Good grief Charlie Brown.... 75 books with a 2 year-old tearing the pages out as quickly as I can read them (and usually before)? A second child on the way (late March)! It's going to be an uphill battle all the way. But, for all that, this whole idea has sparked my imagination - let's just hope that spark doesn't go and trigger a major short-circuit ;)

A quick glance at my library will reveal a slight military bent – as I now only buy non-fiction military histories and memoirs. However, much of my reading also comes from library loans, loans from friends, personal loans, secured loans, debt consolidation loans and car loans! As such, you'll be seeing a bit of Sci-Fi, the odd mystery, a couple of biographies, a comedic throwaway or two (not just the bank statements), an occasional contemporary novel, and maybe even a cookbook. But it's non-fiction and history that dominates. Sorry!

Stay tuned. The little one is in bed and my reading glasses.... have gone missing....

2009 Book List

January
01. Dining with Terrorists: Meetings with the World's Most Wanted Militants by Phil Rees
02. Whirlwind by Joseph R. Garber
03. The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque
04. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
05. 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 by Stanley Weintraub
06. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
07. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
08. God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers: A True Civil War Christmas Story by James McIvor

February
09. Generation Kill by Evan Wright
10. The Himmler Brothers by Katrin Himmler
11. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel Fick
12. The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur by Brian Steidle
13. Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W. Ryback
14. High Hopes: My Autobiography by Ronnie Corbett

March
15. Shooter by Jack Coughlin
16. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
17. The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun
18. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo
19. The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind
20. Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective by Paul Rieckhoff
21. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
22. We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah by Patrick K. O'Donnell

April
23. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
24. The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart
25. Intern: A Doctor's Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar
26. The Prince by Nicolò Machiavelli
27. Genesis by Bernard Beckett
28. Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama by Stephen Fox
29. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes (Abandoned)
30. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
31. Gallipoli: The Turkish Story by Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Basarin, and Hatice Basarin
32. How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

---------------------------------------
Currently Reading
- Gallipoli by Les Carlyon
- Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer
- Five Days In London by John Lukacs

Message edited by its author, Apr 29, 2009, 8:51am.

Hope you find the glasses soon! Shall look forward to your choices.

Welcome to the group! And good luck overcoming your additional "challenges", lol.

I look forward to seeing what military histories you are going to be reading over the course of the next year.

Book 1

Dining with Terrorists: Meetings with the World's Most Wanted Militants by Phil Rees
There are probably few more qualified to examine “terrorism” than journalist Phil Rees. In August 1979, on a visit to Ireland, Rees watched, shocked and bewildered, as men and women of all ages celebrated the murders of Lord Mountbatten and his 14-year old grandson at the hands of the IRA. It was a pivotal moment in Phil Rees' life, a life devoted to the pursuit of an answer – what does it mean to be a “terrorist”?

One could ostensibly view this book as part travelogue, part history; documenting 18 years of the journalist's experience, travelling between war zones, sitting down with “terrorists” and taking the time to listen objectively to their side of the story by simply sharing a meal with them. However, it would be more accurate to call this book a critique of America's “War on Terror”. Rees' thesis is that “terrorist” is an emotive word, devoid of any true definition, designed purely to buy support for the policies of the United States and the Bush administration.

Some may consider Rees an apologist, indeed the preface to the second edition of the book starts by addressing such reactions received after the publication of the first edition. But this is only to be expected and gives added weight to the central thesis - remember, "Either You're With Us or You're With the Terrorists". Another common but pertinent quote is worth recalling, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". As Rees notes, the UN spent 17 years trying to define “terrorism” and failed.

Message edited by its author, Jan 7, 2009, 8:21am.

Well, the following books won't count towards my 75, but here are a few I read this evening (to my 2-year old)...

Zoukun no Sanpo by Hirotaka Nakano
(In Japanese. However, there is an English translation - "Elephee's Walk")

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Tabeta no Daare by Taro Gomi
(In Japanese. Again, there is an English translation available - "Who ate it?")

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Jr Martin

Utatte, Penelope by Anne Gutman and Georg Hallensleben
(Japanese translation of the original French - "Saute, saute, Pénélope!")

Message edited by its author, Jan 6, 2009, 7:40am.

Book 2

Whirlwind by Joseph R Garber
A James Bond-esq ex-CIA agent out for revenge, a young blond Russian spy with a father-complex, a National Security Adviser who will stop at nothing to secure the presidency, and a South African mercenary who personifies evil. This is the cast of characters that fulfill every cliché imaginable in this credibility-stretching; but fun, fast-paced thriller from the author of the 1995 best seller Vertical Run.

Unfortunately, this, the author's fourth novel, was also his last. Joseph R Garber died of a heart attack in 2005.

Check the following links for a NY Times review and first chapter excerpt

Message edited by its author, Jan 7, 2009, 2:52pm.

I have Vertical Run home from the library right now. I enjoy a good thriller every now and again, and hopefully will be able to read all of Garber's. Sad that he has passed away.

alcottacre,

After reading Whirlwind I'm keen to try Vertical Run, which, if the Amazon reviews are to be believed, looks to be the better novel. Picking up Whirlwind was pure chance and turned out to be one of those all too rare surprises. As I noted in my brief review (I didn't want to give anything away) it's not without its faults. The clichés often border on the cringe worthy (and do induce the occasional wince), credibility is consistently stretched to breaking point, and the ending is positively saccharin. But despite that, it is a genuinely Fun (with a capital F), fast-paced, page-turning thriller that I enjoyed from start to finish!

#8 petermc: With those kinds of books, I expect my credibility to be stretched, so to me that is not a big deal. What I want most from the book is fun, and it certainly looks like Whirlwind fits the bill! Thanks for the additional info.

Edited to fix Touchstone.

Message edited by its author, Jan 7, 2009, 10:40pm.

Two new ones for the little 2-year old terror I call son...

Gatan-Goton Gatan-Goton by Mizumaru Anzai
(In Japanese. Available in English as - "Chug-chug Train")
Gatan-Goton is a Japanese onomatopoeic word for the sound of a train moving along a track.

Tyrannosaurus Drip by Julia Donaldson
This doesn't have the appeal of "The Gruffalo" for my 2-year old, who loves the sudden appearance of the Gruffalo half-way through the book. (Although, admittedly, these books are aimed at the 4-8 age group.) Neither is the poetry as inspired or imaginative. However, I couldn't resist the art work by David Roberts.

Message edited by its author, Jan 7, 2009, 10:59pm.

Your first book sounds fascinating. Does it focus on the growth of terrorism after 9/11, or on a history of terrorism?
Thanks

arubabookwoman,

That's a good question. This book is neither a comprehensive history of terrorism or exhaustive in it's coverage of terrorist organizations. Each chapter explores a different region (and it's various organizations), in accordance with the author's travels as a journalist. And as a journalist, the book has a journalistic feel - histories interspersed with 'travelogue' commentary. We are taken on assignments to places such as Colombia, Cambodia, France, the Basque country, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka.

The author does explore the growth of Islamic militancy on the global stage, but the main theme of the book, as I described above, is in seeking to understand their motivations and how we define 'terrorist'. As you might imagine, none consider themselves to be 'terrorists'.

There's plenty of food for thought in this insightful book, and it is never dry. I hope this reply helps. Happy reading :)

Am looking forward to seeing the military history books. Your first book sounds really interesting.

Do you have The Gruffalo's Child? It's lovely. We just bought A Squash and a Squeeze for our 2 year old for Christmas.

cmt,

Do not have The Gruffalo's Child, but I have read it while browsing the children's secton. Will look out for A Squash and a Squeeze.

At the present my little guy is infatuated with the character Pénélope tête en l'air by the same people who created "Gaspard et Lisa". We've recently picked up a whole host of books featuring Pénélope, a little blue Koala that lives in France (!?). We read these in Japanese, but you can buy them readily in English, or in the original French.

>14: My friend Penelope was telling me about those books only a couple of weeks ago! Apparently there is one about Penelope "qui aime les montagnes" (which she does).

As a child, I had a tape of the UK TV presenter Floella Benjamin singing 'A Squash and a Squeeze'. I was outraged when I saw Donaldson's book, thinking the song had been ripped off - until I realised that she'd written the original all those years ago, and only recently turned it into a picture book! Still, I hear the text in Benjamin's voice rather than Imelda Staunton's (who does the audiobook versions in the UK).

I'm going to have to keep an eye on your thread for more of these picture-book recommendations...

FlossieT that's funny about Squash and A Squeeze. I picture Julia Donaldson as quite young and hip so would probably have had the same reaction.

Peter, the Penelope books sound lovely. I have a couple of Mr Men in French but that's about it.

I don't know where you are but Crocodile Blues by Coleman Polhemus is another great picture book - no words at all and the book has 4 colours only with fold-out pages. The story is really engaging and it's one of those books that the 2 year old, the 4 year old and both parents love reading.

Petermec,

Thanks for the explanation. This book is definitely going on my list.

Book 3

The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque
Lisbon, Portugal, 1942. Late evening. The narrator, telling the story in the first person, stands by the river Targus staring at the last of the ships that will sail to America. Without tickets, or even visas, hope to board her, to escape, is all but gone, baring a miracle. A German refugee, fleeing the war and the regime, the narrator has lost all but six dollars at the casino in a desperate attempt to win the funds needed to purchase his freedom. His wife Ruth awaits his return at their hotel. Suddenly he notices a man watching him in the dark. Fearful of arrest and detention he starts to walk nonchalantly away to allay suspicion. The man begins to follow and soon catches up - the miracle the narrator sought is here.

The savior, Josef Schwarz (an alias), another Germany refugee, offers the narrator free tickets (and ultimately visas and passports) to board the ship; but on one condition - that the narrator spend just one night with him. Schwarz has a story to tell and needs an ear. As they move between bars during the course of the night, we soon learn that his wife, Helen, lies dead in a wooden coffin in an anonymous hotel room and what follows is a narrative beginning in 1938 when Schwarz attained his name in a valid passport belonging to a dying Austrian refugee; along with several impressionist drawings that Schwarz has gradually sold to fund his flight from the Nazis. Denounced 5 years earlier (for what we never do discover) by Helen's brother, Georg Jurgens, an Obersturmbannfuhrer in the Gestapo, and sent to a concentration camp from which he escaped, Schwarz returns to his home of Osnabruck (the real life home of writer Erich Maria Remarque) for reasons that are ambiguous even to him.

What follows is a tale of escape from Switzerland, to France, to Spain, and finally to Portugal; all the time pursued by Georg, the Nazi regime, capture, and death. This is ultimately a story of love, a tragedy, but it is also a philosophical tract on relationships, identity, memory, life and death - existence, existentialism. It is profound and moving. Death hangs over every word, and yet to does life. The novel is layered and demands a second reading.

If you have judged Erich Maria Remarque by his most well-known work, "All Quiet on the Western Front", then this masterpiece (the last of his novels that was published while Remarque was still alive) will cause you to reevaluate your opinions.

Message edited by its author, Jan 11, 2009, 1:27am.

#18: Wow! Sounds like another terrific book. I read All Quiet on the Western Front for the first time in 2008 and thought it was great. I will definitely be reading this one as well. Thanks for the wonderful review and the recommendation!

Wow! The Night in Lisbon sounds amazing. I've never read All Quiet on the Western Front, so I don't have any preconceived notions about Erich Maria Remarque. Definitely going to add this one to my TBR list!

I too really like the sound of The Night in Lisbon, which will be going straight on my wishlist.

petermc - I'm very curious - why are you reading to your son in Japanese? Are you based there? I'm so jealous, would love to speak/read Japanese and go there some time in the future.

i read The Night in Lisbon last year and found it poignant and memorable. it's one of those books that should be read more than once...

alcottacre, allthesedarnbooks, jbeast...

If you all get the opportunity to read The Night in Lisbon please post back here and let me know your thoughts. I only hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I'm glad to hear a second endorsement by deebee.

jbeast...

In answer to your question - I live in Tokyo. Most of the books we read our son are Japanese or bilingual English-Japanese editions. I do hope you have an opportunity to visit Japan one day - it's an amazing place!

So then you're australian. And you've settled in tokyo. How cool is that! Would love to visit one day, it's on my wish list!

Message edited by its author, Jan 12, 2009, 4:39am.

Unintentionally, this thread has also become a record for the books that I read to my child. So, here is another for the younger set...

Densha de ikou, Densha de kaerou - written and illustrated by Naokata Mase
(In Japanese. This book is available in English as - "Chugging All the Way", translated by Mia Lynn Perry)

As the Japanese title indicates, you can take the train, in this reversible book, one way (ikou = shall we go) or the other (kaerou = shall we return), reading from front to back, or back to front. The train travels through a variety of picturesque Japanese country scenes and seasons, tunnels separating each one. Much of the joy in this book also comes from the sub-stories that children can construct in their own mind, to go along with the pictures in each scene - on and off the train. Aimed at the 4-8 age group, this is a delightful book that even my 2-year old can enjoy.

As for me, I'm currently re-discovering All Quiet on the Western Front, and finishing off another war memoir, The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. Stay tuned...

Message edited by its author, Jan 12, 2009, 9:07pm.

Night in Lisbon sounds great. But I was coming on here to compare notes on kids' books again, and find that your latest post is about one! We just gave our daughter a book by a Japanese author for her birthday and it's really neat - called Who's Hiding by Saturo Onishi. There are 18 animals andn they disappear when the pages change colour. It looks like it might be a Japanese classic because it was first published in 1983, and has just been published in NZ by Gecko Press, who specialise in translating delightful children's books.

I confess that I have yet to read All Quiet on the Western Front but I'm going to read it as part of Project 1929. I have Goodbye to All That downstairs and I'll read that one first.

looking forward to what u think of The Sorrow of War. i read it a few years back and it has never left me.

#25 The Sorrow of War is another one on my wish list, so will be keen to read your comments too.

#26 I read All Quiet on the Western Front at the end of last year and really enjoyed it (as much as you can enjoy a book with a theme like that). And Goodbye to All That is on my wish list. Looking forward to reading what you think of them, and which you prefer.

>28: jbeast

Given your interest in war literature, have you tried A Midnight Clear by William Wharton? I found it a very moving book.

#29 Tad, no I hadn't heard of it - just looked it up and sounds excellent, and have added it to my wish list. Thanks very much.

OK - The little guy's asleep. I have my end-of-day dram of Laphroaig Single Islay Malt Scotch Whiskey in front of me (10 Years Old - Original Cask Strength). I just pressed the order button on 9 new military related books. It's time to relax...

#26 cmt - Thanks for the recommendation, re: Who's Hiding? - will take a look in the bookshop tomorrow. As for Goodbye To All That - it is one of those books I've always wanted to read, but haven't! I look forward to hearing your impressions, and will make an effort this year to procure it.

Good luck on All Quiet on the Western Front, it's a great book. I read it so many years ago it's but a ghost in my memory. Following The Night in Lisbon, I thought it was time to renew old acquaintances.

All Quiet on the Western Front was originally published in 1928 in Germany (1929 in the USA), however it upset the NSDP so greatly that in 1930 it was banned, and in 1933 all of Remarque's books were thrown on the infamous bonfire. In Austria, soldiers were banned from reading the book in 1929. In Czechoslovakia it was banned from military libraries. The Italian translation was banned in Italy in 1933. Even in the USA, the 1929 edition was censored - but this was based more on propriety rather than political concerns.

Undeterred however, Remarque published a sequel in 1930, called The Road Back, before escaping Germany in 1932. In this book Remarque continues to explore themes on the 'lost generation' as soldiers begin the transition back to civilian life after the horrors of war.

#27 deebee1 / #28 jbeast - So far The Sorrow of War is spellbinding in it's imagery, and I look forward to returning to it after I finish this reply.

#29 TadAD - I must confess, I hadn't heard of A Midnight Clear prior to your post. Such is the value of this site! In queue however, following the previously mentioned titles, I will be reading 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 by Stanley Weintraub. Covering roughly the same period, December 16 to the relief of Bastogne on December 26, 1944, this non-fiction history is not a battle narrative; rather it tells of the soldiers individual experiences. For a comprehensive look at the Battle of the Bulge, I'll be dipping into my (rather hefty) copy of A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge by Charles B. MacDonald, later in the year; together with The Battle for the Rhine 1944 - Arnhem and the Ardennes: the campaign in Europe by Robin Neilands, for a British perspective.

Message edited by its author, Jan 13, 2009, 8:23am.

>31: petermc

I'll watch for your comments on 11 Days in December. It would be interesting to read some true accounts and compare them to the fictional.

I've just started The Sorrow of War, so I'll be interested in your comments--it sounds like you've read it before. I've read many books on the Vietnam debacle from the American point of view, and this will be my first from the North Vietnamese perspective.

If you're going to read it in one night, you'll finish it way before I do!

#33 arubabookwoman - It's been a very, very long time since I've read a book in one sitting. With a 4.30am start each morning, on top of life's other challenges, I'm lucky if I can manage a dozen pages in an evening! In fact, if it wasn't for a 2-hour commute each day, I'd be lucky to complete any book in less than a month!

I'm betting you'll complete that book before I do ;)

Book 4

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Therapy is often cited as the reason men sit down to write of their experiences in the crucible of war. And such was the reason Erich Maria Remarque put pen to paper in 1928, fighting depression and a feeling of quiet desperation, while editor of the famous German sporting journal Sport im Bild.

When interviewed in 1952, Remarque estimated that 6 million copies of All Quiet on the Western Front had been sold. Indeed, published in Germany in January 1929 in book form, it sold one million copies in 16 months in that country alone. By the end of 1929 it had been translated into 12 different languages.

With its anti-war sentiment it was soon banned by the NSDP in 1930, and in 1933 all of Remarque's books were ceremonially thrown onto the infamous bonfires that consumed anything that failed to meet with Nazi ideology. In Austria, soldiers were banned from reading the book in 1929. In Czechoslovakia it was banned from military libraries. The Italian translation was banned in Italy in 1933.

For as many copies that have been sold, there have probably been an equivalent number of words written to analyse what has become the benchmark to which all war memoirs are judged. In front of me, I have The Sorrow of War, Somme Mud, The Things They Carried and A Rumor of War - they have all been compared to Remarque's magnum opus.

What is common to each, are the themes of alienation a soldier feels on returning to civilian life after war, the disconnect youth feel from their pre-war lives when they are without roots in society, the importance of comradeship and the bonds that develop between men facing horrors that are beyond the understanding of anyone who hasn't faced the brutality of war personally, and the dehumanising effects of war; a loss of innocence - they who have only known killing. They highlight how idealistic notions of sacrifice and honour are lost in the grim realities of mud, deprivations, barrages and hand-to-hand combat.

If Remarque intended that "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.", then he was being naive. Consciously or not, Remarque has written a book that is a very powerful accusation against those in power and the industrialists who "profit by the war". He writes, "that wars really ought to be fought by the state secretaries and generals dressed in swim trunks and armed only with sticks ."

In Chapter 10, injured, he lies in hospital and here his accusations are palpable,

And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must all be lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

Without following a traditional storyline, Remarque has created a series of vignettes, narrated in the first person by the protaganist Paul Baumer, with chapters alternating between the front-line and the relative safety of life behind the lines. Here, there is humour and moments of tenderness - efforts to catch a goose, stealing a night with French maidens by crossing a river in the dead of night. But, ultimately it is the pervading sense of loss that permeates the soul of the reader.

In the final chapters, Remarque is at his most eloquent. Here, he finds the voice, a poetic quality, that best illustrates what has made this novel an enduring and much loved best seller...

The summer of 1918 is the most bloody and the most terrible. The days stand like angels in blue and gold, incomprehensible, above the ring of annihilation. Every man here knows that we are losing the war. Not much is said about it, we are falling back, we will not be able to attack again after this big offensive, we have no more men and no more ammunition.

Still the campaign goes on - the dying goes on -

Summer of 1918 - Never has life in its niggardliness seemed to us so desirable as now; - the red poppies in the meadows round our billets, the smooth beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, dim rooms, the black, mysterious trees of the twilight, the stars and the flowing waters, dreams and long seep - O Life, life, life!

Summer of 1918 - Never was so much silently suffered as in the moment when we depart once again for the front-line. Wild, tormenting rumours of an armistice and peace are in the air, they lay hold on our hearts and make the return to the front harder that ever.

Summer of 1918 - Never was life in the line more bitter and full of horror in the hours of the bombardment, when the blanched faces lie in the dirt and the hands clutch at the one thought: No! No! Not now! Not now at the last moment!

Summer of 1918 - Breath of hope that sweeps over the scorched fields, raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, of the most agonising terror of death, insensate question: Why? Why do they not make an end? And why do these rumours of an end fly about?

"Not now at the last moment!" - Yet it is at the last moment, on an October day in 1918 that Paul Baumer, suffering after the death of his only remaining friend, Kat, meets his end. A new voice reports (who we do not know) that, in death, his face was tranquil and seemingly satisfied; on a day so quiet that it is reduced to a single sentence in the daily war bulletin, "All Quiet on the Western Front".

Message edited by its author, Jan 15, 2009, 8:04am.

For my legions of 2-year old readers...

"Click, Clack, ABC" by Doreen Cronin
(US title "Click, Clack, Quackity-Quack: An Alphabetical Adventure")

How do you make an ABC book more interesting than just a loose collection of words? Well, you can create a storyline, give it a rhythm, and match it with large delightful pictures on hardy child-proof boards. Here's a taste: "Animals Awake, Beneath Blue Blankets, Clickety-Clack, Duck Dashing, Eggs Emptying...". Yes, those cows that type, in this popular series by Doreen Cronin, have typed out a set of instructions that ultimately lead to "X marks the Picnic Spot". My little guy loves it, and has had me read it so often I've memorized every word!

>35 re: Book # 4
That was a great review! I read All Quiet very long ago, probably 25 years ago. I do remember being very impressed and really liking it. It may be time for a re-read as I remember almost no details about it.

Thank you for the compliment, profilerSR.

You know, it's a pity Remarque is known virtually for this novel alone. His "Lisbon" novel, reviewed beforehand, is equally worthy of note; and reading reviews of his other works, they all seem to be of the highest quality. It's a pity they are so expensive in paperback :(

Book 5

11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 by Stanley Weintraub
Weintraub writes that this is not "a detailed military history", instead it is "a look at eleven days on a frozen World War II battlefront through the lens of Christmas"; and at just 12 chapters (an allusion to the 12 days of Christmas?) and at under 181 pages of text before the 'sources', the reader could little expect the book to even scratch the surface of a campaign, that within hours of it's opening on December 16th, 1944, lacked a homogeneous front, with battles being fought at the company and platoon level. A battle that opened with the Germans holding the initiative.

So the enormity of Weintraub's task is made immediately clear - provide a short and concise history that conveys a sense of the campaign, while focusing on the theme of Christmas. Unfortunately, the very nature of the campaign, as detailed above, is reflected in this book - the story jumps from place to place (like a Greatest Hits collection) without any well defined organisation, and a plethora of detail adds little to the reader's overall appreciation of the greater story. The author also fails to engender any real empathy with the soldiers and the accounts feel dry as a consequence, while space given to Niven, Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich feel almost gratuitous and add little to his thesis.

However, there are nuggets to be found, and the author is on stronger ground in the second half of the book as the focus shifts more toward the Christmas theme. Anyone with a genuine interest in the Battle of the Ardennes (as the US Army officially termed it) may find this work of mild interest; for those looking for a quick introduction, it may leave you more confused than enlightened.

>39: Oh well, that's a pass then. I'm still looking for a good book on that battle that neither over-simplifies nor inundates me.

>40

The following (in no particular order) are possibly considered to be the three top books on the campaign as a whole...

A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge by Charles B. MacDonald
Battle: The Story of the Bulge by John Toland
The Bitter Woods: The Battle of the Bulge by John S. D. Eisenhower

As I didn't want to buy three books on the same subject (limited funds!), I spent a lot of time researching the pros and cons of each and eventually went with the rather hefty tome by MacDonald. It's on the TBR list this year. It is exhaustive in its detail however and may be in that "inundating" category. Stay tuned...

As for "11 Days", I find myself siding with the Publishers Weekly review, despite a fair few great reviews on Amazon - oh well, mine is just one more opinion to weigh in the balance :)

Message edited by its author, Jan 19, 2009, 9:39am.

Aha! I've found your thread! Per your review, I think I'll be looking for a copy of The Night In Lisbon.

Looking forward to your review of the MacDonald book!

Reading News: Just picked up a copy of A Companion to the Vietnam War (Blackwell Companions to American History) edited by Marilyn Blatt Young and Robert Buzzanco. According to the blurb, this book consists of 24 "definitive...historiographical and narrative essays by leading historians" that examine the Vietnam War "in its most important contexts."

On examination, this book is definitely not light reading. The plan is to read one essay per week (or every few weeks). I might comment on each essay as I read it, or I might amalgamate my thoughts in one final review. We'll see.

------
> 42 - Thanks for dropping by. I'm just doing my small part to launch a Remarque revival :)

More great reviews! I shut my eyes when I say your review of All Quiet because I was in the middle of the book. There were so many quotable, haunting paragraphs.

I have A Rumor of War here somewhere to read. I haven't read a thing on Vietnam. Have you read A Bright Shining Lie or Chickenhawk? I have those to read as well...

cmt,

I have "Chickenhawk" somewhere about here... Ah! There it is! But, I'm afraid I do not have "A Bright Shining Lie" - I'll look forward to hearing more on that one.

The TBR list grows longer every day!!!!

Vis-a-vis Vietnam, this is the 2009 TBR list as of today...
(in no particular order)

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (in progress)

A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo (in progress)

A Companion to the Vietnam War (Blackwell Companions to American History) edited by Marilyn Blatt Young and Robert Buzzanco (in progress)

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Palace Cobra: A Fighter Pilot in the Vietnam Air War by Ed Rasimus

Chickenhawk by Robert Mason

Ending the Vietnam War : A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War by Henry Kissinger

Vietnam : The Australian War by Paul Ham

Message edited by its author, Jan 21, 2009, 4:57pm.

#45: Just so you know, petermc, I am stealing ideas to read off your list. I am trying to read books about the Vietnam War this year as well because it is a period of history with which I am not very familiar.

petermc - Interesting list. A few more ideas. Maybe you know something about them? :

Vietnam: A history by Stanley Karnow - which was very comprehensive and nice to read.
American Grunt: A Vietnam Veteran's Journal by Bo Boudreaux - I own, but haven't read this.
The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham - somewhere on my TBR

alcottacre & dchaikin,

Thanks for dropping by guys. You know, when I loosely set my reading goals for 2009, Vietnam did not figure very high. Rather, I was going to focus on Iraq, Terrorism, and my old favourite, WWII; with a spattering of WWI, Korea, and Vietnam thrown in for good measure. But thanks to the corrupting influence of LT, I suddenly find Vietnam taking precedence! Oh well, plenty of time to get back on track ;)

Thanks for the list dchaikin. I have had an opportunity to peruse Karnow's volume and while it may not be the most balanced, there is much to be taken from here, even after 25 years. The other two books had escaped my notice until now, so thanks for pointing them out. I'd be definitely interested in reading your opinions.

-----

In other news, added to the Iraq pile are two books - the first is Generation Kill by Evan Wright, which is a portrait of the elite Marine unit, the 1st Recon Battalion, which spearheaded the American-led invasion force in Iraq. The second is One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel C. Fick, who was an officer in the same unit examined in Generation Kill. It will be interesting to read these side by side.

I didn't see it on your list but you might want to add Joker One to your Iraq list.

Besides The Sorrow of War do you have any other Vietnamese Vietnam War recommendations?

sgtbigg,

Joker One is already near the top of a rather imposing wish list, alongside "Sniper One" by Dan Mills, The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, Baghdad Sunrise by Peter Mansoor, and a host of Bing West books.

Vis-a-vis Vietnamese Vietnam War books, I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. On a recent walk through my local bookshop, there were several new translations dealing with the war and its aftermath. This is an area I'm yet to explore as deeply as I would like to, but Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong, is one that is very like The Sorrow of War and has likewise been compared to Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip, is another on the wish list, but yet to be read. So, although I can't recommend it as such, I can say it does look to be very interesting.

Edit: Touchstones - Aggghhh!!!!

Message edited by its author, Jan 22, 2009, 5:39pm.

Thanks, I have Portrait of the Enemy which I haven't read but it's on the TBR list for this year. I think I'll kick it down a little in favor of The Sorrow of War.

Book 6

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
Sierra Leone, January, 1993 - Ishmael Beah (born November, 1980) is in Mattru Jong, with his brother and a friend, 16 miles from his home of Mogbwemo in the Moyamba District, to attend a talent show performing as a rap and dance group, when news comes that his village has been attacked by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Intent on returning home to find and be reunited with their families, they are ultimately destined to wander the bush fleeing from the violence and recruitment into the RUF.

Through adventure and misadventure that makes up much of the first half of the book, Beah suffers the most tragic loss of all, before finally finding protection in Yele, Bonthe District, under the protection of the Sierra Leonean government army. The army however, depleted through various battles against the RUF, are finally forced to appeal to the young men to come forward and fight; to protect the village and revenge the deaths of their families and friends. While not forcibly conscripted, the alternative is eviction from from the village and their protection. Here, Beah, at 13-years of age finally resigns to his fate - as a child soldier.

The next few years are filled with unrelenting violence and killing, fuelled by hatred, drugs, peer pressure and war movies; until, in January 1996, he is chosen by his commander to go with a UNICEF team to Freetown to be rehabilitated and repatriated as a civilian. Brainwashed, suffering drug addiction and feeling betrayed, the rehabilitation process is anything but smooth, but through the dedication and patience of a nurse, Esther, Beah is finally rehabilitated and released into the care of his uncle.

A gifted performer and speaker, in 1996, Beah would be chosen to go to the United Nations in New York City, to represent the youth of his country in the First International Children's Parliament. It was here that he met Laura Simms, who would eventually become his foster mother and help bring Beah to New York to live in 1998, after Beah was forced to flee his home in Freetown after the overthrow of the democratically elected government, and the death of his uncle.

Blessed with a photographic memory, Beah writes with remarkable recall and detail. The simplicity of his writing gives his story added power. After travelling with the 'innocent' Beah through the first half of the book, the violence he is capable of, retold in graphic detail, increases its dramatic impact on the reader. If the book has any short comings, then it may be in its abrupt end. The book's credibility has been challenged in some quarters, but if its remarkable success has helped raise the issue of child soldiers to the prominence it deserves, then Beah may feel he has nothing to prove.

Message edited by its author, Jan 24, 2009, 9:44am.

I've been reading A Long Way Gone out loud to a high school student I tutor, but have only read a few random chapters. Beah's story is fascinating, but I can't say I like the simplicity of his style--is it worth reading it from the beginning anyway, if I already know the gist of the story?

Message 31 & 32 , I bought 11 Days in December as a Christmas present for my husband who reads a lot of WWII books. I will read this one when he is finished with it.

Welcome to the group ptermc. There have been so many posts and new people to the 75 challenge that I'm having a difficult time keeping up with it all.

Your reading list is impressive. And, I enjoy learning about what you are reading to your two year old son.

Your thread is very interesting and I'll star it so that I can keep afloat of what is happening both with your reading habits and your son.

Well, a quick check of the reading list in Message 1 will reveal that I have finished The Sorrow of War, but work and family commitments have kept me from writing a considered review. I look forward to rectifying that during the coming week.

Now...

> 53 - wunderkind - To paraphrase, 'Is it worth reading from the beginning if you already know the gist of it?'. I believe it is. As you may note, I didn't shy away from discussing the full gist of the book in my review (something I don't usually do), because I think the power of the work is in the immediacy of the story and (IMHO) that has much to do with the 'simplicity' in which it is written. I hope that makes sense.

> 54 - Whisper1 - Thank you for the kind words. Please let me know your husband's, and your own, thoughts on "11 Days". And as for the bed-time story reviews, I will definitely keep on making notes :) My son received a gift of 99 new books yesterday - so there is plenty to write about! (There is no special significance in the number 99 - that's just how many it turned out to be!).

Peter: 99 books???? Did you just say 99 books????!!! Wow, he must have either A LOT of people who love him or a lot of rich friends :)

> 56 - girlunderglass,

"99 books???? Did you just say 99 books????!!!" - YIP!

"...he must have either A LOT of people who love him..." - TRUE

"...or a lot of rich friends" - I WISH ;)

Message edited by its author, Jan 26, 2009, 6:43am.

A two hour commute -- you poor thing! Great stuff here. Glad I found your thread.

> 58 - suslyn,

Thank you, and be thankful I have that 2-hour commute. Without it, I would have little time to read anything :)

Book 7

Please note, that this review is as much about my own interpretations of the novel as it is about the novel itself. There is much that I have not touched upon as another book of similar length could be written just on its themes and interpretations. It is perhaps one of the more complex and intriguing novels I have read in some time and is wholly recommended.

This review may contain SPOILERS.

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
While The Sorrow of War is a fictional memoir of the Vietnam War as seen by a North Vietnamese veteran, it stands as one of Vietnam's most widely acclaimed novels on the conflict, next to Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong, and is often compared to and studied alongside The Things They Carried in terms of thematic and stylistic elements.

Originally published (and initially banned) in Vietnam in 1991 as Thân phận của tình yêu, by Hoàng Ấu Phương (aka Bao Ninh), it was renamed Nỗi buồn chiến tranh, or loosely translated and entitled in English, The Sorrow of War. Various books on the subject have translated the original title in various forms - "Loves Fate", "The Fate of Love", "The Destiny of Love", and "The Understanding of Love". My own more literal translation would be "The Plight of Love", and I feel that this captures the main theme of the book.

Kein's writes his story in a non-linear narrative, a stream of consciousness broken into fragments that might be taken up again, or even recounted at any point - a "work created by turbulent, even manic inspirations". But, this does not imply that the book is without structure. The novel develops in a progression with undefined boundaries - of memories dominated by the war; to Kien's struggle as the author, to exorcise his demons and perhaps find solace in the past; and ultimately to his relationship with Phuong; as if this confrontation with the truth about what happened to Phuong on a fateful train ride at the beginning of the war is a memory to painful to approach directly. There are hints throughout the novel, there are intimations, but confrontation with certain memories are harder than others.

On completion of his story, Kein leaves the pages in the hands of a mute girl living in his building, in the attic once used by his father as a studio. There he would paint "diabolical" humans, wandering "aimlessly across unreal landscape". The mute girl could be said to be the living embodiment of those paintings. Her muteness, symbolic of all those witness to the horror, unable or unwilling to speak out. In her hands the manuscript represents a voice through which to speak, but it is she who must ultimately have the courage to use it.

The war starts when Kein was just 16 years old, on a vacation camp at Do Son, where he and Phuong hear the news as they watch a storm develop across the Tonkin Gulf - a portent in itself of war and the storm that would tear their lives apart. Yet, this is not just Kein's story. Long after Kein has finished his novel and disappears, the mute girl finds it in herself to deliver the unnumbered pages into the hands of the man who would ultimately publish it. We hear his voice, in the first person, interspersed with Kien's through the novel, as in it he sees that "his story were ideas and feelings and even situations of mine", and despite the fact that "each of us had been crushed by the war in a different way", they also "shared a common sorrow, the immense sorrow of war".

Message edited by its author, Jan 27, 2009, 6:57am.

I just finished reading The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and while The Sorrow of War is on my list of books to read for my study of the Vietnam War this year, I think I will wait a bit on it. Thanks, though, for the review.

> 60 i also liked this book very much, haunting, complex and not easy to forget. peter, since u read a lot of war novels, was wondering if you've come across The Time of Light by Gunnar Kopperud? it's about a German ex-soldier who decades after, continues to look for atonement for their army's atrocities in Stalingrad. also another complex and very well-written war novel.

> 62 - deebee1,

I have not read The Time of Light, but it looks intriguing. Thank you for the pointing me in the right direction.

Stalingrad is on my list of subjects to learn more about in 2009, to that end I'm looking forward to To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations, April-August 1942 by David M. Glantz, which will be released in April, 2009. This is the first in a trilogy by Glantz, covering the Soviet-German operations around Stalingrad from 1942 to 1943. At 700+ pages, it will be non-fiction reading at some of its heaviest - Yay!

Probably a silly question but have you read Beevor's Stalingrad already?

I just finished The Sorrow of War and agree it is a complex and important work. I was puzzled throughout the book by Kien's relationship with Phuong, and as I noted when I discussed the book on my thread, I felt that I would have better understood their relationship and Phuong's character if there had been some reference to the trauma she underwent at the beginning of the war earlier in the novel.

I read The Things They Carried so many years ago my recollection of that book might not be accurate, but The Things They Carried was a book that moved me more deeply than The Sorrow of War, perhaps because in The Sorrow of War the narrator is describing the war from a distance, trying to understand it intellectually. As I recall, The Things They Carried focused on the immediacy of the war itself, rather than on the after effects of the war. We never got to know any character in The Things They Carried as deeply as we did Kien, but we got into the minds of a broad range of characters and their families.

> 64 - cmt (Can I call you Cushla?): I read Stalingrad many years ago, and plan to perhaps reread it this year.

> 65 - arubabookwoman: Thank you for your thoughts regarding The Sorrow of War. I agree that knowing more of Phuong's ordeal (and knowing that Kien's manuscript had been delivered into the hands of the books final narrator), would have crystallized much of what occurs early in the book, but as I suggested in my review, the most painful memories are not always approached so readily or easily. I've actually speed read through the book again since finishing it, and took so much more from it the second time.

I've seen a lot of love for The Things They Carried in a number of threads recently, and look forward to reading this in February so I can draw my own comparisons. I will keep your thoughts in mind as I do.

Book 8

After reading 11 Days in December (see review in Message 39), I suddenly recalled having this very slim volume tucked away amongst a bunch of books on the American Civil War.

God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers: A True Civil War Christmas Story by James McIvor
This slim volume tells the story of Christmas in 1862, leading up to and including the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, the Battle of Stones River (also referred to as the Battle of Murfreesboro), fought from December 31, 1862, to January 2, 1863 in Middle Tennessee. As well as, the impact of the civil war on Christmas in America in the years that followed.

The Christmas of 1862 was the second of the civil war, and where the Christmas of 1861 was marked by the spirit of adventure and enthusiasm, 1862 had given way to weariness and disenchantment. Through the letters and diaries of the participants and contemporaries, and the music and poetry of the period, we see this Christmas as they themselves saw it.

This book does not pretend to be a battle history, or a comprehensive treatment of the political issues concerning the war. What it does give us is a beautifully rendered and balanced account of the period, and those moments and acts of humaneness that exemplify the spirit of Christmas.

It was here, in one of those defining moments, on Christmas Eve, that Confederate and Union soldiers playing and singing their respective patriotic songs on either side of the front line unexpectedly found themselves joining together in singing "Home Sweet Home" in a poignant moment of shared adversity.

Message edited by its author, Jan 28, 2009, 8:05am.

#66 Yep, you can call me Cushla - in fact I'm trying to get the LT gods to change my username. I'm looking forward to seeing what your next three Stalingrad books are like. I'm not up for 2100 pages on it, but good for you. I thought Beevor's book was excellent.

Haven't read your comments about The Sorrow of War yet because of the spoiler warning (thanks!), not that I'll get to it any time this decade at the rate my TBR-Very-Soon list is growing!

#67: I have added that one to Continent TBR as well.

I will be interested in seeing your thoughts on The Things They Carried when you get a chance to read it. I just finished it last night - it will be one of my memorable reads for this year.

Bed-time story review...

Mushi Mushi Daare? - written by Mitsuhiko Imamori and Illustrated by Yousuke Imamori
(Japanese Language)
"Mushi" is the Japanese word for insect. This beautifully illustrated book introduces children (primarily aged 3-5) to a number of common insects along with associated onomatopoeia, such as the Toko Toko (walking onomatopoeia) of the Dangomushi (Australian English: Slater). This book was personally signed by the author and the illustrator, but my son saw fit to tear out this page and several others! Despite it's rather shortened and dilapidated state however, it's still a favourite.

#70 - I'm entertained by your son's treatment of the book. We have a number of those lying about.
#67 - That was a really nice review. I will likely never read that book, but your comments on it will stay in mind.

> 71 - dchaikin,

Thank you for your nice comments. As for my son, I think we are succeeding in teaching him to have a healthy respect for books - we've seen far less mutilation recently :)

OK, OK! I know this is LibraryThing, not MovieThing, but last night I had the pleasure of watching a movie that bridges both worlds...

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (2007) - Directed by Richard Robbins
In 2004 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) developed Operation Homecoming, "to help U.S. troops and their families write about their wartime experiences", sending "some of America’s most distinguished writers" to conduct "workshops at military installations".

As a result of this initiative, the NEA received over 1,200 submissions, of which about 100 were compiled into an anthology, Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (2006), edited by Andrew Carroll; and subsequently expanded in 2008 - the "Updated Edition".

The movie, features several of these stories and poems, read by professional actors such as Robert Duvall, as voice overs to dramatized short films, reenactments, and in one case animation. Interspersed between the readings, the writers talk about their stories and their experiences direct to camera, alongside well established authors of the genre such as Tim O'Brien, Joe Haldeman and Tobias Wolff.

Some of these stories are immensely powerful, such as "Taking Chance" by U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl. While some feature some sharp black humour, as in "Camp Muckamungus" by U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Parker Gyokeres. A few of these stories are available on the internet, as are short videos from the film, at the following site:
http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about...

I challenge anyone to watch this movie throughout and keep a dry eye. I will be looking forward to reading the book, and I leave you with the poem that closes the movie, and is available in the book Here, Bullet by Brian Turner - the only book of poetry I've ever been compelled to buy.

Ashbah
by Brian Turner

The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,
unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice
sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

Book 9

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and The New Face of American War by Evan Wright

"Being around them is reminiscent of being a thirteen-year-old at a weekend sleepover with all of your very best friends in the world. Only this weekend goes on indefinitely, perpetually nurturing the mystical bonds, the warrior dreams."

Winner of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award in 2005, awarded to outstanding non-fiction books pertinent to USMC history, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and The New Face of American War originated as a series of articles written for, and published in, Rolling Stone magazine by journalist Evan Wright. A one-time editor at Hustler magazine, who came to specialise in writing about youth subcultures, Wright saw the military as a natural extension of this theme, and thus came to be embedded with 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, in the lightly armoured lead Humvee of Team 1 as it spearheaded the American-led invasion force on Iraq between March 19th and April 9th, 2003.

Armed with only Moleskine notebooks, Wright faithfully recorded the day by day activities of the battalion and the the lives of the Marines in which he placed his trust and faith as a non-combatant. Written mainly from the perspective of the enlisted men of Bravo Company, this character driven Baghdad-or-Bust road-trip revolves largely around the following men - Second Platoon's commander, 25 year-old Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick; Team One leader, 28 year-old Sergeant Brad "The Iceman" Colbert; 31 year-old Sergeant Rudy "Ballbags" Reyes; 30 year-old Sergeant Antonio Espera; 22 year-old Corporal Josh Ray Person; and 19 year-old Lance Corporal Harold James Trombley. Bravo Company's Third Platoon's 31 year-old commander, nicknamed "Captain America", and Bravo Company's company commander, nicknamed "Encino Man", late 30s; are also the subject of Wright's pen. Both are widely despised within the Company and are often the subject of heated discussion amongst the team members and tensions eventually boil over.

At the tip of the invasion force, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion often find themselves the northern-most force in Iraq, and subsequently under heavy enemy fire. Gaining the respect of the Marines for his tenacity at staying with the team in these most trying of conditions, the men open up to Wright and discuss their feelings. Civilian deaths is a subject that Wright explores repeatedly, and the episodes he depicts highlight the horrors of war and the emotional strain these Marines find themselves under.

"Graves sees a little girl curled up in the backseat. She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California. There's a small amount of blood on the upholstery, but the girl's eyes are open. She seems to be cowering. Graves reaches in to pick her up - thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her, he later says - when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out. When Graves steps back, he nearly falls over when his boot slips in the girl's brains. It takes a full minute before Graves can actually talk. The situation is one he can only describe in elemental terms. "I could see her throat from the top of her skull," he says..... Graves is devastated. "This is the event that is going to get to me when I go home," he says."

Wright also criticises and highlights the lack of planning and preparedness of the invasion force for the occupation after the fall of Baghdad.

For anyone interested in the invasion as seen by the Marines on the ground there are probably few better books. Wright has been criticised for not talking enough to the high-level brass and taking into account the stresses of command, as well as focusing more on what went wrong rather than what went right. There are also suggestions that conversations were reported out of context and details omitted, and that commanders come across as incompetent despite the fact that the majority were quite the opposite. One member of the Battalion in an Amazon review notes that the book is "80% Accurate, 20% Interpretation" - if you find those percentages acceptable, read this book.

Message edited by its author, Feb 5, 2009, 8:50am.

Oh my goodness. Generation Kill sounds like a powerful book. A couple of my good friends are Marines currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan -- I can only imagine what they've gone through. That excerpt about the little girl, though, makes me think that this is a book that I'll want to pick at a little bit at a time.

There are no words to describe my reaction to Graves' description of the death of the 3 year old girl. I am in tears. Multiple this by thousands and thousands and it becomes more and more incomprehensible.

Despite the guilt and pain, I will read this book.

> 75 / 76

Regarding the passage quoted in my review. This is one of the more extreme cases in the book and certainly doesn't represent the overall tone and style. You will learn just as much about the boredom, the sand, the heat and the latrines! But, it is a book worth reading.

I'm currently reading One Bullet Away by ex-Second Platoon commander, 25 year-old Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick, who Wright journeys with in Generation Kill. Fick's book is much dryer, but does paint a much broader picture. Generation Kill has also been made into a 7-part HBO television series. I recently picked up the DVD box set and started watching a few days ago. It's interesting comparing it to the book - while the book is able to place many of the events in a context, the series feels more like actually being there as you are only aware of what is happening directly around you. It also helps to bring the book to life, allowing you to put real images and sounds to the words.

Message edited by its author, Feb 5, 2009, 11:59pm.

I wish everyone could read this book so whenever the country contemplates "armed conflict" there is a realistic understanding of what that means.

Book 10

The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History by Katrin Himmler

"When I was fifteen, one of my classmates suddenly asked during a history lesson whether I was related to "the Himmler". I managed to stammer a 'Yes'. There was a deathly hush in the classroom. Everyone was tense and on the alert. However, the teacher lost her nerve and went on as if nothing had happened. She missed the opportunity of getting us to see what connection, if any, there still was between us, the later generation, and those 'old stories'."

And, so begins Michael Mitchell's translation of Katrin Himmler's Die Brüder Himmler: Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte, originally published in 2005.

Requested by her father in 1997 to access recently released files at the Federal Archives, on his father (Katrin's grandfather) Ernst Himmler, brother to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Katrin suddenly found herself on a journey to confront a difficult truth that in her family had long been clouded in myth, assumption and denial; "a painful process, and one constantly jeopardised by fears of what one might lose".

And, as the introductory paragraph and subtitle, "A German Family History", intimates, 'denial' is something Katrin feels many German families may be guilty of and which people need to have the courage to face. An idea that is cast into sharp relief by Katrin's search for the truth about her own family.

Centered on the three brothers Gerbhard, Heinrich, and Ernst Himmler, and using a wealth a private family archival material, Katrin paints a very intimate portrait of a family molded by the circumstances of the period, without being excusatory. She examines the influence of their parents, the First World War, and the immediate postwar period in Germany. There is a natural focus on Heinrich Himmler, but she does not ignore the wives and families, and their extended families.

Beyond reports, letters, memory, and photographs, much of what is left to the historian is supposition, but Katrin never crosses the line of presenting conjecture as fact. Personal thoughts and opinions are presented as such and often as open questions. Her narrative comes across as open, sincere and conversational, and this book is as much about her own journey as in the history she hopes to present.

Writing as a mother with an eight-year-old son, born to her Jewish Israeli husband, a marriage often strained by the ghosts of their collective pasts, Katrin could have retained the family myths, of her grandfather as a non-political technocrat, and distance her side of the family from the extremes of Heinrich Himmler. Instead she has written this starkly honest book. Of her son she states, in the closing paragraph of her remarkably candid epilogue, "I am still afraid of the moment when he will learn that one side of his family made every effort to wipe out the other."

Message edited by its author, Feb 9, 2009, 7:40pm.

A fabulous review, petermc. This book will be added to my TBR pile for sure.

Message edited by its author, Feb 9, 2009, 7:57pm.

Peter
This book was mentioned on another thread as well and I added it to my tbr pile. I agree with lorie; your review is great!

> 80 / 81

Thanks for the kind words :)

Whisper1 - I actually discussed this book on your own thread - from message #186 to #197 - emanating from a discussion on Roald Dahl. Some of what I wrote there formed my thinking in this final review. By the way, I've been enjoying your reviews on Dahl's books.

Peter
duh....please accept my apologies. I've had a long, difficult day and forgot that it was you who recommended this book in the first place. I am sorry for the confusion...

I enjoy your posts, your reviews and our joint love of the pre-raphelities.

>79: wow. Sounds like a very powerful book. Not usually my kind of thing at all but one I'm going to look out for - thanks.

Book 11

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel Fick

While his fellow Ivy League classmates from Dartmouth College "signed six-figure contracts as consultants and investment bankers", or "headed off to law school or medical school for a few more years of reading instead of living", Nathaniel Fick looked for something more "transformative" - something that would either kill him or leave him "better, stronger, more capable". He became a "warrior" - a Marine.

Divided into three parts; "Peace", "War", and "Aftermath"; Nathaniel Fick's memoir One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer takes us from Marine OCS (Officer Candidate School); to a tour of duty in Afghanistan; to Iraq as commander of the Second Platoon of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion; and finally to detailing life after the Marine Corps and dealing with the effects of post traumatic stress disorder.

A classics major at Dartmouth, Fick, perhaps unconsciously, is liberal with his classical Greek connotations. Just in the first few pages, he quotes Thucydides, is able to translate a Latin motto ("Leadership by Example"), and laments that he was born too late and that in Athens or Sparta his decisions would have been easier. Together with his matter-of-fact style of writing that often borders on the clinical - attempts as purple prose feeling forced and ingenuous - it's difficult to warm to Fick the man.

While Fick is obviously a man of great integrity, honesty and thoughtfulness, read in conjunction with the book, Generation Kill by Evan Wright - a book based on Evan Wrights travels with the platoon commanded by Fick in Iraq - One Bullet Away often feels sanitized in comparison. While Fick is not beyond critical analysis, many of the problems and issues raised in Wright's book are often glossed over or are not addressed.

Some reviewers have called the book 'carefully crafted', written with one eye to a future in office, while his more candid comments as quoted in Generation Kill provide greater insight into Fick's true character or feelings. These are all valid points that merit consideration.

If you have to read one book on the Marine Recon. forces during the first months of the US led invasion on Iraq, then read Generation Kill. But, if you are looking for a platoon commander's point of view, or are looking to add a few footnotes, an appendix, and an extra chapter to Wright's book you should consider One Bullet Away.

Message edited by its author, Feb 12, 2009, 12:30am.

petermc - Thanks for the great reviews. I think the Himmler Brothers...well, just wow... that may be a book I need to get a hold of.

> 86

Thanks for the compliment dchaikin. I take a lot of time over these reviews, so it's nice to know they're appreciated.

I was just checking out your profile and see you are in geology. Well, I have a book coming up later this year that might tickle your fancy - Beneath Flanders Fields: The Tunnellers' War 1914-1918. It certainly ticks all the right boxes for me - as someone interested in Military History, and as a Mining Engineer (although not currently working in the industry).

Message edited by its author, Feb 13, 2009, 6:46am.

Hi petermc, You're mining engineer with a location in "Japan/Australia"? Interesting, you'll have to tell more about what you do. I work for a seismic company, which finally got me out in the field for a week training course last summer, the only time in 10 yrs. My rocks come in wiggles on screen.

I'll look forward to your review.

Peter
Thanks again for your wonderful reviews and great recommendations.

You have quite an interesting library.

I just want you to know that even though I am not commenting, I am paying rapt attention to your thread. My Continent has grown exponentially.

> 88: No longer working in the mining industry or in any related industry. Left it all behind when I moved to Japan.

> 89 & 90: Thanks for the kind words. *embarassed face*

I'm still here reading your thread too (I can't post on my own thread because I am stuck in a reading rut! so I'm getting off here now to go and read... )

I have a new book by Glyn Harper out of the library that you might like if you haven't already read it - Dark Journeys (I think, touchstone not working) - about NZ/Australian troops and the Western Front. It's huge though and I am still knee-deep in Cicero, so at this rate I won't have anything interesting to say about it before it's due back.

cmt,

Thanks for the recommendation. I really look forward to your review when you get around to reading Dark Journey: Three Key New Zealand Battles of the Western Front. Harper is perhaps New Zealand's leading military historian, and the author of several books on NZ at war. I will certainly keep an eye out for it myself.

Book 12

The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur by Brian Steidle and Gretchen Steidle Wallace

I'm sometimes asked why I read and collect books on military history, and my answer is usually twofold. Firstly, family history; and secondly, to recite from the "Ode of Remembrance", "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old. / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning, / We will remember them". Lest we forget.

But military history is not just relegated to the realm of long forgotten battles that gather dust on the shelves of libraries, echoes of youthful exuberance shattered by the scream of incoming shells, medals that lie tarnished behind glass, or rows upon rows of alabaster white stones reflecting the light that once shone so briefly on those whose names are so intricately carved above three simple letters – RIP. We live in a world were conflict is a daily occurrence, where our history is still being written and we still have the power to affect its outcome, and this is a third reason I read books such as these.

The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur documents the experiences of 27 year-old former U.S. Marine Captain, Brian Steidle, who, through his job as a neutral observer with the AU (African Union), monitors compliance to a cease-fire agreement between rebel groups in the Darfur region of Sedan. With each new violation, armed only with a camera and a notebook, Steidle and his team interview victims and perpetrators and document their findings.

Growing ever more frustrated at the lack of action in response to the atrocities Steidle bears witness to on an almost daily basis - atrocities that can only be labelled as genocide - the author finds himself becoming increasingly more disillusioned with the whole programme and ultimately resigns at the completion of his contract. With thousands of photographs, and with his reports compiled during his time on the ground, it would be at home in the U.S. that Steidle would find the opportunity to make a real difference.

The Devil Came on Horseback could have been a much better book, but circumstance does not often pick the most accomplished writer to tell her story. Instead, what we have is an honest book and an important eyewitness record to systematic, government supported genocide that everyone should read or be aware of. People looking for greater background on the conflict may like to supplement Steidle's book with Darfur: A New History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal.

This evening I watched the 2007 documentary film "The Devil Came on Horseback" (http://www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com/) which vividly and powerfully translates the book onto the big screen. Even if you don't read the book, spare 85 minutes for this film.

Message edited by its author, Feb 20, 2009, 8:54am.

Another great post. Thanks!

ditto message 95

>94: found that very moving, petermc - thank you.

> 95, 96, 97 - Thanks, ditto, thank you ;)

Not much time for reading recently, but the next review will be....
Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W. Ryback

peter:

Let's see, if I can guess at some of the books that shaped HItler:

I'm OK; the rest of the world IS NOT
50 ways to leave your lover and your country in shambles
84 Charing Cross Road burned and destroyed

Message edited by its author, Feb 22, 2009, 10:22am.

petermc
I said an audible, "wow" at the end of your review of The Himmler Brothers, which was already on TBR from the other thread.

Great reviews! I appreciate your recommendations for background reading in your reviews. It helps those of us looking to learn about a brand-new topic.

> 100: profilerSR - Congratulations for being lucky post 100. No prizes but the warm and fuzzy feeling such an honour bestows ;)

And, thanks for the kind words. Since finishing The Himmler Brothers I have had my eye on another book, My Father's Country: The Story of a German Family by Wibke Bruhns - a biography of Hans Georg Klamroth who was implicated in the "20 July plot" to assassinate Hitler, and subsequently executed in August 1944. The author, Wibke Bruhns, his daughter, was 6 years old at the time.

The "20 July plot" is the same one which has been the subject of a recent movie, Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise. I actually watched a 2004 German-Austrian TV movie recently on the same subject, Stauffenberg, which despite some shortcomings is well worth seeing.

> 99: Whisper1 - Stay tuned. I will finish the book tonight, and we'll see if any of your guesses are correct when I post the review later this week :)

Message edited by its author, Feb 23, 2009, 1:08am.

Have you read Hitler's Children? It's a collection of interviews with the children of prominent nazi officials. I read it a while ago but I think Stauffenberg's son was one of the people interviewed. It was an interesting book, alot of the children were too young during the war to have any idea what was going on.

>101 My Father's Country sounds fascinating also. I had wondered about the movie, Valkyrie. My 17 year-old wanted to see it and I was hesitant. We may rent it together, when it's out. Is is appropriate, do you think? I just don't want a bunch of gratuitous stuff which adds nothing to the understanding of the storyline.

>101 & 102 I am currently almost finished with a book called My Father's Keeper which also contains interviews with children of Nazi leaders, from two time periods: A 1959 series of interviews, then the same people were re-interviewed in 1999. I saw Hilter's Children at the public library and want to read that at some point also.

How are you finding My Father's Keeper? I've seen it but haven't read it yet.

Edited for improper use of English language.

Message edited by its author, Feb 23, 2009, 8:11pm.

sgtbigg - I must admit I was put off reading Posner's Hitler's Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Their Fathers and Themselves after reading the review in The New York Times (link below). I have the same reservations, as raised in that review, about Lebert's My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders - An Intimate History of Damage and Denial. However, that's not to say I would never read them.

The Himmler Brothers and "My Father's Country" are essentially histories of the 'personalities' of the Third Reich as opposed to their children's. Although that aspect is certainly touched upon.

Link to review: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...

P.S. Another book on the subject is Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families by Peter Sichrovsky

Message edited by its author, Feb 23, 2009, 10:57pm.

profilerSR - I'm afraid I haven't seen "Valkyrie" as of yet, so I can't comment on the violence or gratuity of the scenes depicted in that movie. The movie which I did see, "Stauffenberg", was certainly within acceptable limits however. I liked that this movie is in German too - it just helped add an air of authenticity to it :)

Thanks for the link to the very interesting review of Hitler's Children.
I haven't seen "Stauffenberg" but will watch out for it.

>105
Thank you for the link to the review of Hitler's Children. I haven't read that book so can't comment on it per se. However, I haven't gotten the impression that the purpose of My Father's Keeper is to provide a history of how a society functions to commit atrocities. It is purely the children's stories, briefly, in their own words. I find it interesting due to the very reasons mentioned in the review of HC. How the children have reconciled, explained, rationalized, denied etc. is interesting to me in itself. The review keeps saying 'we didn't need a book to tell us this' but I didn't know anything about Nazi leaders' children or families before reading this book. Maybe it's more appropriate for a casual buff (like me)? I have read other books, and plan to read still more, in order to learn about other aspects of WWII. I never expected MFK to be all-inclusive.

>106
It sounds like I would enjoy seeing "Stauffenberg", but if it's in German, I would need subtitles. :)

I actually think I remember a Highlander series episode about a plot to kill Hitler, but I may be mistaken.

Petermc

Once again, I'm adding books to my tbr pile after reading your recommendations. Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families sounds intriguing.

Book 13

Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W. Ryback

Invoking Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish essayist and philosopher who wrote "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting", in Illuminations, Rybeck believes that through the private library we are able to "glimpse the collector preserved among his books." In nine chronologically ordered essays (entitled "books"), each inspired by a book, or books, from the preserved remnant collections of Hitler's libraries, and from Hitler's marginalia, Rybeck sets out (successfully I feel) to "illuminate those issues that occupied Hitler in his more private hours, often at pivotal moments in his career."

In Book One we are transported back to a "dreary Monday in late November 1915", when a corporal in the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, Hitler, bought Berlin by Max Osborn. This book, on the cultural treasures of Berlin, reveals Hitler the artist, Hitler the tourist, and the Hitler who shared Osborn's "militant Prussian chauvinism".

In Book Two we have Peter Gynt inscribed to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart. Eckart, a founder of the German Worker's Party, later renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDP), was to make a profound impact on Hitler (and the world). Taking the 31 year-old ex-corporal Eckart would become Hitler's "patron, mentor, and father figure," shaping "the soft clay of Hitler's emotional and intellectual world," and scripting "Hitler's role as history's most infamous anti-Semite." As Eckart once said, 'Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who called the tune!"

In Book Three, Rybeck examines Hitler the writer; his works, influences and development; starting with Mein Kampf, which he would write in Landsberg Prison after the failed "Beer Hall Putsch". Hitler then embarked on his second literary attempt - a memoir of his wartime service, now lost. Hitler would go on to write a sequel to Mein Kampf, and then a third volume, which would never see print but has been largely preserved.

In Book Four, there is a discussion of Hitler and the philosophers. From Leni Riefenstahl's gift of a first edition (1848) eight-volume set of the collected works of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, we are launched into an examination of Hitler's association with the works of Fichte, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer amongst others; but it is perhaps the approximately 50 volumes from various authors, published by J.F. Lehmann Verlag and gifted to Hitler from the publisher that "preserve the National Socialist legacy in the full range of its multifaceted nuance and mendacity, a veritable compendium of the perverse moral, ethical, social, political, legal, economic, and historical absurdities and excesses we have come to associate with the Nazi era."

In Book Five, "Book Wars", we are given insight into the struggle between National Socialism and the church. This struggle is encapsulated in two books, Foundations of National Socialism by Alois Hudal, an Austrian Bishop, who hoped the book would split the party from within; and The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's "'chief ideologue' in charge of the 'spiritual' welfare of the German people."

In Book Six, we look at Hitler's fascination with matters of the occult and the spirit. Rybeck examines books such as Law of the World by Max Riedel, and those of Schleich and Schertel, in which he suggests "we glimpse at least a portion of Hitler's essential core." In Schertel's "ektropic" man there is no such thing as "real" and "unreal", "right" and "wrong".

In Book Seven, "Frontline Reading, 1940", the book Schlieffen by Hugo Rochs launches us on an essay examining Hitler's relationships with his staff and his vast library of military books that helped build his thinking, strategically and tactically, in the earliest stages of the war.

In Book Eight, Sven Hedin's America in the Battle of the Continents provides "a history of the outbreak of the war as (Hitler) believed it would ultimately be recorded for prosperity." Hedin, a famous Swedish explorer, Germanophile, and friend to Hitler, wrote that the origins of the Second World War lay squarely at the feet of the Americans and British.

In Book Nine, the abridged German translation of Thomas Carlyle's 1858 biography of Frederick the Great forms the basis for a discussion on the parallels that Hitler perceived between himself and the late King he so revered. As the war was drawing to a close, Germany was hoping for a miracle; as Frederick the Great had awaited a miracle in 1861 with his empire in the brink of ruin. And, just as the death of the tsarina Elizabeth brought that miracle to Frederick, the death of Roosevelt brought the prospect of salvation to Hitler.

Three Appendices provide excerpts from past works on the make-up of Hitler's library, and there are 42 in-text photographs. The high quality of the paper (in rough-cut) and typescript (Monotype Dante) in the hardcover Knopf publication is a pleasure to the touch and to the eye, and befits the quality of the writing.

Highly recommended

Message edited by its author, Feb 24, 2009, 10:57pm.

Great review Peter!
I cannot help but wonder what could be written of each of us regarding books that someone might think shaped our lives.

This could be an interesting discussion actually...
What books did shape your life?

I have amended the review to note that the author also took note of the marginalia by Hitler, which certainly helps to define the authors choices.

> 111

What books shaped my life?

Walter Benjamin (who, incidentally, committed suicide while fleeing the Nazi regime as a refugee) wrote "...as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended."

Thus, as Rybeck interprets,

"Only after the collector has shelved his last book and died, when his library was allowed to speak for itself, without the proprietor to distract or obfuscate, could the individual volumes reveal the "preserved" knowledge of the owner: how he asserted his claim over them, with a name scribbled on the inside or an ex libris bookplate pasted across an entire page; whether he left them dog-eared and stained, or the pages uncut and unread."

Have I avoided answering that one ;)

oh my you're a skilled Evader :)

opps, my message wasn't mean to pry....
My mind was simply going down a path to the books that influenced my life.

Whisper - I hope the winking smilie at the end of my post alerted you that my response was meant only in fun. I felt in no way that you were prying :)

But it is a difficult question... Hmmm.... One book that immediately comes to mind is...

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

Since reading this book about 5 or 6 years ago I have never stepped foot into a McDonalds or similar fast food restaurant. I also started supporting local producers when I could despite the large increase in cost. The book The Omnivore's Dilemma only helped to reinforce my new habits. To quote the last paragraph of Fast Food Nation which really packed the knockout punch...

"Sometimes the most irresistible force is the most mundane. Pull open the glass door of your local fast food outlet, walk inside, get in line, and look around you, look at the kids in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest toys, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, think about where the food came from, about how it was made, about what is set in motion by every single food purchase, the ripple effect near and far, think about it. Then turn and walk out the door, it's not too late. Even in this fast food nation, you can still have it your way."

Your turn...

Message edited by its author, Feb 25, 2009, 6:12pm.

Peter

Hands down...my all time favorite book that continues to influence me is

Harper Lee's masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird.

An incredible high school English teacher taught the text of this book in such a compelling fashion that to this day, when I read the pages, I hear his voice. He was small, thin, self conscious and seemed to know about not fitting in. When he discussed the book, he became self assured, more assertive, larger, more confident.

My sleepy NE Pennsylvania town was "Lilly white." Thus when I read the book, I did not have a broad knowledge base of racial bigotry. However I was very much aware of class distinction. While some may glamorize small town living, the underbelly of my little town was the nasty, gossipy comments by the haves directed toward the have nots.

Alas, I was a precocious child of the "have nots" who was sensitive enough to be hurt, but scrappy enough to hold my head high.

I found a wonderful cast of heros in Harper Lee's book -- the noble lawyer/father Atticus Finch, his in your face, tom boy daughter Scout, the reclusive Boo Radley about whom all matter of superstitious slaunder was directed, and the innocent black man Tom Robinson, accused of a crime he did not commit, and who, like all children born on the wrong side of town, are assumed bad, guilty and not quite worthy.

A very entertaining bunch of posts. Petermc, that's funny about Fast Food Nation. About the time it was published I saw a documentary that made me to stop eating fast food, and I still don't. I can't remember the name, but it was about a guy who ate McDonalds for 30 days straight, every meal. Also, I just recently read The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is changing my habits in others ways.

No ones asking, but if I had to name a most influential book ...probably A River Runs Through It... but it's been a long time since I picked it up.

dchaikin
I'm asking. If you care to share, what made this book the most influential.

>116

Whisper,

Wow! There's not much to say in response to that, but thank you for sharing.

I have never read To Kill a Mockingbird but I have seen the 1962 film adaptation starring one of my favourite actors, Gregory Peck. Did you think it did the book justice?

On the subject of the great Gregory Peck, he also starred in another of my favourite movies from a book which I did read and enjoyed very much - namely, Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1959).

Message edited by its author, Feb 26, 2009, 11:04pm.

> 117

dchaikin,

The documentary you're thinking of is Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me. As for A River Runs Through It, pray tell...

Book 14

High Hopes: My Autobiography by Ronnie Corbett (Audiobook)

If there is anything I love more than a good book, great food, fine wine, Islay whiskey and Dean Martin, it's British Comedy from the 1970s and 80s - my formative years. Off the top of my head, to name just a few, I have such wonderful memories of Dave Allen, Eric Sykes, Spike Milligan, Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Barbara Windsor, John Inman, Eric Morcombe, Ernie Wise, Aurthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Harry Corbett, Wilfred Brambell, Jack Smethurst, Paul Eddington, Nigel Hawthorne, John Cleese - and so many more.

And right there at the top, let us not forget Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett of The Two Ronnies - that fabulous British sketch show that screened on the Beeb (BBC 1) from 1971 to 1987. Comedian Ronald Balfour "Ronnie" Corbett OBE (born 1930), the author of this autobiography, is perhaps most fondly remembered for his delightful, meandering monologues delivered from an over-sized armchair on The Two Ronnies which played on his diminutive stature of 153cm. A stature that gives us the title of this book, "High Hopes".

The unabridged audiobook is read by Ronnie Corbett and listening to his voice takes you right back to those 'golden years' of comedy. All his trademark mannerisms and comedic techniques, born of the Vaudeville tradition, come through in this rather light and inoffensive collection of remembrances. Anyone looking for something more substantive or introspective needn't apply.

Ronnie led a rather charmed life, which makes writing an autobiography very difficult as he himself is quick to note; there being no dark skeletons hiding in the cupboard. But what he does deliver provides a very delightful escape down memory lane. A good knowledge of the names and personalities of British Comedy from the late 40s to the 90s certainly adds to your enjoyment of this book, but is not strictly necessary.

Message edited by its author, Feb 27, 2009, 7:20am.

Peter
Your review of High Hopes is delightful and a sense of happiness shines through.

#118/120 - I'm trying to come up an answer. I think it had something to do with the psychology inside the book. The way the characters communicate, without actually saying very much. But that doesn't really capture it for me. It was something about the whole mentality of the narrator (and author, it's autobiographical, but freely fictionalized) and about the historical and natural world he describes and mixes in. Perhaps especially the natural world. I read this in undergrad when I had only recently chosen geology as a major after ignoring the natural world for my entire life.

On the "What we're *watching*" thread (Message 25), I listed the films I've watched to date in what I'm now calling Operation Iraqi Freedom Watch. My aim is to watch as many of the films that have been made on or about Operation Iraqi Freedom as possible.

The films I've watched to date are...

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
The Mark of Cain
In the Valley of Elah
Battle for Haditha
Stop-Loss
The Hurt Locker
The Lucky Ones

One more is now added...

Home of the Brave
I liked this movie, but can't help thinking that it could have been a great movie rather than just a good one.

Here's a review that I thought summed up my own opinions fairly well:
http://www.murphysmoviereviews.net/2006F...

--------------------

I also just added three new books to my permanent library on the war...

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart
Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor
Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective by Paul Rieckhoff

--------------------

Currently reading on Iraq...

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
"Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper" by Jack Coughlin, Casey Kuhlman, & Donald A. Davis

Expect reviews within the week...

Message edited by its author, Mar 3, 2009, 8:14pm.

Book 15

Shooter by Jack Coughlin

Full title - Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper by Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin, USMC, and Capt. Casey Kuhlman, USMCR, with Donald A. Davis

This is a difficult review to write, and one of those difficulties stems from the collaboration in authorship. Do we take the author to task for his excessive egotism, self-importance, and for glorifying his role as a "cold blooded killer" despite his protestations to the contrary? Or, is he merely the victim of his co-authors? - One of whom, Davis, is a professional author. Has the 'boys-own' style of writing been influenced with one eye to commerciability and the other on the potentiality of a future movie deal? Or, was it designed to build a fan base for the sniper novels that Davis and Coughlin would subsequently co-author (Kill Zone: A Sniper Novel and "Dead Shot", published in March 2009)?

The answer may lay in one, all, or none of these; and at the end of the day you have to judge the book for what it is - a memoir (I don't think this qualifies as an autobiography, despite the braggadocio title) of a United Sates Marine sniper, predominantly set in Iraq during the Second Gulf War. While it reads easily, and will entertain a certain readership, the writing is sometimes awkward and repetitive. The back story of his failing marriage helps to humanize the author, but his lack of introspection and the cursory way in which it is dealt with before the epilogue borders on the frustrating.

Those just looking for a fast-paced sniper / war story will find themselves squarely in Coughlin's crosshairs. Those looking for a bit more may find themselves beyond his effective range. Try before you buy.

Message edited by its author, Mar 5, 2009, 10:18pm.

Book 16

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

I'm still shaking my head in disbelief, disgust and anger after reading this book - one of the best books I've read in many years.

A thousand and one reviews have been written for this book - perhaps you'd like to read one of those because I'm lost for words! This tragicomedy about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in post-invasion, occupied-Iraq has to be read to be believed!

Of course, any work of non-fiction as incredulous as this is bound to spawn a movie - look out for "Green Zone" starring Mat Damon; slated for release later in 2009.

Message edited by its author, Mar 8, 2009, 6:40pm.

Thanks Peter, that one's definitely going on the pile. I haven't read anything about the Iraq war yet.

#126: Wow! If it leaves you speechless, it must be a great book. On to the Continent it goes.

I have had Imperial Life on my shelf so long, I was wondering whether it was still going to be as shocking as it sounded like it would be when it first came out. I guess it is--I'm going to have to get it read.

#127 Cushla - This is an immensely readable book. And very accessible - even to those with no background knowledge.

#128/9 Stasia & arubabookwoman - Tale after tale of unprecedented ineptitude, cronyism and arrogance does leave me a little speechless and, while this book was first published in 2006, the legacy of the CPA will continue for many years to come. This is an important book to understand Iraq today.

Now, back to a soldiers POV with the highly acclaimed...
Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective by Paul Rieckhoff

This will then be followed by more fun and games with the CPA with...
The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart

Stay tuned

P.S. For a bit of much needed light relief I'm currently also reading...
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun

I purchased Imperial Life in the Emerald City a while ago and now you've definitely nudged it up my TBR list!

I am currently reading God Rest Ye Merry Soldiers, which you recommended earlier this year. It is a good read.

As for Lilian Jackson Braun's books, The Cat Who series is about as light as you can get. I hope they work for you!

#131 allthesedarnbooks - My book was in my collection a while to before I finally got to it - I love it when you come across these little unexpected gems!

#132 Stasia - I'm glad you're enjoying GRYMS (how's that for an acronym?!). As for Braun's "The Cat Who..." series - how could I not love a series starring my favourite breed of cat - the Siamese? I must admit it does feel a bit frivilous after you look at my reading list to date, but they say a change is as good as a holiday! I'm now half way through and I am enjoying it. It even gave me one real laugh-out-loud moment this morning, which startled a few people on the train! It's the first in her series of 30, but in my research it seems that the quality of the series nose-dived at book 24 with rumours of ghostwriters. I don't plan to read them all however - yet!

#133: The books took a huge nose-dive, IMO. I own the first 20 or so, but the more recent books I have just checked out of the library to read. I hope you are listening to the audio versions where George Guidall (sp?) does the narration. I think he does a terrific job.

I finished GRYMS earlier. I thought it was very good. Currently I am reading Child 44, which is excellent thus far (at page 70).

>134: I read 21 of the first 23 of Braun's books. I'd pick them up routinely on remainder. However, one day I realized I was reading the same lightweight story over and over and just stopped.

I've heard Prince of the Marshes is excellent... haven't read it myself, but I'll be back to see what you think!

Book 17

The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun

Originally published in 1966, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards would go on to spawn a series, known as the "Cat Who..." series, currently numbering 30 books. The second two novels were published in 1967 and 1968 respectively before fans endured an 18 year wait for the fourth installment. The series, featuring James Mackintosh Qwilleran and his two Siamese cats (the second cat, Yum Yum, would be introduced in the second book), are light and easy "who done its".

In this, the first book, we are introduced to Jim Qwilleran (Qwill), once a hard-bitten and highly regarded crime reporter, now a recovered alcoholic with a shattered reputation, forced to accept a job as a features writer on the local art scene at The Daily Fluxion because no one else will touch him. Also working the local art scene is the controversial art critic George Bonifield Mountclemens III, whose often scathing critiques scandalize the local art set.

Mountclemens, an eccentric recluse, lives in an old Victorian dwelling in a shady part of town with his Siamese cat and an expensive art collection. Offering Qwilleran the downstairs apartment at a very low rent, for the sake of having someone present while he is away at exhibitions, Qwilleran would begin his long-standing relationship with the cat, Kao K'o-Kung (Koko) and be soon immersed in a series of murders that would almost drive him back to the bottle.

To say any more would be to give too much away. Suffice to say, that this a story that relies as much on the charm of the characters and the relationship between Qwilleran and Koko, than the mystery itself. Reading this book put me in mind of one of my favourite mystery series - Colin Dexter's "Inspector Morse". Despite some obvious differences, I couldn't help but draw parallels between Qwilleran and Morse, the local art scene v local academia, but at the end of the day the Inspector Morse character is far more complex and dark - and I like that edge more!

Message edited by its author, Mar 10, 2009, 11:52pm.

I love The Cat Who... books and I've read them all (I think!!)...
There is a new one coming out soon, or so I've heard, called "The Cat Who Smelled Smoke".
I thought the last book in the series was better again, after the series dragged a bit. The last book mixed things up and made me sit up and pay attention.

I've never read the Inspector Morse books - I'll have to check them out!

# 138 amwmsw04 - I might be drawing a very long bow in making those parallels I mentioned in my review, and I doubt that those parallels would stand if I was to read subsequent books in the "Cat Who" series, but they were in my mind regardless.

If you haven't read the 13 books in the "Inspector Morse" detective series yet, then you are in for a huge treat. Also, the novels were adapted to a brilliant TV series starring the inimitable John Thaw (1942-2002) - also highly recommended.

Thanks to Wikipedia, the novels in the series are:

* Last Bus to Woodstock (1975)
* Last Seen Wearing (1976)
* The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977)
* Service of All the Dead (1979)
* The Dead of Jericho (1981)
* The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983)
* The Secret of Annexe 3 (1986)
* The Wench is Dead (1989)
* The Jewel That Was Ours (1991)
* The Way Through the Woods (1992)
* The Daughters of Cain (1994)
* Death is Now My Neighbour (1996)
* The Remorseful Day (1999)

I've been planning to re-read the whole series for some time now - back-to-back, which I think will yield some particularly rich rewards. I may do so later this year.

I agree that the Inspector Morse novels are a treat. I've only read a few of them and, somehow, I never think of looking for another, but I always enjoy them. I'll have to see what the library has.

I just realized that I already have the first novel, Last Bus to Woodstock in my TBR mountain! I apparently decided to check out the series before, ordered the book from Bookmooch, and then forgot I had it...sigh...

Will have to move that book up to the top of Mt. TBR.

Angela

#141 Angela - No place better to start in my opinion than the first book, even though they may be read independently. Character development is one of the most fascinating aspects of reading a series such as this, as well as watching the authors own development as a writer. And, when a series spans many years at regular intervals (such as the "inspector Morse" series) it's especially interesting to watch for changes in environment and culture. Hence my comment that reading the whole series back-to-back may "yield some particularly rich rewards".

Please drop by again and let me know what you thought of Last Bus to Woodstock.

Just finished A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, which is one of the best and most powerful memoirs of war that I've had the pleasure to read. I'd like to do the book justice in my review, which, given my work load, will not be today. Stay tuned.

Currently reading at home:
Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective by Paul Rieckhoff

And, my new book for the daily commute to work:
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind

Both are proving to be outstanding reads!!!

I am staying tuned for all your reviews, Peter!

No time to read last night (and no sleep)! Instead, a late night rush to the hospital and the birth of our second child - a healthy little baby boy at 3.15am :)

Congrats! Hope you get some sleep tonight!

congratulations!

oooooooooooh that's so wonderful!
Congratulations on your new baby -
and here's a pretty card for you! :)

Thank you all! We have officially embarked on another two years of interrupted sleep - but I wouldn't have it any other way! :)

And, here are a couple of books that I really enjoyed reading about parenthood on the birth of our first son, and then upon his becoming a toddler. Both are by one of Australia's best known parenting authors - Dr Christopher Green.

Babies!: A Parent's Guide to Enjoying Baby's First Year
Toddler Taming: A Parent's Guide to the First Four Years

There are written with great humour, and are very positive in tone, which for new parents is much more comforting than books that laden you with a thousand problems (as important as they are!) and worries.

Congratulations! Do you have a name picked out yet?

ETA: I saw your son's name on Eliza's thread, and think it is beautiful. I am ashamed to admit that I first heard the name Rafe in the movie Pearl Harbour - it was Ben Affleck's character's name. Not a great movie, but a great name! I have loved it ever since. I am sure he will bring you lots of joy - and many sleepless nights :)

Message edited by its author, Mar 15, 2009, 8:52pm.

BIG congratulations to you and your family!

Congratulations Peter, that is lovely news!! Hope all is well and he and your partner are home soon.

Congratulations--hope Rafe and big brother are doing fine.

Thanks to one and all for your kind words. The little guy has all the requisite toes and fingers, and was in fine voice when I left at 4.45am to go home and then to work. Fortunately, I'm finishing a little early today so I can spend the afternoon with my new bestest buddy, and get an early night. *yawn*

Congratulations! I hope you'll post a pic for us. :)

Congratulations on the latest blessing added to your family! Like Marcia, I am dying to see pictures of both the kids :)

BTW - Two of the books I read this past week were recommendations of yours, so thank you very much!

Message edited by its author, Mar 16, 2009, 1:23am.

That's wonderful!

#156 - Stasia, If you enjoyed them I'm happy!

Thanks to the new posters for your good wishes!

This is a recent photo I took of my boy, Michael. Will post a pic of Rafe when I get one!

Message edited by its author, Mar 16, 2009, 5:55am.

he's a cutie :)

#158: How lovely. Thanks for sharing the picture, Peter.

Hi Peter, Wow, Congratulations! What an exciting and exhausting life change. Enjoy!

PS - if you're looking for more parenting books let me know ;)...(or just go here:http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dchaikin&tag=Parenting - sort by rating.)

Congratulations! Two boys are fun too :)

Book 18

A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo

Books such as A Rumor of War; books that don't just tell a story but make you live and feel it; are the most difficult to review. You want to do the book justice - recapture its essence rather than intellectualize it.

The 9th Expeditionary Brigade, of which the author, Marine Lieutenant Philip Caputo was a member, was the first combat unit to be deployed to Vietnam, Da Nang, in March 1965. Brimming with confidence and bravado, he envisaged charging the beachhead like John Wayne in the movie Sands of Iwo Jima, but unlike Iwo Jima, Vietnam would be a "formless war against a formless enemy".

As days turned to weeks and then to months, Caputo's image of the war would change dramatically. From an infantry officer, he was transferred to regimental headquarters were, as an administrator his "convictions about the war had eroded to almost nothing" by the time he would eventually be posted back to the 'front line'. By this time, the war had escalated from isolated skirmishes to a series of intense battles, from when the death of one would have a profound impact on morale, to when soldiers ceased to care.

That change of attitude in the minds of Caputo and of all men is brought to a head, when Caputo in frustration and desperation would order a mission to capture (and implied, murder) two VC - one of whom would be revealed as their informer. Suddenly, Caputo and his men found themselves being court martialled for Murder.

Never has a book captured the mind of soldier so well, as idealism is replaced with desperation and hatred, where the lines of duty and barbarity are so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable, where the heat and dust, rain and mud, and insects become as real to the reader as the pages of the book in front of him.

Highly recommended.

Message edited by its author, Mar 16, 2009, 7:27pm.

Another great review that makes me want to drop everything and go out and get that book. Maybe I will.

I had your reviews in mind, I mean just the general tone of them, while reading Richard Bausch's Peace over the past weekend.

Congrats on your newest youngster.

Michael is adorable! I'm sure his little brother is gorgeous, as well.

Thanks for sharing the lovely photo of Michael..
And, congratulations again on the latest edition.

Well, here's the new guy - just 36 hours old. Excuse the quality, it was taken with my new mobile phone, which I'm still coming to terms with...

#164 dchaikin - The Bausch book looks interesting. Any review which states that a book is a "compelling meditation on the moral dimensions of warfare" certainly grabs my interest. I await your review with interest. I'm not sure what tone my reviews have - perhaps I'm too close to the subject to be objective ;) - but I'm glad you like them. Many thanks.

#169 - If I could express what I meant by the tone, I would. It has nothing to do with honoring an objectivity, just your ability to make the books come alive, to share your experience reading them. Also your consistency in theme.

As far as the Bausch - I'm a little stumped on how to review it. I think a "compelling meditation on the moral dimensions of warfare" is a very apt analysis - (even though I find the word "compelling" meaningless in reviews - but that's another topic). It's a good war story, but Bausch is also playing fictional tricks.

I'm just dropping by to thank you for the most illuminating explanation on haiku on my thread. So how come you moved to Japan, by the way? Oh! Rafe looks like a little angel! :)

Two beautiful boys there Peter! Congratulations and best wishes to you and your family.

Just wanted to say congratulations :). I'm here after a slight misunderstanding on Stasia's thread and wanted to see if it had occured exactly as she had written. It hasn't.............

Precious children! Blessings on you all!

Gorgeous photos!

We'll look forward to your next book review in about 6 weeks...

incredible! What a miracle. Blessings to you and your family.

#170 dchaikin - If we hadn't already seen the phrase, a "compelling meditation on the moral dimensions of warfare" used to describe the Bausch book, then I might have plagiarized it to very aptly describe the third part of A Rumor of War. As for "fictional tricks" - intriguing! I await your review with mounted interest.

#171 Eliza - (May I be so bold as to use your first name?) - It's the old story. You know - Boy meets exotic beauty from the Orient, boy marries exotic beauty from the Orient, boy moves to the Orient!

#172 Stasia - Thank you

#173 lunacat - Thank you, and no, medical science isn't that advanced yet - not even here in Japan. Although, my wife wishes it was ;)

#174 suslyn - Thank you

#175 Cushla - Thank you. Don't forget I still have that two hour daily commute. Expect the next review before the end of this week!

#176 Linda - Thank you

#177 - Hi Peter, I struggled with a review. See here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/54129&...

I bet she does ;)

And as for the story.........could we have one.........girl means exotic gorgeous guy from the orient.............etc etc......and if you think thats viable, send him my way, eh?

Oh, JOY!!! Don't you love it when the postman comes stumbling to the doorstep carrying a big brown box full of shiny new books?!

New acquisitions to the petermc library of military history...

The Desert Generals by Correlli Barnett
- A classic book on the Desert Campaign 1940-43 and the Generals who fought it

Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by David Anderson
- The final, bloody decade of British colonial rule in Kenya

The Khyber Rifles: From the British Raj to Al Qaeda by Jules Stewart
- A history of the key role the Khyber Rifles played in Britains struggle to dominate the North-West Frontier

The Savage Border: The Story of the North-West Frontier by Jules Stewart
- Life and conflict on the North-West Frontier

Battle for the Rhine 1944: Arnhem and the Ardennes - The Campaign in Europe 1944-45 by Robin Neillands
- A revisionists take on the Battle for the Rhine, separating fact from myth

The Great Mistake: Antwerp and the Beveland Peninsular by Peter Beale
- Could WWII have ended in 1944?

The Battle of the Frontiers, Ardennes 1914 by Terence Zuber
- A new look at the opening battle of WWI

Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750-1914 by Richard Holmes
- A broad and sweeping military history of the men who served in India and the women who followed them

Anzio: The Friction of War - Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944 by Lloyd Clark
- From the landings to the Battle for Rome, a look at the military and human history from the allied and German points of view

#180: When they were younger, my girls called the UPS driver 'the box man' and could not wait to see the packages. I still love getting books, and my youngest (now 18) insists on opening the packages with or for me!

I cannot wait to get in the 25 or so books I ordered for my birthday, lol.

Peter, it is great to read your list of books you rec'd. yesterday, I vicariously feel as though I was there looking it the box, watching you pull out the shiny covers and smiling. I'm adding Sahib: A British Soldier In India to my tbr pile.

Stasia, please do tell me what you ordered...

A few weeks ago Dover Publications had a big sale and I obtained
Winesburg, Ohio, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Sese & Sensibility, 100 Best Loved Poems, Resurrection The Last of the MohicansWashington SquareO Pioneers and The Mill on The Floss, plus The Awakening...I went a bit crazy in ordering, but most of them were only a few dollars each...

Peter, how are the little ones? How is Michael adjusting to Rafe?

180> I ordered about twenty books after Christmas using gift money, all of them from different sellers. I got at least one package a day, every day, for almost three weeks--it was like Christmas lasted all through January.

#181 Stasia - Knowing your reading rate, 25 books will last you through to Friday? ;)

#182 Linda - With another mouth to feed, my purchases are also now limited to a few dollars each! I keep an eagle eye on Amazon Bargain Books, and a UK specialist in discounted military books - I picked up the hardback Sahib, in new condition, for a song; and it's a beautiful book! There is a long history in my family with India and soldiering. In fact, both my grandfather and father were born in India. They later moved to Kenya and lived through the Mau Mau uprising (sleeping with loaded revolvers under their pillows), hence the book Histories of the Hanged included in the above list. They saw and lived the end of two British empires!

The little ones are fine. Thank you for asking. And, as for Michaels adjustment - well it will take him a little time to adjust I guess. It's going OK though.

Just to let you know too, I'm reading every word on your threads!

#183 wunderkind - I think that receiving books is almost as good as reading them!

Message edited by its author, Mar 21, 2009, 11:02am.

Peter
What stories you must hear of India. How very fascinating it must be to have your father and grandfather live through the end of two British empires! Years ago I saw the movie Ghandi, which set me on a path of learning more and more about British imperialism and their role in India. At the time, my husband joked to friends in saying that the cost of the movie ticket was $4 and then the cost of the books I bought to study India was over $400.

I'm adding Histories of the Hanged to my tbr pile.

Thanks again for your excellent recommendations.

Abridgments - I usually avoid them unless there is some compelling reason not to, such as having no recourse to the original. But, hanging out in the military junkies section of my local bookstore recently, I was amazed at how many abridgments are starting to hit the book shelves!

Here is a little look at a few titles that some may find useful if their interests don't run as deep as mine when it comes to the nitty-gritty.

To cash in on the recent Bryan Singer movie "Valkyrie" starring Tom Cruise (who just recently swept through Japan on a promotional tour), we have...

Valkyrie: An Insider's Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler by Hans Bernd Gisevius
- This is an abridgment of "To the Bitter End", which was originally published in 1946. It is an insiders account of the plot to kill Hitler, written during the time of the events it describes and smuggled out of Germany before the author too escaped.

Luck of the Devil: The Story of Operation Valkyrie by Ian Kershaw
- This is a very short, quick read, cobbled together from Kershaw's definitive and highly recommended two-volume biography of Hitler (see below).

Hitler: A Biography by Ian Kershaw
- For those who balk at reading 2000-page books, Kershaw's superlative two-volume biography of Hitler, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis, is now available in a handy little one-volume edition! The one-volume edition comes in at a little over 1000 pages - about 650 pages have hit the cutting room floor, as have the extensive end-notes originally found at the end of volume two. While the end-notes may be of more interest to the scholar or enthusiast than the lay reader, you may wish to consider this when making your purchasing decision.

On the Holocaust, we have...

Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 by Saul Friedlander (Abridged by Orna Kenan)
- This is an abridgment of Friedlander's Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

And not forgetting WWI...

The First World War: Volume I: To Arms by Hew Strachan, is a 1200+ page first volume to a proposed series on the history of World War I. Unfortunately, it doesn't look as if volume two will be seeing the light of day any time soon (if at all), so while we wait with baited breath, volume one has been broken down into a whole series of individual books - each complete within itself and sporting a new introduction...
- The Outbreak of the First World War
- The First World War in Africa
- Financing the First World War

Message edited by its author, Mar 23, 2009, 3:27am.

I definitely want my Friedlander unabridged!

I hate abridgements. So, tell me, is Kershaw's book on Hitler 2000 pages then? Or did they abridge both the first and second volumes to create a less than 2000 page book?

#187 Stasia - The one-volume edition of Hitler: A Biography by Ian Kershaw comes in a little over 1000 pages. About 650 pages have hit the cutting room floor, as have all the end-notes from volume two! While the end-notes may be of more interest to the scholar or enthusiast than the lay reader, you may wish to consider this when making your purchasing decision.

I've amended the original post to reflect this information. And, I agree 100% concerning Friedlander.

Edit: Touchstones seems to crash when hyphens are in the book's title!

Message edited by its author, Mar 23, 2009, 3:10am.

#188: Thanks for the additional info Peter. I will definitely be looking for the 2 volumes rather than the shortened 1-volume work.

Touchstones have been a bit wonky today I have noticed.

Book 19

The Black Hole War: My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics by Leonard Susskind

As a Junior High School student in the early 80s, I would wait each week with breathless anticipation in front of the television for the haunting music of Vangelis' "Heaven & Hell", the opening soundtrack to Carl Sagan's epic 1980 13-part series COSMOS. Who could not be captivated by Sagan's ability to stir the imagination, incite wonder, and inspire with awe. Consider the opening words to the series and to the book - the best-selling science book ever published in English - "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

Carl Sagan was something of a personal hero to me, as he was to many; his books honour my shelves and I am still afraid to speak each time I replay my COSMOS DVDs lest people hear the catch in my voice. His death in 1996, at the age of 62, affected me as deeply as if I had lost a close and personal friend, and it is his voice that resonates in my mind when I look into the night sky. For a new generation however, there are new voices: Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time, 1988), Brian Greene (The Elegant Universe, 1999), Simon Singh (Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe, 2005), and of course, Leonard Susskind, amongst many.

For those familiar with the field of theoretical physics Leonard Susskind needs no introduction. His contributions are extensive and mind-bending. He is recognised foremost as one of the fathers of string theory, as well as (and not limited to) having developed the string theory of black hole entropy, the principle of "black hole complementarity", the holographic principle, and M-theory. All of which are covered in The Black Hole War: My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics (2008); Susskind's second popular science book after The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (2005), in which he champions the controversial 'anthropic principle'.

So what exactly was the Black Hole War? Well, in 1975 Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein postulated that black holes emit purely thermal radiation containing no information other than temperature, and that as they radiate they loose mass until, theoretically, they completely disappear, along with the information contained within. Susskind was amazed that this theory was accepted with so little outcry. The theory violated the most basic tenant of Quantum Mechanics - that information is never truly lost. For the next two decades Susskind devoted himself to proving Hawking wrong.

Of course this is a very simplified explanation, to discuss it in depth requires a working knowledge of relativity, entropy, time-reversal invariance, the "No Hair" theorem, the Schwarzschild radius, black hole unitarity, and more. Fortunately, for those averse to the complicated mathematics (for which I recommend Susskind & Lindesay, An Introduction to Black Holes, Information And The String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe, 2004), Susskind explains all with simple analogies complimented with ample illustrations.

While the first half of the book explains concepts that may sound familiar and are easily grasped, things become rapidly more complex and far less intuitive in the second half, forcing Susskind to review, tiresomely at times, many of his earlier points and analogies. Susskind's also repeated emphasis on his war with Hawking, rather than his theories, can also come across as sounding slightly obsessive. At the same time however, a strength of the book is the personal dimension that Susskind adds to the 'information loss' debate in his personal anecdotes and examination of the personalities involved.

Susskind will never be a writer, or a popularizer, in the mode of Sagan, but neither does he pretend to be. Instead, we have an insiders look at an important period of theoretical development in the field of physics by one of its key innovators and keenest minds. Worth reading for those who want to know more, but be prepared to be even more confused by the end of the book as you were at the start!

For those who are looking for a great introductory text on the field of black holes, with a gentle introduction to the mathematics, I can recommend Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity by Edwin F. Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler.

WOW! You are reading some VERY impressive books.

Very nice review petermc (as always!) although I fear that The Black Hole War: My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics is probably WAY over my head. Carl Sagan is a favorite of mine. I enjoyed Cosmos and especially Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. My experience with reading about quantum physics and the like is limited to What the Bleep Do We Know, but I found it very interesting and simply written. I need to read more on the subject but it's kind of intimidating!

Book 20

Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective by Paul Rieckhoff

"George Bush better be f*****g right" is the opening sentence to Paul Rieckhoff's memoir of a 10-month deployment in the Adamiyah section of central Baghdad, and sets the tone for a book brimming with unsuppressed anger at US policy and post-invasion planning; juxtaposed against his passion for his men and his desire to protect innocent Iraqi citizens.

As a First Lieutenant and Infantry Platoon Leader for the U.S. Army National Guard, who had been on the ground at 9/11, Rieckhoff considered the war a mistake from the beginning yet volunteered for service anyway, acknowledging the paradoxical situation he found himself in, "torn in half, wrestling with my hunger for combat and my distrust for the president."

Underequipped and overchallenged, Rieckhoff would bring all his men home, but the legacy of those ten months continued to take its toll. Suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Rieckhoff "had to speak out", as the "planning and direction of the postinvasion occupation were "almost all wrong"... there were never enough troops on the ground. Officers and soldiers in the field were being deployed with no training in Iraqi culture and customs.... received little direction from above, and were vulnerable to attacks."

Rieckhoff's anger continued to build in the wake of his experiences in Iraq, dissatisfied with the response he was receiving from the political parties as he sought to make a difference, and as "physical wounds, untreated PTSD, and weak or nonexistent transitional programs often lead vets down a path of marital problems, criminal activity, alcohol abuse, drug problems, homelessness and suicide". In response, Paul Rieckhoff, and "a small band of pissed-off visionaries" founded Operation Truth, to be renamed Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) in 2005 - "America's first and largest non-partisan, nonprofit organization for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan".

For anyone interested in well written memoirs from the soldiers perspective, and on the issues soldiers face in Iraq and at home, this is an eye-opening and important book.

Message edited by its author, Mar 24, 2009, 8:29pm.

Peter
I would read this book, but I fear I would become to irate and upset!

#190 - I look at those books and think about how interesting they would be if I was willing to try to actually understand them...Maybe I should try Cosmos sometime.

>193 re: Chasing Ghosts

Your review was gripping, I can't imagine how good the book must be. Since I'm now living in an extremely under-educated pro-Bush area, I doubt I will find it in my public library. I'm putting it on my Wishlist and hope to be able to get to it soon. Again, great review!

#192 loriephillips - Don't worry, just remember what that great American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) said, "Nobody understands quantum theory."

By-the-by, Susskind relates the story of his first meeting with Feynman in The Black Hole War - in a urinal!

#195 dchaikin - Please do try Cosmos, and if you haven't seen the 1980 television series, rent the DVDs (or check them out on youtube). While it does look a little dated now, much of what it contains still holds true, and where science has brought new understanding the new DVDs have an update after each episode.

#196 profilerSR - Thank you. The paperback is currently available in the Bargain Book section on amazon. It's a very good book. If I have any reservations about it however, it's that I would like the author to have expanded more on the creation of IAVA and it's work. The main body of the book focuses on the author's experiences in Iraq.

---------------

In other news, just finished Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (review soon), and am heading back to Iraq with We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah by Patrick K. O'Donnell.

Message edited by its author, Mar 25, 2009, 7:51pm.

Book 21

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

I'm sorry, but I honestly didn't care enough about this highly regarded book to bother making much of an effort here, other than to record that I've read it, understood it, and appreciated the author's intentions.

Kurt Vonnegut's name needs no introduction - his history and literary motivations have been extensively documented, and this book has been exhaustively analysed. Google it and you'll find a hundred reviews that are far more eloquent and insightful than anything I could hope to write.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.", is the moral of the tale, and it's laid on with a trowel so thick you might have trouble lifting it (metaphorically speaking of course). Predictable and contrived, in all senses of the word, it's not without interest or merit; but I could have put it down, never picked it up again, and never have cared. Oh well!

Here's a link to an interesting review -
http://www.jeremychapman.info/cms/a-burk...

P.S. - I found a copy of the 1996 movie adaption, "Mother Night", the other day and shall watch this sometime in the coming week to see how it compares to the book.

Message edited by its author, Mar 29, 2009, 8:57am.

Peter
First, I'm sending all good wishes your way and hoping Michael is adjusting to his baby brother.

Thanks for your description of Mother Night. I've never been a Vonnegut fan, so I'll skip this one. But, I did enjoy your comments.

#199 Linda - Thanks for your good wishes. We are definitely seeing slow but steady progress on the 'brotherly affection' front :)

As for Mother Night - I really wanted to love this book given the subject matter, and I know that Vonnegut has a huge fan base, and maybe I'm being a little harsh, but I honestly felt that this is one of those 'worthy' books you give to high school students in their final year to read, discuss and review; scarring them for life ;)

On a more positive note. Here's a progress report on other books currently under the microscope...

We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah by Patrick K. O'Donnell
- Just as the blurb says - "A riveting first-hand account of the fierce battle for Fallujah and the Marines who fought there"

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart
- An important read next to "Imperial Life", and very well written

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
- Wow! Not the sort of book I usually read, but a moving legacy to his children

#198 - Well, tonight I watched the 1996 film adaption of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (see book review - message 198), directed by Keith Gordon, and starring Nick Nolte, Sheryl Less and Alan Arkin.

And, I got to say - It was great! Was it perfect? Nah! I might have done a few things a little differently to add a bit more tension here and there, but overall this gets the big thumbs up. Maybe I was a little harsh on the book...

So, do yourselves a favour, even if you're not a Vonnegut fan, and catch this the next time it makes it to cable. Heck, I think I'd even pay money on a DVD rental!

...or just download it?

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4503451/...

Thanks for the recommendation. I want to read the book first, though!

#202 - Downloading is an option, and living in a non-English speaking country it is a very attractive option, but not one I would ever recommend or advocate of course!

So what other options do we have, or in particular me? Well, here are some of my regular haunts in Tokyo (biased to the Shinjuku area where I work)...

Used Books
- The Blue Parrot Bookshop
http://www.blueparrottokyo.com/home.html
Located in Takadanobaba (two stops from Shinjuku on the Yamanote Line) on the third floor of the Obayashi Building (easy to miss - look for the sign board out front), is this excellent little second hand book shop. Check out the website for pictures.

- Good Day Books
http://www.gooddaybooks.com/contents/hom...
Located in Ebisu, this well known second hand book shop (with some new books as well), runs "BookNotes" - a monthly lecture series by authors of the books under discussion, of which attendees must buy a copy.

New Books
- Kinokuniya
http://bookweb.kinokuniya.co.jp/
This excellent store holds an English language book sale once a year at the Takashimaya Department Store in Shinjuku, where many excellent bargains are to be had (by Tokyo standards).

- Junkudo
http://www.junkudo.co.jp/
Junkudo has an excellent English book section on the 7th floor of the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Shinjuku. Worth keeping an eye on this one - with occasional sales offering great discounts.

- Tower Records
http://www.towerrecords.co.jp/
Limited range of books in the smaller stores, but with an excellent selection in major outlets. Especially good with large format books. The Shibuya store is one of the best, with an excellent cookbook selection. Tower Records is also the place to go for imported English-language magazines, with the best pricing in town.

Videos
- Tsutaya
http://www.tsutaya.co.jp/index.html
One of the biggest movie rental and sales outlets. Also stocks used. Excellent range of English language titles - I've rarely been left wanting!

Message edited by its author, Apr 2, 2009, 5:58pm.

ooh now I wish I lived in Tokyo!!
However, I do have a little trip to Barcelona planned next week and I've saved some money for books...there are some great bookshops that I know of but have never visited.

If anyone's interested this is a great site with bookshops across Europe. It's owned by a couple that likes to travel around and look for cool bookshops everywhere - in other words they're living my dream, the bastards. If you know of any good bookshops in ANY town in Europe just write and tell them about it, they always take suggestions into account and will add it to their ever-expanding catalog (and then try to visit it the next time they visit your country too)

Edit:forgot to add the link duh
it's this:
http://www.bookstoreguide.org/

Sorry for taking over your thread I just thought other LTers might be interested :)

Message edited by its author, Apr 2, 2009, 8:32am.

#204 Eliza - If you're going to take over my thread with links as fascinating as that one then take it away! Like you, this is something I'd love to do myself! My own travels in Europe have been pretty limited, although I did spend a year in the UK and France when I was about 20, taking the holy pilgrimage to Hay-on-Wye in the UK - a must-go for any self-respecting bookworm.

I'm finally getting caught up on these threads and, Peter, your boys are so handsome! Congratulations on your new addition.

#206 cal8769 - Thanks for dropping by, and thanks for your kind words!

--------------------------
Currently working on a review of We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah by Patrick K. O'Donnell - my last book for March. Hope to have it up before the weekend is out. What I can say right now is that it's an excellent book!

#207: I just checked and my local library has We Were One, so I will check it out on your recommendation. So far, you have not steered me wrong this year and I certainly appreciate that!

#190- That was quite a tribute to Sagan. I read one of the Sagan biographies that mentioned the price he paid for being a popularizer which is looked down on by some in the scientific community. I think I read the Poundstone bio.

You probably know it, but in case you haven't stumbled across it, the Maruzen across from the Marunouchi exit of Tokyo Station is well worth a browse for new books, and they do have the occasional sale, as well. (I recently found Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary in the bargain bin along with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and maybe a couple of others I can't recall off the top of my head.)

Also, of course, it's always worth trawling Kanda-Jimbocho for used books.

#208 Stasia - If you want to read an oral history from the grunts perspective, warts and all, language included, then O'Donnell's book on the First Platoon, Lima Company of the "Thundering Third" during the Second Battle of Fallujah will satisfy you. I'd hate to steer you wrong, and hope you enjoy this book.

#209 VisibleGhost - I own one Sagan biography: Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson and enjoyed it immensely. And I have read Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone, which I also recommend. Carl Sagan was a complex character as these books reveal in their slightly different and idiosyncratic ways. I recommend that people read both.

#210 dcozy - Thanks for dropping by and adding to the list. My list is pretty much limited to the Shinjuku area where I spend 99% of my time. However, I do venture into the Kanda area on the rare occasion, where I pick up some wonderful and reasonably priced ukiyo-e from lesser known artists that are stunning in their own right, especially when framed!

Message edited by its author, Apr 3, 2009, 12:16am.

Book 22

We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah by Patrick K. O'Donnell

The US Department of Defense codenamed it Operation Phantom Fury. The Iraqi Defence Minister would later rename it Operation al-Fajr (Dawn). To much of the world however, it would be known as the Second Battle of Fallujah, and it began on November 7, 2004. Operation al-Fajr was a combined USMC, US Army, and Iraqi Army offensive aimed at regaining control of the City of Fullajah after the "Fallujah Brigade" debacle only helped to fuel and arm the insurgents, Jihadists, and terrorists after the failure of the First Battle of Fallujah (Operation Vigilant Resolve) in April, 2004.

Flanked on the right by the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines (3-5), and on the left by the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment (2-7), the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines (3-1), the 'Thundering Third', would engage in some of the heaviest urban combat since the Battle of Huế City in Vietnam. When the battle was finally over it would have the distinction of being the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War to date with seventy Marines killed and more than 700 wounded.

Embedded with the the men of First Platoon, Lima Company of the 'Thundering Third', military historian Patrick K. O'Donnell takes us into the heart of this hand to hand, house to house urban conflict with his powerfully personal oral history from the grunt's perspective, We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah. From predeployment training at Camp Pendleton, California, in March 2004; to Kuwait in June 2004; to Camp Abu Ghurayb; to the Second Battle for Fallujah in November 2004; we come to know the men, the "next greatest generation", through their voices, while O'Donnell increases our emotional investment by focussing on "four sets of best friends", of which "each of the four would lose a best friend forever."

Written in a raw, vivid, fast paced style, with excellent maps and containing 40 photographs that compliment the text well (many taken by the author), I highly recommend this book for anyone looking for the human dimension to battle without the soft focussed filter of sentiment.

Message edited by its author, Apr 4, 2009, 9:02am.

#212: I was lucky enough to pick We Were One up at the library the other day. I hope I enjoy it as much as you did, although I suspect it will be a couple of weeks before I get to it.

It will be interesting reading since I just finished Baghdad Burning and the author talks about Fallujah quite a bit.

Edited to correct Touchstone

Message edited by its author, Apr 4, 2009, 6:21am.

Book 23

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

On September 18, 2007, Carnegie Mellon professor and alumnus Randy Pausch delivered a one-of-a-kind last lecture that made the world stop and pay attention. It became an Internet sensation viewed by millions, an international media story, and a best-selling book that has been published in 35 languages. To this day, people everywhere continue to talk about Randy, share his message and put his life lessons into action in their own lives.

Randy died July 25, 2008, at the age of 47. - Carnegie Mellon: Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

By the time Dr Randy (Randolph Frederick) Pausch was invited to give a lecture in the "Last Lecture Series" at Carnegie Mellon, where he was professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design, the university had renamed the series "Journeys". At this point Dr. Pausch had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and given just 3-6 months of "good health".

"I thought, damn, I finally nailed the venue and they renamed it", he quipped in the opening words of his lecture, and quickly exposed the "elephant in the room" by showing slides of a recent CAT scan showing approximately 10 tumors in his liver. And so it was with humour and honesty that Randy Pausch, in conjunction with Jeffrey Zaslow, wrote The Last Lecture to tell the story behind his last lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams", and create a lasting legacy for his children.

"The book is a far more personal look at my childhood dreams and all the lessons I've learned. Putting words on paper, I've found, was a better way for me to share all the yearnings I have regarding my wife, children and other loved ones. I knew I couldn't have gone into those subjects on stage without getting emotional." - Amazon Interview with Dr. Randy Pausch

In this book, Pausch outlines what, in 47 short years, he has learned and deemed valuable in not only "achieving his childhood dreams", but in living a good life. These are the life lessons he wanted to impart to his own children, who would never know him or bear a distant memory at best. It is a deeply personal book and in its purpose it defies rating.

For his family and friends it is priceless, for the general public it is a touching memoir filled with commonsense and pearls of wisdom that many may know but rarely enact, and for those suffering a terminal disease Randy may be a pillar of strength showing that it's not how much time you have left that matters, but how you live it.

Message edited by its author, Apr 6, 2009, 5:28am.

#21: Great review of the book! On to the Continent it goes.

Well, while everyone has been obsessing over the "BBC Top 100" book list, I've been on the search for a much more interesting list that better reveals the psyche of the average reader. And, I think I found it! - over at Spread the Word.

I quote...

"George Orwell's 1984 tops the list of books that people pretend they have read, in a survey carried out for World Book Day 2009 to uncover the nation's guilty reading secrets. Of the 65% who claimed to have read a book which in truth they haven't 42% admit to having said they had read modern classic 1984.

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)


Are you guilty?

Message edited by its author, Apr 6, 2009, 7:05am.

Ha! Yes, I'd seen that list before. I don't know why anyone would bother to lie about having read a book. In my experience, the books people tend to lie most about are the ones that have been made into movies ("I've seen that movie so I can say I've read the book too, right? I mean, how different can it be??") One advantage of that is that it's more difficult to catch them lying because they know the storyline and the characters heh :)

LOL That list is great! I will truthfully say that I have not read a single book on it though!

Hi Peter - Thanks again for the nice reviews. Your comments on "We Were One" have kind of stuck and remind me of some pieces I once read from the newspaper series that later became Black Hawk Down. Those pieces were addictively fascinating and really really disturbing. This was 10 years ago, and I still carry images around in my head.

Message edited by its author, Apr 6, 2009, 9:20am.

>204: I also came across a Google Maps bookstore guide a couple of weeks ago. I think it's mostly US, but the originators want it to spread (I see there are a couple of placemarks in Asia, Peter!):

The Millions' Collaborative Atlas of Book Stores and Literary Places

Rachael..
Thanks for this site, dangerous as it may be. (I'm smiling)

>221: well, you know... I am an inveterate hoarder of interesting links. I'm on a Mac and I see the whirling beachball of Doom all too often nowadays, owing to opening said interesting links in new browser tabs and then never quite getting round to actually reading them.

#215 Stasia - You should finish that book in one sitting. If it wasn't for the kids I certainly would have.

#217 Eliza - I agree that having seen a film or television adaption of a book makes it easier to lie about having read the book, and is a strategy most often used by high schoolers. I think however, that most adults tend to lie about the books they've read when people challenge them intellectually, such as in the compilation of lists such as the "BBC list" currently doing the rounds. I believe that lists such as these implicitly suggest that someone is intellectually inferior if they have not read certain books, or less than a certain number of books in a list.

#218 Cait - Personally, I have only read one of the books on that list. I have read selectively from another, and have read an alternative title by one of the other authors.

#219 Daniel - Thank you as always for your support and interest. I think books such as these make a greater impact because they take place in urban settings that are easily visualized, and raw images are so readily available.

#220 Rachael - Thanks for the link. I love these little gems, and shall be looking into it more as soon as I get home.

Message edited by its author, Apr 6, 2009, 8:20pm.

Well, last night I finished the excellent The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart, and today I completed Intern: A Doctor's Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar. So, what to read next?

I have no shortage of options, and with Iraq unintentionally emerging as my theme for 2009, I have the following books lying on the bedside table (with more to come)...
- Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor
- Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon
- My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell
- State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward

But, it is April, and a significant month in Australian and New Zealand military history. In 1915, volunteer soldiers from Australia and New Zealand would form the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) that would train in Egypt and fight against the Turks and Ottomans at the Battle of Gallipoli during World War I. It would be the first major military operation in which the new Australian commonwealth was involved - a "baptism by fire". Over 8700 Australians and 2400 New Zealanders would never come home.

To commemorate the first ANZAC Day - April 25th, 1916 - one year after the ANZACs landed at Arı Burnu (renamed "Anzac Cove" in 1985), the Freeman's Journal wrote...

Before Gallipoli "we were Australian in name, and we had a flag, but we had been taught by our politicians not to trust ourselves - we were constantly admonished by our daily journals to remember that we were nothing better than a joint in the tail of a great Empire. Anzac Day has changed all that... No matter how the war may end – and it can only end one way – we are at last a nation with one heart, one soul, and one thrilling aspiration. There runs through the Commonwealth a lifting spirit such as it never knew before...

"There is mourning in our homes and grief in our hearts, and the flower of our youth will not return to us… (but) the spirit of our dead heroes has come home across the seas… to whisper that we have taken our place among the nations."

So, in their honour I will be reading...
- Gallipoli by Les Carlyon
- Gallipoli: The Turkish Story by Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Basarin, and Hatice Basarin

And, I look forward to the publication, later this month, of...
- "Gallipoli: The End of the Myth: The Final Story" by Robin Prior

Message edited by its author, Apr 8, 2009, 4:57am.

Peter
I am impressed with your reading. While military books are not in my reading genre, I very much enjoy your reviews and following your progress as you zip through these difficult books.

I hope both your little boys are doing well and that the family is now fully acclimated to a wonderful addition.

Linda - I'm not sure "zip" is the word I'd use (LOL), but I thank you for reading.

I'm aware that some people may be unfamiliar with some of the events and history covered in these books, so I try to add a little background in each review without trying to bore readers, and give a little context to the books I read in other posts - such as the background to ANZAC Day and Gallipoli in Message #224.

The kiddies are doing very well, and they are adjusting well to each other, as evidenced in the picture below...

Message edited by its author, Apr 8, 2009, 5:32am.

#226: How precious! Looks like Rafe has a little more adjusting to do . . .

haha the expression of little Rafe's face!! "Take this person away from me! What is this thing? Not a human being, not a baby...he looks a bit like me too! I don't understand, this is too much for me aaaaaaaaaaargggh take him away I say!! Bring me back my mommy!" :)

Rafe might be saying, "What is this larger being next to me?" "How in the world can I possibly be this cute when I am as big as he!"

Who knows? From the picture alone, Rafe could well be laughing heartily.

Book 24

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart, OBE. Born in Hong Kong in 1973, raised in Malaysia and Scotland, he served a year as an officer in the Black Watch before studying modern history, philosophy and politics at Balliol College, Oxford. Joining the British Foreign Office, he would subsequently serve in the British Embassy in Indonesia (1997-1999), and as the British Representative to Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo campaign (1999-2000). In 2000 he took two years off to walk 6,000 miles from Turkey to Bangladesh. After 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul, which would form the basis of his first book - the critically acclaimed The Places in Between.

Back in Scotland, and looking for further adventure, Stewart saw an opportunity to return to the Middle East and utilize his diplomatic skills with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He writes, "...when the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, I sent in my CV. No one replied. So in August I took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad to ask for a job from the director of operations. A month later, the Foreign Office asked me to be the deputy governorate coordinator of Maysan, which lies in the marshes just north of the Garden of Eden."

This book, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, documents his experiences in Maysan and, following that, his work as a Senior Advisor in Dhi Qar. It would be thrilling, frustrating, and at times life threatening, work; doomed to failure from the start. As Stewart noted in an interview some years later, "...these projects are hubristic. They rest on assumptions about the capacity of the international community to transform failing societies which are misplaced. I am at the moment in the mood to say that societies are very unlikely to be channeled or guided or transformed in any very constructive way simply by an external influence."

Each chapter is preceded with a quote, commencing pragmatically with paragraphs from Machiavelli's The Prince or Discourses and Lawrence of Arabia, turning to Don Quixote, and eventually to ancient Sumerian sayings that mirror the progression of Stewart's own thoughts, expectations and feelings.

Faced with large and growing numbers of political parties, factions, and with numerous tribes locked in ancient and modern feuds, and ever evolving allegiances, Stewart and the CPA walk a thin and fading line between stability and anarchy. Relationships within the CPA and between the civilian and military forces are cause for added anxiety. Despite making real and beneficial (but unappreciated) efforts to improve the lives and conditions of local inhabitants, Stewart would ultimately come to see the work largely come to naught; he and his efforts already forgotten within just several short months after his departure.

This is an engaging book and while simplified in parts for the benefit of readability, it is highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of the region, its occupation, and governance.

Book 25

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar

"Not long ago, when I was interviewing a student for a residency spot at the hospital where I now work, the applicant said, "Perhaps the easiest decision a doctor can make is to become one." I must have frowned, for that definitely had not been the case for me. I was a reluctant traveler when I started my journey into medicine, and this ambivalence surely affected how I coped with it. For much of internship I felt buried - in a waking hell..." - Intriduction (p. xv)

If I wasn't already standing on the shores of middle age, with the waves lapping at my toes, I'd have applied for graduate entry to a medical degree years ago. Instead, I live vicariously through those who have already faced the trials and tribulations of medical school and the demands of internship and residency that follow. Fortunately for me, I have a plethora of memoirs to choose from.

Sandeep Jauhar's Intern: A Doctor's Initiation is yet another title that takes its place alongside well known and highly regarded works such as On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency by Emily R. Transue M.D., and Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years by Michael J. Collins. Perhaps it would also be appropriate to note the collected essays of Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, because, like Gawande, Jauhar is also a contributer to The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Intern is divided into three parts - I. Switching Horses, II. Cracking Up, and III. Reconciliation; reflecting the various stages Jauhar found himself in during his transition from physicist to cardiologist. Conflicted at every turn by the directions his life was taking both professionally and personally, Jauhar battled physical pain and depression, experiencing care as a doctor and a patient, before finally finding peace as a resident in his second year.

Highly readable, always frank, often depressing, and although occasionally reading like a memoir constructed around one of his newspaper essay pieces, I have no hesitation in recommending this to fans of the genre.

Message edited by its author, Apr 9, 2009, 12:16am.

Sounds like you have had some very good recent reads, Peter. Thanks for the recommendations!

your thread is always a good place to find non-fiction recommendations! whenever I try to convince myself that I should read more of the genre I just swing by... :)

Book 26

The Prince by Nicolò Machiavelli

The OED defines Machiavellian as follows...

Machiavellian (noun) - A follower of Machiavelli; a person who adopts the principles recommended, or supposed to have been recommended, by Machiavelli in his treatise on statecraft; a person who practises expediency in preference to morality; an intriguer or schemer. Usu. derogatory

However, to truly understand its etymology, one must read Machiavelli's most infamous work, The Prince. Written in 1513, published 1532, The Prince has remained in print to this day, in various translations and available freely over the internet.

Whether you subscribe to the notion that this political treatise is a self-serving tract designed to gain the favour of the Medici's, or a sarcastic commentary of the period, or full of sage advice on how to acquire, maintain, and protect a principality; whether you shudder at the notion of expediency over morality; The Prince is without doubt a confrontingly realistic view of humanity and may yet hold many lessons for those willing to apply its principles to the modern era. In Rory Stewart's book The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, the author selectively quotes from The Prince to highlight fundamental breaks between political realism and political idealism in the US occupation of Iraq.

I listened to the audiobook version, read, very appropriately, by one of my favourite actors, the late great British Shakespearian, Ian Richardson (1934-2007), who played the Machiavellian conservative politician Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards trilogy for the BBC. A series I also highly recommend next to this fabulous and surprisingly easy to read book.

Message edited by its author, Apr 9, 2009, 9:56pm.

216> The funny thing is the only book from the list that I have read (and finished) was 1984. ;)

#236 - Me too!

--------------------

Well, in other news from book land, the Gallipoli books are proving to be excellent reads, and now that I've finished Machiavelli's The Prince, I've just started on a new 'commute' book, Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama by Stephen Fox. So far, another winner!

>235: I read The Prince last year and was surprised at how much I liked it. I expected it to appall me a lot more than it did.

#237: I cannot wait to see your review of Wolf of the Deep. It has been on Continent TBR for a while now.

>235 Book #26 The Prince. I have consistently read that The Prince was based, at least in part, on Cesare Borgia. I don't know how accurate is that rumor. It's interesting that the book is being applied to 21st Century United States policy. Now that's truly appalling. The Prince has long been on my list of 'books to read before I die, but I think they would be over my head' category. So you think it's easy to read? As a Borgia dabbler, I'm interested in pursuing it.

Well, I don't often do this, but I'm putting aside some of my current reads to pay special attention to one book. This weekend a friend delivers a book to me hot from the post box - he say's I'll like it because it's SF (which I love), by a New Zealand author (he seems to think NZ is part of Australia!), and was just listed in the "Best Books of April" on amazon (where it had just been shipped dierect). So, what is this wonderful book? It is Genesis by Bernard Beckett.

So, after one chapter, I can tell you what he didn't tell me - it smacks of YA! Not that (to steal a line from the comic genius Seinfeld) there's anything wrong with that! But, a quick search online shows me that this book was in fact the winner of the Young Adult Fiction, NZ Post Book Awards 2007. Anyway, I'll see the book through... He wants it back by the end of the week, hence all the hurry, but I should finish it by Tuesday at the latest.

By the way, I've also found that you can read the whole first chapter yourself at the following link...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13882782/Previ...

Peter
Since I'm on a journey to read award winning YA books, I'm adding this one to my list. And, I'll wait for your comments to see how you liked it.

All good wishes to you and your family.

>235: a good friend who finished his medical training at Harvard bought us copies of Atul Gawande's books - would you recommend them, then?

(Also keep meaning to read Rory Stewart... soon. And your boys are so lovely!! Just wait til the little one starts pinching the big one's toys...)

#243 - Thanks for dropping by FlossieT :)

Personally I preferred Gawande's first book, Complications, to his second, Better. However, while readers outside the US may find some chapters less pertinent than others, they are both excellent and I recommend them to anyone interested in medicine and the 'larger questions'.

These books consist of articles originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and The New Yorker and Slate magazines, so readers might want to head over to Gawande's website which lists, and link to, all his articles and research writings, other than those that have been incorporated into the aforementioned books.

Atul Gawande's website -
http://www.gawande.com/index.htm

(Thanks for the nice words vis-a-vis the terrible two! As for the toys, you should hear the noise already when we even try to give the baby one of Mikey's old and long discarded baby toys!)

Flossie--I've read both Gawandes, and I agree with Peter--I liked Complications much more than Better.

#241: Thanks for the link to the first chapter, Peter. I am putting Genesis (evidently no Touchstone yet) on the Continent.

Book 27

Genesis by Bernard Beckett

What is it to be human? What makes a soul? are the two questions facing the reader in this metaphysical thriller by New Zealand teacher and author Bernard Beckett. Originally published in 2006, this book was the product of Beckett's time studying DNA mutations as a recipient of the New Zealand Science, Mathematics and Technology Teacher Fellowship. This may give, as do the original book covers, some clues into the themes and ultimate direction of Genesis, winner of several awards including the Young Adult Fiction, NZ Post Book Awards 2007.

"It's the year 2075. The island Republic has emerged from a ruined world. Its citizens are safe but not free. They live in complete isolation from the outside world. Approaching planes are gunned down, refugees shot on sight. Until one man, Adam Forde, rescues a girl from the sea." - Longacre Publishing

Hinting at it's origins as a story for the stage in it's stylistic execution, this is the story of the young rebel, Adam, who as a soldier refused to kill a young girl, Eve, as her dilapidated boat approached the the Great Sea Wall which protected the small island Republic, Aotearoa (a nice homage to the author's native homeland), from the plague that ravaged the outside world. The Republic, originally created by Plato, it is now ruled by a philosopher-ruler class known as the Academy, and it is through a young girls oral examination to enter this Academy that we come to learn of the Republics history and of Adam's significance.

Anaximander, born long after Adam's death, has studied for years, under her beloved mentor, Pericles, to face the rigorous four-hour oral examination that all perspective Academy members must undergo. Her special subject, "The life and times of Adam Forde, 2058–2077", focuses on a critical character and period in the Republic's evolution. The exam, overseen by a panel of three, is divided by breaks at the conclusion of each hour, neatly dividing this story into four discrete acts.

Telling her story through the course of the oral interrogation, and through holographic reenactments based on transcripts, Anaximander relates the details of Adam's controversial history. Imprisoned for rescuing Eve, he evades the death sentence to become the disposable companion to Art, an advanced android designed by the philosopher William; an interaction that seeks to aid in the development of Art's individuality. Through conversations between Adam and the android, Beckett explores the nature of consciousness in the time-honoured debate of man v machine.

Having, what her mentor Pericles called, "a special feel" for Adam, Anaximander has developed a new interpretation of Adam's legendary life, yet still feels that she has only part of the story. That part is revealed in the final act, and everything that we thought was true is turned on its head leading to sensational revelations on the very nature of the Republic, the role of the Academy, the very identity of Anaximander and her peers; and on the final page, a shocking and wholly unexpected end.

Beckett noted in an interview, "I knew that at the heart of the novel would sit a confrontation between a man and a machine. I knew humanity would be represented by a criminal, imprisoned both by the justice system and his own inflexible beliefs. I also knew the machine would be charming, irascible, and provocative. What I didn't know was anything about the story in which this central conceit would be wrapped. I wrote a short play in which the prisoner was a psychopath and spent a couple of years trying on and off to develop that into a novel but it never worked. I needed a trick that would position the audience first with the human and then somehow twist that loyalty, ideally without them realising it was happening." - Source

While I did not enjoy the look-at-me allegorical tricks of naming characters after famous philosophers or the 'first humans'; the book, occasional dull philosophical debates notwithstanding, redeemed itself in it's final confrontations and revelations. Many of the themes in this book have been explored previously by, and pay homage to, such accomplished writers as Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Orwell, but these caveats do not detract overall from this novel aimed at the Young Adult market, but with enough juice to engage adults as well.

Message edited by its author, Apr 16, 2009, 5:24am.

Oh, yea, definitely going to have to find that one. Thanks for another great recommendation, Peter!

Stasia - Now the kids are asleep, and I've had time to review my review, I've rewritten and even added a paragraph that help give a more complete picture of the book. I hope you enjoy it when you get the opportunity.

The local libraries failed me on that one, but I have put a request for it out on PBS. Hopefully, I can get a copy of it that way.

Oh, why not....

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Wilbur Smith. He, and Hammond Innes, were the authors I loved as a YA. I never met Hammond Innes, but I did get a book signed by Wilbur Smith :)

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Why would I want more than one?

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
There is a myth that sentences should not end in a preposition. It is a myth! Full stop.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I have a very healthy relationship with my real-life partner, thank you very much. But I do have a very special place in my heart for the television fictional characters, Barbara Good (played by Felicity 'bestill my beating heart' Kendal) in the BBC sitcom The Good Life (1975-1978), and Sally Abbott (played by Sally 'oh say you'll be mine' Geeson) in the BBC sitcom Bless This House (1971-1976).

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?
Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book, but if I go back to my childhood then any one of my Famous Five novels would have to rate very highly on this list.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
I'm sorry, I didn't start keeping a literary diary until I was eleven. But, I suspect it was something by Enid Blyton.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
Victory Was Beyond Their Grasp by Douglas E. Nash. I just couldn't finish it, but I will try again one day!

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
The Great War by Les Carlyon

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I would never force anyone to do anything.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Who cares, except for publishers, potential winners, and literary snobs?

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas – Yeah! I know! It's been done to death, and they have all been CRAP!

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama by Stephen Fox

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
None - fortunately!

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
Define lowbrow.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, in the original Middle English.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
After being forced to watch King Lear as a student, I've avoided watching anything ever again by this overrated merchant of torture!

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
They both have good and bad.

18) Roth or Updike?
Who or who?

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Are they even real people?

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Chaucer every time.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Spare me from either!

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
There are more holes in my reading than a shop full of Swiss cheeses.

23) What is your favorite novel?
No favourites, but Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, are all vying for top place.

24) Play?
Any play by the Restoration Comedy genius, William Congreve. That man is a god!

25) Poem?
I don't mind a bit of Tennyson every now and then.

26) Essay?
George Orwell wrote many excellent essays. Will be reading more soon...

27) Short story?
Can't think of any off the top of my head.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Cosmos by Carl Sagan

29) Who is your favorite writer?
If only I could write like Carl Sagan – wow!

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
JK Rowling

31) What is your desert island book?
A book on learning Swahili – just in case!

32) And... what are you reading right now?
See Message #1

Message edited by its author, Apr 20, 2009, 4:35am.

Hi Peter
I enjoyed your review of Genesis by Bernard Beckett!

I love Restoration Drama! Have you read Congreve's The Way of the World? William Wycherley's The Country Wife and George Etherege's The Man of Mode are great too - but Aphra Behn's The Rover is the best!!

#253: I am still trying to track down a copy of The Rover. Thanks for the reminder, Cait!

#253 - Have read Congreve's The Way of the World more times than I care to remember, and most recently saw it performed in 2003 in Sydney, with Miriam Margolyes playing Lady Wishfort.

I also have a limited edition (unnumbered / 875 copies), 1928 Haymarket Press edition of the play, with a signed original etching by A. R. Middleton on the frontispiece, which I picked up in a small bookshop in Hay-on-Wye 19 years ago for only two pounds - a prize purchase in my small collection!

Message edited by its author, Apr 18, 2009, 8:04am.

#255 - So cool! I don't think I have ever come across any Restoration plays in production in my neck of the woods - it is mostly Shakespeare and Shaw, and then some musicals. I would love to see The Way of the World!

Hay-on-Wye is in Wales, right? And it is famous for it's bookstores? It is on my list of places to visit!

#254 - I hope you find it Stasia, but it is rather obscure, so it might be difficult. If you can't find it, let me know, and I will send you my copy to borrow.

#256 - Looks like I was filling in some extra info on that book I have (Msg #255) while you were posting your reply!

Yes, Hay-on-Wye is renown for its bookshops, and is in Wales, although this excerpt from the Hay-on-Wye website is amusing...

Hay-on-Wye lies on the Welsh side of the Welsh/English Border in the County of POWYS, Wales. Although as far as the Royal Mail is concerned, it is better, apparently, to use the County of HEREFORDSHIRE, not to be confused with the county of HERTFORDSHIRE; a very popular mistake ! You will notice, after browsing our Hay site, that the majority of the postal addresses are either 'via Hereford' or 'Herefordshire'. It is purely for postal reasons !

I lived in Herefordshire for a little time, and used to pop down to Hay-on-Wye on the occasional weekend to do a little browsing. If you've never been, then I highly recommend going!

#257: Thanks, Cait, but it looks as if the local college library has a copy. I appreciate the offer, though!

Agghhh!

I keep telling myself, "Don't touch new books until you've finished one you've already started!"

But, yet again I find myself thinking, "I'll just take a quick peek at the introduction. Just get a feel for the book." And then its too late!

Last night I "peeked" at The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby, an author I really enjoy, and a book I picked up, pre-loved, a few days ago, on the recommendation of MusicMom41.

And I just couldn't put the damn thing down. I'm usually out like a light by 11pm, but last night I was still wide awake and reading at 1am! If they baby hadn't started crying, I would have still been reading when the sun came up!

A great book. Look for a review soonish!

Having finished Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama by Stephen Fox, I'm now tackling a book I've had on the back burner for some time...

- The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes

I also have the following books on the Great Depression, but doubt I will read them all this year...

- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy
- The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
- America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard

And on money and other economic related matters (Rothbard featuring again)...

- The Case Against the Fed by Murray N. Rothbard
- What Has Government Done to Our Money? Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar by Murray N. Rothbard
- The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
- The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

And here are two money related memoirs that I recently gave away, because I just couldn't get interested enough...

- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
- The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan

Message edited by its author, Apr 20, 2009, 9:24pm.

What did you think of Wolf of the Deep?

#262 - Loved it! One of the best books I've read in 2009. Will post a full review in the next few days. I've got quite the stack of Civil War books, accumulated over a long period, and I'm finally beginning to pick them off one by one.

I notice you're reading Battle Cry of Freedom - I picked this up recently, and look forward to seeing your thoughts and opinions on it. I can see you're far more knowledgeable than me on the period.

Also recently picked up McPherson's Tried by War and Gettysburg by Sears. There are about a dozen others on the list and I'm looking forward to savouring them slowly.

#263. I'll add Wolf of the Deep to my TBR pile, I'm woefully ignorant about the naval war.

Battle Cry of Freedom is actually a reread, I first read it about 20 years ago when it first came out. It is the best one volume history of the war.

I'll be interested to hear what you think about Tried by War ,hopefully it's not just an attempt to cash in on the current Lincoln craze.

Time for a part 2 thread eh?!

I can't believe there's someone else on here who liked the Good Life. My parents **loved** that show, and To the Manor Born with Penelope Keith.

Anyway, I popped in to say that I'm jealous of your ownership of all those depression/recession books. I've looked at the Niall Ferguson one a few times and may yet succumb. I've stolen the Greenspanone from my dad and will try to read it soon. I've never heard of Murray Rothbard but now I'm curious...

#264 sgtbigg and petermc, I got about 2/3 of the way through Battle Cry of Freedom last year then got sidetracked. I was enjoying it very much but needed a better atlas next to me. I'll try it again, but not till I can concentrate a bit more.

#265: Cushla, McPherson has an Atlas of the Civil War that you might find helpful.

#265 - Cushla

"I can't believe there's someone else on here who liked the Good Life. My parents **loved** that show, and To the Manor Born with Penelope Keith."

What can I say? I'm an absolute geek when it comes to British Television Comedy, especially of the 70s and 80s.

On Penelope Keith - it was lovely to see her again in the 2007 "To the Manor Born" Christmas Special. But, it was her role as the social climbing snob Margo Leadbetter in "The Good Life" that I remember her most fondly; for which she received the BAFTA in 1977 for 'Best Comedy Performer'.

However, if I am painfully honest, it was Felicity Kendal as Barbara Good, that most endeared "The Good Life" to me. In fact, when my wife and I were discussing baby names, we had even decided (on my suggestion) to call our first girl Felicity. However, we ended up having two boys!

Peter
I'm simply stopping by to check the books you are reading and to say hello.

#268 - Linda - Hello! Always lovely to have you drop by :)

#247 Hi Peter - I enjoyed your review of Bernard Beckett's Genesis. I've read this twice now and enjoyed it more the second time when I got away from comparing it to other books. I think it is a great addition to the YA canon of books and hopefully will inspire a new generation of scifi readers to search out the classics.
I've just started reading Ron Leshem's Beaufort as I enjoyed the movie so much.
I'm also a Good Life fan from the old days, my son's name Liam was partly inspired by Liam Neeson's performance in Schindler's List. When we visited Israel we were surprised that a family member had chosen Liam for their son's name. In Hebrew it's an acronym for 'lo yiheyeh od milhimot' (there will be no more wars).

edit touchstone.

Message edited by its author, Apr 21, 2009, 8:28pm.

#270 - I agree. If "Genesis" inspires a new generation to embrace SF as a genre, then that is a great thing. According to the Longacre Press website the book was released in the UK in Adult and Young Adult versions! I have no idea what the difference is though. Packaging?

I hope new readers of SF will however, search out the newest generation of SF writers, than just the classics. The most exciting SF I've read in recent years were by 'modern' writers such as Richard K. Morgan, and I'm currently reading (amongst others) Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground which is excellent!

Great to hear from another "The Good Life" fan. It's constantly rated in the top 10 British TV comedies in viewer polls. As for the origins of the name Liam, I had no idea! Beautiful sentiment though, isn't it?

Spent 5 minutes in my local bookshop, and walked away with four more entries on my WISH LIST...

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier
Collier is a co-author on the excellent paper, "Greed and Grievance in Civil War" (PDF format)

Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life by Ted Gup

Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin

Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides

Note to self - Stop visiting the bookshop!

Book 28

Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama by Stephen Fox

Let me begin this review with some quotations from the book, that clearly show the impact and importance of the Confederate Raider CSS Alabama during the American Civil War; the most successful commerce raider in naval history...

"In twenty-two months and 75,000 miles of cruising, the Alabama burned fifty-two Union ships, sank one, bonded nine, and variously disposed of three others: sixty-five captures in all. By their own estimates, the men of the Alabama seized over five million dollars' worth of enemy shipping. Beyond those numbers, Semmes had affected the Union blockade, Confederate morale, Union morale, Anglo-American relations, and the current and future prospects of the U.S. merchant fleet. A few weeks after the battle of Cherbourg, the New York Herald printed a list of over nine hundred Yankee ships sold into foreign hands, mainly British, since 1860. The Alabama was the main reason."

In the "long-festering squabble between the United States and Great Britain over the Alabama and other British-built cruisers...demanding compensation for all the destruction and added war costs caused.... Some American politicians wanted to annex Canada. The threat of annexation helped push the Canadian provinces toward federation and independence from London in 1867. The rippling impacts of the cruise of the Alabama thus included, at one or two removes, the founding of Canadian nationhood."

"A five-nation tribunal in Geneva - the first major international tribunal, an important precedent - ordered Britain to pay $15.5 million to the United States for the havoc wreaked by the Alabama and two other cruisers. Of this total, the largest share, $6.75 million, was assigned to Semmes's ship."

Largely forgotten by history, the story of Raphael Semmes and the Confederate Raider CSS Alabama is bought vividly to life in Stephen Fox's authoritative and moving character-driven narrative using contemporary diaries, books, reports, songs, and poems of the period. As Publishers Weekly wrote, Fox "makes a convincing case that Confederate Navy Capt. Raphael Semmes should be added to" the list of Confederate War heroes such as "Lee, Jackson, Stuart and Longstreet".

This is a book that will appeal to civil war buffs, as much as to the general reader who enjoys works of history, biographies, and stories of personal and political intrigue. It is certainly one of the best books I've read in recent years. Highly recommended.

Message edited by its author, Apr 22, 2009, 4:27am.

#273: That one is already on the Continent or I would add it again after your review!

I'm adding this one to the tbr pile. Thanks for your great review ofWolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama

Book 29

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes (Abandoned)

I tried my hardest. Honestly I did! At page 50, I willed myself on to page 100. At page 100 I struggled valiantly to reach page 150. At page 150 I invented an ingenious device to make it to page 200. My cunning plan involved placing a wire on my chin and another on my chest, so that if I nodded off, the two points would meet and thus complete a circuit that would connect a car battery under my chair to a pair of electrodes clamped to my testicles. But, this failed to revive me at page 170, so I plugged the electrodes directly into the mains. In this way I sailed past page 200 and even got as far as page 250 before I broke down completely.

I can now report that after a night of rest and close psychiatric observation I am making a slow but steady recovery. As for the book, I'm not sure where it is. I have a feeling the nurse, sitting in the chair at the end of my bed as I type this, has secreted it away should I attempt to read it again and have, as my doctor put it, a "complete brain melt". I don't think this is a proper medical term. I think he was just using layman terms to make it easy for me in my fragile state, but I can't be sure.

My psychiatrist has recommended that I find others, who, like me, have suffered at the hands of Shlaes, as it may be therapeutic to know I'm not alone. So, I went to amazon and perused the 1-star ratings, and found that, indeed, I am not alone! Here are a few thoughts from like-minded, and far more eloquent than I, amazon reviewers...

"This is a rambling critique of Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression that seems to have a theme and coherence apparent only to the author."

"...the book is simply poorly written, and can't be recommended for that reason alone. I'm a lover of historical nonfiction, but here one struggles mightily through paragraphs that seem to have three or four discrete topics, and threads of thought that appear and disappear (and then reappear) on the page like puffs of smoke."

"It is full of non-sequiturs and meaningless information."

"...the author's observations and conclusions .... the main points that she wishes to make .... are not clearly articulated, never plainly stated. They are presumably implied by the highly detailed text, but this reader found it impossible to draw insights from disconnected and often technical treatments of disparate subjects."

"Be warned, Amity Shales "Forgotten Man" is Andrew Mellon and the wealthy. The cover of this book is VERY misleading, even the reviews on the dust jacket have been cherry picked to make it appear as a well rounded account... It fails to address the genuine forgotten people."

"...if Ms. Shlaes' jump around, connect-the-dots prose style wasn't so headache-inducing. Another reviewer called her treatment of The Great Depression "breezy." I'd sum it up as faux history, unpersuasive, and verging on unreadable."

I should note of course, as I'd hate to sound biased, that only 30 people gave this book 1-star, as opposed 129 5-star reviews. So, my new friends and I are obviously in a minority, and may ourselves eventually come to be known, in the singular, as "the forgotten man". Sorry... my therapist says I should rest now...

Message edited by its author, Apr 25, 2009, 5:56am.

That was so funny. Hope your recovery is fast!! I have to go to Borders and read some for free... seriously, you should go and stick it in reviews to warn off unsuspecting readers. And get a hot review.

I like the look of quite a few of those other depression books. I have the Greenspan one here and have eyed Niall Ferguson's a few times.

It's ANZAC Day here and I managed to get our 2 year old to watch the last bit of the dawn service on TV instead of Playhouse Disney. I feel like I should be reading a Gallipoli book but Paris 1919 will have to do!

#276 Another great review petermc, and you made me laugh out loud, but I won't be adding The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression to my TBR pile! Thank you very much for that!

#276 - too funny, good luck on your recovery.

#276: Ouch! Thank you for painfully enduring as long as you did. Now I can take the book off the Continent!

#277 Cushla - ANZAC Day in Tokyo has been one of ceasless rain. We haven't ventured out of doors at all! But, I did achieve one of my aims today, and that was to finish at least one of my Gallipoli books in the memory of all those that fell and have fallen since April 25th, 1915.

The book I finished was Gallipoli: The Turkish Story, and on pages 121-122 there is a poem, reproduced from The Anzac Book. The Anzac Book (see HERE for a full reproduction) was written and illustrated at Gallipoli in 1915 by the troops themselves, and this poem was written by its editor, the renown Australian press correspondent, C.E.W. Bean. It captures the spirit of the period and the respect with which the Turks were held by the diggers...

ABDUL

We've drunk the boys who rushed the hills,
The men who stormed the beach,
The sappers and the A.S.C.,
We've had a toast for each;
And the guns and stretcher-bearers -
But, before the bowl is cool,
There's one chap I’d like to mention,
He's a fellow called ABDUL.

We haven't seen him much of late -
Unless it be his hat,
Bobbing down behind a loophole...
And we mostly blaze at that;
But we hear him wheezing there at nights,
Patrolling through the dark,
With his signals - hoots and chirrups -
Like an early morning lark.

We've heard the twigs a-crackling,
As we crouch upon the knees,
And his big, black shape went smashing,
Like a rhino, through the trees.
We've seen him fling in, rank on rank,
Across the morning sky;
And we've had some pretty shooting,
And - he knows the way to die.

Yes, we've seen him dying there in front -
Our own boys died there, too -
With his poor dark eyes a-rolling,
Staring at the hopeless blue;
With his poor maimed arms a-stretching
To the God we both can name...
And it fairly tore our hearts out;
But it's in the beastly game.

So though your name be black as ink
For murder and rapine,
Carried out in happy concert
With your Christians from the Rhine,
We will judge you, Mr Abdul,
By the test by which we can -
That with all your breath, in life, in death,
You've played the gentleman.

Message edited by its author, Apr 25, 2009, 8:01am.

The Anzac Book looks fascinating!

Also, I read Fast Food Nation over the weekend as a direct result of your post about it, and I think it's going to be life-changing for me as well. Thanks very much for the recommendation.

Also, thanks for your recent post in girlunderglass's thread about Dorothy Sayers. Clearly you're pretty knowlegable about those books. I've just started Nine Tailors, which is my first Sayers ever. Is it fairly representative of her other books? So far, I'm fairly early on in the book, but haven't found much personality in Whimsy yet.

Thanks for checking in ChocolateMuse. The Nine Tailors was also my first Wimsey book.

I don't claim to be an expert in Sayers or the Wimsey character. I'm just a fan! But, I think, and it is generally acknowledged that The Nine Tailors (1934) and Gaudy Night (1935) are her most mature works.

Trivia: The Nine Tailors was influenced directly by The Nebuly Coat by John Meade Falkner.

girlunderglass read Whose Body? and it's fascinating to look at the treatment of death in Sayers novels after Strong Poison (1930) when compared to that first novel. Sayers parents died in 1928 and 1929, and Sayers turned 40 in 1933 (while she was writing The Nine Tailors), giving these books a much darker outlook. Also, consider Harriet Vane in Strong Poison who recently lost her parents, and likewise Hilary Thorpe in The Nine Tailors.

Wimsey's character also evolves over these books, losing some of that early frivolity and becoming a much deeper and more rounded man, yet without losing his endearing good nature. What I remember most vividly however about The Nine Tailors was the atmosphere it invoked for me. A setting, by the way, based on Sayers' childhood. It has been hailed as a masterpiece, as well as boring and dull by critics, but it forever remains one of my personal favourites.

The biographical content mentioned by girlunderglass at the end of her novel, has been reprinted at the end of many of the books. So, you might enjoy getting more of a feel for who Wimsey is by reading that. You can also read his biography on wikipedia.

Happy reading. Sorry my response is so brief. Limited time don't you know, what?

Edit: Typo, and clarification of certain points.

Message edited by its author, Apr 27, 2009, 4:52am.

Indeed, sir.

Thanks very much - you'd beat Wikipedia any day! I'll approach my reading of Nine Tailors with a better understanding now.

#284 - You're welcome. If you are interested in The Nebuly Coat (1903) by John Meade Falkner, as mentioned above, then you can download it free in various formats HERE.

#285: Thanks for posting the link, Peter. I was interested in finding The Nebuly Coat.

I'd like to add my vote to Cushla's back in >265 - new-thread time, perhaps, Peter :)?

#287 Rachael - I promise to start a new thread in May :)

But first I have to write reviews for the following books that I've finished this month, when I get more than 5 minutes for myself...

- The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
- Gallipoli: The Turkish Story by Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Basarin, and Hatice Basarin
- How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

Book 30

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Subtitled The Diary of an Occasionally Exasperated But Ever Hopeful Reader, The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (of High Fidelity, 31 Songs, Slam) is a compilation of articles written for The Believer Magazine between September 2003 and June 2006, on the subject of books and reading.

Freed of the compromises and ethical dilemmas of writing paid book reviews, Hornby's Stuff I've Been Reading column would afford him the opportunity of reading and writing about the books he wanted to read; and should his relationship with a book be affected by "mood, morale, concentration levels, weather or family history", he "could and would say so." There was only one caveat: Thou shalt not slag anyone off; an "admirable and entirely unproblematic" ethos to Hornby, until faced with writing about books he didn't much like!

But, much to the readers delight, it is Hornby's struggles with this one commandment, and his relationship with the management of the magazine, the "Polysyllabic Spree", that gives rise to a series of running jokes within his monthly articles, replete with Hornby's signature wry wit. Take Lloyd Evans of the Spectator at his word, when he writes in the blurb that adorns the front cover of my Penguin edition, that, "It's a hoot, a treasure, an absolute joy... I laughed on every page" (well, perhaps not on every page, but almost!).

Each column is headed with a list of Books Bought and Books Read, and occasionally end with an excerpt from one of the books that Hornby was particularly fond of, such as Dickens' classic David Copperfield, Tony Hoagland's modern poem Impossible Dream from his book What Narcissism Means to Me, and The Bicycle from the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. A selection testament to the broad range of books you'll find discussed in Hornby's warn, delightful and engaging prose.

Since reading this book, I've already procured three titles Hornby opined on for my TBR list, The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson, Five Days in London by John Lukacs, and the two volumes of the aforementioned Persepolis. I will also seek out the next two volumes in this series of collected articles, Housekeeping vs The Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

Thanks for the great descriptions of your recent reads!

droooooooooool I'm ordering that one from the book depository soon - just waiting for some money to suddenly drop from the sky (right into my empty pocket). No seriously. I've been eyeing it long enough. Plus I've been reading some excerpts online that only made me want it more. Of course I'm worried that it'll add yet MORE titles to the long hand-written lists I have. But I guess that's inevitable anyway.

Thanks for...wait a minute??? Why I am thanking you for making me spend more money???

#290 Linda - Thank you for reading :)

#291 Eliza - Be warned - It will certainly add titles to the TBR list. He even made me want to read David Copperfield, and I've never wanted to read David Copperfield! And, since we're throwing thank yous around (or not!), let me take the opportunity of thanking you for putting me back in touch with Lord Peter Wimsey, it was a delight to reestablish that relationship.

Now, two more reviews to write! But, no more time today. It's about to get BUSY!

#52 - yes, number 52 (that's a long way gone, isn't it). I've just found your thread and I've gotta tell you, you have a great sense of humor. Also, I listened to the audio version of Long Way Gone and although I'm not a huge fan of audio I really appreciated this story told in the author's voice. At times he sounds unemotional and I wonder if that is because of all he's been through and perhaps he's numb. I'm not sure. If anyone else has heard it I would love to hear(see) their thoughts on it. An amazing story none the less.

#293 Carmenere - Hi! Thanks for dropping in. It's great to be discovered. Next time I'll be sure to have the kettle on :)

Wow! Message 52! I thought it was a typo - maybe 252 or 152! I'm glad you enjoyed the book. I thought it was fascinating. I haven't heard the audiobook, but I've since seen a few interviews with Ishmael Beah, and I would guess that he's told his story so often now (and having been through so much) that it has ceased to have the emotional impact on him that we (as first time listeners) might expect.

Woo-hoo - I'm in the suburbs of Kanagawa tonight (just outside Tokyo), near a US airbase, and as I type (8.20pm) several low flying fighters are engaged in exercises seemingly right overhead! Talk about LOUD!

Anyway, please don't be a stranger and feel free to drop in anytime :)

Long Way Gone has been on my tbr pile for awhile...looks like I need to move it up a few notches.

Peter..Loud planes overhead? Did the boys react?

Since we are all dropping in, if you go back to message 142 in this thread, you recommended (to me) the Inspector Morse mysteries by Colin Dexter.
I just completed the first one, Last Bus to Woodstock and I liked it. I can't say that I would have thought of the Qwilleran/Morse comparison, but maybe I'll see it as I continue to read Morse mysteries.

I plan to read more of the series at some point. Probably sooner than later, since I like small paperback mysteries to carry in my purse - they come in handy all the time! (One time I pulled it out at the cash register at Walmart because the lady ahead of me was having a problem with payment. It worked! Everyone else in line was angry but I had my book to read...)

My official 'review', if you could call it that, is near the end of my thread which is here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/51253

Thanks,
Angela

#295 Linda - The boys slept right through it all! Thank goodness!

#296 Angela - Thanks for dropping back. I'm so glad you liked Morse. And I'll be dropping in to check out the review shortly. Put the kettle on ;)

Book 31

Gallipoli: The Turkish Story by Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Basarin, and Hatice Basarin

To the ANZACs who landed at Gallipoli on April 25th, 1915, he was known as 'Abdul', 'Jacko', 'Johnno', or 'Johnny Turk'. He was the enemy. He was the soldier of the Ottoman Empire. He was the defender and the ANZACs were the invaders. And the invaders lost. Over 8,700 Australians lost. Over 2,400 New Zealanders lost. Far from family, far from home, they lost their lives, and found a new family and a new home. In 1934, the founder of modern Turkey, and the man who helped lead the fight in those dark days 19 years before, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, defined that home...

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. You are now living in the soil of a friendly country, therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side, here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well."

In 1972 "a small group of nine Turks marched in Sydney's... Anzac Day parade behind the banner: 'Turkish Australian friendship will never die'". The invader and the defender marching side by side. In friendship. Free of animosity. With respect. A "respect between Turk and Australian, born out of war against each other", write the authors of Gallipoli: The Turkish Story, that "is truly unique. Come Anzac Day each year, neither Australia's political leaders nor the RSL embraces the Germans or Japanese as it does the local Turkish community." As well as wanting to tell the story of Gallipoli from the Turkish perspective, the authors also wish "to explain why Australians and Turks now regard Gallipoli as the war that made them friends."

Just 151 pages of text before the Notes, this can not hope to be the definitive text on the Turkish campaign, but it is an admirable introduction and perhaps serves more valuably in it's secondary aim in seeking to define the close bond felt between Australians and Turks, forged on the battlefield so many years ago.

Message edited by its author, Apr 29, 2009, 7:42pm.

Book 32

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

Historian, philosopher, essayist, entrepreneur, television presenter; Swiss born Alain de Botton first came to my attention through the excellent and thought-provoking 2006 three-part British documentary "The Perfect Home", based on his book The Architecture of Happiness. I next ran into de Botton, in an earlier 2004 documentary, Status Anxiety, based on his book by the same name. In each, de Botton proved that philosophy needn't be the preserve of the intellectually superior, but could be made relevant to everyday life; what has been coined the "philosophy of everyday life."

Having just released his latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, I thought it was about time I became acquainted with the writings of this man I had so come to admire on the small screen. I decided to start with his first work of non-fiction, How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997).

Part biography, part literary review, part philosophical tract, John Weightman of the Daily Telegraph summed up this book well, when he wrote...

"This engaging book, which combines whimsical humour with sharp intelligence, is one of the most entertaining pieces of literary criticism I have read in a long while. It cannot fail to please Proustians, who will recognise that Mr de Botton knows his subject inside out, and it will be of particular help to those would-be readers of In Search of Lost Time, who have got sadly entangled in the psychological thickets of the sprawling masterpiece."

On another level it is a self-help book as defined by Frank Gannon of The New York Times Book Review...

"How Proust Can Change Your Life is witty, funny and tonic -- and it provides ample justification for all the college courses that make Proust required reading. Mr. de Botton reminds us that A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, like all great literature, isn't just a means of garnering academic credits or an esthetic height to be scaled. It's good medicine: it can cure what ails us -- but only if we stick with the nine-step program."

But what is equally exciting is the eloquence of de Botton's writing. In fact, one can't help but agree with an amazon reviewer who states "I'm afraid to go and read 'In Search...' now, in case it is de Botton that I've been seduced by rather than Proust!".

This is one of those books I will read again, and savour, word by word.

Message edited by its author, Apr 29, 2009, 11:07pm.

"This is one of those books I will read again, and savour, word by word." What a great recommendation! I already have this book on my tbr pile or I would add it simply on the basis of that sentence!

#299 I'm surprised and enlightened. That book was recommended to me on my profile page once by a random LT users a long time ago. For whatever reason I thought something was strange about the recommendation, and mistakenly assumed there must be something wrong with the book, like some kind of religious aspect. Oops...I feel like I should go hunt that user down and apologize for ignoring them. I'm intrigued now.

#300 Linda - Thank you. And congratulations on posting Message 300. There's no prize other than my personal appreciation.

#301 Daniel - Keep an eye out for this one, and I'll keep an eye out for his other books. And, thank you for adding me to your "interesting libraries" list. I'm honoured :)

#298: Your comment in the last paragraph left me wondering, "Is there a definitive text on the Turkish campaign, and if so, what is it?" Do you know?

#299: On to the Continent that one goes, for sure!

#303 Stasia,

"Is there a definitive text on the Turkish campaign, and if so, what is it?"

Good question! In English? I don't know. Off the top of my head, I know von Sanders' Five Years in Turkey (English Title) is important to most researchers on the Turkish campaign, as are papers published by officers in the Turkish publication, The Military Journal, after the war. I have four books on Gallipoli at home, and shall consult the bibliographies this evening.

#304: Thanks, Peter.

I watched an episode of History Detectives on cable once and one of the places they were investigating was why the British/Aussies/New Zealanders really did not stand a chance at Gallipoli. It was very interesting.

#305 Stasia - Your post about the documentary suddenly reminded me of the 2005 documentary "Gallipoli" narrated by Sam Neill and Jeremy Irons; written and directed by Tolga Ornek; examining the campaign from the Turkish point of view. Well worth hunting down!

Here's a REVIEW from the Sydney Morning Herald.

#306: I will try to hunt down a copy. Thanks for the heads up about that documentary.

Stasia,

Many of the books referenced in Gallipoli: The Turkish Story are in the Turkish language, but here are a couple of English titles pulled from the bibliographies of the books I have that focus more or less exclusively on the Ottoman Army.

- Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Contributions in Military Studies) by Edward J. Erickson
A little pricy at $115, at Amazon. Not specifically about Gallipoli, which is limited to pages 75-96.

- Gallipoli: Companion To The Feature Length Documentary by Tolga Örnek
This is the book that was written to compliment the documentary I discussed in Message 306. I've included some information on it below...

This book is the companion to the new feature length documentary Gallipoli, the outcome of a six-year effort, which was produced around the globe and premiered in Istanbul in March 2005. More than 70 archives in the UK, Germany, France, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey have been researched and more than 16 international historians have been consulted to make the film as historically accurate as possible. Just like the film this book is based on this research and focuses on the human aspects of the campaign by portraying the experience of ordinary soldiers on both sides. The directors of the film put this book together so they could incorporate much of the material that could not make it into the final film, due to the film's running time.

#308: Thanks for the additional info, Peter. I will try and track down the books as well as the documentary.

Thank you everyone for dropping by and taking an interest. It looks like it's high time to start a new thread!

Part 2 can be found at...
http://www.librarything.com/topic/63840

Message edited by its author, May 2, 2009, 9:37am.