I did lot of reading this year with all the enforced, housebound idleness, along with taking many walks and doing a lot of gardening. I read more than a dozen books, and these are the best twelve books in the order of importance to me.
1. The Guns at Last Light--The War in Western Europe 1944-45, Volume 3 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson c2013.
The military campaign that saved Western democracy for you and me, Normandy to the Elbe River. Atkinson provides a masterful description of D-Day and the Normandy battle in the summer of 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's last desperate gamble in December 1944, which was the biggest battle the US military ever fought.
2. Dead Wake--The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson c2015.
A fascinating book about the British luxury passenger ship sunk near Ireland by a German U-boat in 1915 during WWI, that almost brought the Americans into the war early on the Allied side. Germany curtailed its unrestricted submarine campaign as a result for a couple of years while the war turned into a bloody stalemate, then renewed its submarine offensive and America entered (and won) the war. Larson's description of the great ship going down in only 20 minutes and the agonies of the 1198 people, including 128 Americans, who perished in the water is spellbinding.
3. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee c1960, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1961.
Scout, Atticus Finch, Boo Radley, Jem, poor Tom Robinson, shooting the rabid dog in the street, who could forget this riveting book? I think I read it in high school but rereading it 50 years later was like reading a brand new, poignant page-turner.
4. An Army at Dawn--The War in North Africa 1942-43, Volume 1 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson c 2002, Pulitzer Prize for History 2003.
The campaign where the American army was blooded in Africa in 1942-43 in WW2 and started to learn its craft so it could meet and beat the fearsome German war machine two years later in Europe--the big show--in France and Germany and the Low Countries.
5. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James M. McPherson c1991.
A series of essays turned into chapters that in a clear and concise manner shows the reader how Lincoln saved the nation and won the war against daunting obstacle, and through emancipation turned the American Experiment into a worldly example, however imperfect, for other freedom loving nations to aspire to.
6. The Day of Battle--The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-44, Volume 2 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson c2007.
Once the Allies won in North Africa in 1943, they had to go somewhere to fight the Germans because they weren't ready yet to force their way onto the European continent. They invaded Sicily, which knocked Italy out of the war, and then invaded Italy proper which had been occupied by the Germans. For the rest of the war the Allies fought a diversionary campaign in this mountainous country, a bloody, slow slog described in a book, though it described an important theater of the war, was a slow slog to read.
7. Bunker Hill--A City, A Siege, A Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick c2008
I thought I knew about Lexington/Concord and Bunker Hill, but of course there was a long prelude and a lengthy aftermath to these clashes which virtually decimated the small British army in America. That army was besieged in Boston by 15,000 state militia members, Washington came to command it and turn the congruent units into an army and the British were forced to abandon Boston and take their loyalist friends with them. The eight year Revolutionary War followed.
8. American Predator--The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan c2019.
Israel Keys was a loner bisexual serial killer who travelled the country this century killing isolated couples in their own homes after casing them, roaming from his home base in Alaska across the lower 48, killing perhaps dozens of persons by invading their homes and murdering them. He left caches of guns and cash in many states for future use. I rarely or never read through the night but I did reading this gripping true-crime book. Lock your doors before you start reading!
9. The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan c1959.
I visited Omaha Beach last year on the 75th anniversary of D-Day (well, in March, the battle was in June). I just had to reread Ryan's book on the assault on Hitler's Fortress Europa when I got back. 40 years after I read the book the first time.
10. Lincoln's Sanctuary--Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers' Home by Matthew Pinsker c2003.
Lincoln's Summer Cottage is a house in Maryland at a soldiers' rest home that Lincoln went to during the hot summer months when he was wrestling with saving the Union. He probably wrote a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation there. A National Cemetery is nearby, and Lincoln often used to walk among the fresh graves of killed Union soldiers at night, to remind him of the cost of the conflict, startling sentries assigned to guard the premises when he came upon them. He was shot at at least once by a would-be assassin while riding out, unescorted, to the cottage from the White House. There's a lot of history in the place, and this book is a good accompaniment.
11. Custer's Fall--The Native American Side of the Story by David Humphreys Miller c1957.
A short little book that has Indian impressions of the Little Bighorn Battle, copied down decades later. Since I have read a dozen books about the battle and visited the site, I found the slim volume interesting but not overly informative.
12. The Life of Johnny Reb by Bell Irvin Wiley c1943.
Yawn. This is considered a Civil War classic, telling how the average Confederate soldier lived, primarily through their letters home and contemporaneous news articles, orders and court-martial proceedings. The author, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta when he wrote the book, was opinionated against the North and the book was racist in its bland descriptions of slaves and slavery but I am assuming that's how southerners thought about such things at the time. It took me a long time to wade through it but I persevered given its classic designation, at least in the past.
The best reading I did this year, amongst several interesting books was reading the 3-volume Liberation Trilogy by Atkinson, all 2,277 pages of it. It was truly literary history, an amalgam of history, biography, political analysis, battlefield descriptions and even literary allusions to the deep past going back in all the way to Greek mythology and The Aeneid. It was (for me) a page turner, especially volumes 1 and 3, with some slow reading in volume which described the grinding war of attrition in "the soft underbelly of Europe, in Churchill's phrase. The three volumes literally described how the Americans built up the combat readiness of their forces to be able to combat the fearsome German war machine and then to project American might into the European continent in one swift, surprising thrust onto the Normandy beaches, along with British and Canadian forces, and within the year save the world from fascism.
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