William Styron, The Long March, 1952

A book that teaches a hard lesson in leadership but only if readers can discern it for themselves. A company of US reserve Marines is taken on a cruel and impossibly long march of thirty-six miles by a posturing Colonel, and as expected it all goes badly wrong. Simple enough on the surface, but it exposes the different motives that can operate at different levels of leadership. Styron makes it very believable, first deliberately misdirecting then reversing the reader’s sympathies. A very neat, useful and yet hard-hitting little book.  PY

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Francis Cottam, Hamer’s War, 2003

Martin Hamer is a 1930s German soldier in need of a war. He gets one, of course, but it’s a far more personally destructive war than he expected, and any redemption he can gain from his misplaced loyalties comes with a high price: his disillusionment with the Third Reich is increasing, and when he falls for a female Polish labour camp inmate the mutual drive for survival is the instinct that prevails over the politics. These tensions are what gradually bring Hamer’s character into such excellent focus. Told as a series of vignettes that intersect and join like a jigsaw puzzle composed from the boundaries inward, Hamer’s War is told with a clarity that casts the right amount of light into a dark but convincing story. Recommended.   PY