"Never in her life - she could swear it from the bottom of her soul - had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?"
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As the saying goes, "the devil is in the details". And so this classic study by Col. David Glantz and Col. Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed, shows you all the nitty-gritty military details you need to understand just how exactly the Soviet Union won the war against Nazi Germany in World War 2.

And yes, the book is chock full of figures: how large the competing forces are in each offensives; how many guns and tanks they produces and deployed; which military units are deployed in which part of the front, and who their commanders are, among others. But more than these numbers, the book goes into detail on how the Soviet military machine worked.

This book dispels such notions as that the Red Army won simply by outnumbering the Germans, or that Hitler was just a downright bad military leader. Instead, the book shows how the Red Army learned from its mistakes early in the war, and went on to turn the tides starting with the breaking of the siege of Stalingrad. The "deep attacks" strategy adapted before the war, and scrapped in the wake of Stalin's purges, became the Soviet Union's saving grace, and once properly applied, the Red Army crushed the German forces, as they advanced to Berlin for the final reckoning.

When Titans Clashed shows the military history of the "Great Patriotic War from Soviet perspective, and illuminates the finer details of how the titanic struggle was fought and won by the Soviet Union.

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Venice: A New History, by Thomas Madden is an excellent overview of the history of the Republic of Venice. What started out as a refuge for fleeing Romans grew to became a maritime empire on par with other great empires of the Middle Ages.

But how did Venice reach such prestige? What was its role in the Fourth Crusade? Were they just as greedy as Shakespeare portrayed them to be? All these and more are answered in the book, which illuminates the story of this fascinating state, that lived its life "for honor and profit".

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The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman, examines four instances when policy-making based on "rejection of reason" led to catastrophic failures: the Trojan Horse, the Renaissance Papacy; the American Revolution; and the Vietnam War.

For the author, folly is a consequence of "acting against self-interest", when policies are pursued despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Like how the people of Troy let the wodden horse in without inspecting it, and ended up being defeated and their kingdom destroyed.

The popes of the Renaissance period chose to live in extravagance and vulgarity, despite widespread clamor for reform, and ended up facing a massive schism that destroyed the Church's prestige and weakened its power.

The British Empire, through its Parliament, kept on passing on tax bills to the Americans, despite widespread opposition from a people weary of being governed from across the Atlantic, and being taxed even without having their own representatives in Parliament.

And, two centuries after the Revolution, it was the Americans' turn to fall into their own folly, as successive presidents pursued a costly war in Vietnam by convincing themselves of the threat of communism spreading over Southeast Asia, despite that threat being inconclusive at best.

This book examines how policy-making can fail, and how such failures can turn catastrophic, if counter-evidences are ignored, and hubris dominates over reason.

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