I Read Like Nuke LaLoosh Pitches, Kind of Wild and All Over the Place

Since our last meeting I’ve finished seven books on everything from Astrophysics, to the Civil War, to Religion.

Merlin’s Tour of the Universe: A Skywatcher’s Guide to Everything from Mars and Quasars to Comets, Planets, Blue Moons, and Werewolves by Neil De Grasse Tyson is a series of Q & As on astrophysics and astronomy. The questions ranged from interesting, to whimsical, the answers were illuminating, accessible and entertaining. I like NDGT a lot and this didn’t disappoint.

One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross by Harry Kemelman is a murder mystery set in Israel and solved by everyone’s favorite Rabbi/Detective. As usual Rabbi Small manages to annoy pretty much everyone involved including his congregation, the Jerusalem police and Shin Bet the Israeli intelligence service in the course of solving the mystery. I must say this one isn’t quite up to the standards of others I’ve read. In other books, the Rabbi uses some form or aspect of Talmudic reasoning to solve the mystery, which he elucidates when he walks the police through the solution, this time, the key to the mystery is simply a run of the mill, mundane, observation. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t quite as good as they usually are.

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 by John Scalzi was also a bit of a disappointment. It is a collection of Scalzi columns from 10 or 20 years on a wide variety of random topics. The problem is that most of them are so topical that I had little interest in them at this remove. Not his fault, I didn’t read the subtitle, but there it is.

“The Devil’s to Pay”: John Buford at Gettysburg. A History and Walking Tour by Eric J. Wittenberg was, as the title suggests, an outstanding monograph about Buford and the First Cav at Gettysburg. Wittenburg has followed Buford’s actions very closely and gives the read a clear idea of where the 1st Cav was and what they did throughout the battle. This is followed up by four appendices on various issues and capped off with an excellent driving/walking tour (complete with GPS coordinates for each waypoint) and an extensive bibliography. And he does all this in 288 pages. I was very impressed with the book and wish I had read it before I went to the battlefield back in October. I recommend it very highly for anyone who is interested in Buford, Cavalry during the ACW or Gettysburg.

The Family Corleone by Ed Falco was just not a very good book. The book purports to be a pre-quel to Puzo’s epic The Godfather, covering the years between about 1929, where the “young Vito” sections of the original book end and the late 1930s when the “old Vito” section begins. There are two major problems with the book. First, the writing sucks. Seriously, this guy just isn’t very good. And he covers his lack of skill by inserting pidgin Italian words and phrases into his character’s language. The second problem is major departures from the fact set given in the first book, for no apparent reason. Several of the incidents referred to obliquely in the original book are bastardized here: Sonny turned to a life of crime after seeing Vito kill Fanucci, in this book, he sees Vito kill Tom Hagen’s father. Vito fought a gangwar with Salvatore Maranzano in this book it was Giuseppe Maraposa. Luca Brasi dispatches one of Capone’s button men sent to kill Vito on behalf of Maranzano with a fire axe while the other one chokes to death on a towel used to gag him, in this book, he does it with much less panache. Anyway, you get the idea. The really weird thing is that there wasn’t any reason for the changes, none of them advanced the plot, or got the writer out of a tough situation. They were just gratuitous, like Falco either didn’t bother to read the original, or didn’t want to be bound by the canon. Anyway, if you’re a hardcore fan of The Godfather, you’ll pretty much have to read this, even if it sucks, but you’ve been warned.

Richmond Shall Not Be Given Up: The Seven Days’ Battles, June 25-July 1, 1862 by Doug Crenshaw is another excellent installment of the Savas Beatie Emerging Civil War series. The book includes a very nice thumbnail sketch of the Seven Days campaign, followed by fairly detailed descriptions of each of the individual battles, interspersed by a driving tour using current landmarks. All in 192 pages. It is an excellent overview of the campaign for novices, and a great tour guide for those contemplating a trip to Richmond. Its another book I wish I had before the trip I took in October.

Stories by John Shea was a collection of gospel stories and parables most of which have been updated to modern times. It’s a very Catholic book and I re-read it every so often, just because I enjoy the stories so much. Although the book is heavily Catholic in terms of its theology I think any Christian would enjoy with the possible exception of the very fundamentalist evangelicals who will probably find it shamefully “liberal” or “watered-down”.

16 for the year.

A Bit of a Slow Start

So far this year I’ve been a bit slow on the reading front. Don’t know why. Anyway, so far I’ve finished:

Ike and McCarthy by David A. Nichols was an excellent and illuminating book about how Ike destroyed McCarthy by working carefully and methodically behind the scenes. I had no idea, having spent all these years thinking it was Joe Welch, Ed Murrow and the gavel to gavel TV coverage that did McCarthy in. Excellent book.

Next up was a pair of “alien contact” novels, Mote in God’s Eye and its sequel The Gripping Hand both by Niven and Pournelle. These are both fun books, which do a good job of imagining a truly alien set of aliens. In many ways they are classic 80s science-fiction in that they’re not all that well written, and the characterizations are pretty two dimensional, but they crack right along, and they’re fun.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse by Michael Wolff was very gratifying and fun to read, but at the end of the day is probably, to quote Shakespeare, “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”. The book is very titillating and reinforces & confirms pretty much every bad story you’ve heard or read about Trump. But it doesn’t really break any new ground, I didn’t actually learn anything new by reading it. I doubt if anyone else reading it will either.

Alarm Starboard! A Remarkable True Story of the War at Sea by Geoffrey Brooke was, truly remarkable. It is the wartime memoir of a young man who joined the RN as a midshipman at age 17 in the late 1930s a few years before the war broke out. During WWII he served aboard HMS Prince of Wales and was at the Atlantic Conference in Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, at the Battle of Denmark Strait where HMS Hood was sunk by Bismarck, and was aboard when Prince of Wales was sunk by the Japanese. He served in Singapore until just before the surrender there, then escaped via an extraordinary odyssey involving ancient sailing junks, Malay pirates bribed with opium and many other adventures winding up in Australia. He served for a time escorting convoys to Murmansk aboard HMS Bermuda before being sent back to the Pacific aboard HMS Formidable as a Chief Flight Deck Director responsible for supervising the movement of aircraft on the flight deck as well as directing fire fighting and dealing with airplane crashes on deck. While serving in this capacity he was aboard and directed operations during the two Kamikaze hits Formidable sustained on 4 and 9 May 1945. The book was outstanding. It was well written and extremely engaging. I enjoyed it immensely.

Next were a pair of WWII RAF novels Piece of Cake and A Good Clean Fight by Derek Robinson. These were a bit of a mixed bag. Cake was excellent! It covered the transformation of Hornet Squadron, an RAF Hurricane squadron, from sort of a “flying club for gentlemen” before the war, into the hard, gritty reality of fighting aerial battles of attrition. Notably, its one of the only novels I’ve read that spends an appreciable amount of time on the Phony War. The book ends just as the Battle Of Britain is winding down. The second book, wasn’t nearly as good. It takes up the activities of Hornet Squadron, now flying P-40s, in North African desert in April of 1942. The great strength of Cake was its focus on the pilots and their lives, this book, has a much more diffuse focus with separate plot lines involving a German intelligence officer, and a sort of scummy SAS officer. This diffusion makes the book kind of choppy and hard to follow. Anyway, I didn’t like it as well.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi was a good but not great novel of alien contact, multi-planet conglomerates, and a black-sheep, ne’er-do-well, disbarred lawyer turned prospector. It was great fun, but I’ll probably have forgotten it in a couple of months.

The German Suitcase by Greg Dinallo was an interesting book about a modern advertising executive finding an old pre-war Steinbach suitcase in the trash outside her building, just as she’s brainstorming a new ad campaign for the firm. She decides to incorporate the suitcase into the campaign, and the book takes off telling the story of the evolution of the ad campaign juxtaposed with the backstory of the suitcase which involves both the Holocaust and the White Rose German anti-NAZI resistance. I enjoyed the book, and if you like these kinds of “peeling the onion” stories you might as well.

9 for the year