Current Reading: July 2025

Kicking off the new month, finished a very interesting Horses in the British Army 1750 to 1950 by Janet Macdonald

After collecting dust for a long time, I finally read Sauber-Mercedes C9: The Return of the Silver Arrows. It makes an interesting contrast with the current age of endurance racing, which is lively if not full-throttle in terms of technological development.

>2 Shrike58: It's good to know that there's someone else out there who reads these kinds of book. Back in the day when these books where much more affordable I picked up quite a few of them, including a number of Bamsey's books. And I have a half-shelf full of the Autocourse Grand Prix annuals from back in the seventies, eighties and early nineties, back when I could walk into my local Waldenbooks and grab a copy. Ah, memories...

>3 jztemple: I think the Crash of 2008 went a long way towards cratering the market for these books, and then the men (mostly) who were buying these books started passing on. This is not to mention the rise of Internet as a source of quick information.

Knocked off Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, the author's effort to sort out the more shadowed elements of his family's lives, on the way to sorting out his own emotional issues. Even if you don't particularly care about Halberstadt's personal concerns, it is a useful slice of life of an otherwise lost moment in history.

Finished (finally) an exceptional The Lee-Enfield: A Century of Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield Rifles and Carbines by Ian D. Skennerton

Wrapped up Sinostan, an examination of Chinese economic and social penetration into Central Asia. Already feels dated.

Finished Demagogue, pretty much now the standard accounting of the life and acts of Senator Joe McCarthy, and quite readable if one feels the need to get to grips with the man.

Wrapped up Rites of Retaliation, in which the author uses the disruption caused by the introduction of the United States Colored Troops to consider the U.S. Civil War as a struggle between civilizations.

Knocked off The Man Who Saved Britain, which is now old enough to be a historical document in and of itself, but I still got some enjoyment value out it.

>8 Shrike58: Thanks for your review of the McCarthy biography. Several years ago I read Tye's excellent biography of Satchel Paige, Satchel: the Life and Times of an American Legend. (Paige was a baseball player, a pitcher who excelled, literally for decades, in the Negro Leagues before Major League Baseball's integration.)

I like to read old magazines, and I remember reading a piece about McCarthy a few years after his death by a famous journalist of the day (no, I don't remember which one!), hypothesizing that McCarthy had lived for the power and notoriety he'd gained in the Senate, noting that McCarthy died relatively shortly after his downfall from power for, basically, no reason other than a loss of the will to live. But I don't know how that conjecture stacks up against the facts as they're known now, or how Tye presents things.

>11 rocketjk: The evidence Tye gives suggests that McCarthy was committed to his marriage and his newly-adopted daughter. Tye observes that the real cause of death was the interaction between a violent process of detoxification interacting with an infection picked up in the hospital, so its arguable that what really killed McCarthy was his last-ditch effort to clean up his life.

Just finished Damn the Torpedoes: A Short History of U.S. Naval Mine Countermeasures, 1777-1991 by Tamara Moser Melia