Current Reading-August 2024

What's up for reading this month?

>24 Shrike58: jztemple: put that on my WL

I completed two books this week dealing with the Holocaust:

The Last Jew of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman Mr. Rajchman served as both a barber and a dentist at Treblinka. Unlike Wiesel or Levi, Mr. Rajchman does not have a way with words, although his tale is horrifying. Rajchman participated in the uprising and was 1/100 prisoners who escaped. He made his way to Warsaw where he participated in that ghetto uprising. For safety reasons he and his new wife lived many years in Uruguay before moving back to Poland. He was one who testified against John Demjanjuk, one-time auto dealership owner from Cleveland, Ohio, later convicted as being a guard at Treblinka and Sobibor. Nothing "new" in this book, but it's always good to "remember." I make it a point to read at least one book about the Holocaust per year. 192 pages 3 stars NF/War Room WWII/Being Jewish

One "annoying" (for lack of a better word) aside, is that Mr. Rajchman used the word "murderer" for everybody not Jewish within the camp instead of labels such as guards, cooks, gassers, etc. While I don't quibble with the word and its implication, it became so repetitive as to wear thin.

"The Hell of Treblinka" (not a good touchstone) by Vasily Grossman “It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.” Grossman was a reporter that traveled with the Red Army. He was one of the first to enter Treblinka.

"The thrift, precision, and calculation and pedantic cleanliness common to most Germans are not bad traits in themselves. Applied to agriculture or industry they produce laudable results. Hiterlism applied these traits to crimes against mankind and the Reich's SS behaved in the Polish labour camp exactly as though they were raising cauliflower or potatoes."

Grossman's short article (62 pages) on Treblinka is one of the most revealing that I have ever read. The author presents the facts as told to him by survivors and captured Nazis. His last comment was, "a story so unreal that it seems like the product of insanity and delirium”.

Just finished Out Here on Our Own, the author's oral history of his hometown (Rocksprings, Wyoming), and his effort to understand how an isolated community becomes a cesspool of social pathology. A lot of it boils down to that if you're an unimaginative person, with a tendency towards addictive behavior, places like this are a trap; particularly since no one is going to offer you a hand in terms of empathy.

Finished reading Medieval Mercenaries by William Urban. Overall, the book was decent. Urban provides an overview of mercenaries in Medieval Europe, as well as an examination of mercenaries through literature of different eras. I found the historical examination to be good and informative. Urban uses various historical examples to demonstrate how mercenaries operated. However, I felt that the examination of mercenaries portrayed in literature could have been improved. The book seemed to not be as focused during these parts. The book is generally a decent read.

From the library: Vatican Secret Archives: Unknown Pages of Church History by Grzegorz Gorny and Janusz Rosikon (2020), English translation by Stan Kacsprzak

Knocked off Weird Dinosaurs. The book is just old enough to be a commentary on contemporary history in and of itself: My overall thought is that there was a different world; pre-COVID, before the on-going breakdown of the global economy, and not yet in the foothills of the next great war!

More institutional and social history than military history, Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military, examines the twists and turns by which the official mind attempted to maintain "Jim Crow" segregation in a mass military during WWII, and the resulting dysfunction. I was impressed, but not THAT impressed; I'm a little too saturated in the issues at hand to be that surprised.

Finished Dragonslayer: The Legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, which examines the processes by which the general became a legend, and how the legend became greater than the man once he went off the rails post-1918. Also posting here because Ludendorff's post-1918 career is the most novel portion of this book, and what it says about the politics and zeitgeist of the Weimar Republic.

Finally finished The Coming of the Railway: A New Global History, 1750-1850 by David Gwyn. This is a very technical look at how railways (railroads in the US) came to be. Unfortunately it is at once both overly detailed and too shallow. There are many pages on materials used for the rails, how many bridges on this line or that one and so on and so forth. The book also covers so many locations over so many years that there isn't any thread to follow. It also suffers from having very few illustrations which would have been very helpful in understanding the technical details. In fact the author assumes a rather high level of technical knowledge from the reader, something I didn't have and therefore I was repeatedly scampering to the Internet to understand this concept or that mechanism. Folks who are really, really interested in the nitty-gritty might enjoy it, but the more casual reader can find many other books on the subject to enjoy.

Gave up part way through Red Eagles: America's Secret MiGs by Steve Davies. This is the story of the secret programs from the late 1960 to the First Gulf War to acquire, test and use Soviet equipment to help train US military pilots and aviators. I thought the book would be reasonably interesting, but instead it is a overview of a lot of government programs and agencies. Additionally there are a lot of people introduced throughout the book, often with several pages of background about them. Ultimately it is a book about people and agencies and not a lot about the hardware and the flying, which I was more interested in.

I'm 75 pages (or so) into Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, by Michael Hiltzik. The story thus far has been one of competing attempts to use the Colorado River to irrigate the American Southwest: well-enough told, but also relatively familiar because I used to teach a university course on American attitudes toward nature.

Hiltzik has a nice touch when it comes to sketching characters without getting bogged down in their backstories, though, and I'm sticking with it to see how he handles the character-heavy story of the dam's engineering and construction, and the logistic behind it.

>11 ABVR: I read that book a few years ago and felt it was pretty good, although my interest was more on the engineering and construction.

Finished up Counterterrorism Between the Wars, which examines the post-1918 roots of how conflict between nations short of war are conducted. This turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected, having only learned that the meat of the book was the struggles of the United Kingdom to get other governments to take the international control of the trade in small arms seriously, after having already put in for the inter-library loan.

Just finished Cursed Kings, the fourth volume in Jonathan Sumption's series on The Hundred Years War. It's perhaps sufficient to say it maintains the high standards set by the preceding volumes.

Just completed Empire of the Air: The Advent of the Air Age, 1922-1929 by Viscount Templewood (Sir Samuel Hoare). This is a rather odd book, primarily being the personal memoirs of the author during the time he served as Secretary of State for Air in the British government, although it was really two terms as there was a short interregnum when his party was out of power. The book starts off with a couple of chapters about politics, then, as Secretary of State for Air, he relates how he dealt with the issues of trying to keep the Royal Air Force a separate service rather than being split up and incorporated into the Army and Navy. He was a strong supporter of Hugh Trenchard and was instrumental in helping carry out many of Trenchard's ideas of how an air force should be run.

His office also made him the minister responsible for civil aviation and he helped expand aviation through the founding of University flying clubs and other activities, including setting up an air service from England to India. Several chapters in the book relate the story of the first scheduled flight in which he and his wife took part (his wife being the first woman to fly between those two places). The book also has a chapter on some of the more interesting persons he met, including T. E. Lawrence and General Balboa, the head of the Italian Air Force. And another chapter deals with the story of the building of the airships R.100 and R.101 including the disaster which struck the latter one.

Overall the book is well written and easy to read, although as it is about the 1920s and was written in the mid-1950s there are some elements which might necessitate a quick trip to Google to look things up.

Finish a very short non-fiction, The Dreyfus Affair by Charles Rivers Editors. I needed a bit of background on this incident as I'm beginning a 20 book read of Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. Zola was tried for libel and lost over this incident.

Wrapped up William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest, Wells being a shadowy figure who played both sides in the war for control of the "Old Northwest Territory." I think the author did a good job with the material at hand, but probably not a great job; a lot of times this book read like one damn thing after another and missed some opportunities to develop better insights in the meaning of the conflict between the First Nations and the early American Republic.

After reading The Picts and Scots at War by Nick Aitchison which I found hard going I am now just past the first chapter of Bosworth 1485 by Michael K. Jones which seems more promising

As part of the August War Room read in the 75's group, I read

Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm. Only having read one graphic novel before, I was a bit skeptical, however, this turned out to be a great non-fiction history read about the science of the Manhattan Project and radiation, in general.

Hiroshima by David Hersey tells the story of 6 survivors before and after the atomic bomb. This was a second or third re-read for me and just as good as the first time.

Wrapped up World's Fairs in the Cold War, a mosaic examination of the rise, fall, and renaissance of the "universal exhibition" phenomena post-1945. A little dry for the general reader, and presumes a good general history background, but I found it quite interesting; the one chapter explicitly dealing with the "fall" was unconvincing.

Finished Stalin as Warlord, which while considering the continuing grasp of the dead hand of "the Boss" on Russia, mostly felt like a strong essay struggling to escape a routine monograph.

>7 Shrike58: Divisions looks like a very interesting book. I once saw a documentary about the singer Tony Bennett. He was in the Army during WW2 and he talked about what happened when he ran into a couple of his pals from New York City (he was from Queens). He invited them to come and eat with him in his company's mess hall. The problem was that they were black, and this didn't go down well at all. He was told to stop spending time with these men in public, and when he refused, he was punished by being put on corpse detail. These were the soldiers who were sent out after battles were over to retrieve the bodies of men who had been killed. It was a punishment detail. Bennett's "crime" was socializing with black soldiers. Anyway, that's the story that Bennett told to his interviewers.

From the library: Queen of the Sea: A History of Lisbon by Barry Hatton
A fascinating read about Lisbon and its place in Portuguese history.

>22 rocketjk: Sounds like the level of petty "chickenshit" that so endeared the US Army's officer corps to its enlisted men.

>24 Shrike58: I would rank the attitudes described in Bennett's story to be more insidious than the word "chickenship" implies, but that's just a matter of semantics. In general to your point, yes, I agree. Though I'm not sure that in this case the majority of the enlisted men would have disagreed with the officers, sad to say.