Current Reading: March 2023

First up I see. Knocked off Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester. Come for the maritime disaster and royal follies, stay for the social and political history.

>1 Shrike58: Looks interesting, thanks for posting about it!

>2 jztemple: Pickford impresses me with the level of archival work he did, and the how he manages to incorporate it into a book of reasonable length without being heavy-handed about it.

Next up is Bernd & Hilla Becher, a catalog from the first posthumous exhibition summing up their life's work. I've always had a certain fascination with their pictures when I ran across them, but never really followed up until now.

Read The Modern Cruiser: The Evolution of the Ships that Fought the Second World War by Robert C. Stern. A very technical work, but well done.

I finished An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young. Andrew Young's memoir of his life and, most importantly, his experiences working alongside Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is extremely detailed and, at 531 pages, takes a while to get through. However, the journey is very much worthwhile for anyone interested in reading a comprehensive history of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Since this is a memoir rather than a straight history, Young is able to provide, also, a personal dimension that frames the events extremely well.

Finished The Bishop of Broadway: The Life and Work of David Belasco by Craig Timberlake. Not the easiest biography to read as the author does a lot of "life and times" writing early on, giving a lot of background, but by about one-third of the way through he starts concentrating on Belasco. He does however feel the need to include large amounts of quoted text, like the transcripts of trials and the entire text of reviews. That being said, it is a good look at one of the most interesting characters in Broadway history. Somewhat gossipy, but overall worth reading. The book was published originally in 1954 and the writing is rather sophisticated, but not academic; I was thanking myself for having the Kindle version so I could look up the meanings of some words that have dropped out of use since it was written.

Adding to my collection of esoteric books read, today I finished The Railway Clearing House in the British Economy 1842-1922 by Philip Sidney Bagwell. I admit I had never hear of this organization (wiki link) until when reading a book about British railroads I came across a mention of it. Turns out to be a very interesting organization. The book actually covers a lot more than the economic implications of the RCH, it also describes its origin, operations and a lot more. Something interesting for rail fans.

Done with Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War; mentioning it here because it's as much a study in international relations as it is an examination of military strategy. Very much politics pursued by military means. Not the first book on the subject you should read, but I found it very thought provoking.

Finished Conquest of the Skies, which purports to be a comprehensive history of how the race for endurance and distance in "Golden Age" aviation fed into the development of the long-range bomber, but falls short of the author's apparent aspirations. Though Wolf does turn up some interesting stories that I really wasn't aware of; definitely inter-library loan fodder.

Just completed Seize the Trident: The Race for Superliner Supremacy and How It Altered the Great War by Douglas R. Burgess. This is a subject area that I have a lot of interest in, so I persevered and completed it, in spite of some cringworthy phrases and a plethora of technical and historic errors. You would think that a book under the imprint of International Marine/McGraw-Hill might have an editor with a bit more maritime experience. But otherwise it was a well told story.

Wrapped up The Great Air Race, the account of an aviation spectacular spawned by Gen. Billy Mitchell in 1919, that was truly epic, while at the same time stretching the capacity of the United States Army Air Service to the breaking point.

From the library: We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson by Keith Weldon Medley

Gave up after getting about one-third of the way through One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 by Rosemary Ashton. It sounded like an interesting idea, a triple biography covering only a single year, and mostly only the summer, but it just wasn't enjoyable.

Bill Bryson did something similar with one summer America 1927 which was quite good if you are interested

>15 cindydavid4: No, this is the second triple biography I've tried and that's enough.

hee, I get it!

How about a collective biography? Finished up The Murder of Professor Schlick, an examination of the so-called Vienna Circle of thinkers who wanted to put philosophy on a more logical basis, the better to assist in developing the new wave of physics of the time. Most of them were lucky to get out of Vienna before the looming wave of fascist politics came crashing down on their heads. Having read this work I'd be inclined to give the author's other writings a try.

Currently I'm reading The Comanchero Frontier: A History of New Mexican-Plains Indian Relations by Charles L. Kenner. Somewhat in an academic style, not unexpected since it was originally Kenner's PhD thesis, it is nevertheless very informative.

From the library: Desegregation in Northern Virginia Libraries by Chris Barbuschak and Suzanne S. LaPierre