The Library
A short, hand-picked reading list: the classic accounts, the great memoirs and oral histories, the books that explain how war is remembered, and simple gear for recording your own family's stories.
The oldest surviving war writing, read in modern translations that add maps, notes and context.
Homer; translated by Robert Fagles · 1990
The Iliad shows how a war was carried in memory and song for generations before anyone wrote it down. Fagles's translation is readable aloud, which suits a poem that began as spoken performance.
View on AmazonHerodotus; edited by Robert B. Strassler, translated by Andrea L. Purvis · 2007
Herodotus set out to keep great deeds from being forgotten, and he openly reports what different people told him, even when their stories disagree. Reading him shows the earliest attempt to gather many voices into one history.
View on AmazonThucydides; edited by Robert B. Strassler (Richard Crawley translation, revised) · 1996
Thucydides explains his own method: checking eyewitness reports against one another and admitting where memory fails. This edition's maps and notes make that method easy to follow for first-time readers.
View on AmazonJulius Caesar; edited and translated by Kurt A. Raaflaub · 2017
Caesar's Gallic War is a commander's own report of his campaigns, written in the third person and with a clear interest in how Rome would see him. It is an ideal case for learning to read a firsthand account with care.
View on AmazonXenophon; edited by Shane Brennan and David Thomas, translated by David Thomas · 2021
Xenophon marched with ten thousand Greek soldiers trying to get home from Persia and later wrote the journey down himself. It is one of the earliest soldier's memoirs, with all the strengths and blind spots that implies.
View on AmazonPersonal accounts by people who served, written close enough to the events to carry their weight.
Ernst Jünger · 1920
Jünger built this account of the Western Front from the diaries he kept as a German infantry officer, and he revised it several times over his long life. Comparing it with British memoirs shows how differently the same war could be remembered.
View on AmazonRobert Graves · 1929
Graves, a British officer and poet, wrote this memoir of the trenches about a decade after the war ended. It helped shape how a whole generation of readers came to picture the First World War.
View on AmazonErich Maria Remarque · 1929
This is a novel, not a memoir, but its author served as a German soldier on the Western Front. It is a useful example of how fiction written by a veteran can shape public memory as strongly as any history.
View on AmazonVera Brittain · 1933
Brittain served as a volunteer nurse and lost her brother, her fiancé and close friends in the war. Her memoir is a reminder that the record of a war includes those who served behind the lines and those who grieved at home.
View on AmazonE. B. Sledge · 1981
Sledge kept secret notes in his pocket New Testament while serving as a Marine in the Pacific, and decades later shaped them into this memoir. It shows how a veteran can return to his own wartime record and give it lasting form.
View on AmazonBooks built from interviews, where many voices tell one war from many angles.
Al Santoli · 1981
Santoli, himself a Vietnam veteran, gathered the accounts of thirty-three Americans who served and let them speak in their own words. It is a model of an interviewer stepping back so the speakers can be heard.
View on AmazonStuds Terkel · 1984
Terkel interviewed veterans, war workers, and civilians on several continents, and the quotation marks in the title hint at how complicated their memories were. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and remains a standard example of the form.
View on AmazonWallace Terry · 1984
Terry, a journalist who covered the war, recorded the experiences of twenty Black servicemen. The collection preserves perspectives that general histories of the war often left out.
View on AmazonSvetlana Alexievich · 1985
Alexievich interviewed hundreds of Soviet women who served in the Second World War as snipers, medics, pilots and more. It shows how whole groups of veterans can go unrecorded until someone asks them directly.
View on AmazonMax Arthur, in association with the Imperial War Museum · 2002
This book draws on the sound archive of Britain's Imperial War Museum, where First World War veterans were recorded late in their lives. It shows why recording older veterans while there is still time matters so much.
View on AmazonBooks about how wars are remembered, written about, and turned into shared stories.
Paul Fussell · 1975
Fussell, a Second World War veteran, traced how soldiers' letters, poems and memoirs turned the First World War into a lasting set of images and phrases. It is the classic study of how literature shapes collective memory.
View on AmazonJohn Keegan · 1976
Keegan compared Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme from the point of view of the ordinary soldier rather than the general. He also asked hard questions about how much historians can really know about what happens in combat.
View on AmazonTim O'Brien · 1990
This is a work of fiction, written by a Vietnam veteran, that deliberately blurs memory and invention. It raises a question every reader of war stories eventually faces: what makes a story true?
View on AmazonJay Winter · 1995
Winter looks at war memorials, rituals, and art to show how communities and families grieved after 1918. It helps explain why remembrance often focuses on loss and mourning more than on battles.
View on AmazonSamuel Hynes · 1997
Hynes, a Marine aviator in the Second World War, read hundreds of soldiers' personal narratives from the twentieth century's wars. He explains what these accounts can tell us that official histories cannot.
View on AmazonA practical guide and a few simple tools for interviewing a veteran and keeping the results safe.
Donald A. Ritchie · 1995
Ritchie, a longtime historian with the U.S. Senate Historical Office, wrote a clear handbook covering interview planning, questions, legal releases, and preservation. Later editions update the advice on recording technology.
View on AmazonRecording gear
A dedicated recorder that saves uncompressed WAV files gives cleaner, more dependable sound than a phone left on a table. Look for simple controls, a headphone jack, and removable memory cards.
Shop on AmazonRecording gear
A small microphone clipped near the speaker's collar picks up a soft voice clearly and reduces room noise. Check that the plug matches your recorder or phone before you buy.
Shop on AmazonRecording gear
Old photographs, letters, and service papers last longer in acid-free, lignin-free boxes and sleeves kept in a cool, dry room. Labeled storage also keeps each item tied to the story that explains it.
Shop on Amazon