Major-General Sir Andrew Russell was a distinguished soldier and a dedicated leader of men. He was among the top-ranked divisional commanders in the British armies that fought on the Western Fro nt in World War I. He has been described as 'the one military commander of genius that New Zealand produced in the twentieth century. Yet little of his story is known. Born into pioneer farming stock, Russell's early days were spent on sheep stations in the Hawke's Bay region; he was educated at Harrow and at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and later served in the British Army in India and Burma. When World War I broke out, Russell commanded the New Zealand brigade that served with distinction at Gallipoli. He was subsequently knighted and given command of the 20,000-strong New Zealand Division that under his leadership became one of the finest fighting formations on the Western Front. The Forgotten General, however, is not just about a consummate military commander. It also tells the story of the men he led through four unbroken years of war-starting with the raw and inexperienced brigade that arrived on Gallipoli in May 1915 and finishing with the lite division at the spearhead of the British counter-offensive that finally ended the war on the Western Front. ...Show more

The Kia ora Coo-ee. The Magazine for the Anzacs in the Middle East 1918 by David Kent

$30.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: very good

The Unknown Soldier by Neil Hanson

$10.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

Of all the million British dead of the First World War, only one - the Unknown Soldier - was ever returned to his native land. An anonymous symbol of all those lost without trace in the carnage of the battlefields, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey amid an outpouring of grief that brought the who le nation to a standstill, far outweighing even the emotion expressed over the death of Princess Diana over eighty years later. Inspired by this example, almost every combatant nation buried its own Unknown Soldier and the graves became the focus of a pilgrimage that still continues today. Drawing on largely unpublished letters and diaries, Neil Hanson has resurrected the lives and experiences of three unknown soldiers - a Briton, a German and an American. Every word is based on the testimony of those who fought, those who died and those who mourned. Few books have ever shown the terrible reality of warfare in such compelling, unforgettable detail, or told such a moving story of human life and loss. Amid all their sufferings, the common humanity of the men and their loved ones shines through. Each soldier lives on in the memory of his family to this day. ...Show more

The Roses of No Man's Land by Lyn MacDonald

$25.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

1918: The Year of Victories by Martin Marix Evans

$10.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good