Since my last post I’ve finished another 13 books, but am just now finding time to write them up.
Career Night on Union Station (#15) by E.M. Foner is the fifteenth installment in the Earthcent Ambassador series of humorous science fiction. I enjoyed it as much as I did the last fourteen.
Shiloh and the Western Campaign by O.E. Cunningham is an excellent overview of the battle. I read this because I’m contemplating a trip to the field this fall and didn’t really know very much about the battle. Anyway, Cunningham is pretty strong on placing the battle in the context of the campaign and he does a reasonable job of laying out what was happening on the field in the various places at the various times. I enjoyed it.
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam by Stephan Sears is an outstanding monograph on the battle. I read this years ago and I re-read it in anticipation of revisiting the field next month. This is probably the best one volume history of the battle. As a side note, I was pleasantly surprised at how much more I got out of the book having been to the field last year.
Gettysburg a Testing of Courage by Noah Andre Trudeau is a really good Gettysburg book covering the whole battle with particular emphasis on integrating the stories of individuals into the big picture. Trudeau is an excellent writer who manages to impart great tension into his descriptions. His accounts of the details of the Confederate attacks on the second day had me on the edge of my seat even though I knew how they came out.
Like Wolves on the Fold and How Can Man Die Better by Mike Snook are a pair of books on the opening actions of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War. Wolves covers the battle at Rorke’s Drift while Die Better covers the battle at Isandlwana. Snook, a serving officer with the successor unit to the 24th, has a lot of myths and misconceptions to correct, about the behavior of the troops (the location of the bodies in groups suggests an orderly, controlled, withdrawal), the ammunition supply (opening the ammo boxes without a screwdriver was not a problem), and COL Durnford (who was something of an idiot) at Isandlwana. As well as correcting the rather dire portrayal of some of Rorke’s Drift defenders in the film Zulu, Hook wasn’t a drunk, Bromhead and Chard weren’t idiots, the large number of VC’s awarded were richly deserved, not sops intended to make the fight politically palatable. These books are now going on fifteen years old and I think while they were pretty revisionist when they came out their view is now pretty much the accepted version. Certainly they are far better than the much exploded old Washing of the Spears.
The Outsider by Stephen King is the latest from the great Maine horror master. This one deals with the murder of a small boy and the DNA and eyewitness evidence implicating a local little-league coach resulting in his arrest. During the proceedings, incontrovertible evidence (surveillance footage and more DNA) places the coach 70 miles away form the murder for the 24 hours before and after the crime. What the hell is going on here? Read the book and find out. This is as good as any other Stephen King book I’ve read. I’m glad to see the old boy still has “it”.
Surgeon in Blue: Jonathan Letterman, the Civil War Doctor Who Pioneered Battlefield Care by Scott McGaugh is excellent but a bit dry. It’s a good account of the revolutionary improvements Letterman brought to the AoP, I just wish I wasn’t constantly trying to fight falling asleep while reading it.
Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine by Thomas A. Desjardin is a good little account of the everyone’s favorite crowd of down-easters during the Gettysburg campaign. The book starts with a brief history of the 20th Maine, which was assembled from excess recruits from other Maine regiments, through their initial training under Adelbert Ames, to Chamberlain assuming command when Ames was given command of a brigade in XI Corps. The books covers the 20th’s approach march to Gettysburg, its defense of Little Round Top, and its participation in the rest of the battle, Finally it wraps things up with an account of how the LRT defense was remembered by it participants in later years. It was a fascinating book from which I learned three really interesting things; first, Oate’s 15th Alabama was actually in the process of terminating its attack and withdrawing when the famous bayonet charge occurred. Second, that Chamberlain never actually ordered the bayonet charge, it seems to have been a spontaneous reaction to the color party posting forward a few feet to protect some wounded troops in front of them. Last, the topography of the 20th Maine/LRT battlefield was extensively altered in the early 20th century when the War Dept cut a road (Chamberlain Ave) following the 20th Maine line to facilitate access for aged veterans. Although the road has been taken up, the right-of-way is still clear and the topographic alterations persist. Anyway, this is a great book if you’re a big fan of JLC or the 20th Maine.
Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoner During the Revolutionary War by Edwin G. Burrows was a fascincating story I had never heard before. During the Revolution NYC was the headquarters of the British war effort and the main receptacle for Rebel prisoners, who were mainly held in a fleet of prison hulks in Wallabout Bay, which was later the site of Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Brits held as many as (numbers are sketchy) 30,000 prisoners in the hulks over the course of the war and perhaps as many as 11,500 or 18,000 (again, numbers are sketchy) died as a result of illness, exposure, and malnutrition. Even the low estimate of dead would account for more than twice as many men as died in all the battles of the Revolution combined. The dead were so ubiquitous that bones of the men hastily buried along the sandy beaches of the bay, continued to surface periodically into the early years of the 20th century. The book not only covers the story of the prisoners and their British captors, but also includes the sporadic efforts to memorialize the dead culminating the construction of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park 1908. The crypt of the monument contains the “20 hogsheads” of bones of the dead prisoners collected from the shores of Wallaby Bay over the years. The book was a fascinating look at a little known aspect of the AWI and every student of that conflict should have a look at it.
Archangel Down by C. Gockel was a forgettable little sci-fi book about an alien invasion. It was bundled with a bunch of other books in an Amazon freebie collection. Unfortunately the collection was marketed as a complete series of books, but is actually a collection of initial volumes of different sci-fi series, subsequent volumes in each series are available with a per volume cost. Anyway, I didn’t like this enough to pay even $.99 for the next volume, and I haven’t bothered to read any of the other series starters.
70 for the year
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