If you're waiting for me to review something current, that may be a while. I have a substantial stack of books to read, just like any book lover.
A resource that I find invaluable is
Locus Magazine. They publish reviews extensively and their reviewers are very good. I add books to my SF/Fantasy and Literature categories on
Krusty Books Bookstore based on their reviews. They also provide their own bookshop.org links, as they too are in the affiliate program. I can't really complain if you buy through them instead of me. In any case, they have some really good reviewers.
Available here:
Reading The Man
Robert E. Lee is a difficult figure to come to grips with today. The "real" Lee is hidden behind a mythological figure, the famous "Marble Man", a figure deeply connected to the larger mythology of the Lost Cause.
Douglas Southall Freeman's famous Lee biography from the 1930s is frequently referenced as an impressive piece of research. Many historians and biographers since have held it up as the gold standard. But Freeman was a firm believer in the Lost Cause mythology and as a result, while his research impresses, his conclusions are frequently problematic. Alan Nolan (
Lee Considered, 1991) points out a number of cases where Freeman ignores statements in Lee's own writings that are not consistent with Lost Cause interpretations.
In the immediate aftermath of the surrenders of Confederate forces in 1865, a number of Confederate officers and politicians set out to reframe the history of the war, in a way that was much more favorable to the South. When I say immediate, I mean immediate. The most famous of this group, Jubal Early (who had served as a Corp Commander under Lee), went to work on this only weeks after the war ended. Their goal was to portray the South as a victim.
Continue reading "Book review: Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor"
Available here:
The Infantry's Armor
The U.S. Armored Divisions of WWII are fairly famous and well documented. But more than half of the tanks in U.S. service were not in armored divisions, and none of the tanks in the Pacific were. These tanks were instead in the independent Armored Battalions, and attached to Infantry units.
There is a standard narrative offered up in many histories about the challenges of infantry-armor coordination early in the war. This narrative goes on to state that by the end of the war, all the problems were gone and and combined arms operations were a finely tuned machine.
The reality is much more complex, and this book gets into all the details. It starts with the light tanks (M2 and M3 models) that were deployed in the Phillippines at the time of Pearl Harbor, These tanks are almost forgotten, but they were the first US tank units to fight in WWII. As was true in most cases during the war, there had been no training for the armor or the infantry on how to cooperate, there was no doctrine, and so they had to try to figure out what they were doing in the worst of all possible circumstances. That they accomplished anything at all is remarkable.
Continue reading "Book review: The Infantry's Armor: The U.S. Army's Separate Tank Battalions in World War II, by Harry Yeide"
Available here:
The Woman Who Smashed Codes
I have a long standing interest in the history of codes and code breaking. One of the notable figures of the first half of the 20th century is William Friedman, a founder of the field of Cryptanalysis. Friedman is particularly noted for the signal accomplishment of the US Army Signals Intelligence Service - in the 1930s, his band of cryptoanalysts succeeded in reverse engineering the Japanese "Purple" machine, which was used for all their diplomatic traffic. And so the US read these message through the entirety of WWII. Less well known but rather important is that the crypto machine that Friedman developed for the army, SIGABA, was never broken (unlike the Enigma, which the Germans were sure was never broken - but it was.)
Friedman's career has come to overshadow a different career, that of his wife, Elisebeth. After WWII, Elisebeth could focus on preserving William's legacy while not spending so much time on her own. Her papers are preserved, but rarely looked at. Fagone is the first biographer to spend the time, and the result is well worth it.
Continue reading "Book review: The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone"
Available here:
The Player of Games
I am a comparative latecomer to the novels of Iain M. Banks. I'm now reading them in order of release, and have just finished his third novel,
Use of Weapons. Banks fans regard this as possibly the finest work in his series of novels about The Culture, an advanced human civilization which has achieved a sort of Utopia, where the vast majority of the residents have no needs, wants, or work. The civilization is run by powerful AIs referred to as minds.
Utopia is actually a pretty boring subject when you're trying to write a series of novels. Banks addresses this by focusing on the margins - the margins where the Culture interacts with other civilizations in space. These are very dark margins, and the Culture is absolutely ruthless in dealing with otthers in defense of its own interests.
Use of Weapons focuses on a Special Circumstances operative and his controller. Special Circumstances is the hidden hand of the Culture where they want complete deniability when meddling with other nearby civilizations. Think of it as covert ops on steroids. The story is presented as parallel threads from different times in the operatives life - from his youth in a privileged family on a world outside of the Culture's sphere of influence, through a number of operations during his career, up until his apparent death. The line between hero and anti-hero is quite blurred; we are never quite sure if we should like him or be terrified by him. Things in this book are rarely what they seem at first glance.
I don't know if this is Bank's best Culture novel or not; I'm only three books in. But it is excellent.
Available here:
https://bookshop.org/a/118706/9780674248274 (on backorder as I enter this.)
I was in an Albany NY area Barnes & Noble, looking over the history section, when I saw this book withe title "Hattiesburg" staring right at me. It was a bit of a surprise. My mother is originally from Hattiesburg and I visited the city many times when younger, although not for a while now (I don't think i've been back since attending the marriage of my cousin Richard). Of course I bought a copy, it looked interesting, an examination of the lives lived by white residents and black residents of the city during the Jim Crow era.
Sturkey is a history professor at UNC Chapel Hill, and I am told a well respected one, although I was not familiar with his work before this. I'm certainly impressed by the book, and recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
The founding of Hattiesburg dates from the 1880s. At the time, the area in Southern Mississippi was largely unsettled Yellow Pine forest. There was no local history of plantations and slavery. Hattiesburg was built to serve the lumber industry which sprung up to harvest the forest. Hattiesburg boomed until the 1920s, when the lumber ran out and the sawmills shut down.
This book is available here:
https://bookshop.org/a/118706/9781591143369
The Battle of Jutland was the great naval battle of WWI. It was also inconclusive, and the great showdown between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet didn't quite happen. It did come very close to happening.
As a result, the battle remains controversial. The Grand Fleet was substantially more powerful than the High Seas Fleet, and most believe that the result should have been to put the High Seas Fleet at the bottom of the North Sea. The result is an ongoing
argument between proponents of Jellicoe (Commander of the Grand Fleet), and Beatty (Commander of the Battle Cruiser Force and an immediate subordinate of Jellicoe.) They were two extremely different personalities. _The Rules of the Game_ is about about how the Royal Navy came to be in the state it was in 1914, which was quite different from the Royal Navy that won decisively at Trafalgar a hundred years before. Jellicoe was a product of the system, and Beatty was a bit of a rebel who managed to rise through the ranks nonetheless.
Continue reading "Book review: The Rules of the Game, by Andrew Gordon"