4º British: Recommended books about II World War

There are many books about the II World War and The Cold War... This is just a selection of the last updates or some different approaches to it, in case you are really interesting into this topic (This article was updated on March, 2018).

Antony Beevor: The Second World War (about 1200 pages). A complete and update revision of the full war (from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the final surrender of the Axis in 1945). This British historian has also some other books about specifical events and battles of the IIWW.

English edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012

Spanish edition: Pasado & Presente, 2012.

Art Spiegelman: Maus, a survivor's tale. A real contemporany classic, the Pulitzer Price-winning tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, father of this comic book author, and how he survived the Nazis.

Originally published in chapters (1973, 1980 and 1991) there is one full edition in Spanish: Reservoir Books, 2007.

Laurent Binet: HHhH. The debut novel of this French author reccounts "Operation Anthropoid" (the assasination of Nazi leader Reynhard Heydrich in Prague) but it's also interlaced with the author's account of the process of researching and writting the book.

Spanish edition: Booket, 2011.

Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands, Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. 

English edition: Basic Books (2010)

Spanish edition: Galaxia Gutenberg (2011)

Götz Aly: Los que sobraban (Historia de la Eutanasia Social en la Alemania Nazi, 1939-45). One of the most unknown crimes of Nazism was the murder of 200.000 German people, victims of euthanasia because mental illnesses or dissabilities, which made them an “unnecessary” burden for the Nazi present and a risk for the maintenance of racial purity. The purpose of Götz Aly has not been to offer one more denunciation of the crimes of Nazism, but the facts in the collective responsibility of the German society, from which the doctors who caused the deaths to the families that accepted them.

Spanish Edition: Crítica (2014)

Keith Lowe: Savage Continent (Europe after the II World War). In this book Lowe describes a continent still shaken by violence, where much of the population had not yet accepted that the war was over. He underlines the lack of morality and the thirst for revenge of the five years following the war. He also describe ethnic clashes and the establishment of a new order that finally brought a difficult stability to a continent devastated. Based on original documents, interviews and academic studies in eight different languages, "Wild continent" radically changing the way that until now was the WWII and helps to understand the Europe of today, heir to those conflicts.

English edition: Penguin Books, 2012

Spanish edition: Galaxia Gutemberg, 2012

Martin Davidson: The perfect Nazi (Uncovering my grandfather's secret past and how Hitler seduced a generation). As a child growing up in Scotland, the journalist Martin Davidson thought that his maternal grandfather Bruno Langbehn was merely a retired German dentist. But after his death in 1992 Davidson discovered the truth.

English edition: Viking, 2010

Spanish edition: Anagrama, 2012

Robert Gellately: Stalin's curse, battling for Communism in war and Cold War. Based on newly released Russian documentation, this book explains the real obstacle to the World's development and collaboration. 
English edition: Oxford University Press (2013)
Spanish edition: Pasado&Presente (2016)

Enjoy the reading!