I’m currently making my way through The Third Reich Trilogy as an audiobook and it is hands down the best researched, most in-depth piece of history I’ve ever read / listened to.
Evans must have spent half his life in primary sources and uses that research to great effect. The book includes many diary and newspaper extracts from the time for example (including liberal use of Goebbels diary) and goes into detail in all sorts of areas that paint a very clear picture of everyday life in Germany at the time.
It’s long (around 90 hours audio or over 2000 pages) but I have learned so much from it.
The Indifferent Stars Above It’s a book about the Donner Party. Unfortunately all lost people learn about is “people eat each other” but the actual story so much more intriguing and that one little anecdote really minimizes the whole thing. It’s a string of bad luck coupled with greedy speculators, classism, hubris, and plain stubbornness.
The crazy thing to me is how close they almost made it to not being stuck in the mountains, one day. They sent a group out to try and get to California and alert people to their plight, that story is harrowing in its own right. Add to that, many of the survivors settled in some of the most beautiful and now expensive land in California and it’s just a wild ride from beginning to end.