Since the beginning of the new year, I’ve already finished eight books and in a notable departure from normal practice, two of them, the D&D book and the Longstreet bio, were actual hard copies rather than eBooks read on my Kindle.
Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs is exactly what it says on the tin, a comprehensive history of the groundbreaking RPG. I played D&D casually in High School, so I found the history of the game, and the detailed and comprehensive account of TSR’s development and marketing of it enthralling. Readers should note that it is heavily focused on D&D and not a larger history of TSR. I had hoped there might be some info about the TSR/SPI interaction but there wasn’t. I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in D&D.
Flashman by George McDonald Fraser is the first book in the series about everyone’s favorite anti-hero. This is my second or third time through the series and it’s still excellent.
For those of you reading this BLOG who aren’t familiar with George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, they are a series of 12 historical novels using a minor character from Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In Hughes’ book, Flashman is a coward and bully who persecutes Tom Brown and his friends before eventually being and expelled for drunkenness.
Fraser takes up where Hugh’s left off and tells us the story of the rest of Flashman’s life. The series is based on the imaginary “memoirs” of “General Flashman” which Fraser describes (in a preface to the first book) finding in an antique tea-chest, in a Leicestershire saleroom in 1965. As the “editor” of the papers, Fraser produced a series of historical novels describing episodes of British and American history during the 19th century.
All sorts of major and minor figures from history appear in the books, everybody from Abraham Lincoln as a young Illinois Congressman, to Bismarck, to Rajah Brooke of Borneo to Geronimo (as a young boy named One-Who-Yawns). Fraser’s research was impeccable, and the books are heavily annotated, with end notes and appendices, as Fraser pretends to “confirm” or “correct” the “memoirs”. Often these notes inform the reader that a particularly outlandish character really existed or that an unlikely event actually occurred.
The great appeal of the series comes not only from the detail of sometimes obscure historical events, but also from the character of Flashman himself. The books are told in first person narrative, as if written by Flashman, a character who openly and freely admits to being a coward, lech and poltroon. Such an “anti-hero” is very refreshing and the perspective of such a character on historical events is delightful. All in all, if you are at all a fan of historical fiction, I can’t recommend these highly enough!
The Battle of Leyte Gulf: The Last Fleet Action by H.P. Willmott is a detailed and astute analysis of the series of naval and air battles fought between the U.S. and Imperial Japanese navies during the last week of October 1944. Willmott, as might be expected from his previous works, has a lot to say about the battle and the conventional wisdom regarding it. His over-arching theme seems to be that the correlation of forces was so heavily weighted in favor of the US that Japan had no real chance of affecting the outcome of the war, or even appreciably delaying the invasion of the Philippines. For example, Willmott, looking at both sides’ Order of Battle points out that the U.S. Navy deployed more destroyers to the battle than the Japanese had carrier-based aircraft. He also rather roundly castigates Halsey over his failure to form TF 34 and takes a few swipes at the historiography of the battle (he’s not a fan of Morison’s work). Potential readers should be aware that this is not a blow-by-blow account of the battle but rather an analysis of WHY “who did what to whom” and the larger effects of battle on the rest of the war. With that being understood, I recommend the book very highly.
After finding it deeply discounted for Kindle I purchased and reread The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Frankly, I had forgotten that the last time I read this, back in 2010, I didn’t think it had held up very well. Describing it this way:
“So, at the end of the day, we’ve got a book that touches on a bunch of themes, the future of military ops, time dilation, and how society might change, without examining any of them in a thoughtful way. Still not a bad read though.”
I’m not as negative about the book as I was last time I read it (that review is here: Bill Pilon, “Bill Pilon’s Book Blog from Atlanta, GA” #662, 9 Dec 2010 3:12 pm) but I can’t really recommend it except as a curiosity.
The next two books; A Magnificent Disaster: The Failure of Market Garden, The Arnhem Operation, September 1944 by David Bennett and Arnhem: Myth and Reality: Airborne Warfare, Air Power and the Failure of Operation Market Garden by Sebastian Ritchie came directly from watching Band of Brothers over my Thanksgiving break. Having watched Band of Brothers, I decided I needed to add some American Airborne troops to my 15mm miniature armies. But I had to order those figures from the UK (I use Forged in Battle and Peter Pig for 15mm). While waiting for them to arrive I found a US retailer that had Forged in battle British Paras, so I ordered and started painting them. Painting them got me watching a Bridge Too Far while painting, which caused me to re-read these two books. Reading these books together was illuminating. Bennett’s book basically considers Market-Garden a near run thing that could have gone differently had small issues (moving the 1st AB drop zones, making two drops per day, lighting a fire under XXX Corps) been resolved. Then Ritchie comes along and demonstrates that none of those issues were actually fixable, that Market-Garden was more or less doomed from the start. I enjoyed both books and recommend both highly for anyone who is a student of Market-Garden.
Blood Alone (Billy Boyle book 3) by James R. Benn starts with our hero waking up with amnesia in a field hospital in Sicily with a handkerchief embroidered with a monogram L in his pocket. Almost immediately people start trying to kill him and take the handkerchief. The rest of the book slowly unfolds the story which involves Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, US Naval Intelligence, the Sicilian Mafia, and the Allied conquest of Sicily. If you liked the first two Billy Boyle books, you’ll like this one. If you haven’t read them, don’t start here.
Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth Varon is an interesting biography of Lee’s “Old War Horse” primarily focused on Longstreet’s career AFTER the Civil War. Varon has mastered the contemporaneous primary sources does an outstanding job of describing New Orleans in the immediate post war period and Longstreet’s position in local politics and his fight for Black social and political equality. She also convincingly demonstrates that the Virginia cabal of Lost Causers led by Jubal Early didn’t start blaming Longstreet for Gettysburg until AFTER Longstreet eschewed White Supremacy and adopted the Republican party. She ascribes Longstreet’s movement from pro-slavery White supremacist to integrationist favoring Black political power and social equality to his respect for Grant and his whole-hearted acceptance of the spirit of the surrender terms of Appomattox. Finally, she wraps up rather topically by noting that despite being the 3rd most prominent and important surviving ex-Confederate there were no monuments or statues erected to Longstreet in the post-war era. She believes this was because of Longstreet’s failure to support White supremacy and sees this as proof that those statues and memorials that were erected were primarily intended to advance the cause of White Supremacy. This is a powerful book and I recommend it to anyone interested in the Civil War or Reconstruction.
8 for the year.
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