Reddit mentions of If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

In a rather different vein from a lot of the suggestions I'm seeing here, I want to plug Michael Herr's Dispatches as an incredible piece of Vietnam literature. There's also If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien.

If you're willing to consider graphic novels, check out Maus, Persepolis, and Laika.

If you're interested at all in vampires and folklore, I recommend Food for the Dead. Really interesting read.

A history-teacher friend of mine recently gave me The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but it came highly recommended.

By the by, last year I required my students (high school seniors) to select and read a non-fiction book and gave them the following list of suggestions. Columbine was one of the really popular ones, and I had a bunch of kids (and a few teachers) recommending it to me, but, again, I haven't gotten to it yet.

• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steve D. Levitt
  
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• The Omnivore’s Dilemna: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
  
• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
  
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
  
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
  
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
  
• In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
  
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
  
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
  
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
  
• A Brief History of Time: The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition by Stephen Hawking
  
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
  
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
  
• Columbine by Dave Cullen
  
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
  
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
  
• The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
  
• The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston
  
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
  
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt
  
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
  
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl
  
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
  
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
  
• Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
  
• The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way by Bill Bryson
  
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry
  
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
  
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
  
• Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by Michael E. Bell
  
• Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
  
• Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation by Cokie Roberts

This was used as the cover of If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O'Brien.

I have mostly nonfiction recommendations, but hope the following are of some use to you! I used these in my classroom in the past year with much success.

I can edit and add more fiction later when I get home, and look over my bookshelf as well.

World War II


"In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin" by Erik Larsen - highly recommend, especially if you are familiar with Larsen's previous book, The Devil in White City


"The Monuments Men" by Robert M. Edsel - highly recommended, especially if you are interested in the juxtaposition of art, war, and espionage.

"Unbroken" - by Laura Hillenbrand, highly recommended. Hillenbrand's command of the language and prose coupled with the true story of Louis makes this a compelling read. Even my most reluctant readers couldn't put this done.

Vietnam War

"The Things They Carried" and "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up, and Ship Me Home" by Tim O'Brien are quintessential war canon. Must reads.

Iraq/Afghanistan/Modern Military Operations:
"The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers was called "the modern AQOTWF" by Tom Wolfe. Pretty poignant book. Absolute MUST READ.

Closest that I can think of is O'Brien, where, if memory serves, he discusses the sort of not-really-trying shooting.

Not exactly "how to be a man", but general non-fiction I've really enjoyed:

Benjamin Hoff - The Tao of Pooh -- Sounds childish perhaps, but its a fantastic read. Worth the time.

http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Pooh-Benjamin-Hoff/dp/0140067477

Biography of E=MC2 -- Einstein's famous equasion, told biography style. Great read, not too "sciency".

http://www.amazon.com/mc2-Biography-Worlds-Famous-Equation/dp/0425181642

Tim O'Brian - If I Die in a combat zone -- http://www.amazon.com/If-Die-Combat-Zone-Ship/dp/0767904435

Also, military field guides / training manuals are non classified and excellent resources for any sort of camping / survival you may do. Most surplus type stores carry them, or you can download and print your own!

Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green by Johnny Rico.

If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O'Brien

I also liked Going After Cacciato, by O'Brien.