Current Reading 2019

Because you asked for it, here it is!

And some books I've completed that I posted elsewhere:

Wings to the Orient: Pan American Clipper Planes, 1935-1945 - A Pictorial History by Stan Cohen.
U.S. Small Combatants, Including Pt-Boats, Subchasers, and the Brown-Water Navy: An Illustrated Design History by Norman Friedman.
A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher by Joel Achenbach.

Finished a delightful U.S. West: The Saga of Wells Fargo by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, published in 1949. The book is really more of an anecdotal history of the founding of Wells, Fargo followed by the establishment of its San Francisco headquarters and the subsequent servicing of the western boom towns in California and Nevada. It is really a "life and times" book, more about the mining booms, the stage lines and the railroads, and above all, the wide variety of characters found in these places. Beebe is a very stylish writer and where he might be short of academic authenticity he more than makes up for it with some great storytelling.

Completed a very interesting Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism by Jack McCallum. All I really knew about Wood before this was that he was the commanding officer of the Rough Riders. Turns out he is one of those amazing individuals who had a great influence on so many events of his lifetime yet is almost forgotten to history. The author has scrupulously noted all his references and has a wealth of endnotes, but still seemed to make some pretty basic errors which make me wonder a bit about the accuracy of other items I'm not familiar with. However, my overall opinion is that these are just minor items which would have been caught by a more knowledgeable editor. Overall I can highly recommend this book.

Finished Regulus: America's First Nuclear Submarine Missile by David K. Stumpf. Rather dry but still enjoyable if you are interested in the subject.

Finished listening to an interesting Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer by Rob Manning.

Finished listening to the Audible version of Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark. Not for the faint of heart or those who dozed off in chemistry class.

Just finished an excellent President McKinley: Architect of the American Century by Robert W. Merry. A very good book, I highly recommend it.

Completed a rather short and, for me, too academic From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830-1920 by Paul Israel.

Completed reading a comprehensive but very good Thunderchief: The Complete History of the Republic F-105 by Dennis R. Jenkins. These books from Jenkins and Specialty Press are excellent, although due to space limitations some of the photographs and illustrations are reproduced in a smaller than desirable format. Also while the title says "Complete History" it is really the complete technical history, not a complete combat history, although there is some relating of service in the Vietnam War. Still, they are superbly written, illustrated and produced and well worth the price.

Just finished reading Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart, It is the first that I have read o this other that as a footnote or as a just passing statement. Politics is and always has been a very ugly business.

I also finished Mayflower: A story of Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Philbrick and Code Girls about the Women Code breakers used in World war II

Finished a couple of interesting books.

The Schweinfurt-Regensburg Mission: The American Raids on 17 August 1943 by Martin Middlebrook. Another excellent book from Middlebrook with a detailed breakdown of the mission, first person quotes and a detailed analysis.

In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown by Nathaniel Philbrick. A very well done book. I've read several books about the Yorktown campaign and the events that lead up to it yet this book seemed to cover the ground with some new and interesting observations.

Finished a very good The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum.

Finished listening to the Audible version of Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter by Tom Clavin. Very good book and a very enjoyable narration as well.

Yes, The Poisoner's Handbook was very good. It almost restored my faith in public servants.

Deep in David S. Reynolds "Walt Whitman's AMERICA", from 1995, which obviously is a biography of the poet, but even more it is a history of the United States during Whitman's life, delving deeply into the social, political, and cultural life of the country, as they influenced Whitman's life and work.

Finally finished the Kindle version of Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte, a biography of the 31st US President. Very long, but worth the read. A fascinating individual.

Tonight, I started Georgia and State Rights: A Study of the Political History of Georgia from the Revolution to the Civil War, with Particular Regard to Federal Relations by Georgia native Ulrich B. Phillips. This was originally published in 1902 as Ulrich's doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. This is definitely going to be a "understanding how they thought back then" kind of read, for Ulrich, while he believed that slavery was an economically inefficient system, he continued to believe that the relationship between large plantation slaves and their masters was "a relation characterized by "propriety, proportion, and cooperation." Although Ulrich's scholarship became more sophisticated--and he is still considered a groundbreaking historian in terms of his research methodology and scope--he remained, for the most part, a defender of slavery until he died in 1934. My copy of the book is a 1968 edition published by Antioch Press. Wish me luck.

Over the holiday I started reading Vaccinated One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases. It seems like good time to get away from politics and back to medical history.

Finished The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by J. L. Bell. The book meanders a bit, but it pretty good. It documents how the efforts by the British Army's General Gage in locating and seizing cannons and other military stores from the patriots/rebels, and the efforts by the latter in hiding and removing those items from British control, drove events that culminated in the fighting at Lexington and Concord.

I finished Georgia and State Rights by by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, originally published in 1902 as Phillips' doctoral thesis at Columbia University. Ulrich, according to New Georgia Encyclopedia, went on to become "the first major historian of the South and of southern slavery." Writing from 50 to around 80 years after the Civil War, Ulrich during his career never moved off his view of slavery as "a relation characterized by 'propriety, proportion, and cooperation.' Through years of living together, Phillips maintained, blacks and whites developed a rapport not of equals but of dependent unequals. Though masters controlled the privileges that the slaves enjoyed, Phillips considered blacks 'by no means devoid of influence.' Phillips considered slavery to be a labor system 'shaped by mutual requirements, concessions, and understandings, producing reciprocal codes of conventional morality' and responsibility."*

At any rate, the history is an interesting tour through the attitudes about Southern history from the perspective of the South circa 1900. Subjects like the "removal" of the Creeks and Cherokees from Georgia territories, the internal party politics of the state are provided through the lens of the debate between states rights proponents and those hoping to maintain a stronger Federal U.S. government. For example, Georgia states rights advocates were bitterly opposed to the Federal contention that the central government had the right to make states abide by the treaties that Washington had signed with Indian tribes. Luckily for these Georgians (and, of course, to the woe of the tribes), Andrew Jackson became president. That was that for Indian treaties.

Ulrich also makes it clear that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. He provides evidence that even the non-slaveholding, poorer Whites became convinced that the economic prosperity of the state, and so their own prosperity, depended on the continuation of slavery. Or at least that's what the richer landowners were claiming. While many/most of Ulrich's attitudes on these issues are unpalatable, the history provided here is interesting.

* https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/ulrich-bonnell-...

Finally finished A Very Brilliant Affair: The Battle of Queenston Heights, 1812 by Robert Malcomson. It is a well done book with plentiful maps, in-body illustrations and good organizations. I just seemed to struggle with the mention of so many names on both sides and with trying to keep them straight.

I finished The Longest Debate: a Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by Charles W. Whalen and Barbara Whalen. This is a fascinating, in-depth, day-by-day account of the creation, debate and passage of one of the most important pieces of legislation to ever come out of the United States Congress. Charles Whalen served in the U.S. Congress from 1967 to 1979, so although he wasn't part of the proceedings described in his book, he knew a lot of the participants and was intimately familiar with the workings of the two chambers. Barbara Whalen, Charles' wife, was, among other things, a newspaper columnist in their native Ohio.

The book takes the bill from its inception during the John F. Kennedy administration, urged upon the president by his brother, Robert, the attorney general, as a moral imperative, through Kennedy's assassination and to the legislation's passage with even stronger support than Kennedy's by his successor in the White House, Lyndon Johnson. Committee meetings, caucuses, amendments, pressure and support from civil rights leaders, individual arm-twisting and cajoling, all are delved into here in a riveting, detailed presentation.

Finished listening to the Audible version of Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates by Eric Jay Dolin. Pretty good book. It focuses on the pirates which were active (at least part of the time) off the coast of the North American colonies during the late 17th and early 18th Centuries.

Completed an interesting Pluto and Lowell Observatory: A History of Discovery at Flagstaff by Kevin Schindler and Will Grundy.

Finished Hell on Wheels: Wicked Towns Along the Union Pacific Railroad by Dick Kreck. Fairly good, rehashed a lot of previously covered ground.

Completed Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling by Michael Cannell. Very interesting and well written.

I finished Anybody's Gold: The Story of California's Mining Towns by Joseph Henry Jackson

This is a brightly written, very well researched and extremely readable history of the California Gold Rush. Jackson was a well-respected California historian and editor, serving as the literary editor for both the San Francisco Argonaut and then the SF Chronicle. (Here's a short biography.) He did an impressive amount of research for this book, delving into the historical archives of several libraries and museums. He was thereby able to find primary resources, including newspapers of the mining towns and the personal journals of the miners.

Jackson successfully puts lots of color and movement into his history. He revels in offering characteristic incidents, gleaned often from those newspapers and journals mentioned above. He also enjoys describing the miners' superstitions, and narrating the prevailing legends and tall tales, some of which were still being offered to visitors when Jackson was doing his research. (The book was published in 1941.) Jackson, however, is not shy about immediately debunking those legends when appropriate, and rightly (in my view) saying he had providing each legend as a way of filling in the color and atmosphere of the times and of how those times have come to be viewed by subsequent generations.

There is a dark side to all of this, which Jackson mentions fairly often but doesn't delve into much or even seem particularly troubled by. That dark side, of course, is the era's racism. Mexican miners were routinely run off their land and their claims. Indians had no rights at all. Chinese people were allowed to work only those claims that whites had already worked over and abandoned and were tolerated in some areas only because they were willing to pay an additional tax for the privilege. For a modern-day reader, these facts will not be dismissed during the reading, and they do take the luster off of Jackson's overall glee in describing the times.

I finished No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead by Peter Richardson. This book was published in 2014, and Richardson attempted to differentiate his book from the (at a wild guess) dozens of previously published band biographies and musical histories of the Grateful Dead by, as the title suggests, writing a book about the ways in which the band shaped, and was shaped by, the important cultural events of their era(s). All in all, I'd say that Richardson succeeded in this goal quite nicely.

Richardson does a nice job of providing an overview of the background to and creation of the original Counter Culture/Hippie movement as it developed in San Francisco. It is fair to say that that movement and the Dead were organically joined, and that probably neither would have developed as they did without the other. As Richardson portrays it, the Dead's style of performance, in which they aimed to tear down the walls between musician and audience and to create music that would lend itself to ecstatic dancing in particular, placed them squarely at the center of the growing scene.

I just finished Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year by Glenn Stout. I'm not a Red Sox fan, or even much of a https://www.librarything.com/topic/303388#baseball fan, but I love history, especially origin stories.

Completed reading The Golden Age of the Newspaper by George H. Douglas, which focuses on the American newspaper scene from the 1830s to the 1930s.

Finished an excellent Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison by Joseph Wheelan.

Finished The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough. Not as good as some of his previous books, but that wasn't helped by the subject matter which wasn't as inspiring.

Completed our latest car book, The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War by Walter Lord. Very enjoyable narrative style, still holds up after almost sixty years.

Finished listening to the Audible version of Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency by Dan Abrams and David Fisher. Very enjoyable.

Completed Mr. Roosevelt's Steamboat by Mary Helen Dohan. Not very good, written almost as a historical novel.

Completed listening to the Audible version of The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln's General, Master Builder of the Union Army by Robert O'Harrow Jr.. Very interesting.

Completed the Kindle version of On the Bottom: The Raising of the Submarine S-51 by Edward Ellsberg. A pretty good conversion to Kindle format with only a few errors, mostly random periods showing up. The book was very interesting to me as a retired engineer. I'd previously read another of Ellsberg's books and he is a pretty straightforward relater of events without flowery prose or heightened dramatics. The story itself, of raising a sunken submarine in 1926, is fascinating.

Finished Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's by Frederick Lewis Allen on the Kindle. Still a very interesting read.

Completed a fascinating An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson by Andro Linklater.

Finished listening to the Audible version of Under Pressure: The Final Voyage of Submarine S-Five by A. J. Hill. Very good book, aside from a few errors by the author in nautical matters and the narrator's lack of familiarity with nautical pronunciations.

Completed reading The Lives of William Hartnell by Susanna Bryant Dakin, a biography of an early Californian whose life in California covered the time from the liberation of Mexico from Spain to the conquest by the United States. Very well written and still an interesting read even after seventy years.

Gave up about half way through Halsey's Typhoon: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm, and an Untold Rescue by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. There is an awful lot of padding in the book to grind through. Additionally neither author seems to have a good grasp on nautical and naval details so there are a quite a number of small but annoying errors in the book. It make one wonder if they mess up on the small stuff whether they have really gotten the big stuff right.

Finished an excellent From Peepshow to Palace: The Birth of American Film by David Robinson. This is an overview of pre-history of the cinema and the first twenty years, 1893-1913, of the American film industry. It doesn't go too deep, but is reasonably complete. Highly recommended.

Finished reading Via Western Express & Stagecoach: California's Transportation Links with the Nation 1848-1869 by Oscar Osburn Winther. An older book but pretty good. The latter part of the book covers the Pony Express and the Butterfield Overland Stage, which is familiar ground for me, but most of the book covers stages lines and express services within California, which were pretty extensive.