And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Yanis Varoufakis

An excellent look at the current crisis situation in the EU.  Varoufakis discusses some complex economic models but he explains them clearly, so it is possible to learn quite a bit about macroeconomics.  The goes over the Bretton Woods agreement, then the financialization structure that took its place after the Nixon Shock (when the US stopped backing European currencies at a fixed rate convertible to gold).  He also traces the history of the EU idea from its earliest stages as a heavy industry cartel centred in France and Germany.  He sees this origin as a corporate cartel as a major shadow hanging over the further development of the EU as primarily a regulatory economic block for large corporate interests - rules based, technocratic and essentially apolitical, asocial and antidemocratic.
He also looks at some of the shady practices of the EU bank in Frankfort leading up to the collapse of Greece and several other smaller EU countries in 2009.  Predatory loan practices similar to the subprime mortgage crisis in the US.  Banks pushing loans to high risk businesses and countries that could never pay them back, and then cutting the loans up to make derivatives of "shared risk" that were then sold to other EU national banks - who of course threatened to collapse when the true value of the derivatives emerged in the 2009 crisis.
He sees the EU technocrats and governing bodies as suffering from dogmatism which keeps them from seeing both the real nature of the economic problems and also the possible solutions which could be enacted (except that they come from outside accepted dogmatic thinking).
The German political and banking elite comes off quite badly in his analysis.
A complex book, worth rereading.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

A classic about WW 1.  The best book I have read as far as concerns the actual experience of trench warfare, from visual description of the banal horrors to be seen around you, to the psychological effect on the soldier's thoughts and reactions.
None of the the heroic histrionics nor the joys of camaraderie myths.
An introduction to the realities of any war...

Remarque went on to write some other successful books which are no longer remembered much.  Must track some down.

Midnight at the Pera Palace - Charles King

Subtitled "The Birth of Modern Istanbul"

Clever use of the Pera Palace as a focus to look at the emergence of modern Turkey and explore some of the rich 20th c history of Istanbul.
He looks at the Young Turk and Ataturk periods as well as the occupation at the end of WW I.  There is also quite a bit about the post-Revolution Russian community and what became of it.  There is a whole chapter on Trotsky's time on Büyükada.  You also get a glimpse of the intrigues during WW 2 when Turkey was neutral and every side had spies and agents operating in the city.  There is a chapter on the discoveries that led to the Haghia Sophia becoming a museum.  There are also several chapters on the role that Istanbul played as a transit point for Jews escaping Europe en route to Palestine during the later half of WW II.

One thing I found interesting is some of the detail on how Ataturk and the Republic used taxation and government seizure to push Jews and other ethnic groups out of their businesses (and by extension out of the city) and then sold their property and goods to the up-and-coming Turkish middle-class/party hacks.  In one instance a war tax of 150 to 200% of total value was placed on Jewish, Greek and Armenian businesses.  So after the Young Turks were chases from power, ethnic cleansing continued, just in a neater, tidier form...

Rites of Spring - Modris Eksteins

An interesting exploration of the early part of the 20th century from two perspectives - the avant-garde art movements in Paris and Berlin, and also the rhetoric and unfolding of WW1 (with an additional look at the rhetoric of Nazism in the 30s).

While providing details about ideas, perspectives and goals of major art figures as well as political and military figures, Modris is mainly teasing out an idea that both the avant-garde movements and german militarism (and later Nazism) share certain central ideas or goals - the search for authentic experience, the need to break down old social and artistic barriers and structures,  the need to build some kind of new man, new order, new aesthetic while at the same time not having a clear idea of what is to follow.  The main impetus is the idea of breaking free and an extreme individualism.

Kind of interesting to think about these origins of what is the dominant western individualistic ethos of our time...

Another point that struck me was the importance of Berlin as an avant-garde centre in that time period.  Paris seems to have dominated the plastic arts, but Berlin is the source of much of the modern in the living arts - architecture, technological design, furniture, etc.   Kind of knew this but not as clearly.

You could say that militarism and Nazism led to a kind of void - modern plastic arts seem to have suffered the same fate.  You cannot live in perpetual rebellion.  The 20th C as the age of adolescence....