History Buffs Book Discussion and Activity Group

The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, by Sean McMeekin (Amazon) (366pp)

The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region. As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I―Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution―are illuminated as never before.
Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East.
-- Amazon description

City Of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York, by Tyler Anbinder (Amazon) (571pp)

New York has been America’s city of immigrants for nearly four centuries. Growing from Peter Minuit’s tiny settlement of 1626 to a clamorous metropolis with more than three million immigrants today, the city has always been a magnet for transplants from all over the globe.
City of Dreams is the long-overdue, inspiring, and defining account of New York’s immigrants, both famous and forgotten: the young man from the Caribbean who relocated to New York and became a founding father; Russian-born Emma Goldman, who condoned the murder of American industrialists as a means of aiding downtrodden workers; Dominican immigrant Oscar de la Renta, who dressed first ladies from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama.
Over ten years in the making, Tyler Anbinder’s story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs. In so many ways, today’s immigrants are just like those who came to America in centuries past—and their stories have never before been told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit.
-- Amazon description