In a way the war reporter serves as such for life. If not, ask Arturo Perez Reverte or own Max hastings. Not that these two great writers were left with the hollow gaze of the thousand yards, as it used to happen to the soldiers more in the vanguard. But the imagination has to be peppered with sadly unfading memories of destruction and hatred. And at least as far as Reverte is concerned, his evocations of the war in Yugoslavia are frequent as a sad mirror where to compare, extrapolate or simply remember ...
But it can be said that Pérez Reverte exorcised himself with that little book «Comanche territory»And then he was already focused on an overwhelming novelistic career. Max Hastings for his part continues today with war as an argument, still determined to unravel all the chronicle that can be contributed of conflicts that have already been defeated. Perhaps it is in the spirit of a necessary learning that is never completely done.
And of course already a veteran not only of wars but also of life, his voice stands as one of the most authorized to address warlike aspects not so far from the twentieth century. And so we relive moments in which madness swept over the world until synthesizing a strange cold war that seems to last until today. Nothing better than Hastings to understand the world left behind by the scraps of the last century.
Top 3 recommended books by Max Hastings
Overlord: D-Day and the Battle of Normandy
That, paradoxically, hell was a beach, we all sensed. Because Normandy may not have the best coastline to lie down in the sun, no matter how much the early summer of 1944 went by. But it was not the best destination to be shot to death, either. And hundreds of men ended up there in a kind of ambush already planned and considered inevitable to finally tackle Nazism from all sides.
The landings of June 6, 1944, on D-Day, marked the beginning of Operation Overlord, the initial battle for the liberation of France. Max Hastings, one of the leading and most acclaimed historians of the period, questions and dismantles many legends in this masterful study that brings together the accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors from both sides, as well as a host of previously unexplored sources and documents. .
Overlord provides the reader with a brilliant and controversial perspective on the devastating battle for Normandy and bequeaths us one of the most comprehensive and praised works on the events. An absolute historiographic reference.
The vietnam war. An epic tragedy
From Forrest Gump fleeing the front with a bullet in the ass and his friend Bubba to his men to the tragic Apocalypse Now or the crude and even delusional (like war itself) Metallic Jacket. These are just some examples of films in which the Americans watered the world imagination on those strange days of the also known, much less, as the Second Indochina War. Hastings is doing a balancing exercise to get voices from all sides.
Vietnam was the most divisive modern conflict in the Western world. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing dozens of participants from all sides, researching American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. It portrays scenes from Dien Bien Phu, the North Vietnamese air raid, and lesser-known battles such as the bloodbath at Daido. Here are the lived realities of the fighting in the middle of the jungle and rice fields that killed two million people.
Many have treated this war as a tragedy for the United States, yet Hastings does not forget the Vietnamese: in this work there are testimonies from Vietcong guerrillas, paratroopers from the South, hostess girls from Saigon and students from Hanoi, along with soldiers from Hanoi. South Dakota infantry, North Carolina marines, and Arkansas pilots. There is no other work on the Vietnam War that has mixed a political and military narrative of the conflict with poignant personal experiences - the Max Hastings hallmark readers know so well.
The Secret War: Spies, Codes, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945
In the past, the vicissitudes of military intelligence are always the most interesting. Espionage, that sort of foul play in combat turned into cheap blows that no one sees, not even the referee of the international community. Once the law is made, the trap is made, even more so for a war in which we are openly going to bring out the worst in us, no matter how much the issue of one or other motivations is made up later ...
It is about tackling the other side of the Second World War. And it is not precisely that we find a kind face here… Hastings's purpose is to offer us a global vision of what this secret war was like on both sides in which "hundreds of thousands of human beings risked their lives, and many lost them." His book offers us a fascinating overview of characters, ranging from well-known names - such as Sorge, Canaris, Philby or Cicero - to unknown ones such as "Agent Max", who contributed to the German defeat at Stalingrad, or that spy, without know, it was the Japanese Oshima.
Along with them are the scientists who cracked the codes, the members of the "special operations" teams - like the British SOE or the American OSS, in which they ranged from a Hollywood actor, like Sterling Hayden, to a politician like Allen Dulles. - and the Yugoslav or Russian guerrillas. Protagonists of hundreds of stories that Hastings tells us with his narrative claw.
