William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life by James L. McDonough was simply outstanding. McDonough is particularly strong on Sherman’s early life before the ACW. I learned an awful lot that I didn’t know about his life and McDonough has obviously gone to great pains to track down the primary sources which illuminate Sherman and who he was. Readers should not that this book does not focus as heavily as one might think on the Civil War, 14 of the 28 chapters of the book lie either before (10 chapters) or after (4 chapters) of the war, but I think that is actually a strength of the book. I really didn’t understand Sherman’s pre-Civil War life and how it impacted his performance during the war.
Inside Out: A Memoir was Demi Moore’s “tell-all” memoir about her life and loves. I’ve been a fan of hers since the mid-80s so I picked this up from the local library. It was a compelling read that shows an unusual amount of self-awareness. It was interesting to get her version of the events I’d only been peripherally aware of, but that’s probably because I am a fan of hers.
India’s war : World War II and the making of modern South Asia by Srinath Raghavan is a fascinating account of India’s participation in WWII and it was a real “eye-opener” for me. I had no clue about India’s involvement other than having seen Indian units in wargames and some vague awareness of the Bengal Famine. Raghavan has done an amazing job of mastering all the threads of India’s involvement and bringing them together in one cohesive narrative. If you’re at all interested in India, you should read this book.
The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice Cream God by John R. Powers was a re-read of a book I first found when I was in High School and have re-read periodically every now and again since. I just looked up what I said about the last time I read it in 2013 and don’t really have much to add.
The Unoriginal Sinner tells the story of Tim Conroy, an Irish Catholic kid from Chicago’s south-side Mt Greenwood neighborhood as he graduates High School, attends college and tries to get his life started while getting advice from a local garage mechanic named Caepan. It’s a hard book to describe, but I’ve read it every couple of years since discovering it in the late 70s and have enjoyed it every time. One of the features of the book is Conroy asking questions of “God” then receiving “answers”. The answers he receives usually reflect some more or less profound truth about the human condition. For example, in reply to question about why religions are so dour he receives:
“All religions have worked hard to give you the impression that I’m a stiff; the kind of guy you’d never invite to a party. . . . I like laughter and the people who do it; from the twitterers to the chucklers to those whose laughter roars out in a gallop of explosions. To me, laughter is taking a bite out of life and saying, ‘Just right.’ Signed: God”
Anyway, it’s a touching, memorable book and I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially if you’re Catholic, and/or from Chicago and are of a certain age.
So, that’s the four really good books I read, now on to the ones that weren’t so good.
Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford by Alissa Quart is an unfortunate treatment of an extremely timely and important topic; what has happened to the US middle class. Quart presents a slew of anecdotal data that tend to illustrate the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The stories in the book are interesting and heart rending, but for various reasons don’t quite work. Just one example, one the stories is about an immigrant from Central America who fled gang violence to come to America leaving her son in the car of the son’s grandmother. Here the woman built a life as a live-in caregiver for children and eventually saved enough money to bring her son to America when the grandmother became too infirm to care for him. When the son arrived, he experienced quite a bit of culture shock moving from rural Central America to Queens. The mother decided to help the son’s mental well-being by purchasing him a $1200 pure bred puppy. It didn’t’ seem to help the mental well-being and now the woman is experiencing financial difficulty. The book is replete with examples of well-intentioned people doing stupid things such as taking out massive student loans to acquire educational credentials to qualify for jobs that can’t possibly generate enough income to replay the loans. And don’t get me started on Ms. Quart’s solutions to the middle class problem, each of which seem involve direct Federal payments to individuals and/or unfunded mandates for employers. We’ve got a serious problem with how our economic society works, but this author doesn’t understand how it happened or how to fix it. You can give this one a pass.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest by Cheryl Strayed is another memoir about long range hiking, this time on the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m a sucker for any kind of through-hiking memoir so when I saw this one at the library, I snapped it up. I’m afraid I found it only kind of “meh”. Strayed is a good writer, but here she interweaves the story of the difficulties of her life, many of which were precipitated by poor decisions by her or her mother, with difficulties on the trail, many of which were precipitated by poor decisions by her. For example, who starts out a 1500 mile multi-month hike with boots that are one size too small and backpack that she has never lifted, let alone hiked with, when fully loaded? Since I was primarily interested in the hiking part, the life-interludes, were a bit boring. There also wasn’t much detail on the hike apart from occasional descriptions of terrain, or fellow hikers, which were all too infrequent. Anyway, there are better hiking memoirs out there. I’m glad I got this one from the library.
Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz was a strange book that might could have been great, but, for me, misfired. Horowitz decided to replicate Frederick Law Olmstead’s three 1850s journeys across the South which Olmstead exhaustively reported in a three volume book: Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Horwitz faithfully replicates the geography of Olmstead’s original journeys, and sees much of the same landscape, but the human-scape is so different, and the times have changed so much, that the comparison to Olmstead is almost totally irrelevant. At times I found myself wondering, “why is he doing this?”. There are flashes of brilliance in the book, the accounts of attending the “Mudfest” in Louisiana and his visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky are worthwhile. But all in all, the book was a bit of a struggle to get through.
Gettysburg Rebels: Five Native Sons Who Came Home to Fight as Confederate Soldier by Tom McMillan was the account of five young men who lived in or near Gettysburg for some period of time before moving South and on the outbreak of the War, enlisted in the Confederate army. The main thesis of the book was that these men represented an under-utilized resource Lee could have used to familiarize himself with the local area in order to mount the same sort of wide-ranging flank march that Jackson conducted at Chancellorsville. The author establishes that the Confederates had a system in place to identify and exploit the local knowledge of its troops (its how they found out about the road leading around the US flank at Chancellorsville for example). He also establishes that at least one Brigade commander knew of at least some of the local knowledge because he issued a pass for one of the local troops to go see his family. He goes on to lament that the CSA never put the pieces together to exploit the local knowledge and win the battle. The problem with that, as I see it, is Occam’s Razor. If the Confederates had a system, and the system was working (as evidenced by the pass) yet it didn’t yield results, the reasonable conclusion is that there were no results to yield. That none of these men had local knowledge that could give Lee the edge in winning the battle. The fact that all these young men moved away from Gettysburg in their teens, the better part of a decade before the war, indicates to me that their not having much relevant local knowledge is more likely that the CSA dropping the ball. Your mileage may vary, but there’s no “smoking gun” to show how Gettysburg might have turned out differently here.
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick is a straightforward account of survival at sea. In 1820, a Nantucket based whale ship, Essex, was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale. The 20 men in the crew took to the three whale boats, and eventually, after many trials and tribulations, including cannibalization of the dead, and at least one case of killing a crewman specifically to be eaten by the others, 8 of the twenty men were rescued. The book explores a number of themes, including Nantucket society and how it might have influenced who did and didn’t survive, the whale trade in general, and treatment of African-American crewmen in particular. Interestingly, every man who survived was a Nantucket man, despite them comprising a minority of the crew, and none of the African-American crew were among the survivors. I’m not sure why I didn’t find this book compelling, I’m usually a huge fan of Philbrick’s. Maybe it’s the discursive asides about Nantucket, maybe it was the theoretical asides about the pre-wreck lives of the crew in an effort to explain what came after. I don’t know, but at the end of the day, it just wasn’t that good to me.
29 for the year
BillP's Book Blog 