Current Reading-April 2026

Starting a new thread on April Fool's Day! Hope you had some laughs today.

Finished: Mary of Modena: James II's Dazzling Queen by Justine Brown
Biography of Mary of Modena, wife of James II of England. She was the 3rd Catholic royal to marry into the Stuart family and the first from Italy.

I have the author's previous biography about James II.

Knocked off a rather dull The Bofors Gun by Terry Gander

Rather more social history than military history. For some folks it will be a trip down (unhappy) memory lane. For others, for whom the early 1970s are mostly unknown, it'll probably be rather useful.

Finished an excellent The Chisholm Trail: High Road of the Cattle Kingdom by Donald Emmet Worcester

As part of my ongoing engagement with Nevada history, I just started Richard G. Lillard’s Desert Challenge: An Interpretation of Nevada, first published in 1942. I like the description on the front of the dust jacket of the 1949 second edition: “Neither a formal history nor a tourist guide, this book is a richly documented interpretation of the rise of a unique state under the peculiar conditions of the sagebrush desert.” The opening pages are very well written, and I am looking forward to the rest.

Has anyone read Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up? If you haven`t, you really should. This book is so detailed that I had to stop reading it at night. It is about the POW camps by the Japanese. If you love reading about World War 2, this is a must-read book.

Finished a disappointing Argonaut: The Submarine Legacy of Simon Lake by John J. Poluhowich

>7 jztemple: I would hope for better fact-checking at a university press! I guess everyone is operating on a shoestring these days.

I have finished reading Then and now; or, Thirty-six years in the Rockies by Robert Vaughn. I purchased this book primarily because it contained C. M. Russell illustrations. I read the letters but they are in no particular order. The writing is rather plain and repetitious.

>8 PatrickMurtha: A pity; Lake deserves a good modern treatment.

I'm about a third of the way through Pekin to Paris which is a first person account of the automobile "race" from Pekin (Beijing) to Paris back in 1907. It reads like a novel and the word pictures describing the places along their route in 1907 are well written. There is, as one might expect given the time frame, a certain amount of condescension with respect to anyone other than the group of individuals involved in the "race". However, it does not descend into out and out racism or misogyny and, when the author is proved wrong, he has the good graces to admit it.

So far, one of my favorite exchanges in this regard involved a conversation concerning the route to Kiakhta from Urga: "You will see for yourself what a terrible thing that journey is."...I smiled condescendingly...Feminine sensitiveness carries it victims sometimes to the most natural and pardonable, but yet remarkable, exaggeration. I could not have imagined at the time how entirely right (she) was...and that a few hours after this conversation we were to tremble for the safety of our machine."

Finished an excellent Lancaster Against York: The Wars of the Roses and the Foundation of Modern Britain by Trevor Royle

Dual posting The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France, because this is as much political and social history as it is military history.

Some book news, I just got in the mail Vought F7U-3 Cutlass (Famous American Aircraft) by Tommy H. Thomason and Alfred C. Casby. I was impressed with Shrike58's review and from an initial flipping of the pages, it looks like something I will appreciate.

Also, yesterday we were book shopping over on the West Coast of Florida and picked up, at a Goodwill Bookstore, the five volumes of the series From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, a history of the British Royal Navy from from 1904 to 1919 by Arthur J. Marder. I also picked up an additional book by Marder plus eight other books.

Today I ordered anther bookshelf!

>14 jztemple: :)

>14 jztemple: Hope you enjoy the book as much as I did. Also, as they say, if you build them they will fill!

Wrapped up The Wolf Age, which I thought was pretty good, but which left me with some vague reservations that I'm having a hard time saying something intelligent about. Glad that I've done a fair amount of reading regarding the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans before I picked it up.