Book Blog Update: Newfoundland edition

So here I am in Newfoundland at the tail end of Christmas vacation making what I think is the last update to the 2019 book blog. Since my last update I’ve finished 10 books, most of them good or excellent.

First was a bit of a spy jag with John Le Carre: The Biography by Adam Sisman, a pretty good bio of my favorite spy author. The book was good, thoroughly-researched, extensively sourced, and well written. So what’s the problem? Well, David Cornwall (the man behind the Le Carre nom de plume) simply wasn’t a very interesting subject. He’s just a guy with a troubled childhood, a troubled marriage, and a series of very successful books. I’m glad I read it, and if you’re interested in the man behind the books, you should too, but at the end of the day its one of those books I was looking forward to ending.

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carre is his most recent spy novel and has drawn a fair amount of flak for being stridently anti-Trump and anti-BEXIT. Although I agree with those political stances, I must admit this isn’t Le Carre’s best work. The book was a bit slow getting started, quite good in the middle, but then wrapped up very perfunctorily, as if the author had suddenly realized he had written enough to fulfill his contract and wrapped the book up as soon as possible. If you’re a Le Carre fan, you’ll want to read this, but you should get it from the library.

On the other hand A Murder of Quality also by John Le Carre, was an excellent book. When the wife of a master at one of the second tier English public schools is murdered, George Smiley is asked to look into it. Much subtle investigation and detecting ensues until the evil-doer is uncovered. This was the second novel featuring George Smiley and at this point, Le Carre hadn’t quite decided what Smiley was going to be when he grew up. It was fascinating to see the “work in progress” of one of the great characters in espionage literature before he was actually involved in espionage. I recommend this one highly.

The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth is my traditional Christmas Eve read with a good cigar and a glass of scotch in hand after the wife has gone to bed. It was enthralling as usual and a personal tradition that I look forward to each year.

A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor: Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan was an ultimately unsuccessful effort to exonerate RADM Husband Kimmel, CINCPAC at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack from responsibility for the consequences of the attack. The book is very focused on NCA’s decision to not transmit the MAGIC intercepts to Hawaii. The authors contend, without a shred of evidence as far as I can see, that had Kimmel and Short been given MAGIC, they would have made totally difference decisions leading to a different outcome for the Japanese attack. Based on my reading of many other sources, including Lambert and Polmar’s outstanding Defenseless: Command Failure at Pearl Harbor I think the authors are barking up the wrong tree here. Interested parties are encouraged to read both books and make up their own minds.

Company Commander by Charles B. McDonald was another outstanding WWII memoir, this time from the 21-year-old commander of a rifle company in the 2nd ID’s 23rd infantry in the fall of 1944 and the spring of 1945. I can’t say enough good about this book, in fact, I can‘t believe I waited so long to read it. The book is very, very, well written and enthralling view of life at “the sharp end” of WWII infantry combat. Anyone even remotely interested in WWII needs to read this book.

See You at the Bar by David Black is the fifth installment in the adventures of everyone’s favourite RNVR submariner Harry Gilmour. This time Harry is in command of HMS Scourge and up to all sort of Special Ops mischief in the Mediterranean. Readers of the series will also be interested to know that this volume wraps up the story line of Captain Charles ‘the Bonny Boy’ Bonalleck VC who has been trying to kill Harry for the last couple of volumes. Anyway, this one is as good as the other four, but if you haven’t read any of the others, they really should be read in order.

The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard by David A. Goodman is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. A recounting of the highlights of Picard’s career from the various episodes of NextGen and the movies from the perspective of the protagonist. There is a fair bit of narrative of Picard’s early life on the vineyard in France and the conflict within his family that frames much of the rest of Picard’s later career. I book was clever and well done. I’m glad I read it, but probably won’t come back to it. Recommended for ST:NG fans.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene was the outrageously funny account of the misadventures of James Wormbold the Havana representative of a British vacuum cleaner company, who is approached by MI-6 and asked to become their chief source of information and intelligence from Cuba. Wormbold, finding himself in financial difficulties, agrees and begins fabricating (and being paid for) agents who produce fictitious intelligence reports. As might be expected this all goes pear-shaped in a most hilarious manner. I enjoyed the book immensely and recommend it very highly.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham was an absolutely horrifying account of the worst nuclear disaster of all time. This book really is everything you could ever want to know about the catastrophe. The author weaves the history of the plant, the technical details, the human stories, and both the short and long term impacts into one seamless narrative. Seriously, this might be the best book I’ve read so far this year. If you’re at all interested in what happened, you should read this book.

147 for the year.

A Statistical Correction…

Holy crap! I just did some checking and I haven’t read Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. I read some guy named Ben Winters’ book Underground Airlines…

Having just read a description of UR, (a magical realism novel where the historical Underground Railroad, is actually a kind of subway!!), I won’t be reading that.

Also I was reviewing my blog posts and realized that I counted Dave Powell’s outstanding Decisions at Chickamauga twice…so, I’m at 137 for the year, which merely ties the old league record instead of setting a new one.

137 for the year, but stay tuned…

New League Record and there’s a month left to go!

I’ve had a pretty productive month reading wise. Since my last post I’ve finished nine books, bringing me to 138 for the year, which is more books than I’ve ever read in a year, with a month still left to go.

Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead was a bit of a disappointment. I loved his Underground Railroad, but this one, a fictionalized version of one African-American youth’s experience at a Florida reform school just wasn’t very compelling. Throughout the short novel I felt openly manipulated by the author as he tried to create a story of totally unjustified brutality and abuse that just didn’t ring true. I can’t recommend this one.

Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child by Laura Cumming was another disappointment. I read a review of the book in the NYT and on that basis, took it out of the library. The author’s mother was kidnapped as a 3-year-old child. Five days later she was found dressed in different clothes and apparently well cared for in the interim. Cumming set out to unravel the mystery. Turns out there wasn’t much of a mystery, the incident was fairly prosaic and pretty much everyone involved knew and understood what had happened. This base story, a reasonable basis for a short article, was crammed into a 300 page book. Avoid this one. If you really want to know what happened drop me a line.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was a real eye-opener. Readers of this blog will know that I recently took a trip exploring the path of Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea with a long-time friend. As a result of the trip, my friend decided to read this book, and because I hadn’t read it in 30 or 40 years, I decided to read it as well. Holy crap! This is a much different book than the one I remember reading. I had no recollection that the book was so casually and comprehensively racist. The racism literally permeates the entire book. Further, after 40 years of reading and studying the ACW, I have come to realize that Mitchell’s depiction of the historical events and occurrences of Reconstruction are so massively wrong and inaccurate that they actually slide into outright dishonesty. She is deeply committed to the historical fiction of the “Lost Cause”. The book is still a cracking good story, but its so fundamentally racist and historically mendacious that I simply can’t recommend it as anything but a monument to and example of how deeply racist mainstream American culture was and to a large degree remains.

Assisted Living by E.M. Foner is the second in a series of humorous sci-fi novels, about a rambunctious AI colony ship dealing with human passengers in a quest to be rehabilitated in the eyes of its makers. The universe of the novel is the same one as in Foner’s “Union Station” series and as with all of those, this book was funny and engaging. I can’t wait til his next book comes out.

Next up where a pair of military histories of the ACW that I read simultaneously. A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War by Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh and How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War by Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones. Both books were excellent but the Murray and Hsieh one is quite a bit more current. Both had a very interesting thesis and both were well supported. If I had to do it again, I would read Hattaway and Jones first, then the other one.

Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester is an excellent little tale of how one man can make a difference even in the impersonal, industrial, era of WWI naval combat, its only 140ish pages, but it was a great yarn!

The Replacement Wife by Eileen Goudge is a weird book about a professional matchmaker who suffers a relapse of her cancer and resigned to dying, decides to find her husband’s replacement wife before shuffling off this mortal coil. As might be expected, much goes wrong. I’m a bit of a sucker for happy endings, so I was fairly disappointed that this book didn’t have one. It was well written, and engaging, but I can’t say that I actually enjoyed it. You have been warned.

Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy by Christopher Knowlton is the absolutely fascinating story of the rise of the American cattle industry and its most visible personification, the cowboy, between the end of the ACW and the 1887 “Great Cattle Die Up” when something like half of American cattle died during a particularly harsh winter, which completely ended the open range, and totally changed the business of cattle ranching. If you’re at all interested in the American West, the economic development of the US, or Cowboys, you need to read this book!

138 for the year