It seems that mankind's second favorite occupation is war—whether engaging in it or writing about it. These titles show us that while much about war's roots, conditions, and results remains the same over the years, memoirists, analysts, journalists, and historians can reveal the many individual stories of change along the way.

Capt. Best's 1950 memoir is now back in print, and deservedly so. A former British intelligence officer based in Holland as a businessman, he was reactivated into intelligence with the start of World War II but was all too soon captured by the Nazis, spending the duration of the war as their prisoner. Best's skill at turning the relative stasis of his imprisonment into fascinating narrative is exceptional. Lovers of espionage and war literature, fictional and nonfictional alike, should read this.—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal

Lt. Gallagher arrived in Iraq in 2007 and promptly started to blog about it; his site became widely read by soldiers. It was ordered shut down in 2008 but was part of the cultural shift that by the next year embraced blogging by soldiers. Here, his exceptional narrative technique makes the soldier in-group cant both believable and coherent; his relentless pursuit of sanity in the midst of a chaotic storm of IEDs, policy changes, sheiks, civilians, and baffling missions makes this blog-based memoir an exciting read reminiscent of Anthony Swofford's Jarhead.

Olds, a West Point graduate and All-American football player, became a top fighter pilot in World War II, earning 12 victories. In Vietnam he again shined, leading a wing and scoring four more kills. A larger-than-life personality, Olds worked hard, played hard, married a Hollywood actress, and died in 2007. Christina Olds, his daughter, and Ed Rasimus (USAF, ret.) compiled Olds's writings and turned them into this memoir, sure to be popular among readers of military and aerial war books.

Stack, a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, entered Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11. Her initial excitement and eventual disillusionment with the war, and all the other wars she saw in Yemen, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan, make a sad story of death and failure by many parties as she wonders when the cost of violence outweighs the promise of freedom and democracy. For general readers on the Middle East as well as journalism students.

Topping's remarkable AP and New York Times career brought him interviews with Mao on the battlefields of the Chinese Civil War, with Castro a few days after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with just about every major figure in Asia from 1945 onward. Densely packed with personal recollection, this is very much a memoir rather than a history. Nevertheless, it's an absorbing narrative of American successes and failures after World War II.

The author was 14 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland between them. Many Poles, including Waydenfeld's family, were swiftly deported to Siberian labor camps. Only about half survived. Released in 1941, Waydenfeld and his parents endured a desperate journey across a hostile county and eventually reached the West. A remarkable tale.

With prose that's a joy to read, the redoubtable and much-published Hastings turns his pen to what Churchill remains most famous for. Despite other works examining this subject, libraries and readers of many persuasions will want this massive and detailed examination of the prime minister and his personal war.

Lt. Murphy earned the Medal of Honor for bravery during a 2005 fight with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. The award was posthumous. With extensive detail on Murphy's training, the operation itself, and the aftermath, this plays on readers' emotions about a fallen hero. Likely to be popular among some military buffs.

Cawthorne ("Sex Lives" series) offers short but reasonably informative essays on 50 forces defined by him (not using military standards) as "elites," ranging from Persians and Spartans to Russian Spetsnaz and American SEALS. Attractively produced and illustrated, it could attract some readers although it's of marginal use.

Cummins (The War Chronicles) compiles short vignettes about violent episodes throughout history. With bloodshed as its sole organizing concept, it's one of those books that you can imagine on the bargain shelves. Not recommended.

Laskin follows 12 men, born in Europe, who emigrated to America, made lives here, and eventually found themselves in the American Expeditionary Force of World War I. They mostly left tight-knit communities of immigrants—Italians, Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Russians, and Irish—to fight in Europe, but they returned as Americans, a sea change that affected the nation ever after. Strongly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/09.]

This coffee table-sized book compiles hundreds of marvelous black-and-white combat pictures, mostly by navy photographers, and adds excellent captions and maps but a pedestrian text. Still, a fine picture book and homage to brave men.

At first this seems yet another narrative of the epic battle for the sea lanes of the North Atlantic, of some interest but well-trodden ground. Halfway through, in a not entirely comfortable meld, it turns into a biography of the author's father, a successful architect who left to do his part in the war at sea. Still, both Snows have a way with words, and Snow senior's experiences, while entirely typical, lend a degree of depth and personality to a war of tonnages and statistics. Well worth reading.

With images from the UK's Portsmouth D-Day Museum, this attractive book is filled with scenes—from ordinary to spectacular—of the Normandy invasion, many in color. The text adds little to a specialist's knowledge, but this book will nicely round out a World War II collection.

Drawing on his years as a CIA expert on aerial reconnaissance, Brugioni tells the story of Cold War intelligence gathering by airplane and satellite. His firsthand knowledge of dozens of once-classified programs will be invaluable to students of the field who have a high tolerance for a dense, detailed narrative. A valuable source, not only on well-known programs (e.g., U-2 flights) but many lesser-known ones that changed the course of the Cold War.

An accomplished trial-and-error engineer, Curtis eventually became one of the most important figures in the early development of both military and civilian aircraft, enduring endless legal battles for the right to build airplanes, which the Wrights claimed, and complex battles with the War Department over design and manufacturing. With the outbreak of World War I, Curtis worked with the navy to adopt the new technology. Recommended for aviation history collections.

Here is the contentious and tangled history of the development of the tilt-rotor plane that was developed for the Marine Corps to replace helicopters in assaults. The Osprey earned a bad name after killing more men and costing more money than any Marine Corps equipment in history but now seems to be working effectively, if expensively, in Afghanistan. Immensely detailed and of interest to hard-core aviation buffs.

The author, a U.S. naval officer, attempts to disentangle the complex threads of the various militant ideologies and disaggregate them from Islamists and Islam, noting that without a sound intellectual framework by which to classify these ideologies, the United States is stuck in a dichotomy between those who regard all Islam as evil and those who assert that Islam is peace. This difficult study is well worth inclusion in both religious and military collections.

Jablonsky traces the development of Eisenhower's ideas about command and control of world-spanning military forces, including the necessities of coalition warfare. Ike's early work, under MacArthur and Marshall's tutelage, and his experience with the British General Staff, led to our Joint Chiefs of Staff and a streamlined U.S. command structure. In a heavily worked field, this is a strong book for serious readers.

In what he considers a revisionist account of the spread of nuclear weapons and the economic, military, political, and moral consequences of America's nuclear arsenal, Ritter, who was chief weapons inspector for the UN Special Commission in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, argues that the U.S. addiction to nuclear weapons is the greatest threat to international stability. Best for foreign affairs specialists.

Waziristan, in northwest Pakistan by the Afghanistan border, doesn't seem to have changed much from the 19th century, at least for invaders and foreign administrators—still violent, treacherous, devout, complex. Roe, a British officer currently serving in Afghanistan, argues in favor of considering history and culture in war there, pointing up the difficulties faced by Western forces. Recommended for readers in military or social history on the region.

Georgetown professor Sherman, who held the first chair in ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy, focuses the skills—and specialized language—of both philosopher and psychoanalyst on exploring the moral burdens carried by soldiers, the moral qualms in being trained to kill, and the effects of killing even in a just war. Recommended for advanced study.