Another Big Bunch of Books

Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition by Paul Watson is an outstanding update on what we now know about the Franklin expedition. The book examines the various search expeditions in great detail, does and excellent job of collating all the available evidence gleaned by them and finally, recounting the finding of the two ships. Of particular note is how well it examines the Inuit information about Franklin’s crowd. I now feel that my understanding is current with our state of knowledge. A tip of the hat to Oliver Upshaw for turning me on to it.

The Rooster Bar, Gray Mountain, and The Whistler all by John Grisham are pretty typical Grisham novels fun, quick, reads that I quite enjoyed, but won’t remember in six months Chancellorsville by Stephen Sears is an outstanding book on the campaign by one of my favorite Civil War authors. The title kind of sells this one short as it is really a pretty good history of the Army of the Potomac between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville as well as the campaign itself. Sears does a good job of integrating first person accounts within the context of the big picture and goes beyond a narrative of the battle to give us a fair amount of analysis about what went wrong and what might have been. I recommend it very highly.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America by Alissa Quart is an interesting look at how the middle class is increasingly being squeezed in the modern economy. Quart’s focus in this book is on the particular difficulties of families with children mainly because of child-care costs. As wages have stagnated and housing costs have risen more households are turning to having both partners work outside the home, once there are kids (or if there’s only one parent), the childcare costs consume a large percentage of wages. More and more couple are choosing to delay children or forgo them altogether with knock-on effects of lower birth rates causing an ageing workforce, which if unchecked by either higher birth rates or more net immigration, will lead to economic retrenchment. Its an interesting problem, but I wish Quart’s book was a bit more factual/statistical/solution oriented than the collection of anecdotes it mainly is. Not really recommended, you can find more, better, info with an hour or so of Googling and reading online.

Going Deep: John Philip Holland and the Invention of the Attack Submarine by Lawrence Goldstone was a fascinating story of the development of submarines. The book starts with a overview of subs from Drebble in the 16th century, through Bushnell’s “Turtle” in the AWI, to the CSS Hunley and all spots in between. Then it launches into the meat of the book, the more or less epic battle between John Holland and Simon Lake who each sought to sell their particular vision of submarines to the U.S. Navy (and other navies). The book proceeds on two trackers, first there is the technical development of the sub features, a parallel track of the bureaucratic machinations of Congress, the Navy, and what passed for defense acquisition in the early years of the 20th century. The book was fascinating even though some of the details of the Congressional maneuverings got a bit tedious. Recommended for anyone interested in how submarines became a potent weapon system.

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck was a very strange little novel about a group of friends who came back from WWI to Monterey CA and basically became bums who drank wine and avoided work. The book starts with one of them, Danny, inherits two houses, he rents one to his friends (who never pay any rent) and lives in the other. When the friends accidentally burn their house down, Danny lets them move in with him and they have many adventures. Like I say it was a strange book.

Finnegan’s Week by Joseph Wambaugh was a reasonably good story about three cops, a male 45 year old wanna-be actor SDPD detective, a 20-something female NCIS investigator, and a late 30s somewhat jaded female CA State EPD investigator. The three come together gradually when a shady HazMat waste contractor sends two of his minions, one of whom is an unstable meth-head, to pick up a load of intentionally mislabeled waste from a corner-cutting customer along with their usual pick-up of contaminated diesel from the Naval base. While at the base, the two minions steal 1000 pair of navy shoes which they sell in Tiajuana, abandoning the truck while claiming it was stolen while they had lunch in one of San Diego’s rougher neighborhoods. The waste turns out to be bad stuff which kills a kid in Mexico and we get to watch the three cops gradually unravel the case as the two minions attempt to cover their tracks and their shady boss tried to figure out what his liability is. Oh, and the male cop, whose in the middle of a mid-life crisis, is romantically interesting to both of the other cops. It was, as all Wambaugh’s stuff is, very well written, and very darkly humorous. It is a very nice way to kill a couple of hours, especially if you like Wambaugh.

Battle above the Clouds: Lifting the Siege of Chattanooga and the Battle of Lookout Mountain, October 16 – November 24, 1863 by David A. Powell is another volume in Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War series each of which provide a concise overview of a Civil War campaign and a driving tour to supplement the narrative. Powell does his usual excellent job here of bringing together the various primary and secondary sources to provide a good grounding in what happened. While I haven’t taken the tour, I’ve used Google maps to kind of walk through it and it seems to be a pretty good overview as well. I’m planning on going up to that area when the weather breaks this year and run through the US Army War College Guide to the Atlanta Campaign so, I’ll probably take the tour in this book on to that. Readers should note that the book focuses on the efforts to open the “Cracker Line” and Hooker’s attack on Lookout Mountain and therefore ends the day before the Battle Of Missionary Ridge. I’m sure that will be covered in a future volume. Anyway, I recommend this for anyone who wants a basic knowledge of this aspect of the Civil War.

The Confederate States of America : What Might Have Been is an outstanding counterfactual history by Dr. Roger L. Ransom a well regarded economic historian. The book examines the Civil War through the lens of how the South might have won and then follows up on that victory by laying out some likely historical developments that would have resulted from it. Readers should be aware that this is not Peter Tsouras/Harry Turtledove alt-history, but a serious examination of voluminous data in order to examine various contingencies. With that in mind, the book was excellent! I can’t say I agree with all of Dr Ransom’s conclusions or counterfactuals, but they are always well argued and developed. I enjoyed the book immensely and recommend it highly. Those of you who are on the fence, should hie themselves over to Dr Gerry Prokopowicz’s excellent Impediments of War website here: http://www.impedimentsofwar.org which archives his weekly ACW podcasts and listen to the program with the author and Gerry discussing the book. The show can be found here: http://www.impedimentsofwar.org/singleshow.php?show=519 A tip of the hat to Dr. Prokopowicz for turning me on to it.

57 for the year