Read Banned Books -- June 20, 2023

moveon.org

Lists of banned books are a good way to figure out what to read next.

While we are talking about books, I should mention that Cormac McCarthy died. I am sad to admit that I have not read any of his books, but I have seen movie adaptions.

Book: Somme 1916 -- February 17, 2017

I read Paul Kendall's book Somme 1916, which takes a detailed look at the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.  Kendall writes from the British point of view, panning from the left end of the line where there was a diversion, to the left and center where there was hopeless slaughter, to the right where there was some success.

The book begins with an introduction to the British Army in the early war, explaining the distinctions among the Regular Army, the Territorials, and Kitchener's New Army.  It shows the conflicts that took place during the planning for the battle.  The first part concludes with the week-long preliminary bombardment.

Parts 2 through 7 cover the sector assigned to each corps.  The stories of young men, officers, NCOs and enlisted, getting mown down by German machine guns and artillery gets depressing.  Stories of individual bravery make it a bit easier to read.  One chapter is dedicated to the horrible Livens Flame Projectors, which were giant flamethrowers that had to be buried in the ground in No Man's Land.

Part 8 evaluates the battle.  Kendall feels that the effort, which helped lead to the later German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, was worth it. 

Book: The First World War -- August 23, 2014

This month we remember the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One, the Great War, the War to End All Wars.  I thought this was a good time to reread Hew Strachan's The First World War.  He wrote this book in conjunction with a television series.  Now I have to find his multi-volume set of books on the war. 

Strachan makes a point of talking about aspects of the war away from the Western Front.  He makes much of the Germans getting blamed for the war, but makes the strong point that the Austrians started it by declaring war on Serbia:
http://cablecarguy.blogspot.com/search/label/WWI

He digs into the reasons various countries went to war. 

His conclusion is that it was not a war without purpose. 

Book: The Guns of August -- August 1, 2014

This month we remember the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One, the Great War, the War to End All Wars.  I thought this was a good time to reread Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August.  Tuchman set the stage and then wrote in great detail about the events of the first month of the war.  She wrote about the French Army's belief in the offensive, the German Army's theory of schrecklichkeit (frightfulness), and the general way in which events did not turn out the way that leaders planned. 

Tuchman had a way with words.  “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers -- danger, death, and live ammunition.” I particularly liked her sections on the burning of Louvain and the bombardment of Rhiems, two indelible black marks against the Germans.  “Two firing squads marched to the center of the square, faced either way and fired till no more of the targets stood upright. Six hundred and twelve bodies were identified and buried, including Felix Fivet, aged three weeks.”  

Book: Few and Chosen: Defining Giants Greatness Across the Eras -- December 12, 2013

We were visiting Half Moon Bay last month and chanced to stop at Bay Books, a wonderful store.  The owner saw my Giants cap and led me over to the sports shelf.  He mentioned that his uncle had been an executive with the San Francisco Seals. 

He strongly recommended the book Few and Chosen: Defining Giants Greatness Across the Eras by Giants great Bobby Thomson and Phil Pepe.  I took his advice and bought it.  I enjoyed it greatly. 

As Bill James has pointed out, many old ball players like to say the game has gone downhill since they played.  Bobby Thomson was not that way.  He includes players up to the era of Matt Williams, Jeff Kent and Barry Bonds. 

Thomson told many stories about the men he played with, and the men he met during later years. 

Book: Castles of Steel -- March 6, 2013

Some years ago, I read Robert K Massie's Dreadnought, a history of politics and navies in Britain and the newly formed German Empire.  I learned many things I had not known about German history in the late 19th Century.  Castles of Steel is Massie's sequel, describing how the two navies faced each other during the First World War.  He takes the side of Admiral John Jellicoe in the Jellicoe/Beatty controversies about the Battle of Jutland.  Massie manages to tell exciting stories about battles while also explaining the political and economic background of events.  He gives the Royal Navy and its blockade of Germany credit for winning the war. 

Book: American Uprising -- February 5, 2011

Amercian Uprising/the Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt by Daniel Rasmussen is a study of the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt that threatened New Orleans.

The revolt, involving hundreds of slaves, required years of planning. Rasmussen does a good job of talking about the societies from which many of the slaves had been kidnapped, and how their methods of methods of warfare influenced the revolt.

Rasmussen was faced with many problems in relating the events. The uprising lasted only two days and may have killed only two whites. There are no written records from any of the slaves involved in the uprising, and only a limited number from any slaves in the United States.

One solution to the problems was to go into excellent detail about the history of Louisiana, of sugar farming with slave labor, of the Louisiana Purchase and the first, terrible, US Governor, William Claiborne. Rasmussen spends a significant amount of time on the conquest of West Florida. This made sense when I saw that this was the subject of an award-winning Sophomore essay. It was also important because at the time of the revolt, much of the US Army force in Louisiana had been diverted to West Florida.

Once the revolt was defeated, largely because of a surprise attack by a party of planters from across the river, the planters took brutal revenge on the surviving slaves. They then set to work to suppress the memory of the revolt. Rasmussen describes this and explains the motives of the planters and Governor Claiborne. He devotes most of a chapter to the ways that historians treated the revolt in later years.

I enjoyed reading the book and had only two real criticisms. I got lost in a jump from talking about Louisiana to talking about the revolt in Haiti, which provided inspiration for the rebels in Louisiana. Also, I had trouble finding the one map in the book, when I wanted to go back and trace the progress of the revolt.

This is the author's first book, based on his Senior thesis at Harvard. Based on this, I'll keep an eye open for his future work.

Book: Fighter Pilot -- January 23, 2011

Robin Olds was the son of Robert Olds, a World War I aviation instructor and squadron leader, who went on to become one of Billy Mitchell's Boys and he developed the original operating procedures for the B-17. Robert Olds and his friends who visited the house to sing, Hap Arnold, Eddie Rickenbacker and others, all had a major influence on young Robin.

Robin went to West Point and joined one of the classes which passed through in an accelerated fashion because of World War II. He went on to fly P-38s, then transitioned to P-51s. He became an ace during the war.

After the war, he became one of the early pilots of the P-80 Shooting Star. I was interested by his comments about how the Army Air Force seemed to have no idea how to use it tactically, and how he tried to get his superiors to think about that. He received an exchange posting with the RAF and flew Gloster Meteors. He was impressed by the way the RAF used radar and ground controllers to fly in all kinds of weather, another thing that the Army Air Force did not do much.

He married actress Ella Raines. I thought a photo of her would be more interesting than the cover of the book. (update 24-January-2011: I should mention that the cover of the book is actually a good one -- a photo of Olds being carried on the shoulders of his men after his last combat mission in Vietnam. He said he was trying not to cry.) Olds spent many pages in the book talking about the dynamics of their relationship, through good times and many bad times. This is not common in military autobiographies. Olds learned twenty years after the fact that his wife had pulled strings in Washington to prevent his being sent to the Korean War.

I thought the most interesting part of the book was the section on Olds' service during the Vietnam War. He found the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing in great disarray and applied many lessons he had learned over the years to make them a cohesive unit, and to raise the morale of the groups with which they had to cooperate. One thing Olds did was to fly his F-4 Phantom on a regular basis. He revived the fighter sweep to reverse losses to North Vietnamese MIGs.

After his return, he made many politically bad but truthful statements to President Johnson, the Air Force Chief of Staff, and the press. Somehow he wound up serving a year as Commandant of the Air Force Academy, where he again had to deal with poor morale.

The final part of his book, after his retirement, gets poetic about flying.

I enjoyed reading the book and I am happy that General Olds' friends and families harassed him to work on it, and I am happy that his daughter Christina and his friend Ed Rasimus were able to assemble it from his unfinished writings.

Book - The American Civil War - August 29, 2010

John Keegan's The American Civil War may have been the first Civil War book I have read that was not written by an American. I enjoyed his one-volume history of the First World War and I enjoyed this book, too.

The European point of view shows up first in the title. We Americans often forget that our was not the only Civil War, although as Keegan points out, ours was the only one so far to occur in a functioning democracy.

I was amused by his comments on uniforms ("The armies of the Civil War were the worst tailored of any great conflict.") and facial hair (He points out that the fashion started in the Crimean War - I thought it started with the Gold Rush).

He made some interesting comparisons (Stonewall Jackson = Erwin Rommel) and some that were startling (George McClellan = George Patton).

Over-all I liked his approach as a military historian. He gives a thorough picture of the military geography of the United States in the two major theaters of the war. He gives a clear-eyed view of the situation throughout the war. He says that Grant and Sherman were the only first-rate generals among the many created during the war. I think his best efforts are an investigation of how the war consisted of at least one good-sized battle a day, and yet soldiers kept fight.

I felt that the end of the book was abrupt and it lacked a conclusion.

Book - Little Blue Book of Advent and Christmas -- January 12, 2010

I just finished with the Little Blue Book of Advent and Christmas, which is published by the Diocese of Saginaw, Michigan. I had previously read The Little Black Book of Lent.

There is a pair of facing pages for each day from the first Sunday of Advent to the Feast of the Advent of the Lord. The right-hand page has a quote from the day's Gospel and a commentary. The left-hand page has some additional things to think about. On Sundays, it omits the Gospel and has a longer reflection. The book encourages people to spend six minutes each day reading and thinking. I started reading it on the bus home and finished it on BART. I enjoyed it.

The book has a plain blue cover so people won't have to feel self conscious about reading it anywhere. There is going to be another black book for Lent and a white book for the Easter season.

Catherine Havens is the editor, and much of the commentary comes from the writings of the late Bishop Ken Untener.

http://www.littlebooks.org/

Book: Carville-by-the-Sea -- December 29, 2009

I received Woody LaBounty's new book, Carville-by-the-Sea, San Francisco's Streetcar Suburb as a Christmas gift. I enjoyed learning more about San Francisco's Carville neighborhood. He gives a well-documented history of the growth of Carville from a single shack to a neighborhood with water, electric power, a school, and a firehouse.

He frames the story with his dream of buying a house in San Francisco.

I also appreciated the way the author included Gelett Burgess and his writings about Carville.

Order the book using the supporting website: http://www.carville-book.com/

Book: Pharmakon -- May 21, 2009

This book, by Dirk Wittenborn, came from my book club because I didn't tell them not to send it soon enough. I considered sending it back, but then decided to give it a try. I don't read enough recent literature.

The central character, Doctor William Friedrich, is a psychologist who developed a scale for judging happiness. After his World War Two service in the AAF, the scale helped to get him a position at Yale, where he learned about a natural drug used by shamans in the south seas to help people who were depressed. Friedrich and the colleague who told him about the drug try to develop it. Things don't work out well.

I could say the same about the book. Wittenborn is a good writer, who can turn a phrase. The first sentence is a classic. The first section of the book is gripping. After that, entropy sets in and the book stops dead at the end in a way that many people will find unsatisfying. The book follows Friedrich's children, but they are not as interesting as the doctor and his wife.

The point of view shifted several times from first person to third person. I can see why the author did it, but it was confusing at times.

Book: Alfred & Emily -- April 24, 2009

Doris Lessing talks about how World War One damaged her parents and how the trenches continue to haunt her 90 years later. In the first half of Alfred & Emily, she writes an alternate biography, imagining what her parents' lives might have been like, and what Britain might have been like, if World War One had not happened. I liked this part. It was a fairy tale with a realistic edge.





In the second half of the book, she presents a series of short items about what really happened to her parents, what the family's lives were like in Southern Rhodesia, and her issues with her mother. I was struck by her repeated comments about how her father's diabetes would have been treated differently today.





I had not read any of her stories since I was in college.

Book - Little Black Book of Lent -- March 11, 2009

My wife bought me a book after mass one day. It is published by the Diocese of Saginaw, Michigan, and it is called The Little Black Book of Lent.


There is a pair of facing pages for each day from the Sunday before Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. The right-hand page has a quote from the day's Gospel and a commentary. The left-hand page has some additional things to think about. The book encourages people to spend six minutes each day reading and thinking. I've been reading it on the bus home. I'm enjoying it.


The book has a plain black cover so people won't have to feel self conscious about reading it anywhere. There is going to be a white book for the Easter season.


Catherine Havens is the editor, and much of the commentary comes from the writings of the late Bishop Ken Untener.


http://www.littlebooks.org/

Book: Watchmen -- February 23, 2009

I missed Watchmen when it first came out, but I kept hearing about. Now that they're getting ready to release the movie, I thought I should catch up. I liked the conceit of people being inspired by comic books to become "costumed adventurers". Most of the costumed adventurers did not have super powers.


The characters seemed familar. After I read the book, I looked around on the web and found that the author was inspired by Charlton characters of the 1960s. I usually avoided Charlton comics, but I bought the issue of Captain Atom where Steve Ditko relaunched that character and the Blue Beetle. I also remember the Question Mark.



I liked the graffiti, and the quotes.



It's not for young kids.



There was a lot of rain yesterday. We watched the Academy Awards. They tried something different for the acting categories, having a previous winner introduce each nominee.

Signs of the Times #27 -- February 17, 2009

I took this photo on 12-February-2009. I started going to Stacey's while I was in grammar school.



Heavy rain at times today.

Firehouse #15 -- January 7, 2009

The Disneyland Fire Department's firehouse has been at the foot of Main Street since opening day in 1954. Walt Disney and his family had a private apartment upstairs. I took the photo in August, 2008.

The Chronicle says Stacey's will close in March. I feel guilty that I didn't buy any books there during the Christmas season.

Book: The War with Hannibal -- October 13, 2008

I finished reading the Penguin edition of Livy's The History of Rome from Its Foundation, Books XXI-XXX, which covers the Second Punic War. The only works of Titus Livius that I had read before were books I-V, which covered the history of Rome from its foundation to the sack by the Gauls. I noticed many differences in Roman customs. I don't remember a mention of sacrifices with "full grown victims" in I-V. I don't remember the practice of strewing the couches of the gods.

It's not Livy's fault, but there were far too many guys named Hasdrubal.

There has been a big fire on Angel Island. No historic buildings destroyed.

Book: The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volumes 1 and 2 -- April 15, 2008

When I was in college, I discovered William Baring-Gould's The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. I read the whole thing one summer. It was from this work that I discovered that there are people who do not believe that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson really lived, and who believe that one Arthur Conan Doyle not only wrote the stories but made up the characters.

In The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S Klinger considers the scholarship that has taken place since Baring-Gould's monumental work in the 1960s, and also takes into account that we are farther in time from the world of Holmes and Watson and that even more things need to be explained, especially to us Americans.

I recently read volumes one and two, which present all the short stories, in the sequence in which they were published in books. This puts them slightly out of the order in which they were written and the order in which they were first published in magazines, but I like it better than Baring-Gould's effort to present the stories in the order in which he felt they actually took place.

I enjoyed Klinger's footnotes and explanatory essays. I had never realized how many wicked colonels there are in the canon. And how many women named Violet. He takes a moderate view on the number of times Doctor Watson may have married.

Now I have to start saving for volume 3, which has the novels.

The Giants won their first game in San Francisco on 15-April-2008. Today they lost to Arizona. Last night they beat Randy Johnson.

Book: The Yiddish Policemen's Union - December 29, 2007

I read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It is set in Sitka, Alaska, in an alternate history. Jerusalem fell in 1948 and the state of Israel was destroyed. The United States reluctantly allowed the world's Jews to settle in a federal district established in Sitka. The story takes place in 2008, when the special district is due to be eliminated. Everyone in Sitka is worried about the future.

The main character is Meyer Landsman (good last name), a homicide detective. He lives in a seedy hotel on Max Nordau Street (thank Heaven for wikipedia -- I didn't remember who Max Nordau was). Another player, a junkie chess player, is murdered and Landsman feels a need to solve the case, even though he is encouraged not to.

I liked the imaginary society Chabon created. It felt real. The plot got a little too complex for my taste, but I enjoyed the book to the end.