Another Bunch Done

Since my last post I’ve finished another ten books:

Attack at Daylight and Whip Them: The Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862 by Gregory Mertz is another volume in Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War series of books. Like the other books in the series this is a concise account of the battle framed as a battlefield tour with very detailed and accessible directions. The book was engaging and well written and could absolutely be the first book to pick up if one was unfamiliar with the battle. I recommend it highly and think it might be just the ticket for my upcoming visit to the battlefield.

They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by De Anne Blanton & Lauren M. Cook was in interesting book on the females serving as soldiers during the war. The book does a very nice job of marshaling all the available facts on the phenomenon and presenting the narratives of several individuals. I really enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it. It’s too bad that the historical record is so incomplete that we’ll never know how many women actually fought.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser was an uneven biography not only of Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House on the Prairie fame) but also of her daughter Rose Wilder Lane a prolific author of the first half of the 20th century and one of the founders of American Libertarianism. The book seems to be primarily based on Wilder and Lane’s correspondence and a few contemporaneous records, and his heavily laden with the author’s assumptions about the mental state and thought processes of both women. There are some interesting parts, Wilder led a fascinating and difficult early life which she very thoroughly sanitized for her books. Her later life was, until very late, no easier. It was extraordinary to me that she lived well into the 1950s. Anyway, I can’t recommend the book, even for serious fans of the “Little House” books. Maybe there’s a better bio out there.

I also finished nine more (Numbers five through thirteen) in E.M. Foner’s Union Station humorous sci-fi series on my second time through them. They continue to be a blast to read and I quite enjoy the half hour or so I spend with them each night before going to sleep.

64 for the year.