Comedian Mike Donovan

BOOKS

by Mike Donovan

1905, by Leon Trotsky - c)1909 – Vintage edition c)1971 by Studies of the World Inc. - This is the story of the first Russian Revolution, the one that came up short.
    Before the big Russian Revolution of 1917 there was the little Russian Revolution of 1905. Leon Trotsky (real name Bronstein) was heavily involved in both Revolutions. 1905 is his history of the first one. The Tsar managed to control the 1905 revolution from above, as this revolution was definitely from below. 1905 was largely an anti-war revolution protesting Russia's disastrous war with Japan in the Far East. It had a similar feel at times to Kent State. The Tsar was some no good right wing Republican dragging young men off to die in a needless war for greed or conquest.
   I read half of LT's autobiography (My Life) many years ago. To me, Leon is not enjoyable company. "Choose an author as you would choose a friend."
    It's hard to endure Leon's big ego but his books have obvious historical value, so I have tried, to my everlasting regret, to make it through them.
   Trotsky was one of the three men who ruled the USSR after the death of Lenin in 1923. But Stalin drove him, and Zinoviev, the third guy both out of power. Stalin was a solo act from 1925 on. Stalin then expelled Trotsky from the USSR.
   By 1940 Leon was living in Mexico City and writing a vicious biography of his former boss. Leon was going to show uncle Joe that the pen is mightier than the sword. Perhaps, but not mightier than the axe. A hit man from the Kremlin snuck up on Trotsky in Mexico while he was typing his new book and split his skull with an axe.
   Trotsky's violent ending boosted his legend and gave great status to his writings. An anti-Stalinist, but very Communist sub cult-called "Trotskites" carried on well into the 1980's.
   More than anything else, Leon Trotsky, like so many of the early Red Russian revolutionaries, had always wanted most of all to be a great novelist or poet. Success in the political and military field was somethings these people fell into by accident while pursuing their real goals. Hitler wanted to be a famous painter.
   If not for his political fame, Trotsky's books would never have been published. Trotsky's writing is “wearying to read; unrewarding.”

The Abolitionists, A Collection of their writings, by Louis Ruchames - - A pleasure to read. At least it it would be. I haven't read but 10 pages.

Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, by Carl Sandberg – Four Volumes – c) 1939 Charles Scribner
    I have only read one fourth of Volume Four, but it's easy to see why I have to keep going until they are all four finished. How can you watch a bad sit-com when a prolific literate and important work like this sits unread on your shelf? It's easy to find these books. Forget Doris Goodwin; read Sandberg for crying out loud!

Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls, June 1942 – April 1944, – Volume VII of The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II b by Samuel Eliot Morison – C) 1951 Little Brown
    SEM is the dean of naval historians. Harvard educated and a combat navy veteran of WWII, the USA commissioned him as the official biographer of the US Navy in the Second World War and he slam dunked it.
    The whole Japanese offensive in the Aleutians, in my opinion, was a reaction to the Doolittle raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Doolittle was under orders not to assassinate the Emperor, but his plane directly overflew the Imperial Palace at low altitude. You know that scared Hero and those around him. The Japan of 1942 worshipped the Emperor, and now they had to prevent any further such surprise air raids endangering the life of the god on earth. Forces that should have been concentrated on the South Pacific and the Solomons, New Hebrides and Fijis, cutting off the lifeline to Australia, were instead divided up into three groups. The Southern group would assault the Solomons and Port Moresby in New Guinea. The Central group would attack and seize Midway Island. The Northern group was to take the Aleutians.
   Only one of these three groups was offensive in nature, that was the southern group. The offensive thrusts to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and Midway Island in the Hawaiian chain, then central front, were essentially defensive in strategic Japanese planning. There was no follow up operation planned to take Oahu next if the Royal Marines occupied Midway successfully. The whole idea was to prevent any more of those sudden air raids on Tokyo from points due east and northeast.
   As a result of the diversification of its Pacific naval forces, no one theatre gave Japan an advantage of overwhelming force. So they lost at all three. They lost at Coral Sea because half the forces that should have been there were headed towards Midway or Alaska.
    The official US Navy history website says that the defeat at Coral Sea hurt Japan because the losses at Coral Sea weakened the size of the force sent to Midway.
   I say that the reverse is true. Just because Coral Sea came first doesn't mean that the exact sequence is so crucial to a correct analysis. The decision to send which forces where was made long before either battle took place. I say that the assignment of the best Japanese carrier forces to Midway instead of Coral Sea where they belonged, is what caused the defeat at Coral Sea, and the defeat at Midway was also the result of the decision to split the forces. It wasn't the direct result of one small Japanese carrier sunk at Coral Sea in May.

Allies, From Pearl Harbor to D-Day, by John S. D. Eisenhower – c) 1982 Doubleday
     The son of a president writes very well; My kind of no nonsense style. The title is a little bit sarcastic. This book is about all the nasty disputes between Britian and the United States in WWII.
    Dwight David had a rough draft of about 102 pages at about the time he took over at NATO. Then Ike decided he would never get around to finishing it, so he handed it to his son and said, “do whatever you want with it.
   25 years later, after a career in public service, John S.D. took on the subject with his dads notes and rough draft and this book is the result.
   After reading many British military historians taking shots at American incompetence, foolishness, loud arrogance, and lack of fighting ability, it is a pleasure to read someone taking Ike and the Yankees side against the sniping Brits.
    No matter how smart it gets, Allies is still easy to read.
    Clearly the same layout, fonts, and design as the twin memoirs of his dad, President Eisenhower.

The American Experience, A Study of Themes and Issues in American History, by Robert F. Madgic, Curriculum Coordinator Educational Coordinates, Sunnyvale California, Stanley S. Seaberg, Teacher, Henry M Gunn High School, Palo Alto California, Fred H. Stopsky – c) 1971 – Addison-Wesley
    The writing is good and lively.
    AE is really just a general US history textbook for eight graders, but it's 1971 so they mix the format a little trying to be hip and cool. There is no mention of the War of 1812 but they have big sidebars on social issues. The book can't help but fall back into an old fashioned history of the USA, no matter how hard it tries to be something better than that.
   I don't care for the layout and design at all. There's an ugly brown-gold tint to a lot of the graphs and illustrations. Don't ask me why. This is not a pretty book. I've read 169 pages.
   Positively brutal assignments for student at the end of every chapter. You'd have to be a college professor to do them all well and correctly.

An American Life, by Ronald Reagan - Only about one-fifth of the book is about his years in the White House, so we get very little detail on events such as Grenada and the Beirut Marine barracks disaster of 1983. Nevertheless, this is a great book.
   Reagan was a life guard for two summers and saved six lives. Or 1 for very 1,000 he took in Central America.
   Reagan is often falsely credited with having been a major league baseball broadcaster. He was actually only recreating Cubs games one batter at a time in his WHO radio studio in Iowa. People were actually stupid enough to believe RR was really watching the game he was describing, when he was really just getting wire bulletins and pretending. One time the connection broke down and Reagan had the batter foul off 27 pitches until the line was repaired.
   Reagan had been the villain of the left for almost two decades before he made it to the Presidency. He got a head start on the role. Everybody I knew hated him, but he got re-elected in a landslide. In my opinion, the most hated President in my lifetime.
   The key event in his presidency was the April 1986 attack on Libya. Libyans blew up European disco killing four American soldiers, so the United States roughed up the Libyan capitol with a few FB-111 bombers. The United States had not used military force since 1975 and the world had begun to perceive it as a paper tiger. The USA had gone so far left that taking lives in a military mission was bordering the unthinkable. We had gone so far from days of WWII when banner headlines told of one city in Japan or Germany being destroyed and people turned the page to read the sports scores as if they had just read of a new traffic light being installed.
   Now it was completely the other way. In the liberal 1970's it was war itself that was to blame. Taking one human life was unthinkable. Jimmy Christ Carter wouldn't do it. No president ever should except in extreme obvious self-defense. So Reagan was taking a daring step in using military force aggressively. He knew by the standards of the left, he would be called a murderer.
    But Reagan dared. He took the United States back to war for one night in April, and the sky did not fall. His ice-breaking gave Bush senior the opening to go one step further in Desert Storm. That base in Kuwait, (the 51st state) made the 2003 Invasion of Iraq logistically easy, and now the United States will not be so easily bullied in the Middle East as it had been for a couple of decades before the Libya raid. He was doing his impression of John Adams sending the frigates over to take down the Barbary States holding US crews hostage.
    Reagan's bold initiative in the Libya raid made it all possible ... for better or worse. It tested the reaction of the world if the the United States resumed its old role of tough guy, abandoned since 1975. A lot of terrorism came Uncle Sam's way between 1975 and 1986. Reagan struck back. It was hardly unprovoked. It had been a long time coming.

The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey - Professor Bailey of Stanford has a special talent for smoothly incorporating the most clever quotes. He is a great editor and as well as a famous historian. Bailey is always easy to read.
   By the time I actually made it to the end of this 962 page book I was pretty mad at him, though. I'm throwing some haymakers in the margins over the last pages. I think Bailey is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Why doesn't he just come out and say so once every 90 pages, just to do the right thing. Why is Tom Bailey pretending to write an objective textbook?
   I prefer the attitude of Howard Zinn who is never guilty of the Confucian sin of 'concealment.'
   So that's my beef with Bailey. Having said that, Tom Bailey is one of the truly fine U. S. historians. I'd read anything he's ever written and he's written a lot. I'm on my fourth Bailey book right now, this one about the Quasi Naval War in the Atlantic between the US and Germany 1939-41.
    The American Pageant is probably the best one-volume history of the United States. Two harvard Historians have recently revised it with new chapters and published it all over gain. One of these authors is the President of Harvard.

The American People, A History, by Pauline Maier - c) 1986 – D. C. Heath
   This is a textbook for seventh graders and I am thoroughly enjoying the simplicity of it. Books of detail often miss making the main points, or at least miss making them stick. In the detail, the main point becomes secondary, or at least fogged up. With simple textbooks for school children, I can read the main points shot out of Pauline's cannon and that refresher course is very helpful for commanding the science.
   The quiz questions are overbearing, however. This books sets a new word record for most questions relative to the amount of info provided in the text. A paragraph of text is often good for two quiz questions. Really sad.
   AP has great maps, but not half as many as it could have had with no loss of used space. There's also a lot of PC in AP.

American Spirit, by Clarence L. Versteeg, Professor of History, Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois, - c) 1985
    I've read 98 pages. There is a popular TV show out called, Are You Smarter Than a Seventh Grader? - Of course, most American adults seem as if they are not as as “smart” as a seventh grader, and that's the whole basis of the show, to embarrass American adults in their glorious ignorance.
   Of course, American adults are far smarter than a seventh grader on average, but appear to not be by being his with a quiz on matters they are completely rusty on.
   American Spirit is a pretty good microcosm on why that TV show can exist. This is a school textbook on American History and for every ten minutes the student reads, he or she has to stop and spend three hours answering quiz, essay, map, classroom experiment, and p.c push-poll questions (“Give four reasons why the Europeans were cruel to the Indians.”)
   By the time the average American gets out of school they do not ever want to go near a textbook ever again as long as they live. So naturally the seventh grader beats the 40 year old adult on a TV game show. The kid is in prison being forced to study this material in un-fun formats, while the adult hasn't looked at the material in 30 years.
   Of course, the adult knows 89,000 things about the real world out there that the child knows zero about, but those things don't come up on the quiz show. Anyone who watched a movie or a TV show knows that rule 2 is that kids are always superior to adults, and that starts with smarter, and you and I know that is a lie, to kiss up the the demographic that forces parents to take them to the movies and fund Hollywood. (Rule one is that women are always superior to men in every way – some sort of sick compensatory sexual profiling for past offenses, and I hope the revenge energy dies out some day and there is some faint equality of the sexes in the video media again.)
    AS is very nicely designed except for the tragic attitude. Give them three paragraphs to read and then make them pass a test on those three paragraphs for a full hour. School is prison for children. No one ever gave me a choice and I knew from a very early age that I hated it there and I didn't want to be there. One out of every 50 children like going to school. One out of every 700 doesn't feel exited beyond belief when school lets out for the summer, or they get a “snow day.”
    America loves to beat itself up about how ignorant the average American is. Take the fun out of learning with books like this and this will continue indefinitely. This book should be called American Martinet Spirit.


America's Longest War, The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975, by George C. Herring - c) 1979, revised 1986 - This must be a pretty well written book because I've almost finished it.
   The author has a very orthodox Blame America First and Only approach to the history of the Vietnam War. Professor Herring (University of Kentucky) is always impressed by the fighting qualities of the VC and the NVA, but if he ever praises the fighting quality of the grunts, the Marines or the ARVN, it escaped my notice. He will occasionally credit "superior firepower" when the Yanks win one, but never the American soldier for his bravery and skill.
   Even in defeat the Communists (he almost never uses that word for them) have the high ground because it is implied that in an even fight with equal material, they would have whipped the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies every time.
   Herring admires Ho and his movement immensely.
   America's Longest War was published as part of the America in Crisis series under the editing leadership of the well known author Robert A. Divine.
    Do you know that famous photo of the South Vietnamese officer shooting a VC suspect in the head? That famous film too? The moral of the movie is that the South Vietnamese were as ruthless as the VC. They never tell you, and Herring doesn't tell you, that the guy had just murdered an entire family just ten minutes earlier.
   Herring is on my bad list of Vietnam historians, but the book was popular and is a good starting point for the scholarly left version of everything.

Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, by Eric McKitrick – c)1960 – A really fine writer. I only regret is that I have but 15 hours a day to give to my authors. I've only knocked off one chapter but the guy is excellent. The subject is always complex. Foner's book on Reconstruction is probably the best, but Stampp and McKitrick are a close second. 508 pages. I only have 466 to go.
   I recently saw this book cited as one of the pioneers in the revisionism of Reconstruction history. Eric is up there with Kenny the Stampp and Eric Foner on the list of good guys.

Armageddon, The Battle For Germany, 1944-1945, by Max Hastings – c) 2004 Knopf
   Max Hastings is great. Every time I think I've turned a real corner and have become an expert on WWII I read a book like this for an hour and feel like an idiot.

At the Highest Levels, The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, by Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott - c) 1993 -
    I once went an entire day this year without seeing Michael Beschloss interviewed on TV. Talk about overexposed, how does he ever find time to study? Get off my TV you blabbering dullard! I'd rather hear the Strobe light, but he isn't a camera hog.
   What a combination of high-level liberal historian, and high-level liberal player this book is.
   I never cared much for either of these two guys. I read one third of two of Talbott's books on Soviet-American relations and disagreed with his take on pretty much everything, with the possible exception of the front-piece dedication to his wife. Beschloss books I just can't seem to get very far in. I'm always Besh-lost by page 50. I own four of them and can't finish one of them with out no-doz
   Talbott had fantastic inside access to the workings of big government when he was Assistant Secretary of State under Bill Clinton. They were close friends in college and that's how Strobe, a Blame America Firster to the tenth power, became an important figure in think-tanking US foreign policy. This is as much of a spoils appointment as Reagan or Andrew Jackson ever made.
   The worst thing about Beschloss is the quote-jockeying. Not only is every paragraph filled with quotes, chopped in with his own writing and paraphrasing, but even the long sentences are. Its hard to get into the flow when quote-paraphrase-writing are all mixed in like an egg omelet. Write your own book!
   I hope that Talbot supervised the final draft of this book, and not Beschloss. Talbott is by far the better writer. It was scary when he was super-powerful. Strobe is on my personal enemies list as far as people I disagree with, but his writing is agreeable. He flows, and is an excellent adversary. I listen to Bechsloss interviewed and I don't want to ever pick up one of his books. Rarely has such a bad writer and a good writer collaborated on a book. I wonder which wins out in the final tone. Have you ever cut some cheap coffee into a can of good coffee? All you taste is the bad coffee.

Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, My Life in American Politics, by Ed Rollins – c) 1996 –
   The Bedknobs and Broomsticks of political books. Rollins managed the 1984 re-election campaign of Ronald Reagan and now he thinks it was because of his amazing skill! The economy was booming, Reagan had survived an assassination attempt and was a popular hero, and opponent Mondale was not only a dull speaker, he bragged that he was going to raise taxes. My grandmother could have managed the 84 Reagan campaign to a landslide win from her death bed.
    This is the most inarticulate memoir I have ever read. Baseball players talking to microphones (Go Bird Go! The Mark Fidrych Story, with Jim Hawkins) write with more class and style. Every page is Ed Rollins bragging about what a big tough guy he is. It's really sickening. Ed's “book” is needlessly profane and insufferably simplistic. He has a very bad alpha-male complex and I'm sure if he reads this and we happen to meet in the Green Room somewhere I'd be in physical trouble. Rollins is on TV frequently. Even Bechloss thinks it's a bit much.
   Ed comes across much better on TV than in the book. I never had any dislike for him until I survived this dreadful book. In fact, I'd sort of liked him. But now......”write, so that I may see thee.”
    Bare Knuckles in good fun for the way it gets inside the events of recent politics, but putting up with Ed's inexcusable ego, combined with the writing style of someone who obviously never gave that skill a thought in his life, is a chore. And the obnoxious self-indulgence never quits. He gives us more information on his childhood than one finds in the memoirs of President's of the United States! Who cares about your ancestors, Ed?
   Rollins was a semi-pro boxer as a young man, and boasts about that throughout the book. Everything in politics is a Rollins boxing analogy. You don't defeat a political opponent, you knock him out with a right cross. What an insecure man he must be. President Ford was a big shot athlete in College and was drafted by the NFL and turned them down, but he barely mentions it in his biography. A secure man Gerald was. Rollins gives us 15 pages on his boxing career. The reader goes down for the count.
    He was on his way to the big time of course until one night some guy knocked him out and ended his ring career. I wish I could have been in the front row with a box of popcorn. I'll go one further. I wish I had thrown the punch.
   When I finished Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, I barely made it to the back room to throw up. I had to go read 30 pages of The Clinton Wars, by Sid Blumenthal just to get the aftertaste from this junior high writing out of my system. Shocking that a powerful political expert and player could come up this short in the literary department. It's just not a good book.
   It is a worthwhile book. Rollins has strong and blunt opinions on many famous politicians that he worked with. Not only are the opinions interesting in and of themselves, but Rollins was important enough that what he thought about these people is part of the story, and worth noting.
   It's not boring. But the bragging, good God! When Rollins wrote that his father had taught him first and foremost to be humble, I busted out in a roaring fit of laughter, one of the best laughs I've had in weeks. Rollins had me on the floor clutching my stomach and it wasn't from an punch. It was from a punch-line that wasn't supposed to be.
   Bill Richardson ruined his memoir with the big ego about what a great baseball player he was as a young man. Rollins did the same with his punching-brag festival. Apparently they are still young men.

The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939 – May 1943, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1951 Little Brown–
   This is Volume I of his 14 book masterpiece History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.
    The Navy commissioned Sam as the official historian of the Navy in the war. I read 8 of the 12 volumes when I was 12 years old. I only comprehended about half of it, but I loved it. I was hooked on these books at my local library. These days, second time around, with underlining and marginal notes, I'm still occasionally confused but I I get more of it.
   The chapter by Commodore Dudley Knox is an explosive expose of the hoax that is the legend of Billy Mitchell. You can rent the stupid movie where Jimmy Stewart plays Billy and turns him into not only a god and a Nostradamus, but a real victim.
   Mitchell was supposed to be the prophet that tried to warn everybody about air power and how America needed to develop it between the wars. No one would listen to him, that's why the USA started out so far behind in air power when the war started. If only we'd listened to Billy, who knows how many lives could have been saved?
   But that is not true. Billy Mitchell only believed in long range land-based air power, and even at that only in strategic land-based air power. He thought, quite wrongly, that by the time the next war began, land-based heavy bombers could destroy cities thousands of miles away and win the war without a ground campaign. He though that the Navy was completely obsolete and did not believe there was any point in building aircraft carriers, and actively worked to prevent their construction. Virtually no one knows this!
   Of course, land-based air power never matched his vision even when the entire America economy was tooled to do just that.. Not even with Allied advantage so great that waves of B-17's and B-24 Mitchell bombers were blacking out the sun in 1944 did strategic Mitchell air theories work. He was wrong on almost everything that counted when it counted, and now his name has a halo.
   The Navy won the war in the Pacific in spite of it's backward starting condition thanks to the erroneous prognosticator Mitchell. Naval air power won the Pacific War and even when land-based air power became important at the end game, it was only from island bases that had been secured by naval air power. It was only the A-bomb that made land-based air power strategic in and of itself. Mitchell hadn't foreseen the atomic bomb.
   Mitchell didn't even believe in the future of air power for tactical ground support. It was all about mass terroristic destruction of enemy cities and industry from the air until they said uncle and surrendered.
   If the United States had not believed in Mitchellism, and the billions of dollars spent on heavy air power had instead been spent on mass production of landing craft, the war would have ended about a year sooner than it did. The air campaign against Germany and Japan were productive, but not remotely as productive as anyone had hoped or predicted. The story of World War II proved Billy Mitchell wrong on all counts.

The Battle for Asia, by Edgar W. Snow – c) 1941 - What William L. Shirer was for Germany, Edgar Snow was for China; the American eyes and ears on the scene for all the developments leading up to war.
   There was a major difference however. Shirer was a solid conservative, while Snow was a Communist sympathizer.
   There is no doubt at all that Communists showed more integrity and courage compared to Chiang Kai Shek in these years of China's sorrow so Snow can be forgiven for the red in his heart. Battle For Asia is remarkable because it is based on his travels, yet it remains solidly political throughout. He isn't snowing us with self-serving anecdotes, nor describing places where he slept, meals he had, or boring ordinary people he met by the side of a dusty roadway. Travelogues like that from any era are the pits.
    This is the book that came out in between his two big sellers. The first was Red Star Over China, 1937 a loving portrait of Mao when both men were at the the top of their game. The other was People on Our Side published in 1944, a plea to the US reader to see the Chinese Communists for the wonderful force for good that they are.
    Edgar Winter Snow got into some trouble during the McCarthy era and moved voluntarily to Switzerland for a while. The worse the name of Mao became, the more the millions of copies of Red Star Over China became an ill star over Snow.

Bitter Glory, Poland and its Fate, 1918-1939, by Richard M. Watt - c)1979 -
    Excellent writer and book. It's difficult to have any clear understanding of World War II without a clear understanding of the Polish problem. Hitler's didn't just begin in Poland, it began over Poland.
   Few histories of the war concentrate on Poland until it is invaded in 1939. This book covers the entire period in Polish history from the end of World War One to the conquest of Poland in World War II. With all the focus on Neville Munich, history neglects Poland between the wars, and this book plugs the gap completely.
    Poland suffered horribly in WWII. For every Jew murdered in Germany, a hundred were murdered in Poland. Poland did not provoke Germany as Goebbels lamely told the Germans on the radio when the war erupted. The Katyn Forest massacre and the Warsaw uprising are unspeakable tragedies.
   But the books almost always paint a false picture of complete Polish innocence and victimization. Once the war began, yes. But between the wars, was Poland's conduct always so pure? This book answers the question, and it is no.
    Poland celebrated its independence at the end of World War One with an unprovoked war of aggression against Russia. In 1921 newly independent Poland attacked the Soviet Union. It was a major war. Poland occupied most of the Ukraine and intended to keep it. The Red Army counter-attacked in 1922 and came to within the gates of Warsaw. The Russo-Polish War of 1921-22 was settled with the help of international mediation.
    To this day almost every history book in the west describes this war as an example of Soviet aggression! Conservatives don't need historical lies on their side to help out the cause.
    Poland between the wars was no pure democracy. There was even an element of fascist totalitarianism in the mix. Just because Germany was so much worse doesn't absolve Poland from what it was too. When Hitler wiped Czechoslovakia off the map in 1938 he gave a slice of it to Poland and Poland didn't turn it down.
    The leading character in Bitter Glory is Joseph Pilsudski, the dynamic leader of the new Polish nation. He is known as the "George Washington of Poland."
     In the early 1980's me and fellow comic Kenny Rogerson went on stage for two weeks under fake names for the fun of it. Kenny tried several names. I stuck with one. Crowds of 300 people heard the host say, "You're next comedian has been on Showtime, and has written for the Boston Globe, lets hear it for Joe Pilsudski!"
    Poland at one point in this tale, is ruled by a pianist.

Black Protest, History Documents, and Analysis, 1619 to the Present. Edited with an introduction and commentary by Joanne Grant – c) 1968 by CBS Publications – Great collection – I read about the Chicago Riot of 1919 for the first time here then gave away my copy to Isaac the men's room attendant at the Comedy Stop in Atlantic City. We had remarkable conversation between shows last week. Isaac is an educated, articulate and spiritual man, one of the best conversationalist I have ever met. He was homeless a year ago. He can have my old paperback copy but note to self: buy the hardcover – I have to read more of this wonderful book.

Bloody Buna, by Lida Mayo - c)1974 - 178 pg -
    There is no doubt that if there was an award for the most horrible campaign of the Second World War, the one where you really wouldn't want to have been there in your wildest hero fantasies, one of the nominees would be the battle for bloody Buna.
    Buna was a heavily contested objective on the northeastern coast of New Guinea in World War II. The Japs took it in 42. The Americans an the Aussies took it back in 43. The Australians led the land fighting, MacArthur and Nimitz led the fight by sea.
    The Japanese hoped to maintain an airfield near Buna in order to help conquer the whole of New Guinea. If the Japanese had taken all of New Guinea it was probable they would have invaded Australia. It is understandable then, that while the Americans and British contributed, most of the toughest fighting in this campaign was done by the Australian defense forces.
    The Allies also had the support of the lightly armed but strategically crucial native population. The locals didn't like colonialists, but they knew a greater evil when they saw one, and the locals did everything they could to help the Allies in Bloody Buna.
     The fighting was merciless, relentless, and severe. There were a trillion vicious bugs and dangerous wild animals. To move fighting units through thick hostile forest entire battalions had to hack their way through by machete. There were infectious deadly diseases sweeping the ranks of both sides. The heat and humidity were always extreme. Starvation and thirst were a constant friend, especially on the Japanese side where people were resorting to horrible things to stay alive. I'm not even going to describe them.
    Now you know why they called it 'Bloody Buna.'
    Lida was an historian in the Office of Military History, U.S. Army.
There are a lot of maps. At first glance they are not attractive, but when I used them intensely to follow the action they excelled.


Blue Smoke and Mirrors, How Reagan Won, and Why Carter Lost the Election of 1980 – By Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover – C) 1981
    A really good book. I read it from witcover to witcover. Jules wrote about a hundred political campaign books, or it seems so anyway.
    As the title would indicate, this is more or less an attempt to discredit the victory of Ronald Reagan. Two venerable liberal reporters who didn't vote for him try to pick him up and throw him out of the ring.
   During the 1980 primaries, George HW Bush was the main competition for Reagan in the Republican field. The problem for Bush was that he was too preppy and Yalie, and that he was too much of a moderate liberal Republican. The authors argue that the Yalie thing was valid but the liberal label was not on the mark. If you took the name off the speeches and let a smart voter read the platforms of the various anonymous candidates, Bush comes out just as conservative as any of them. This experiment was actually done to prove it. So it was the Bush style and image that was preppy lib.

Bombs Over Baghdad, Desert Storm for the Liberation of Kuwait, A Personal Narrative, by Ron Weiss – c) 2002
    This is a fine book, but bizarrely packaged. Ron Weiss worked for a private company in the Middle East for a dozen years or so and was there during the Gulf War. He diligently collected news clippings from all over the world on a daily basis during the long crisis from August 1990 to February 1991. (There is a fancy word for a book that is a collection of newspaper articles serving a scholastic reference purpose, but I don't remember what it is.) BOB is a great contribution to the historical science.
   What is bizarre is the 20 page introductory chapter. Its just a rambling biography of the personal life of Weiss for the past 20 years, bearing no relevance whatsoever to the subject of his book. It had me bursting out loud laughing in the coffee shop.
   “Houston was good to me. I was there on my own, independent, free to travel and had the opportunity to meet new people. Some of the women I met were very interesting, but the spark for marriage never ignited to interfere with my independence.”
   He adds little comments at the end of each of his collected articles. You'll read the priceless take on some delicate political problem from a Jordanian newspaper source (thanks Ron!) then Weiss will add, “We're coming for you Sadaam. You are a paper tiger.”
   So its all this great research with an eccentric guy who can't decide if he is an editor or an author. He wants the author credit so he interjects comments to make his mark in the pages. He seems like good people.

“God Bless George Bush, James Baker III, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and General Norman Schwarzkopf. Without their leadership and driving force to successfully, we would never know what Saddam Hussein's intentions were if the world allowed him to annex Kuwait to Iraq. Would Saudi Arabia have been next? What would the price of oil have been on the market? What would have happened to the world economy?”

    Rite on, brother. I hope you find a wonderful wife. You have to settle down sooner or later, and you look like you're about 70. I might try to look this guy up and invite him to my next gig at Atlantic City.

Breaking the Bismarck's Barrier, 22 July 1942- May 1944, Volume Six of the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1950 – Little Brown
JFK in his PT-109 fought in this campaign to take back the Solomons and beyond to Rabaul, which kept the US Navy busy for most of 1943.
   MacArthur kept insisting that his army wasn't trained and ready for a land campaign, so Admiral King kept saying, no problem, I'll let the Marines do it. The Marines are a subdivision of the United States Navy.
    If you see me in the cafeteria reading this book, don't put your tray down and start talking to me.

The Brotherhood of Oil, Energy Policy and the Public Interest, by Robert Engler, author of The Politics of Oil – c) 1977 Mentor.
   Engler of City University of New York wrote two book in his life. This is the second. He has a definite left bias, but that is to be expected considering CUNY and the era it was published. The public was at a fever pitch hating the oil companies.
   I'm only a chapter in, but the writing is good and I've learned some very interesting things.

Bush in Babylon, The Recolonization of Iraq, by Taraq Ali – c) 2003
   Taraq is the editor of the New Left Review, so you know he will be fair and balanced. Verso Press in the U.K. did a great job with the physical book. BB is an almost unique size, a small by healthy little hard cover. Nice layout. Too bad it has to be so nasty. Much of the book is an overview of foreign colonialism in Iraq over the last 100 years.
   The cover photo has a little boy in Iraq urinating on the helmet of a US soldier pointing his rifle. If that's the cover photo, the bad taste one-sided version of everything has to follow, and does.
   Taraq writes about the poets of Iraq quite a bit. And nothing pleases me more than reading about Iraqi poets.

Butler's Book, by Benj. F. Butler, A Review of His Legal, Political, and Military Career – c) 1892 – A.M Thayer
    A jerk on the side of right, is better than a fine person on the side of wrong. Ben, “The Beast” Butler is one of the most insufferable obnoxious self-consumed snob braggart pinhead arrogant squids that ever walked the planet. But he was almost always fighting for the right causes.
    Butler was a Massachusetts politician and a Civil War General. Southerners hated him. Historians all hate him. I hate him too.
    I actually bought BB presuming that upon hearing his side of things, I would lose some of my prejudice against him. Historians all put him down, but I figure, I never met the guy, so who am I to judge? On the other hand, when you read someone's autobiography, now you've met the guy, and now you can judge. I can judge. Ben Butler is an insufferable jerk. But I'll take 100 of them in the United States Senate if they vote on the plane of a high conscience, regardless of their personal conceits.
    You may be horrified to note that this is a first edition from 1890 and I mark it up with notes like any other book. It's fun to carry a book into a diner that is 121 years old! AM Thayer of Boston made a sturdy and very heavy hardcover. 1,037 pages – I've only managed to suffer through 107 of them so far.

The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Costs of the War in Iraq, by George Soros – c) 2004 -
    Of all the books that tie W. Bush to a tree and then fire hatchets at him, this is the one that has the most class, the most decorum, the most fairness. Soros is merciless in his hatred for the policies of W. Bush, but he rarely makes it personal, and GS makes his arguments well. I wish all the other 'Bush-Bash-Books' had the kind heart that this one does, even though he is beating Bush to bits on the facts.
   Soros, a gazillionaire philanthropist and polymath, has done a lot for the cause of weed.
   ('Polymath' means an expert on an impressive number of different subjects.)

The Cambridge Modern History, Volume VII – The United States, Planned by The Late Lord Acton L.L. D., Regius Professor of Modern History – Edited by A.W. Ward Litt. D., G.W. Prothero Litt. D., and Stanley Leathes M.A., and I seldom know what British abbreviations stand for - c) 1903 – 750 pages
   What a masterpiece. A British historian writing a general well-fleshed history of the United States from his Oxford hearth at the turn of Queen Victoria's century. Some of the pages are bound together at the outside and I have to cut them open with scissors to keep on reading. CMH puts the year being discussed in the text at the top of every page, and there isn't even a strict chronology. It's just to help the reader follow and learn.
    I gather from the info that the Lord prepared the material outline and the Ward and his fellow editors put it into a polished book form, but who knows where 'planned by' and 'edited' starts and ends?
   The inside of this jacket is marked with the ink stamp that this book is the property of David Donald. I bought this book at the used book bin at the Russian Research Center for $3 and I'm fairly sure that this was once owned by that famous historian.

The Cause of Japan, by Togo Shigenori - Togo was the Japanese Foreign Minister at the beginning of World War II and then again at the end. This is his account of the war years through Japanese eyes at the highest level. Shigenori was tried by the Allies after the war and sentenced to 20 years for war crimes. “Shig” wrote this memoir from prison. Togo never made it out alive and died of natural causes as a war criminal.
   I don't know in what year he wrote this hardcover because the previous owner slashed that page out for some reason.
    I have not made it very far in the book largely because there is a very long introductory chapter by the translator. Those are always a turn-off and I like to start books from the beginning so there's a dilemma every time I pick it up to start reading. Maybe the previous owner should have slashed out that intro chapter too. The pre-game show shouldn't be half as long as the game.
Shigenori was not one of the hawks in the pre-war Japanese government. The record is clear. But too many things happened on his watch for him to have escaped at least some of the blame. A lot of people feel that Togo should have been given a more lenient sentence.
    Togo was also Ambassador to both Germany and the USSR in the pre-war years, so all in all he had quite a seat for the play.

Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, by David Donald – c) 1970 – Volume 2 of the giant bio of the greatest friend the black person ever had in the United States Senate. Charlie Sumner fought for justice before, during, and after the Civil War. A racist South Carolina Congressman nearly beat Sumner to death on the Senate floor with a baseball bat (a heavy cane that was probably more powerful than a baseball bat.) Davey Donald doesn't love Sumner. The guy that writes the definitive biography of of the greatest Americans of all time, doesn't even remotely like him as far as I can tell.
     I don't like David Donald as a writer and I don't like him an an historian. Ask 100 historians about him and you'll never hear the end of how great he is. His judgement stinks. Every time I read him I get either annoyed or bored or both.
   Charles Sumner is my hero and I don't like the dry detached non-committal way DD the great biographer treats my great man. Donald certainly laid half the blame for the Preston Brooks heavy cane attack on Sumner in 1856 on the victim in volume one. Sumner was supposedly asking for it with his pompous speeches. Bruce Catton takes the same attitude on that one.
    In this volume 2 DD doesn't pick a team once again. I'd say Donald's books are for detached white scholars only. General readers or those who look for a portrait in heroism for Sumner, the man who fought for full equal rights for blacks long before Lincoln did, should look elsewhere.

The Civil War in the American West, by Alvin M. Josephy – c) 1991 – I have three books by Alvin and they're all the same. Not fun to read but nothing very annoying either. Always good, never great, and never fun.
   But Josephy has a precious talent for finding the subjects in American history that desperately need more treatment and giving them a solid treatment. Certainly the Civil War in the American West is a vastly understudied subject. Most of the great Civil War historians, like Catton and Foote, give the far western theater very little treatment.
   AJ is quite a big shot. He was an editor at Time, taught at Harvard College, and at the time of this book, was Chairman of the board at the Smithsonian.
    One great story in here is about the exploding mules of Glorietta Pass, New Mexico. The Union men packed up a bunch of mules with TNT and pushed them towards Confederate lines with the slow fuse burning. I won't tell you the outcome.

The Civil War Day by Day, An Almanac, by E.B. Long, With Barbara Long – c) 1971 – The phone book of the Civil War. What's even more impressive than the scope of this 1,087 page reference is the reverence that other historians have for it. No historian is infallible but all historians turn to Long as the genius record-keeper of the war. If a Confederate spy threw a rock at a Union sentry near Murfreesboro at 4 a.m. on Wednesday July 8 1863, Long notes it in this diary of events.
E. B's wife Sharon wrapped it up and published it after he died in the final stages of preparation.
It's hard to try to read it as a narrative because it looks feels and reads like a reference book, but once in a while Long comes up with a long entry and turns into Shelby Foote.
609,000 men and 21 women died in action in the Civil War (this includes disease.) - For every ten Union men who died in a Confederate prison because of bad conditions, eight died of bad conditions in a Northern prison.
Lincoln told 3.2 stupid stories a day.

The Civil War in Spain, by Robert Goldston - This was a war so brutal that at one point a town was thrown down a mine shaft. Goldston has an amazing talent for taking any complex historical subject and turning it into a 210 page paperback with just the right emphasis on every part of the subject. This is my fifth Goldston paperback.
   I recently learned that Goldston books are written for “young adults.” All these years I thought I was smart for reading so many of them. Now I feel like an idiot.
   The Spanish Civil War was fought between left wing fascists backed by Stalin, and right wing fascists backed by Hitler. Pick a team! Moderates need not apply. The Spanish Civil War was as sane and reasonable as an argument between Glenn Beck and Rosie O'Donnell.

The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal – Clinton defense tome by an inside friend of Bill.
   Stylish stuff. All right, sometimes he does get carried away with the great writing till it isn't great writing anymore. Excess of confidence as big shot senior editor makes him lose touch with the simple reader at times, like he's writing more to see how great it going to look, rather than to make his point.
   Nevertheless, Sidney “Blue” (Clinton's nickname for him) is a great writer, a real man of literature, one of the lettermen of his day. It's not just a political book, its modern literature. You get not only SB's info and pov, you also get a sample of how one of the big political editor-authors plies his craft.
   Blumenthal defends Clinton like an adolescent lap-dog. Clinton himself doesn't believe in his innocence the way Sid does. I spend a lot of time yelling at Sidney in the margins, sometimes impolitely.
   Clinton Wars has some insider stuff I liked. Clinton and Blumenthal used to
do impressions of Carville as soon he he left the room.

The Coming Fury, by Bruce Catton – c) 1961 - A book I'm actually almost finished reading. The coming of the Civil War by the deacon of Civil War historians, the prolific Catton. I always manage to get through Catton's CW books, but I confess there is something about his work I do not care for. He certainly hedges his bets and remains a little too detached from emotional issues where I feel he should get in the game and make a call now and then.
   One Southern historian says that Catton has a pro-North bias. Never saw a glimpse of that myself. There is so much bias in Civil War history books that it's as if the skirmishes are still being fought by Johnston in Texas.
   Bruce thinks Sumner brought it on himself when Brooks of South Carolina tried to beat him to death in 1856. That's not what I'd call a pro-North bias. Besides, all historians should have a pro-North bias. Even good Southerners, if they study the war, should have a pro-North bias. What's wrong with showing bias for the obvious good side, no matter where you were born? If I wrote a book about the Salem witch trial I wouldn't take the side of the ignorant tyrants who hanged the witches, just because I'm from Massachusetts. If I wrote a book about South Boston, I wouldn't describe the busing riots of 1974-5 by saying the people throwing rocks at school busses were the victims, just because I'm from Southie. I'd still have to say that the 700 white parents sarcastically singing “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas” as black students go from their buses into the High School were in the wrong. Southern historians don't write Civil War books with a pro-North bias. But they should.
    Sometimes I don't like Catton's writing, but then I'll read a couple of crummy modern political book chapters, then go back to Catton, and find him refined and fabulous. My problem with BC is that he doesn't have a liberal bone in his body, yet he never reveals an overt redneck moment either. I think he is a passionate scholar and a hard-working wordsmith, but from a grand perspective, taken as a whole, in spite of their usefulness to history, his books have nothing to say. No great point he seems to want to make, no argument. Put some vinegar of your own into it, will you, old fellow? Make a call. make us mad at you. Do something. And enough of the three-paragraph bios of every man who ever commanded a regiment.
    As for his battle descriptions, I do get lost now and then. I think Ike and Omar Bradley describe a battle more clearly, but that Catton is far better than Liddell-Hart or Edward Beach. On a one to ten I'll give him a six. I have never met an author who can hit a ten in making a complex battle 100% clear to me. I always miss some of it and just give up and continue reading. Part of the problem is a lack of maps.

The Compact History of the United States Navy, by Fletcher Pratt - c)1962 - It's 331 pages, so its not that compact. Pratt is a famous war historian. The best story by far is from one of the naval battles of the Guadalcanal campaign.
    Just before his cruiser sank, a southern sailor tossed an officer's mattress overboard. He then dove into the water, climbed onto the mattress and paddled away as his ship went down. Then he floated among the other survivors with his arms behind his head, enjoying the warm equatorial weather and singing "Deep in the Heart of Texas."
   This is a very enjoyable hardcover. Pratt is an old-school unabashed cheerleader for the United States, and its Navy. He can ignore unpleasant information from time to time when telling a story.
   The United States Navy was not very helpful at all during the Revolutionary War. Pratt likes John Paul Jones.

A Concise History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by John S. Reshetar, Jr. - c) 1964 – This is published by Praeger so it has a Cold-War hawk bias at the foundation. Nevertheless, it is a fine general history that says at the outset that it is only trying to be a good general history for beginners based on primary sources. Now you're talking.
The Soviets flooded the world for 90 years with their own histories of the CPSU, especially the one written in 1929 which became the Party Bible until well into the Krushchev era, all by Progress Publishers. So if Reshetar Jr. is a little bit of a homer, so what? I've sat through reading the hostile one-way Soviet histories, my home team deserves the same ear.

A Concise History of the Middle East, Fourth Edition, Revised and Updated, by Arthur Goldschmidt, c)1991 - Westview Press is so proud of the popularity of the book and the popular demand for new editions that the subtitle of the book is about that. The first edition came out in 1991.
    Westview Press, if my own library is any indication, is fond of left-wing biased books. Nothing wrong with that, I'm just saying it is. So it's no surprise that from the little that I've read of this book so far, it's obvious that it's our job to understand and appreciate the Islamic culture and their historical position, but not at all their responsibility to appreciate our culture and respect our position. The ignorant west is the bad guy here.
'Schmitty' is an enjoyable writer. All racism in the Middle East is directed at the Middle East. Like they aren't the home of all-time Pashas of Anti-Semitism.

The Conquerors, Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany – 1941-1945 – By Michael Beschloss – Simon & Shoestring
    I get lost when I read Beschloss. I will never be a fan of his writing.
   The Conquerers is rough on Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau.
    On April 12, 1945 President Roosevelt was sitting still for famed Russian painter Lizzy Shoumatoff. Franklin suddenly lurched forward all of a sudden and Shoumatoff scolded him jocularly to “sit still you stubborn Dutch mule!” FDR then keeled over and said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my neck.”
   Prior to Conquerers I had always read that FDR's last words were, “I have a terrific headache.”
   But as he was being lifted towards a bed he said,”Be careful.”
   So FDR's last words were actually, “Be careful.”
   He might have been trying to finish the sentence, “Be careful of an overextended federal bureaucracy.”

Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions – May 1942 to August 1942 - Volume IV of the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, by Samuel Eliot Morison
The Marines get all the ink but the silent service did just as much to win the war. The US submarine service disrupted Japanese supply lines to the point where near the end of the war, when a Japanese oil tanker left Borneo, everyone knew the ship was doomed. It was not going to make to to Japan.
   US subs had faulty torpedoes for the first year and a half of the war, but then it was watch out Tojo as the American subs came off the assembly line in big numbers and this time they had excellent high octane torpedoes.
   I still need eight volumes of this amazing work by Mr. Morison.

Counsel to the President, A Memoir, by Clark Clifford, with Richard Holbrooke - c) 1991 – Random House
    Young Americans probably don't know his name but The Cliff is an important figure in American history. Counsel to the President is a masterpiece of political literature. I'm three fourths the way to the finish line of page 665, and have found it a rewarding investment of time every time. The author got into some trouble later on in the BCCI scandal.
    This guy is a great writer.
    Clark Clifford is conceited and a snob. For once we actually have a case of someone who has a right to be. This guy sat in with several Presidents at all the important meetings. He was a close confidant of Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. He played poker with Truman. CC was a lawyer to the Presidents and Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War.
   A friend recently asked me what my favorite autobiography was and I shrugged and said, “I don't know, maybe the one by Clark Clifford.”
   There is no question that Clifford pleaded and argued with his boss Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam was a losing proposition and the United States should withdraw. CC was ahead of the hippies. He milked the Nam credit for the rest of his life, but yes, it was valid.

A Country Made by War, by Geoffrey Perret - c)1989 -
   This general history of the United States military is one of the smoothest and most stimulating books I have ever read on any subject.
    Perret served in the Army in 1958-59 so he gives us a military expertise with a layman's touch. Geoff won his stripe, but wasn't involved long enough to get military stuffy. Perret pays a good deal of attention to military affairs in the between-war periods of peace, which few other military histories do. It may be the most valuable contribution in his pages. Events in wars are obviously the result of preparation, or lack of it, in peace.
   Sometimes he is a Blame American First guy, but more often than not Perret (almost reluctantly) betrays a dependable patriotic streak in his work.

Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency, by Hamilton Jordan - c) 1982 - This is a beautifully written insider account of the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981 by President Carter's Chief of Staff, Ham Jordan.
   Iranian students took dozens of American hostages in November 1979. The Iranians overran the American Embassy and kidnapped our people. They blindfolded Americans from the embassy and paraded them through the streets of the Iranian capital with mobs chanting hatred at them. They were held captive until the day Ronald Reagan became President in January of 1981.
    Early on in the crisis, Zbigenew Brzezinski gave some tough advice to Carter, which the President ignored entirely,

             "Mr. President, you can't allow this thing to settle
               into a state of normalcy. If you do it could paralyze
               your Presidency. Yes it is important that we get our
               people back. But your greater responsibility is to
               protect the honor and dignity of our country and its
               foreign policy interests."

     Zbigineiw told Carter this on November 9. Secretary of State Vance was on the scene to disagree and advise caution. Vance won the argument. Brzezinski, the cold war expert, was the only hawk in the Carter cabinet. Carter enjoyed his memos and mini lectures. But he seldom followed
Zbiginew's advice.
    Relations between the US and Iran have been bad since November 4, 1979. Neither side has really gotten over the great Hostage Crisis.
   Most insider Washington books are filled with self serving stories, excuse towels for failures, and a lot of blamesmanship. But Hamilton's Jordan's humility is monumental throughout the book. A rarity in the world of politics.

Crusade in Europe, by Dwight D. Eisenhower – c) 1948 – A detailed account of all the battles of the US Army in Europe during World War II by the commander of Allied Forces there and a future President. The book probably helped get him elected. Everyone's dad had this book at home when I was a boy.
   As far as I am concerned, this is the best book ever written on World War II. The maps are tremendous too. What an experience to slowly go through the war with this man. Ike has so much class he tries to avoid using names whenever he tells a story about a blunder that cost a battle. Of course he can't avoid it when he tells the famous story about General Patton slapping a sick soldier for alleged cowardice.
   I think it's great writing! Wall to wall! Completely great. If it's ghost written, so be it.
   The maps are amazing. Mark Clark and Omar Bradley come out pretty good in these pages. Patton a little less so, but Ike liked him and knew he was a great general. General Montomery takes a few criticisms too.

Crusaders for American Liberalism, The Story of the Muckrakers, by Louis Filler, c)1961 (1st edition c 1939) - The Muckrakers fought the evils of big business in the early years of the 20th century. Most of the Mucks were writers.
   In these last years of the Gilded Age the giant corporations were so out of control with unlimited power that,

      "Not only did they threaten the 'little' man - the shopkeeper
       and the worker - but the 'large' man, the successful man
       who could not or would not engage in brutal business war
        was faced with extinction."

   I'm only up to page 43. It's not an easy book to read. The style is heavily academic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does slow down the speed reading.
   Big business monsters seem to be making a comeback today and there doesn't seem to be a powerful Muckraker making a comeback alongside it. The big corporations are monster-fish consuming the entire lake. Where are the muckrakers?

The Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersh -c) 1997 - See more faults. A total focus on all the negative things about John F. Kennedy, his presidency and his family. Hersh asserts plainly that John F. Kennedy stole the election of 1960. Hersh used to work for the NYT and he wrote the big seller that said that KAL-007 was a US spy plane. - Kennedy's favorite book was Melbourne.
   Hersh talks a lot about how sick Kennedy always was and how he was always buzzed on pain killers and various other meds. This is a very mean book.

Days of Infamy, MacArthur, Roosevelt, Churchill – The Shocking Truth revealed, How Their Secret Deals, and Strategic Blunders Caused Disasters at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, by John Costello c) 1994
    The subtitle explains it well enough. Costello is a very good writer and this is an important book. I read the first 170 pages eagerly then it slowed down.
   The main point for me is that the B-17 bombers of the Philippines, was the first line of US defense in the Pacific as dawn broke on December 7 1941. The Japanese attack on the Philippines on December 7 was more catastrophic for the US defense strategy than what happened at Pearl Harbor.

De Gaulle, A Biography by Adrain Crawley, by Adran Crawley – c ) 1969 – Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis
I've crawleyed through the first 25 pages then jumped ahead to the chapters on the Fall of France in 1940.
   This book has the useful and sharp perspective of a member of the British Parliament at a time when De Gaulle was still a key player in world affairs. So far it seems that Crawley is more critical of Britian than he is of France or De Gaulle. Its a nice piece of literature and scholarship, but its one of those “Blame Britain First” works.
   De Gaulle and the United States were a bad marriage that always had to continue for reason's of self-interest.
   I think De Gaulle's snobbish arrogant behavior is a tiresome reality of world history, but the United States has to take the blame for the way it all so badly started off. The events of 1942 might be a key to how De Gaulle treated the USA in the 1960's.
   Back in 1942 De Gaulle was openly fighting back against the Nazis who had swallowed his country and were murdering millions of unarmed civilians. Vichy France was the puppet regime of Hitler pretending to be France. De Gaulle considered the Vichy regime a lying sack of traitors.
The United States decided early on to support Vichy, not the French resistance in matters of grand strategy. The United States could gain more by playing along with the puppet regime in Vichy and keeping France neutralized.
    The United States believed that if it supported French resistance led by de Gaulle, this would provoke the Nazis into occupying all of France, expelling all foreign diplomats, and unleashing the formidable French Navy into the war on the side of the Axis. FDR and company thought that there was so much to gain by keeping Vichy France in neutral, that it was worth the price of turning our backs on simple right versus wrong resistance, the kind that the Free French Forces were advocating.
   Late in the war, De Gaulle and the United States were pals in combat, but early in the war the United States was trying to persuade De Gaulle to not stir up any trouble with that resistance stuff. If I were De Gaulle or a De Gaullist of 1942 who put his neck on the line for Free France, I don't know how I could ever forgive the United States for that callous Machiavellian US policy of supporting Vichy in 1942 when the chips were down.
    We always rub it in on how we liberated them in 44. But there was another chapter back in 42 that most Americans don't know about.

The Decline of US Power (and What We Can Do About It) - By Business Week staff writers Bruce Nussbaum, Ed Mervosh, Jack Kramer, Lenny Glynn, Lewis Beman, William Wolman, and Lewis Young - c) 1980 - This is a very useful timepiece with a special focus on energy and the problems for the US in the Middle East.
    Decline was clearly written before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979, yet the authors are already predicting that the Soviets may soon find themselves entrenched in a Vietnam style quagmire there.
    As it all turned out, the Russians invaded Afghanistan because they thought they were heading towards a Vietnam quagmire if they didn't. The Russian puppet regime in Kabul was getting dangerously close to losing their civil war and were already at war with fundamental Islamic opponents. The invasion was supposed to win and close out the Civil War, ending the budding Vietnam. Instead it upgraded it into full scale war as stalemated as it had been before the invasion.
    The authors have business knowledge that most historians and political analysts do not, making this a rich book. For example, when they report on how Iran seized so many US businesses after the Shah was ousted at the beginning of 1979, they also mention how some companies were protected from loss in subtle ways. Major corporations had their property in Iran seized, but they also had paid Iranian orders for American goods that they now didn't have to deliver.
    With the image of the US today as the bullies of the Middle East, it is worth noting that for a long time before that, we were the bullied. The Decline of US Power speaks loudly to that. The title alone speaks loudly to that. Young people today who do not remember the bullied seventies, cannot appreciate the positive contrast of US Power in the Middle east today.

Delivered From Evil, The Saga of World War II, by Robert Leckie – c) 1987 – Harper & Row
   First of all, Robert Leckie was a decorated US Marine who fought in the jungles of Guadalcanal. That fact permeates his writing, even though he tries to be a straight ahead historian. He's a monkey in a three piece suit writing all his academic military histories, when he really wants to have one too many beers and punch you in the nose.
Leckie spends a good deal of time ripping Churchill to shreds like like a young dog tearing up a very old stuffed animal. I enjoy that part. He takes brutal shots at lack American courage under fire, and only someone who has shown that courage can get away with it. So we get some real shots at the snooty British, but some real shots at his own side too.
    The criticism however is always directed at the U.S. Army, not the Marines. Leckie also has a special hatred for U.S. non-combatants that borders on unhealthy. Hey Bob, at least the rear echelon people served.
According to Leckie (“Private Lucky” in his first hand stories in disguise) if you weren't on the front lines like he was, then you have a lot of nerve daring to say you were even in the Armed Forces.
   I'm up to page 845 out of 946 pages. That a good healthy size general history. As usual, there really should have been at least 30 more maps.
   I have read several of Leckie's books, so I obviously like his work, but he doesn't exude a whole lot of warmth.

Diplomacy for Victory, FDR and Unconditional Surrender, by Raymond G. O'Connor - c)1971 - In the book The New Dealer's War, Thom Fleming makes a strong case that the worst decision ever made by the President Franklin Roosevelt was the January 1943 demand for unconditional surrender. No negotiated settlement of any kind. New Dealer's War argued that with no hope to end the war with some dignity in a negotiated settlement, Japan and Germany were left with no choice but to fight on to the bitter end. If only FDR had not demanded unconditional surrender, up to a million soldiers would have seen their loved ones again instead of having to die on a battlefield for no good reason other than to satisfy FDR's harsh terms.
    In DV Ray O'Connor, chairman of the department of history at the University of Miami argues just the opposite. He says that FDR made a brilliant strategic decision at Casablanca in January of 1943 when he decided (and forced Churchill to agree) that the Allies must insist on the unconditional surrender of Italy, Germany and Japan.
    It is an interesting and important debate.
    If I have to make a call on this one, (its a tough one) I'd say that the only way to exterminate German militarism in 1945 was to do it just the way it was done. FDR believed this and I agree with him, and I'm no fan of FDR. Roosevelt had seen World War I and how Germany had never seen a foreign soldier set foot on its home soil, yet Germany had capitulated (it was never formally a “surrender” just an armistice whereby Germany agreed to pay 900 zillion dollars in reparations, apologize for starting the war, dismantle its armed forces, and give up huge chunks of territory all over the world. Other than that it wasn't actually a surrender.
    But the legend grew that Germany had not lost on the battlefield, but had been betrayed by traitors, especially the Jewish bankers and the politicians they control. German militarism was the monster in the movie that comes back to life after you think the movie's over because he fell into a lake while beheaded, on fire, and weighed down with 40 cannonballs. But there he is again a few scenes later, somehow alive again, ready to terrorize and destroy.
    So FDR had that World War I mindset, that we will never purge Germany of the sick disease of militarism until every German has paid the price of war. That was the only thing that would ever sober these crazy people up. I'm half German. There were several instances when German resistance people approached the Americans with plots to kill Hitler or try in some other way to seize control of the government. But they either got weak support or none at all. There were some very powerful people, including Roosevelt who pretty much didn't want any negotiated settlement of any kind, even one that looks pretty sweet. Many diplomatic overtures from people with connections to the german resistance movement were rudely ignored by the big men in the FDR gang. They wanted total military victory even if the enemy did everything but completely surrender. This was Prussianism from way back when and it had to be absolutely destroyed.
   I guess it worked. For now. But history is forever young and you can't kill an idea whose time has come in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A Diplomatic History of the American People, by Thomas A. Bailey - c)1958
   I had a hardcover of the 1940 first edition and was 451 pages into it when I found this revised sixth edition from 1958. I can't throw the old one out because it has too many notes so I started the new edition where the old one left off in the chronological story. I finished the new edition to the final 855th page. It was sad when the book had to end. It's that good.
    This is one of the most successful diplomatic histories ever published. On a one to ten this book gets a nine. Stanford Tom's work is informative, smoothly written, and opinionated. TB is also a great editor. He always picks out the best stories and the best quips to add spice to the tale. I don't want to look up when Bailey died because when I open his books he lives.
   Top shelf book.

A Diplomatic History of the United States, by Samuel Flagg Bemis, Farnam Professor of Diplomatic History in Yale University – c) 1936 Henry Holt – 809 pages
   This might be the most respected and famous classic work in the field of American diplomatic history for the student and general reader. I have enjoyed 566 pages of Diplomatic so far, but I have to say that Bemis is a bit dry for my taste. It's always work to bear down and follow him. He's a good writer, but not great. Great is easy. SFB is never easy.
Bemis is relatively unemotional. If he shows a liberal or a chauvinist fang now and then it is brief and not too bloody. No one should think his is the last word on anything, just because his research is on the cutting edge. History is always up for grabs and Sammy would be the first to say, “Don't take my word for anything. Challenge me – Challenge everything- and AKS, Always Keep Studying.”

Empire for Liberty, The Genesis and Growth of the United States of America, Volume One to 1865, by Basil Rauch and Dumas Malone – c) 1960 – Appleton Century Crofts – 850 pages
   This is a good book but it's a pro-South anti-North polemic by Southern historians. EL is full of petulant rationalizations defending the South and explaining logical reasons for its imperfections, while maximizing in emotional tirades, any offense by the North.
   Appleton Century did a fine job with the physical book. It's a non glossy non color work, yet almost has the rich physical feel of a color glossy book. It opens flat and has a nice balance between too much black space and too little.
   I've read 623 heavily annotated pages. Basil and Dumas are great writers but I'm not desperately searching for Volume Two like I would be if they weren't such jerks. They spend three sentences describing the worst of slavery and 30 pages explaining all the areas of the South where slavery was nonexistent or not popular. Yeah, I get it. Nice try.
   Both authors conveniently claim Columbia University as their university anchor,, but both are from Virginia. Again, nice try.

The Enduring Vision; A History of the American People, by Paul Boyer, Cliff Clark Jr., Joseph Kett, Thomas Purvis, Harvard Sitkoff, and nancy Wolloch – c) 1990 – This fat colorful textbook is a disgraceful polemic masquerading as a general history. It is liberal brainwashing for the 1992 college freshman.
    Having said that, it is also a masterpiece. Enduring Vision has been very enjoyable and I only have about 90 pages to go out of 1,152 pages. The greatest tribute to a book is to read it. The pictures and the maps are fabulous. All great choices. A collective work of lefty art. This is a project that each of the authors and everyone else involved in it can be proud if. I got it for $3.00 in Atlantic City in 2005 in mint condition. Today, this heavy slick book would run the student at least a hundred bucks.

Eyewitness: The Negro in American History, by William Loren Katz, c)1967 - This is a gorgeous physical book to have, hold, browse and read, both inside and out. Pitman Publishing can be proud. It's heavily illustrated and highly educational.
   Most of the book is comprised of historical excerpts from the writings of American history. Katz is guiding us through the material and adding his own work in between.
   I was sad to read one clip that shed a rather bad light on my home town of Boston. Apparently there was some racism here in 1797. Prince Hall, the nations' first black Mason, lived in Boston and held meetings at his home. In a lecture to a group of free blacks he urged them to hang in there. Slavery had been made illegal in Massachusetts during the American Revolution. Mass. couldn't however, outlaw ill feeling.
    Hall's black friends had to be patient. How else could they,

            "bear up under the daily insults you meet with in
             the streets of Boston, much more on public days
             of recreation ... by a mob of shameless, low-lived,
             envious, spiteful persons, some of them not long
             since, servants in gentlemen's kitchens."

   My favorite story of this entire story (and its not even in this book) is the tale of Box Brown. Box was a slave who had himself mailed in a wooden box to Philadelphia to an abolitionist doctor's office. The package was dropped off in the good doc's office where a small group gathered and watched as the crate was opened. Up popped Mr. Brown who looked around and said "Good day, gentlemen."
When he died, he revised his role as “Box Brown.”

The Fire This Time, U.S. War Crimes in the Persian Gulf, by Ramsey Clark, Former U.S. Attorney General c) 1994 Thunder's Mouth Press
   This guy should legally change his name to “Even Ramsey Clark.” Every time a lefty cites him to back up a point, they always say “Even Ramsey Clark” came out against this conservative proposal or action. The implication is that because he is a former U.S. Attorney General, he is part of the “Establishment” and we are supposed to be impressed that even Ramsey Clark came out against this.
   That credential was valid for a few years after he left office in the 1960's, but Clark has been so extreme left wing for so long, that it is now a contrived trump card that should be torn up and thrown away. It should now be a case where they can cite him as just another well known lefty leader, not a former U.S. Attorney General. The proper way to cite him is to say, “Ramsey Clark is also against this, as to be expected.”
   Clark is an oxymoron. He is a sincere knee-jerk. He comes down hard left on everything, but unlike bozos like Keith Olberman, he isn't all about ego, and aggressive self promotion, he really means it. I wouldn't have realized that about him if I had not read some of this excellent book.
   I will probably be on the opposite side of his point of view forever, but I truly respect him far more after spending time with his writing. And he writes very well.

The First Casualty, From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth-Maker, by Phillip Knightly C) 1975 – Great book. I read the first half in 1982 and that's it. Very cynical work. Phil lets his facts do the talking. He doesn't add many emotional extras.
   Apparently the Crimean War and the Civil War saw the first specialized professional war correspondents.

Firsthand Report, by Sherman Adams - Sherm was a member of Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet who near the end of the 50's had to resign as the result of the “Vicunia Coat Scandal of 1958.”
   A Boston businessman had given Adams a Vicuna Coat as a gift. The the Boston businessman got himself involved in a banking scandal and was called before Congress. Adams was guilty of guilt by association and turned in his resignation as White House Chief of Staff.
   Sherm's troubles would seem mild by todays standards, but they were enough to bring Mr. Adams down at the time. This is a very good story and there aren't a lot of firsthand sources on Ike in easily accessible book form.
   Sherman Adams was possibly the second most powerful man in Washington in the first six years of Ike's term. First as Special Advisor to the President, then as official Chief of Staff, you didn't get to talk to Ike until you talked to Sherm first. He was the power behind the throne, and as is usually the case was resented by many.
   The joke went around Washington that we should all pray that no one assassinates Sherman Adams. Then Eisenhower would become president.
   Not a lot of people were walking the streets of DC in tears when Sherm Adams went down.
   Sherman Adams touched my life in one way. After he retired from politics he built a ski resort at Loon Mountain, New Hampshire. That business has long survived his passing in 1986 and I've worked a couple of comedy gigs there.

For Red Sox Fans Only, by multiple authors – Rich Wolfe editor – c)2004 – Interesting timing for the book written by and for Red Sox fans. In came out in June of 2004 and is full of sad stories from alleged “long-suffering” Red Sox fans. That October the Red Sox finally won it all after 86 years, so book got dated real fast. It's time for a volume two and I might actually be involved in creating. Rich Wolfe has been negotiating with publishers and wants to do the volume two with me doing the interviews! I have a chapter in volume one and Rich and I correspond regularly. He has also read one of the chapters in my history book and has promised to help get it published. He likes it.

Forging of the American Empire, A History of American Imperialism from the Revolution to Vietnam, by Sidney Lens -c) 1974
    Sidney Lens thanks four of his 'academic friends' for helping him on the book. One of them is Howard Zinn. What else do you need to know? The Blame America First Society gives this book a gold star. Sid sees everything through a lefty Lens. Foreign countries can do no wrong. They are all victims of uncle Sam's bully billy-club.
    I like this book even though Sid and I have an adversarial relationship in the margins. The United States, if we read Lens correctly doesn't have a decent or moral bone in its body. Never did. Every thing we have ever done in foreign policy is imperialism.
    This is a fun book to read because Lens makes his arguments with historical facts to back them up. Sid may manipulate them sleazily, but he at least works with facts. He's good at his job. And Lens is a good writer too, if that counts for anything. I like as a reader to face the challenge of the best lefty minds. I don't prefer reading my own side preaching to me, the choir. The books that back up my political views are fun to read, but I try to avoid them because there is only so much reading time and its much more productive to challenge your own opinions than to verify them with cheerleaders for your own team.

France Reborn, by Robert Aron, translated by Humphrey Hare – c) 1964 – What a jerk! This is a bona fide chauvinist's idea of the history of latter half of WWII covering the liberation of France and the restoration of home rule. I thought I bought a history book. Instead I got a 472 finger pointing lecture on why the United States should have done ten times more to help France.
   I bought this book because I was going to France for the first time and wanted a goof book about France to take with me. After 40 pages of the author's astonishing bitterness and sneaky biased fact-juggling in the worst spirit of journalism and historical science I set it aside and brought a general history of France (by Anatoly France) to France instead. What a jerk!
   I read another Aron's book about the Vichy France and it was just as awful. Every low trick in the book to make France look pure and holy and always the victim of perfidious foreigners, especially the USA. Relentless sickening chauvinist negativity towards the Allies and all apologism for French people.
   It is shame on you Mr Aron for having more hatred in this book for the America who helped you than for the Nazi Germany that invaded and conquered you. Far more. This book is political sociopathic flotsam. I paid good money for this book at an upscale used book store ... you swine.

The General's War, The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf by Michael R. Gordon, and General Bernard E. Trainor c) 1995 Little Brown
   What a couple of Monday Morning Quarterback 20-20 hindsight squids. This history of the Gulf War of 1990-1991 is informative and sniper opinionated. Trainor made himself famous during this war by being on TV criticizing everyone and everything and being wrong half the time, and after the war he wrote a book in the same vein with Gordon.
   Trainor warned before the Gulf War began that it was going to be very bloody and this wasn't Grenada we were up against, this was a large battle tested Iraqi Army that had fought the Iranians for eight years.
   He doesn't quote in this history of the Gulf War, the times he was on TV being wrong during it.
   I have 109 omniscient 'if only I had been in command' pages to go.
   They don't like General Schwartzkopf at all.

The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943 – by Joseph Goebbels, “with” Louis P. Lochner – c) 1948 – If there's another volume I'm not looking for it. I don't know what I paid for this hardcover but it couldn't have been a lot because I know I still feel creepy trying to read it. Who wants to get inside the brain of this ugly despicable rat?
    I've never read Mein Kampf for the same reason and its been in my library for 30 years. Some people say its the very reason these people made it to the top without being stopped, that people didn't want to listen closely to the hated poison they spewed, so avoiding them grew them.
    Goebbels deserved a special punishment. He beat the hangman by committing suicide in May of 1945 as the Allies were closing in. He should have been turned over to “The Ice Man” for a proper execution
   I've read 20 pages.
“Dear Diary – Today I gave a racist speech of endless lies that led to the mass execution innocent women and children. Little Paula is getting her wisdom teeth in!”

The Grand Alliance, by Winston Churchill, - c)1950 - This is the third volume of his six pack "The Second World War." The grand work is on millions of bookshelves all over the world, yet they generally are unread if you press the owner. Too fleshed out for pleasurable reading, a masterpiece that desperately needs a two-volume abridgment.
   This one is 711 pages. TGA deals mostly with the year of 1941 when Britian fought the Axis in North Africa and the Balkans. Too many long boring telegrams from him to some distant commander in which he justifies his position in some argument. This six volume work should be abridged to three. But it's a must read nevertheless.
   When Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and Roosevelt were little kids, Churchill was already a famous veteran politician. He guided Britian through World War II as a great old man, then wrote these tome's as a man old enough to be a presenter today on 60 Minutes!

The Great Crusade, by H. P. Willmotte – The Free Press
   This is a great general history of WWII by one of the best known mentors on the subject.
Willmotte has little interest in telling the story of WWII. It's mostly a display of his genius analysis of every aspect of it. The real great crusade in play here is the author crusading his pet points, most of which were covered in far more detailed argument in his many other previous WWII Books. Relentless analysis actually takes the fun out of it at times, even though GC is clearly worth reading.
   If you only read one general history of WWII, this is not the on for you.

The Great Republic, A History of the American People, by six authors, Bernard Bailyn (Harvard – a famous historian) - Robert Dallek, (UCLA) - David Brion Davis (Yale) - David Herbert Donald (Harvard – a very famous historian) - John L. Thomas (Brown) - Gordon S. Wood (Brown) – c) 1992 (fourth edition)
With this much academic firepower this general US history book for college freshmen has a lot of potential to live up to, and it does not fall short. It is generally one step deeper in perception than the average US history textbook, and I mean the good ones. GR is 721 pages - I'm up to page 427. There are some sluggish chapters where they abandon the narrative and get into things like trends in literature and education. There are few things less educational than the study of education (because its boring, and whenever a subject gets boring it loses whatever educational value it might have because the reader's brain will involuntarily choose to not retain the info.)
   This is only volume one of two. I wish I had volume two . Volume one ends with the disputed Hayes-Tilden Election of 1876 that the Republicans are falsely accused of stealing.
   The Great Republic is a great book.

The Growth of the American Republic – Vol II
by Henry Steele Commager of Columbia and Samuel Eliot Morsion of Harvard c) 1940 – Oxford University Press
    This is one of the most popular textbooks of the era. Morison and Commager are heavyweights in the history industry. I think this is bad book. They write well and have complete command of the material, but I think overall the book is racist and mean-spirited. I carefully read every page of both volumes and they make me sick.


Gustav Le Bon, The Man and His Works - Edited by Alice Widener - c) 1979 – The book was originally published in real time in 1896.
    Gus le Bon is the greatest philosopher I have ever read. He is like Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) except le Bon is completely serious in his cynicisms whereas Bierce is having fun. Gustav's observations on the psychology of the crowd are indispensable to a deep knowledge of stand-up comedy and political riots. C'est le bon!

"The majority of men's opinions are founded not on deduction,
but on hate, sympathy and hope."

History of the American People, by Norman A. Graebner, Gil Fite, and Phil White. c) 1970 – This hardcover college freshman general history weighs about 40 pounds. Today, a new book like this would cost daddy about $125. I don't care for the McGraw Hill design or maps or even the colors and fonts. The text is generally liberal but occasionally stuck on the fence between the pre-1970's conservatism and the burgeoning 1970 leftism. I haven't read enough chapters to evaluate the talent fairly. It's 1,406 pages. I've read 112 pages. Way too many of those slow chapters on art, architecture, changes in education, economic trends, farming and tariffs.

History of Eastern Arabia, The Rise and Development of Bahrain and Kuwait, by Ahmad Mustafa Abu Hakima, Professor of History, University of Jordan - c)1965 -- I bought and read this short hardcover during the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91. It's not an easy read. Too many footnotes for one. But it is certainly worthwhile and it's hard to find material like this in the states. This was published by Khayats in Beirut.
   Today's Kuwait City was known at the time of this publication as 'Kuwait town.'

History of a Free People, by Henry W. Bragdon, and Samuel P. McCutchen – c) 1954 - MacMillan
   This was a strict, yet highly readable textbook for high school seniors when I was being conceived. I have meticulously read my way to page 505.
   Bragdon taught history at Phillips Exeter Academy. The quiz sections are cruel.
    Both these guys get real bad grades on the race issue.
    Nice physical book. Double columns with boldface leads, good illustrations. Very right-wing book. It has a two-page world political map in the middle and China is marked as a “Soviet Satellite.”

A History of Latin America, by George Pendle - c)1963 - Pelican books wants us to know that although author Pendle may be a London born diplomat who was British Council to Paraguay during WWII, he is nobody's snob. Pendle, "lives at Frinton-on-the-Sea without belonging to either the golf or tennis club. He gets his exercise by sawing up driftwood."

A History of the Luftwaffe 1915-1945 by John Killen – c) 1967 – I like the chapters on World War I the best.

A History of the Modern World, by R. R. Palmer, (Princeton University) and Joel Colton (Duke University) – c) 1965 – The first edition came out in 1950 – My good friend Martin Olsen gave me this book for Christmas in 1980 – Here it is 2009 and I am up to page 189. I sit down with this fine masterpiece two or three nights a year and never regret the investment.
   Government deficits were invented by England to give the rich class a stake in the success of the government. They arrived on the heels of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The bank of England, which was founded on the government deficit started in 1694. These deficits enabled England to finance the fleet which ruled the world and took the center of power away from France.
    The book is so Eurocentric that the title is somewhat in error, and there isn't a whole lot about the New World. I highly recommend this book.

History of the October Revolution, by the Institute of History at the USSR Academy of Sciences - c)1966 Progress Publishers, Moscow - This is total Soviet propaganda circa 1966 but why not hear the winners tell the story? The Russian Revolution is a big chunk of world history and the Soviet take on it has value.
    Progress Publishers made some pretty damn good books. They're all sturdy long-lasting hardcovers, the pages are slick to an almost glossy and show no signs of acid rusting. The fonts are likable and they are almost invariably well illustrated, though rarely is there a map. My copy of this history of the Bolo Revolution (Churchill called them 'Bolos') actually has red lettering for the word October on the title page. My copy also has one of those long thin cloth bookmarks as a preacher uses in his Bible, attached to the binder. Nice touch.
The writing in this and in all the Progress books is always pretty good. No one wants to go to jail for bad writing so they're always diligent. I wouldn't call it easy to read or fun writing, but it's appreciable.
     Progress was the publishing wing of the Cold War Soviet state. I don't see the PP books in the used bookstores and flea markets as much as I used to so I'm glad I stocked up on about 25 or so before the end of the Cold War slowed up the supply.
    My sessions with these books are not progressive. To read ten pages takes forever because the text is hard work and then there's the rebuttals I must make in the margins.
   This excerpt is from the second to last page'

           "Since October 1917 humanity has been developing
             and will continue to develop under the influence
             of the great ideas of the October Revolution. Our
             epoch is an epoch of the triumph of the ideas of
              Marxism-Leninism. Already quite a number of
            European and Asian countries are progressing
            along the road opened up by the October Revolution."

    The editors are named Sobolev, Gimpelson, Trukan, and Chebeyavski. Lord knows how many writers and researchers were involved. It's 424 thickly used pages. Sure, much if not most is propaganda, but it consistently makes good political arguments and offers unique perspectives.
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A History of the People of the United States, From the Revolution to the Civil War, by John Bach McMaster, - c)1896 Volume I - Great book by the scholarly and erudite McMaster. I have four of the six volumes. Volume one takes the story up to 1790.
   The most exiting reading is about Thomas Paine, one of the heroes of American history. he was the man who helped ignite the American Revolution with his incendiary pamphlet Common Sense. Paine was there at Valley Forge, the time that tried men's souls.
    But Paine had a wicked past in England before he got here. Tom was like the athlete with a bad reputation that gets a fresh start with a new team and becomes a beloved hero. Back in England he had been a wife-beater! "His wife soon died of ill-treatment," writes McMaster. For her, these were the times that tried women's souls.
    Paine remarried. It didn't last long. Thomas Paine's second wife left him when he became abusive. TP was evicted from his apartment, had his London business taken from him, and ended up an impoverished street hustler without a shave. Paine then took his fate by the horns when he managed to get a well-written letter into the hands of the visiting Ben Franklin. Ben took a pitiful interest in Paines' way with words. It was Franklin who sponsored Paines' voyage to America where Tom quickly became a successful editor of Pennsylvania Magazine, leaving his past behind and forgotten.
   Late in life Thomas Paine deteriorated physically and morally and died a hated man, having cheated most of his friends as readily as strangers.
This hardcover copy was given as a Christmas gift to someone from Henry Marcy, M.D. on December 26, 1896. It was spanking new at the time. Doctor Marcy worked at a place called Sunnyside, at 860 Mass Ave. in Cambridge. The telephone number to his office was 565!
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A History of Presidential Elections, by Eugene H. Roseboom - c) 1957 - This man is not my friend. Gino has a racist reactionary viewpoint of the post Civil War years. Rosie is furious that the victorious North "imposed" negro suffrage on the South. He points to Northern hypocrisy as if that would be a good reason to not give the vote to the blacks in the south,

          "In 1866 three northers states rejected Negro suffrage at
            the polls. Negroes could only vote in seven northern states
             in 1868, and five of those were in New England. What was
             sauce for the Southern goose would not do for the northern
             gander."

    Yes, all that is true, Gino. But there is a simple explanation. The federal government was always way ahead of individual states in promoting freedom and progress. Many Northern states were indeed racist in 1868 by today's standards. But since they had not seceded from the Union the federal government could not force them to be progressive and decent and fair to the blacks. They retained their powerful states rights and sometimes used it to keep blacks from obtaining political power.
    The Southern states on the other hand had not only denied the black the vote, they had enslaved the race and seceded from the Union after the election of 1860 did not go their way (If Democ rat Breckinridge had won they would not have seceded.)
    When the southern states lost the war they lost their states rights over which they had seceded in the first place. So this did lead to some irony, with the more racist South being forced to adopt progressive federal legislation which could not be imposed on the North. If the vanguard of negro suffrage happened to be in the south, the south had only itself to blame, and the hypocrisy of the North is neither here nor there. Whatever it took to make things right morally, the federal government was willing to do in the immediate post-war period when moral men like Sumner and Schurtz still had clout, and damn both the northern and southern states and later historians is they didn't like it.
    Of course, all that progress snapped back in the Jim Crow era after the election of 1876, but that is another story.

A History of the Soviet Union, by Georg von Rauch – c) 1957 – Praeger
   This guy is a despicable pro-German apologist. I read all but 37 pages. It's a history of Russia but the real agenda is the defense of Germany in history.

History of the United States, Volume I 1000-1660, by Edward Channing – c) 1905 - MacMillan – 537 pages
    This was the first of six EC volumes covering US history from Leif Ericson to the end of the Civil War. When they were published collectively in 1931 Channing won the Pulitzer Prize for history.
   I own four of the six volumes and this is the one I finished from cover to cover with notes. Edzo is a Harvard man. Channings' writing is sluggish but excellent. He clearly concentrates on original sources. Historians have been ripping off his original research for 70 plus years. They read historians who read Channing and write their history books based on these historians who read him. Newer historians now write books based on the works of those who read those who read those who read Channing. Eddie C is the end of the rainbow.
   There aren't enough multi volume histories of the United States available today. The format seems to be either one or two volume histories whenever general histories are published. Its time this trend is broken and the old style level returns to vogue. There needs to be more of this happy medium. Every individual aspect of American history has 20 professors writing 900 page books on it, but general history is either ignored or reduced to one or two-volume deals. As the years pass the two volume history becomes less and less adequate for anyone wanting more than the most frustratingly superficial level of detail.

A History of the United States, by Daniel J. Boorstin and Brooks Mathers Kelly, with Ruth Frankel Boorstin – c) 1986 – Ginn and Company – 763 pg
   My heavy hardcover is a little beat up, but this is a beautiful textbook by a beautiful writer, Danny Borstein the Librarian of Congress. I don't know beans about Kelly, but I am a fan of Boorstin.
   The material here is meant for about an eight grader, so it's heavy reading for an amateur like me. Danny-Brooks seem to belong to the old school that criticizes the Abolitionists for the coming of the Civil War and brands Southern Reconstruction as an unfair horror inflicted by the vindictive North, which surprises me. There's a lot of unfriendly quiz material every eight pages, which ruins the book as a straight ahead read.
    The headshot of an American eagle on the cover against a black border is first-rate. Ginn did a great job with the layout and design.
    I'm up to page 393.

A History of the United States, [Since 1865], by T. Harry Williams, Richard N. Current, and Frank Freidel – c) 1965 - Knopf
    This is an awesome book. I've spent some real quality time with these three history heavyweights. Freidel is the Harvard guy and T. Harry from LSU. I'm up to page 341 and only have 480 to go.
   The first edition is from 1959 and the revised 1965 edition still feels like 1959. Even though this is only a general history for high school seniors or college freshmen, they make one stimulating point after another, seeing it all from an amazing depth considering the limited amount of space they work with and amount of the story they need to cover.
   A lot of students once saw this superbly designed expensive school hardcover as homework. I see it as pleasure reading.

A History of United States Foreign Policy, by Julius W. Pratt - Second edition 1965 - Pratt is always reasonable and seldom jingoistic, which is commendable for the era. First published in 1955. Top shelf. One of my top 20 books of all time. This is such a good book and I have read it so thoroughly that I don't know where to begin my commentary so I won't.
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History of World War II - Armed Forces Memorial Edition, by Frances Trevelyan Miller - c)1945 – Universal Book and Bible House
   This is the narrative history that was given free to every member of the Armed Forces at the end of the war. It's a heavy hardcover with about 80 pages of choice photographs. My current copy ends with the battle of Okinawa. I had another copy that included the A-bomb and surrender but I threw it out after reading 173 pages (out of more than 900).
   This earlier edition was given to Phil Crimmins after his days in the Army in the Pacific. His son Barry, author of the book Never Shake Hands With a War Criminal, gave it to me about 16 years ago. I never could enjoy reading it because the pages were brittle and yellow and doomed to extinction from acid. They smelled funky. So I was seldom encouraged to read it.
    When I was in Atlantic City last year a found another copy for three or four dollars in very good shape. It had light grey strong pages so slick they seem almost glossy. It had no smell. When I got back I took out the old edition and sliced out all the wonderful illustrations, then scanned the pages I had read and annotated into the computer. After these last rites the old copy went down the chute at the end of the hall.
   As you may be able to guess, this version of the history of the war is sanitized propaganda. But it does include a thorough battle history. I regret to say that I am not fond of Trevelyans' writing. I use this book to check on its version of certain events but not as a chosen read of several days.
I hope Barry doesn't mind that his dad's war book is now in landfill. The pages were terminally ill. The illustrations live on.
    After the war Phil served in occupied Japan. He saw an old Japanese man approach a US soldier who was patrolling a narrow bridge that crossed a steep gorge. The GI was puffing a cigarette in the middle of the bridge as the old man approached him. The Japanese man asked the soldier in broken English for a cigarette. The soldier became enraged and grabbed the old man, and threw him to his death off the bridge. Phil had served in combat, but it was this event after the war that gave him the most trauma.
------------------------------------------
Hitler vs. Roosevelt, By Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan - c)1979 – The Free Press – 273 pages
    For well over a year before Pearl Harbor the United States was engaged in an undeclared yet very hot shooting war in the Atlantic with German U-boats. Churchill was hoping these sea clashes would bring the United States formally into the war but this never happened. It was only after Pearl Harbor that we got into it with Germany.
    It was Germany that declared war on the United States, not vice-verse. In his speech declaring war Hitler cited angrily all the major incidents in the undeclared Battle of the Atlantic that are described in detail in this book. The furor of the fuhrer had obviously been building.
    Bailey is the venerable Stanford historian and Ryan was a sub captain in the US Navy in WWII, so they make an ideal team and wrote a great book about a key subject. Bailey often writes with a poison pen but I get the distinct impression that he doesn't think he does. He's subtly cross with a lot of incidents and issues. My football-card bookmark is on page 135 out of 273. I took this book on my cruise to Bermuda (where I made my Karaoke debut singing Mack the Knife.) Bermuda was part of the Lend-Lease deal with Great Britian. America was allowed to use Bermuda as a naval base as payment for the 50 destroyers lent to the UK.
   I've read 155 pages.
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How War Came, The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, by Donald Cameron Watt. - c)1989 -Pantheon – 624 pg – I've read only 34 pages so far. I guess DC is British. He thanks a lot of guys named Lord and Sir in the preface.
   This is an extremely detailed piece of scholarship, and I highly recommend it as a way to get a several layers deep insight into the origins of the war. The author is brilliant.
   But Cameron is not a delight. It takes a frown to follow his writing. You have to concentrate too much to make it an enjoyable experience.
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The Image, a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, by Daniel J. Boorstein - c) 1961
Boorstein is one of the most famous historians and writers of all time. This book actually changed the way I think. His insights into the media hype nonsense going on even back then was right on the money and then some. --- He talks of ow we used to hero-worship, but now through the media revolution we 'celebrity worship'. hero worship is almost something we mock;

    "If we took a census of the names which populate the national
     consciousness - of all those who mysteriously dwell at the
     same time in the minds of all, or nearly all Americans we
     would now find the truly heroic figures .. to be a smaller
     proportion than ever before."

    One more on the difference between a hero like Washington or Aristotle who led lives of achievement and greatness, and a celebrity;

      "The very agency which first makes the celebrity in the
        long run inevitably destroys him. He will be destroyed,
        as he was made, by publicity. ... No one is more forgotten
        than the last generation's celebrity. This fact explains the
        newspaper feature "Whatever Became Of..." ... A woman
        reveals her age by the celebrities she knows.
           There is not even any tragedy in the celebrity's fall, for
        he is a man returned to his proper anonymous station.
        ... not by any fault of his own, but by time itself.
           The dead hero becomes immortal. He becomes more
        vital with the passage of time. The celebrity even in his
        lifetime becomes passe."

     The Image is one of my top ten books of all time. Every other paragraph is worth quoting.

The Impeachment of George W. Bush, A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens. - by Elizabeth Holtzman, with Cynthia L. Cooper. - c) 2006 Avalon
    Liz is a former Congresswoman who served on the 1974 House Judiciary Committee that voted yes on three articles of Impeachment of President Nixon. She milks this credit to say that if she says W. should be impeached, then he should be because she says so and she was on that Committee that knows all about the subject.
    It's not that simple of course, there are other points of view, just don't expect the fiery partisan Holtzman to present the other views fairly. She will present them in preposterous exaggerated form.
    Holtzman makes her arguments fairly well, without resorting to Al Franken style cheap shots of no intellectual stimulation. The book is well argued and not one of the immature Bush-bashing books. This book has a little class, even though I reject its passionate partisan feelings.
   Bottom line, you can print all the bumper stickers and write all the books you want, there was never a remote chance that impeachment proceedings were going to proceed against George W. Bush. This was just a writing, publishing and venting exercise.

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, by Alfred T. Mahan – c) 1890
   The main point is the influence of this book upon American history. Presidents, and Naval chiefs became total disciples of the principles in this book. The American Navy was built up partly because of this book.
It is very well written. History books often cite the popularity and influence of this work, but they seldom mention that it is no coincidence that the book is also very well written. It's the same with the Origin of the Species. Both Mahan and Darwin took a school test sort of subject and turned into a fine piece of literature, while making their provocative arguments. I would recommend this book, even if it wasn't important.

Intelligentsia and Revolution, Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922, by Jane Burbank – c) 1986 Oxford – Its one thing for westerners then and now to be condemning the Bolshevik Revolutionaries as hypocrites and ruthless opportunist traitors to the true principles of socialism. Its quite another to have a close look at how the rest of the intellectuals in Russia saw the Bolsheviks at the time they took over. Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of the “Bolos” were only one of dozens of factions inside the volatile Russian cauldron focused on here and they were generally despised by their contemporaries as this book proves.
   One of the giant intellectual heroes of the era in Russia was Plekhanov who died just as the Revolution was turning Red with a capital R and small r red with blood. Plekanov's swan song article on January 1918 warned that,

    Their dictatorship represents not the dictatorship of the toiling
     population, but the dictatorship of one part of it .. precisely
     because of this the have to make more and more frequent use
     of terroristic means. ... Neither socialism in general, nor Marxism
    in particular has anything to do with it.

    The reason socialism, communism and Marxism failed in the USSR from 1917 to 1989 is because it never really was any of those things. The bully dictators and thugs used these ideologies as a beard for raw power. This editorial is mine after studying all this stuff for all of the 1980's
   Jane Burbank is a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

It Sure Looks Different From the Inside, by Ron Nessen -c) 1978 - This is an insider account of the Ford Administration by his fairly popular press secretary, Ronald Nessen. There aren't lot of first-hand sources on the Ford years, so it's a pretty useful and well written book. Here is Nessens' description of what may be the most important, and the most sad moment of the Ford years. This is the one clip that is often played on the lazy sound-byte video version of American history. It's Ford explaining to smiling college students that they would not have to go to Southeast Asia.
   Nixon had promised South Vietnam that if North Vietnam violated the 1973 Peace Accords, the United States would not sit back and do nothing. Now in 1975, the North was invading the South and Ford was announcing that the United States was going to sit back and do nothing. Congress had restricted President Ford's options anyway, so it would have been impossible for Ford to have taken an interventionist stand even if he wanted to. But clearly he didn't want to,

   " America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam,"
     Ford declared to the thousands of students jamming the university
     field house. "But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is
     finished as far as America is concerned."

The students cheered and applauded loud and long.
The president did not say a single word about further assistance to
South Vietnam, nor did he repeat earlier charges about North Vietnam's
violations of the peace accords. "

    A week later the US Ambassador evacuated the doomed country on the last helicopter out of South Vietnam and the Vietnamese Communist regime took over. Two days after that Congress voted down a bill to provide $327 in relief aid for Vietnamese refugees fleeing the country. Ford was angry and said "Goddamn it I just don't understand it." What's so hard to understand, Jer? You're the one that set the tone with the famous campus speech a couple of weeks earlier. The Congress was merely following your moral lead.
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Jack, A Life Like No Other, by Geoffrey Perret - c)2001 - An erudite scandal rag like no other. This is the 21st century bio of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Jack got a lot of attention when it came out. It was a little bit controversial. Perret has dug up some sordid stories about JFK and tells them in sordid style. I don't care for this book, but at least it moves along quite well. I get the feeling that Perret dirtied up the story because that was the only way he could put a new twist on a hackneyed subject and give his publisher a reason to say yes.
   Jack also ruined another book I was reading, the American Presidency, by Harold J. Laski. Geoffrey makes me wonder if I should read any more of Harold's book,

          "His father decided that he should have a year at the
            London School of Economics; to study under Harold
           J. Laski as Joe Jr. had done. Laski is almost forgotten
            now but in his time was a highly respected socialist
            thinker who had taught at Harvard for a while just
            after World War I. A superb classroom performer in
            the 1920's, the Depression of the 1930's had turned
            him into a Stalinist dupe, not only admiring Stalin but
            applauding his crimes."

    If you want a richly educational and respectful Kennedy book try President Kennedy by Richie Reeves. If you want the tabloid scandal bio with a lot of big words, this is the one for you.

Japan and China, From War to Peace, 1894-1972, by Marius B. Jansen – c) 1975
   Princeton professor Jansen wrote this solid excellent scholastic and readable hardcover textbook. I actually paid good money for this in a used bookstore, and I don't regret it. For me, reading this type of book is like eating candy.
    I gave Japan and China to my nephew for Christmas a few years ago. It was beautifully gift wrapped. My nephew was three years old at the time. It got a few laughs around the tree. He didn't keep it.
   Rand-McNally Publishing Co.

Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, by David Bergamini – c) 1971 – I love this book. Its one of the top ten World War II books ever written.
   The accepted history of the Second World War had the Emperor of Japan as an innocent pawn of the militarist clique who made all the decisions that took Japan to war and all the decisions after the war started. The Emperor Hirohito was a pacifist who studied fish and tended to his aquarium while the fate of the world was decided all around him without his permission or even his input.
    This book exposes this as a myth and a hoax. Hirohito was very much active in the planning and execution of Japanese war planning, war moves, and war crimes. When Japan attempted to conquer most of Asia in 1941-42, Hirohito and his Princely family were very much involved at all levels.
    After the war the Australians were furious because the Allies were not going to hang Emperor Hirohito. It was common knowledge down under that he was behind the thing as much as Togo, Konoye, or Tojo.
    But the Americans, with British consent thought that it was better to let one criminal go free if it mean the effective pacification of the conquered nation. If MacArthur had hung Hirohito like the Italians hanged Mussolini, the occupation of Japan would have been a ten year bloodbath that made the Iraqi occupation of 2003-9 look like a golf match.
   The Japanese worshipped the Emperor and would surrender to the occupiers if he told them to. He told them to and they did. The Australian griped and huffed, but in the end they let it go.
    Somewhere along the line we started to believe our own publicity and by the time the 1950's came to an end virtually every historian on the planet was saying that Hirohito was an innocent man who tended to his fish while the Japanese soldiers raped and murdered without his knowledge or consent..
    Bergamini's 1,081 pages of research say otherwise.
    In addition, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy is a solid and detailed general history of the war in Asia, with a lot of attention paid properly to Japan's war with China from 1937-1941. Actually it should properly be called Japan's war on China.

Japanese Destroyer Captain, by Captain Tameichi Hara, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, with Fred Saito and Roger Pineau - c) 1961 - I hesitated to start this book because I like my war books with some politics sprinkled in with the bombs. I thought JDC would be purely a military memoir of battles in the Pacific.
   The Captain's book is much richer than that. It's a valuable portrait of the Japanese military and political mind. Tameichi is still completely egotistic about himself, his role in the war, Japan's role in the war, and even Japan's role in the coming of the war. Captain Hara is an unrepentant Japanese militarist jerk 15 years after the Emperor got on the radio and asked everyone to call it a day. Captain Hara 'missed the memo' as they say today.
   Haras' typewriter is seething with hate as it glorifies the Japanese performances in the war and downplays the American performances. The Americans only win because of superior resources, never because of courageous or effective performance. He writes interestingly about all of his political emotions at all stages of the war.
   Since I started Japanese Destroyer Captain I have seen some other books cite this as a valuable source on the Pacific War, which made me feel better about the time I've invested with Captain Hara.
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JFK, The Man and the Myth, by Victor Lasky - C) 1963 - Good timing, chowderhead. This is a real mean-spirited attack on the halo that the nation was putting on President Kennedy at the time. Just a week or two after Man and the Myth hit the stores, Kennedy was assassinated (by a guy hiding in the sewer if we are to believe the History Channel's The Men Who Killed Kennedy.)
    Laskey was trying to make Kennedy the bad guy and with three shots at Dealey Plaza he made himself look bad instead.
   Victor was a great interview on television with a spirited sense of humor, but in his writing he is not so nice. He went on to write another book, a hatchet-job on RFK, and that book came out just a few weeks before Sirhan Sirhan killed him in the pantry. This was horror novel timing for Laskey, back to back. Every hero he tries to debunk gets murdered on book-signing day.
   Too bad Victor Laskey isn't still alive. Then we could talk him into writing books about Osama bin Laden and Phil Donahue.

John F. Kennedy: War Hero, by John Tregaskis - This little 1962 paperback is the story of Lieutenant Kennedy and PT-109. JFK was in command of a fast torpedo boat in the South Pacific in 1943. He was participating in the Central Solomons campaign, the next American offensive after Guadalcanal. Near the island of Gizo a Japanese Destroyer, the Amagiri rammed PT-109 in half in the middle of the night.
   John Kennedy and his men swam to a little island and eventually were rescued. Kennedy showed much leadership and courage in the episode. The famous story of PT-109 no doubt helped him win the very close election of 1960.
    Tregaskis also wrote the best seller, Guadalcanal Diary. A recent Kennedy bio (I think the one by Nigel something or other) offers a slightly less adoring version of these events. It implies that perhaps Kennedy might have been at fault for allowing his boat to be rammed by the Japanese destroyer.
The island that the crew of 109 first swam to is now named Kennedy Island.

Keeping Faith, Memoirs of a President, by Jimmy Carter - c)1982 - A pacifist in the White House; registered church deacon as president. It didn't really work out. Jimmy Carter set United States foreign policy back 25 years. The Iran Hostage crisis of 1979-81 was a complete catastrophe for him and for America. We're still paying for it today.
     "Fairness, not force, will guide our foreign policy." he promised in a speech at the beginning of his tenure. Great. Tell the world ahead of time that the USA unilaterally renounces the use of force in foreign policy. Great. Tell everyone in our armed forces that they will never be used, because we do not believe in this evil thing called 'force.'
    Carter was obviously brilliant and was famous for being a hard worker. Keeping Faith reflects these qualities. Keeping is a very educational book and time well spent. I always make it to the finish of memoirs of Presidents and Secretaries of State. Its too good to be true to be able to read and learn history from the very people who made history. I always find it odd that a million people will read a new biography of Teddy Roosevelt, Robert E. Lee or Chairman Mao, but far fewer seem eager to read original works by these same subjects. I don't think it's a close call on which book will be the more enlightening, no matter how well researched and written the new book is.
    The Reagan military buildup began under Carter. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979, Carter turned hawkish. Coming so soon after the seizure of the American Embassy and the kidnapping of our embassy staff, the Russian invasion was the last straw. His Administration and his Congress initiated new weapons spending, plus research and development, on a massive scale. Reagan picked up in 1981 where Carter left off and the Republicans ended up taking all the credit for the revival of America's military primacy in the 1980's. But the effort had been bi-partisan.
Carter was like the retired gunfighter in a western movie who won't put his gun belt on until he finally gets his 30th shot of whiskey splashed in his face in the third to last scene.
   Carter strapped on his gun-belt in the last year of his presidency. He's not the complete dove that history is incorrectly remembering him to be. By the time he began to get it right, he was voted out of office. One year of common sense did not compensate for three years of 'all you need is love.'

Kent State, by James A. Michener – c) 1971 – Great pictures scattered through the pages, which is always better than one section of photos in the middle. Beautiful physical book by Reader's Digest Press.
Aside from the seriousness of four hippies being gunned down by US Army Reserve soldiers, I enjoyed getting a chance to sit down with this famous author for a few sittings. I can't read his novels, as generally speaking I'd rather not read than read novels. But this is an excellent and biased hardcover political investigative account of the Kent State massacre. These were four more KIA's in the Vietnam War.
   The protest was against the US invasion of Cambodia without Congressional authorization or public disclosure. If anyone can find the picture of the hippie giving the finger to the troops moments before they shot him, let me know. I saw it in another book on Kent State but I didn't want to pay for an entire book because of one picture I had to have.

Khruschchevs' Russia, by Edward Crankshaw – c ) 1959
    I have a few Crank books, and most of them I find very hard to enjoy. He is full of himself, and too often writes more to impress than to inform. But most of Eddie's other books in my library came from the late 1960's and 70's, when he was intoxicated with getting a great name as the super-scholar.
    Krushchev's Russia, fortunately, was written before Crank became diseased by conceit, and so the writing here is much more direct and tasteful.
   1959 is the height of the Soviet threat to the United States. They had Sputnik and our missiles were malfunctioning. It seemed that the USSR was not only willing (Communist propaganda,) but also able (ICBM's) to destroy the United States. Crankshaw asks everyone to calm down for a moment and take a look at the USSR for what it is, not what it brags that it is.
   The following excerpt can certainly be applied today to our perception of Iran,

    “One of our difficulties when it comes to understanding foreign
     countries is that we think of them almost exclusively in terms
     of foreign policy .... The Soviet Union is seen by us always in
     relations to our problems and hardly at all in relation to its
     own. ... We are so taken up by what the Russians say about us,
     which is usually vicious, and so little interested in what they
     say about themselves.”

Crankshaw is a Brit who wrote for The Observer from 1947 to 1968. My father subscribed to it and I used to see it lying around our house as a small boy.
    I'm kidding.

Korea, The First War We Lost, by Bevin Alexander – c) 1986 – I don't think I agree with the premise that we lost this war. We were there to stop aggression from the North and to preserve South Korea from being wiped off the map. We did that. My Uncle Sonny fought there and his jeep overturned on him in a mine blast. He was hurt but finished the tour with the Cavalry Division.
    Bevin is a good writer and a good worker. This is a very intense history of the war, with plenty of maps. Hooray.

Korea, The Untold Story of the War, by Joseph C. Goulden – c) 1982 – I'm always wary of any book that claims to tell the untold story of anything. Its an easy claim to make. I'm writing a book called Gate of Heaven, The Untold Story of Mike Donovan's boyhood years. I wonder how Goulden's book is really useful untold, as opposed to just untold. I'm only up to page 42.
    Goulden probably has an anti-military bias since he wrote a previous book about the lies of the United States in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. That book was called Truth is the First Casualty.
    Korea, the Untold Story is tragically mapless.

The Last 100 Days, by John Toland, c) 1965
     The final offensive that conquered Germanyy told by a fine writer and historian.
     There was no comparison between the overall behavior of the American troops and that of the Russian troops during the final drive on Germany in 1945. The amount of raping that the Russians did is a study in evil.
    Russians still complain that the west does not appreciate the great sacrifices the Soviets made to defeat Hitler. The brag about how many more Russians died than Americans. The American media always praises the great heroic Soviet contribution and sacrifice in WWII. They leave out the part about the Soviet troops rolling into a town, shooting all police and local officials, shooting all German troops and officers who surrendered, shooting the wounded, then raping and murdering women of almost any age. It was a mass rape and murder across a continental moving line. The Russians committed a Nanking holocaust on the towns an cities they “liberated” in Poland and Germany and Romania and Hungary.
   Because the United States and the USSR tried to be allies in the first years after the war, the Nazi-like behavior of the Soviet Army was given a free pass. Nazis were going to the gallows in 1946 for crimes that the Soviets committed with impunity on the way to Berlin.
   Toland tells a disturbing story in these 585 pages. There is so much about Soviet atrocities that The Last 100 Days doesn't exactly feel like “a war book.” It's more like a true crime book.
     Most people with a fair general knowledge of World War II are not aware of the mass of Russian mass rapists of 1944-45.
    Max Hastings wrote a more recent work that talks of these mass rapes.

The Latin American Republics, A History, by Dana Gardner Monroe – c) 1950 – Appleton Century
   The first edition came out in 1942. The nations of Latin America are covered cohesively only up to that point. They add a caboose chapter after WWII to bring it up to date, but it doesn't really, even if it does add the basic facts.
   I've very disappointed in myself for how long I have owned this book without going very deep into it. I have cross-referenced it with US history a few times, very usefully. I can't decide if this was a college schoolbook, or a bookstore book.

MacArthur's War, Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero, by Stanley Weintraub - c) 2000 - This is more of a general history of the Korean War than the title indicates. The author served in the US Army in the Korean War.
   The entire war might have been lost if not for a single South Korean WWII vintage PT boat.
   On the morning if the invasion date of June 25th 1950, a South Korean PT boat saw two transports loitering where they shouldn't be. The PT chased one back in the direction of North Korea, and sank the other with torpedos and cannon.
    It turned out that these were loaded with crack North Korean troops hoping to take the port of Pusan by surprise.
   The North Korean invasion nearly drove the UN forces off the peninsula except for a last ditch stand around Pusan held and then counterattacked. If Pusan had already been in NK hands, the war might have been lost.

Liberalism: A Guide to its Past, Present and Future in American Politics, by Milton Viorst
Introduction by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey - a 1963 paperback - Liberalism in 1963, measured by today's standards, would be considered almost conservative, certainly centrist.
   On page 66 Milt takes a look at how conservatives handled the end of the Second World War and our relationship with Russia,

    "For conservatives the readjustment to hostility toward the Soviet
     Union was easy. .... It was satisfying for conservatives, for the sake
     of patriotism, to be able to engage an enemy on the left."

   It's less than 200 pages and a smaller than average paperback in height and width. I guess liberalism didn't have a lot to say about itself back in 1963. Things have changed quite a bit since then.

The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler, by Robert Payne – c) 1973 – The only one nuttier than Robert Payne is his subject. I really like his writing, but he goes off the deep end with fantastic theories and sweeping statements about human behavior in all his books. Yet his research is obviously thorough so you end up wondering what to believe. In any case RP doesn't settle for just telling the story, that's for sure.
   This book is a guilty pleasure because Hitler will always fascinate, and its possibly not a good thing. The quickest way to sell a bad novel is to get a swastika on the cover. I've read 397 pages with about 200 to go.
   I feel like telling Payne that there is no need to call Hitler bad names after you tell us what he did. Just tell us what he did and we'll condemn him without your coaching.
   The book has three sections of pictures and the last one is supposed to be a shot of Hitler's dead body from the chest up. It's quite a compelling photo but why do I never see it or hear of it anywhere else?

Lincoln and the Russians, by Albert A. Woldman, -c) 1952 –
    In the fall of 1863, with the bad news from Chickamauga still fresh in everyone's mind in the North, the Russians sent a powerful Naval war fleet to New York City to show its full diplomatic and political support for the Union. But was there more to the Russian motive than friendship for the USA? Of course there was.
   This is one of my favorite books, but he fills it up with so many long quotations by Russia's Baron Stoekl that the Baron should get a co-author credit.

Lion by the Tail The Story of the Italian-Ethiopian War, by Thomas M. Coffey – c) 1974 – I finished this slowly with notes and cross referencing for two weeks. This is such an understudied subject. It's almost unknown that Italy used poison gas in Ethiopia against the African fighting men. What is even less known is the scale and extent of the mustard gas bombing from the Italian Air Force, and how decisive the use of the gas was in winning the war.
    Great writing, scholarship, and with just the right touch of sarcastic moral indignation now and then. Not a boring page.

Mac OS X Leopard, The Missing Manual, The Book That Should Have Been Put in the Box – c) 2007 -Pogue --
   I made the switch this year to Mac. I guess I'm converted, but there are some disadvantages. The fact that Mac can't offer a program to match Dragon Naturally Speaking is an issue.
   The best thing I got from this very thick book is a trick that comes with all Mac laptops and even most Mac users don't know about it. If you hold down the ctrl key you can blow up the entire screen or shrink it again with easy control by holding two fingers on the keypad and moving the fingers north or south. I use it all the time to read things on line in small fonts.

MacArthur's War, Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero, by Stanley Weintraub - c) 2000 - This is more of a general history of the Korean War than the title indicates. The author served in the US Army in the Korean War.
   The entire war might have been lost if not for a single South Korean WWII vintage PT boat.
   On the morning if the invasion date of June 25th 1950, a South Korean PT boat saw two transports loitering where they shouldn't be. The PT chased one back in the direction of North Korea, and sank the other with torpedos and cannon.
    It turned out that these were loaded with crack North Korean troops hoping to take the port of Pusan by surprise.
   The North Korean invasion nearly drove the UN forces off the peninsula except for a last ditch stand around Pusan held and then counterattacked. If Pusan had already been in NK hands, the war might have been lost.

Madam Secretary, A Memoir, by Madeleine Albright, with Bill Woodward - c) 2003 – Mirimax
   This is an enjoyable and important book, but I'm very disappointed by her conceit. I wasn't expecting that. So you're a genius, and always were. Point taken. Can we move on now, Maddy?
   She tells some sad stories about being the plain-jane low-self-esteem teen-ager. The pre-game show is too long. It takes well more a hundred pages to get to anything important. I don't care about your damn ancestors, okay?
    You won't get much about Bill Clinton's foreign policy in his book, My Life, so this is a good place to look into it instead. The last 400 pages look like they are going to be way better than this first 200. I paid full price for this with a Christmas gift certificate, so you can be sure I'm going to read every last page. I'm up to 195. The pages in this large paperback smell nice.
    She really likes Warren Christopher.

The Making of the President 1964, by Theodore H. White - c)1965 - This is the 64 model of a series of books by scholar/reporter Teddy White on US Presidential election campaigns. I read the 1972 model and loved that cover torn off paperback. With this brown hardcover I'm only up to page 38, but White is always easy to pick up where you left off.
   In 1985 I saw him on an ABC TV panel with Ted Koppel and a lot of big brains and he seemed very eccentric. It made me less inclined to read him from then on. He was wailing on cigarettes while peering through thick glasses, his legs crossed, and always giving dramatic and long-winded comments. Some points were good, but on other topics I sensed that the other panelists wanted to make a joke at his expense but kept their cool. His speech patterns were very unique, and definitely odd.
   These Making of the President books were best-sellers, and deservedly so. They're easy to find at the thrift stores and flea markets for a buck or two. I think the last one was 1988, but I'm guessing. The first was in 1960.

The Man Who Would Be President, Dan Quayle – by Bob Woodward and David S. Broder – c) 1992 – Let's see, a campaign year biography of a right wing Vice President by the liberal branch of the D.C. press, Washington Post. Quayle was dead before the first word got typed up on the first draft.
    The Potato incident was June 15, 1992. When the VP couldn't spell potato in front of an 8th grade class, the nation ridiculed him for months. He thought it was spelled with an e on the end. I always misspell sargeant.

Mandate for Change, 1953-1956, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, c) 1963 – Volume I of The White House Years – Doubleday
   I devoured this memoir of high office from cover to cover and it's too bad that all out presidents didn't write this much of their presidencies. There is a lot in here about Formosa, Quemoy and Matsu. A lot of people in this era thought that WWIII was going to start up over one or all three of these Chinese places.
   Sometimes I can read a person's memoir and come out of them thinking far less of them. You gotta be a first class knave to pull that off because I'm plenty gullible and like to like my authors. That was the case with Truman. I liked Harry less after reading his side of it. That's not a problem here. I like Ike far more after reading his memoirs than I did before I started them.

Marathon, the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976, by Jules Witcover – c) 1977 – Viking
    Witcover is ok. Sometimes very famous writers deserve to be. The motif of this book, as far as I can tell, is that when you get right down to it, after all is said and done, in 1976, Jimmy Carter got very very lucky.
    I'm up to page 119 but hope to finish it from Witcover to Witcover.

The March of Democracy, From Civil War to World Power, by James Truslow Adams – c) 1933
   This is volume two of the right and left wing redneck historian (he can never make up his mind) whose work is vile and mean at all times. Don't take my word for it. Read it yourself. These books are real survivors in the flea market used book store yard sale world. They were mass read and that's why I take some time to condemn them.
   Adams was a very influential historian for general readers, and he wears his pro-South racist venom on his sleeves.
James Truslow Adams is always sneaky. He makes his vicious points while feigning the innocent story teller. Have some guts and take your stand, historian polemecist. He hates the North, hates the Republicans, and, most of all, hates New England.
   He loves Virginia.
   Once this 1930's pop historian gets past Reconstruction he is far less offensive, but while he is on that era, Adams is just a bad person.
   I hate him.

The March of Democracy, The Rise of the Union, by James Truslow Adams, - c)1933 - This is volume one of an extremely successful 2-volume American history by JTA.
    This guy is racist bum, but I enjoy his writing. I run out of fresh pens with all the rebuttals I have no choice but to write in the margins.
March is an important book to criticize because Truslow is one of the truly big names in the craft of American history. I'm always offended when other historians cite him as a reference without condemning him. I'd like to visit his grave with a case of Schlitz. This so-called history book is a polemic praising and defending the South and attacking the North. As far as JTA is concerned, the wrong side won the Civil War.
    Adams relentlessly attacks the Abolitionists as the real troublemakers that started the Civil War. He never condemns slavery and he never condemns the slaveowners. He reserves his emotional tirades exclusively for the North, especially New England, and especially Massachusetts.
    Sometimes in life little people in little situations do rotten things and I just hold my temper and think, 'save your anger for important people and important matters.' This disgraceful book and this terrible man fit the bill.
JT not only is a racist Southern chauvinist, he is sneaky and deceitful in making his arguments. No member of the Klan should be without this scholastic fascist book. I have several James Truslow Adams works in my library. They're all hard to put down, but easy to put down. The man doesn't have a decent bone in his dead body.
    The history of the science of American history is a crucial part of American history. The poison that the intellectual leaders of bad ideas spread among the nation's people have repercussions for decades to follow. The young adults who read this book felt justified 20 years later when as middle-aged police officers they sprayed water hoses on innocent blacks demanding equal rights.
   It's only fair to provide samples to back up such charges.
Adams seldom or never blames slavery for the Civil War, but he uses the weasel word 'causes' to put the blame on a book that merely depicted it, and in the process he puts false words in Lincoln's mouth,

        "... Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin considered
         by Lincoln many years later to have been one of the leading
         causes if the Civil War."

   Lincoln hadn't really said that. When he met Stowe he wryly remarked, 'so his is the little lady whose book started so much trouble.' Its a slick twist on what Lincoln really meant. As always, its Blame the Abolitionists First with Adams.
   As for John Brown, Adams is beside himself over that man's violent nature. But as for slaves being whipped, put in chains, separated from their loved ones forever, or killed in many cases when too darned rebellious, JT has not a word of indignation in the entire book,

       "An act of violence by a Northerner was in a few months to
        startle the nation and anger the South even as it had not
        yet been. On October 16, 1859, the fanatic John Brown,
        whom we have already found murdering Southerners in
        Kansas, seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and
        with his party of nineteen, part white and part black,
        terrorized the town. His plan had been to start a slave
        insurrection, the nightmare of the South for two centuries,
        and a movement which, if it had spread, would have entailed
        on our white men and women unspeakable horrors and
        atrocities."

   Only a 'fanatic' would offer up such an outrageous double-standard. The 'horrors and atrocities' of slavery are nowhere on this man's radar.
But the real venom he saves for men of Massachusetts like my personal hero, Senator Charles Sumner, a man who fought as hard for the rights of blacks as any black person ever did, and who in 1857 was beaten nearly to death with a heavy cane on the Senate floor by a South Carolina Congressman,

"For such men ... like Charles Sumner, all sense of proportion and
values had been lost. The dishonor of our treatment of the Indian
left them cold. They were untouched by the demands for justice
from their own factory laborers. For them the universe had
narrowed to the slavery of the black and hatred of Southerners. Of
the latter there can be no doubt. It was shown by the indecency
of Sumner's language in the Senate, and the foul-mouthed abuse
of such men as Theodore Parker who talked of teaching manners
to the South ... For twenty years that was the sort of thing which
Northern Abolitionists had been hurling indiscriminately at an
entire section of our people. They were neither statesmen nor
genuine humanitarians but madmen bent on burning down the
whole national structure in a conflagration of hate in order that
their own brand of fanaticism might be made to prevail. It is little
wonder that the more radical Southerners returned defiance for
for defiance and gave back hate for hate.

   As usual the specious argument that laborers in the North were treated just as bad as the slaves in the South. Adams never rips slavery; only those phony statesmen and fake humanitarians in the North who protested against it. Notice how his racist heart suddenly bleeds for the Indian when it's momentarily convenient. The March of Democracy was an important evil contribution to American History. It should have been titled The March of Hypocrisy.
   I finished both volumes of the March of Democracy on my march to the barf bag. I put a lot of time into this guy.

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius - c)167 - These are the refined words of wisdom and reflection by one of Rome's better rulers. It's a very short book and a lot of fun. Aurelius is trying to improve himself as a person and is more or less reading the riot act to himself about life and death, things as they are, and things as they could be. It's really the gospel according to Saint Marcus.
   I wish I was stronger on the ancient classics. The few times I try to read them I enjoy them, but making time for Greek classics like Plutarch's Lives in this day and age is a Herculean challenge.

Memoirs. Andrei Gromyko, by Andrei Gromyko - c)1989 - The Soviet Foreign Minister at the height of the Cold War comes out slugging and doesn't rest between rounds. His memoirs are a recitation of history that makes the Soviets the good guys and the Americans the bad guys with the bald simplicity of a movie. Glasnost and Perestroika were well under way when he wrote this book but these two spirits never made it to Andy's typewriter.
   Gromyko was known in US diplomatic circles as 'Mr. Nyet,' which of course means 'no' in Russian.
In spite of my 8,000 angry notes in the margins this is an excellent book. It is not a waste of time.
    My wife and I were in upstate New York when she came out of the convenience store with a newspaper. As we drove along she said, "Andrei Gromyko died."
    I said "He died on the operating table."
    She stared at me. "How did you know?" There was no way I could have.
    A lucky guess? Yeah, it probably was. But it was a lucky guess I made with confidence. In any case it was time for Gromyko to go. He was never going to go along with the Gorby good vibrations revolution. Writing incendiary books like Memoirs when Gorby and Yeltsin were trying to get billions of dollars out of the United States was not helping the cause. If the new Russia didn't bump him off, it at least probably was not sad to see him go.

Memoirs of Cordell Hull, Vol II – c) 1948 – This book is too good to be true. It should be called, A Diplomatic History of World War II by a Major Player. I've read the first 380 pages and I need to find a cheap copy of volume I.
     Cordell Hull was the Secretary of State under FDR during World War II. He's the gritty Tennessee man who threw the two Japanese envoys out of his Washington office on the afternoon of december 7, 1941.
     Thomas Fleming's book The New Dealer's War claims that FDR did not think that Hull was particularly intelligent and that he kept most important decisions as far away from Hull as possible. That is highly debatable. The best thing about this book is the detail it gives to “other” diplomatic fronts in World War II, like Central and South America, the Middle East and Africa. Maybe FDR was keeping Hull busy with the secondary fronts in order to keep his non-liberal nose out of the main event, and that could be why there is so much detail on those other fronts.

The Memoirs of Field Marshall Kesselring, by Albrecht Kesselring, - c) 1953 Greenhill (Greenhill reprint)
    “Smiling Al” wrote a useful war memoir that defends his actions on everything and criticizes others. The Nazi general is neither boring nor lively, and writes of war with little emotion over the death and carnage.
   Kesselring did his best work defending Italy against the Allied advance in 1943. The military historians love his work there.
    Kesselring knew that the war in North Africa was lost after August 1942, but he fought on with the mission of holding down Allied forces there as long as possible. To some extent he succeeded.
   Sometimes Kesselring will tell a war story, the moral of which is that he has a good heart. I'm not convinced.
   I paid full price for this book with a Christmas gift certificate from my mother to Barnes & Noble Bookstore. I knew I had to by something different and important and something I would definitely read. I took MFMK to Vegas, the ultimate compliment.

The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers, by Benjamin Shwadran c) 1973 - Israel Universities Press – 549 pages
   This is a very academic and very readable book, with a really fine layout and design. We can presume that MEOGP is not especially sympathetic to the Arabs in all the oil controversies. I've only read 33 pages, and doubt if I'll find much more time for it, but you never know. It's such an important subject and I hardly think a dated version of the oil controversy is dated. I see it as historically refined and enhanced version, giving the eyes of that generation on the problem through the prism of the events of that time. You can recreate the events of 1955 or 1973, but you can't recreate the perspective. Only the author in that time zone can do that.
    This book won some sort of award for excellence. This may have been the best general history of the oil industry prior to The Prize by Yergen, which can't be beat.
   I learned from this book that Britian drove hard to find oil in the Middle East because it wanted it's Royal Navy to stop being oil dependent on The United States.

Modern History of China, by Henry McAleavy - c)1967 – by the always conservative Praeger Publishers
   The best history of China I ever finished cover to cover .... wasn't this one. The best one that I ever completely finished I left on Martha's Vineyard by accident at a gig. It was called the Ageless Chinese by Dun Li. Sad. It was full of notes and everything. I hate when the library takes a casualty. I got a book stolen at the post office last October but that is another tale.
    Hank is a Brit scholar who lived in China from 1935 to 1950. When the Communists came to power is was time to pack up and start writing his book from a London fireplace.
    I haven't read this one on a while but going back over my 60 pages covered I see notes that are neither praising Henry nor condemning, a good sign. McAleavy of the University of London is ok. Some of the best writing is when the reader is only thinking about the message and not the writing; the referent, not the vehicle. If any writer gets through 60 pages of my bookmark and pen without an angry and gutter language criticism in the margin somewhere, that's the same as an A plus.
You can say curse words in China but you can't write them. There are no pictograms for blue language
    The Jesuit missionaries in China in the 1600's allowed Chinese converts to keep their Confucian tradition of ancestor worship as they embraced the new western religion at the same time. But then in 1718 the stupid Pope issue an edict forbidding this. You were either with Christ or against him. Emperor K'ang Tsi was understandably steamed. K'ang began booting all the missionaries out of China and had more than few of them iced.
   Who knows how much the course of world history would have been different if the two great religions of Confucianism and Christianity had been allowed to grow in harmony?
   I studied Chinese history for two years (1980-81) then switched over to Russian studies. In the meantime I left about 98 Chinese history books half finished, including this one.

Mussolini, A Study in Power, by Ivone Kirkpatrick - c)1964 - Ivone is an excellent writer and biographer A thorough bio of the Italian fascist Dictator. 672 pages. I was sorry to reach the end of this book. Its as much a general history of the rise and fall of the Italian Empire in WWII as it is a bio of Mussolini. What a story. What they did to him at the end was cold.

The National Experience, Part Two: A History of the United States since 1865, by John M. Blum, Edmund S. Morgan, Willie Lee Rose, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth M. Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward.
   This is a very mature college freshmen history of the USA, part II. Three Yalees, a famous Stampp, and a guy who served in the Kennedy inner circle. This is quite a collection of talent. I like NE, but I wouldn't say I love it. The last three writers I was already familiar with and it was the same in their solo books. I liked the writing but I didn't love it. Stampp is a hero for busting up the Blame the Abolitionists First school of Civil War history.
   I've read 103 pages of The National Experience. I've read 1,897 pages of the National Enquirer. Edward Bellamy inspired “Nationalist” clubs all over the USA, long before Franco ruined the name.

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The New Dealer's War, by Thomas Fleming, c)2001 – What a cook book! This book really cooks. It's 561 pages and I've read each chapter twice, some three times. And I do not read fast.
   This book takes a very negative look at FDR, his presidency, his leading us needlessly into World War II, and his dictatorial methods with people, and policies. Fleming also has a lot of criticism of American cruelty in the war so it isn't a knee-jerk righty swiping at the lefty icon. Not at all.
    Its not that I think TF is right on everything, and in fact he is at times clearly unfair, twisting selected info to suit his theories. Fleming quotes pro-FDR people out of context, and I often find myself writing strong rebuttals in the margins.
   However it is so almost impossible to find books critical of Roosevelt that this fills an important need. There are about 300 debunking Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and W. Bush. New Dealer's War fills a need for balance, and fills it well.
   Fleming uses big words a little too often, but his tone is not academic language drudgery. The book is lively and very well written. Its all argument, with little straightforward history telling.
    I don't think anyone can write about Roosevelt fairly without giving this hatchet job a look-see.
   It's scary how many powerful leaders are depicted crying into their hands sobbing about FDR saying, “That man lied to me! He just lied to me!.”
Maybe he was a great president, but if this book is to be believed at all he was a first class liar. He always perhaps had the greater good in mind when he lied, but Franklin D was evidently a big fat liar.

A New American History, by W. E. Woodward – c) 1938 – Garden City
   I read every word of his 875 mean-spirited pages.
   Woodward is a good writer, but a racist apologist for the South and for slavery. All old history books are two history books. This bitter hostile book says more about the 1930's than it does about 1790 or 1870. This book is a disgrace. Woodward is in the same racist historian boat as James Truslow Adams, and Claude Bowers, a boat I'd like to sink with a floating mine deep in the icy North Atlantic.

New Lies For Old, The Communist Strategy of Deception and Misinformation, by Anatoly Golitsyn - c)1984 - One of the top ten books.
    No, make it one of the top five.
    In the middle of 1989 when the nations of Eastern Europe were rebelling and seizing their independence from the crumbling Soviet Empire an article appeared in the Boston Herald that intoned that maybe there was more to this Glasnost euphoria than meets the eye. The writer was Don Feeder and he mentioned a book called New Lies For Old in which a Soviet KGB defector had predicted these events and the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Golitsyn said that much of this would be disinformation, revolution staged from above. He also predicted that sadly, the west would buy it all. The result would be unilateral disarmament by the west and financial aid to the Soviet Union.
    Golitsyn wrote this five years before it all happened.
    No one took Golitsyn seriously because another Soviet defector named Nosenko assured the CIA that Golitsyn was just a crackpot. (se Deception by Jay Epstein for more on this interesting spy war)
When I read the column I called the Herald and got Feder on the phone. talked about the book and Soviet-American relations for about 40 minutes. In the end he asked if he could have my copy of New Lies For Old. I said no. He told me he had found it hard to obtain a copy and had only read excerpts. I still said no. No Don Feder, famous columnist who now has a website link on the Drudge Report. You can't have my copy of the sacred New Lies For Old.

Night Over Europe, The Diplomacy of Nemesis 1939-1940, by Frederick L. Schulman - c)1941 - This was written in the final weeks of 1940, so you can imagine the passions that flow through this 600 page work. 'Dated' books like this are that much more valuable in historical quality, not less.
    Schulman, a Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government at (beautiful) Williams College, was ahead of the pack in 1936 when he wrote an alarmist tome called The Nazi Dictatorship, A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism.
     Fred is on target when he rips the Roosevelt Administration for trying to have it both ways in these months when our friends were being assaulted and we wanted to both help them out and stay out of the conflict,

          "A nation torn between cynicism and sentimentalism
           formulated preferences which it had no will to translate
           translate into conduct. ...
           ... Americans disliked and feared a Nazi conquest of
           Europe more than anything else except one thing:
           American participation in war to avert a Nazi conquest
           of Europe."

   In the 1950's Schulman was the target of a lot of McCarthyist critics, some of whom even tried to get him kicked out of Williams College. His writings on the WWII Years would seem to make him anything but a pink lib.
Williams is located snugly in the exact northwest corner of Massachusetts. I drove to Williams College in a blizzard with three comics in my rented Continental in 1985. We were within ten miles of the school when the state police told us the roads to WC were closed. We had to drive back to Boston in the blizzard and one of the comics was drunk.
   President James Garfield was an alumni of Williams and was in fact on the way there for an honorary ceremony in 1881 when a lunatic fatally shot him at the Union Station in Washington D.C.

No More Lies, The Myth and the Reality of American History, by Dick Gregory - c) 1971 - Edited by James R. McGraw - Gregory is the stand-up comedian who walked away from a solid show business career to become a political activist. This is his very left and very 1971 take on some of the myths of American history. It is primarily a polemic on race, but he is also very up in arms progressive about the women's movement and the plight of the American Indian. I like his take on how the Europeans "discovered" America,

      " Such a view is like my wife and me walking down the street
        and coming across you and your wife parked in your brand-
        new automobile. My wife says to me, "That sure is a beautiful
        car. I sure would like to have one. " So I answer, "Well, Lillian,
        let's discover it." The feeling you would have as we took over
        your car gives some idea how the Indians must have felt. "

   Dick refers to Thomas Hutchinson, the colonial governor of Massachusetts on the eve of the American Revolution as "a white Uncle Tom."

No More Vietnams, by Richard Nixon - The former president tells his side of the Nam story. Very compelling reading no matter where one stands on the Vietnam War.
    I did a show at a suburban high school recently and the wall of one of the buildings was painted with a giant mural absolutely idolizing all the Vietnam War protest marchers. I hope the young people can keep an open mind on the subject, in spite of all this orthodox brainwashing. Our schools are not teaching diversity and independence of thought. There was no mural to our men who fought bravely in Vietnam. There was no mural to the five million Vietnamese and Cambodians who were massacred when we withdrew from Southeast Asia.
   Nixon's opinions on this subject are worth listening to if we're going to buy this mural without thinking. If Howard Zinn is required reading in American schools, why can't a book by a former President make that status too? How many schools do you think have this book on a required reading list?
    I'm not a Nixon fan, but its not fair to condemn the war and worship the protestors without hearing out both sides of the argument. This is a great book.

The Occupation of Iraq, Wining the War, Losing the Peace, by Ali A. Allawi – c) 2007 - Yale University Press
    Ali A. is Chalabi's nephew and the former Minister of Defense in the US. installed interim Iraq government. He is resentful towards the United States, but I'll allow Allawi that, since he is from Iraq.
    Occupation came out juts before “The Surge” proved his thesis, that the war was going permanently downhill and is un-winnable, wrong. But how was he to know? He had the timing of Vic Laskey who wrote books bashing John and Robert Kennedy that both hit the stands just as they were being buried.
   OI is a triple AAA piece of writing by AAA. He really makes it a smooth ride.

Off With Their Heads, Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media, and Business, by Dick Morris, Fox News Political Analyst – c) 2003 Harper Collins
   This is a great book by a guy with the speaking voice of a poindexter but the political opinions of John Wayne. Morris is on Fox News all the time. he spent two years as an advisor to Bill Clinton.
   Morris tried to talk Clinton into getting tougher on terrorism by coordinating motor traffic stops with the search for terrorists. The cops would access a data base to see is the motorist was not a known illegal immigrant and on some special list of dangerous persons.
The chapter on the big mouth Hollywood leftist political pontificators is priceless. (“Move over Tony Blair. Cheryl Crow has something to say.”)
This is a lively and stimulating book. Morris knows the game so well, and is so articulate, it is hard to resist deferring to his arguments.

Old Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison and His Time, by Freeman Cleaves - c)1939 - The biography of our first Whig President. History is far more interested in WHH's campaign for his presidency than in his presidency, much like Jimmy Carter. The 'Log Cabin and Cider' campaign of 1840 was the first slick media-hype contest of American history. Harrison was not really a political man, which was the main reason the Whigs picked him. The Whig Party was really the anti-Jackson Party. It didn't really know what it stood for, only that it was against the 8-year dynasty of Andrew Jackson. 1840 was a fine year to pick a non-political man to head what was in a sense a non-political political party, the Whigs.
    Harrison lasted a month in office. He held his inaugural outdoors in frigid cold and got fatally sick from it.
    Harrison made his name at the battle of Tippecanoe. The Indians had united in Indiana and thought they were going to rout the whites. But Harrison won big. Chief Shabonee later admitted,

            "The Prophet had promised that every squaw should
              have one of the white warriors to use as her slave. Oh
              how those women were disappointed."
              pg 104

    I don't know if Cleaves has university history professor credits, but he probably does. They didn't always emphasize credentials in the books back then.

Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier's Story, by General Omar Bradley - I just finished this 554 book for breakfast today. What a great book. 'Brad' as he was known to Ike, was the general manager of the American ground offensive in Europe from D-Day to the German surrender on May 8.
   I am so much more enlightened on World War II from making it ever so slowly through this four star hardcover. There are lots of maps. They are needed. I didn't find the military detail confusing until the last couple of chapters after we had crossed the Rhine and the entire central European theatre was imploding.
   This should be read side by side with Ike's Crusade in Europe. These two men and their two books tell the war in Europe better than any source I could imagine. They are incredibly identical in physical character, the books I mean. They probably weigh exactly the same on a scale within a tiny fraction.
    The binder cover is a drawing of four stars, representing the four star general author. He might have had a ghostwriter. There's a few flowery phrases I don't see coming from his fingertips.
It's possible that this should be categorized under the heading A SOLDIER'S STORY, by Omar Bradley, but looking at the title page and the binder I see huge block letters topside for the guy's name and under a line we get smaller italics for the word's 'A Soldier's Story', so I'm calling this one as I see it.
    A guy I met in Ipswich told me that Bradley's big error in the war was to take the Huertgen Forest with needless hiGH casualties. Brad's book doesn't talk much about the Huertgen Forest.

On the Hill, A History of the American Congress, by Alvin M. Josephy - c)1979 - It's not easy to find general histories of the US Congress. For every history of the Congress there must be a hundred biographies of Presidents. This book fills a key gap and the guy is a good writer. I'm taking this book to Vegas with me on Monday.

The Opium War, by Brian Inglis - c)1976 - I have three books about the Opium wars between Great Britian and China in the mid 1800's and unfortunately I have not found any of them to be an enjoyable read, although I did make it all the way to the end of one of them. It wasn't this one.
   The subject is fascinating. The British were trying to keep the Chinese people addicted to opium, a real opiate if there ever was one, while the Chinese government was trying to just say no to the trade.
   The issue was money and greed of course. British India was very good at growing the stuff but the Indian people weren't very fond of buying it. The British Isles were not rich in agricultural products and needed something that the world wanted if the Queen hoped to maintain a favorable balance of trade. So Britian turned to her colonies to grow opium and to her merchant seamen to sell it to China. When the Chinese tried to put a stop to it, the British started a war and shelled the hell out of them. Then Mr. Li said, "Sure, bring in all the opium that you want. I don't know what we were thinking."
    This happened twice. There were two Opium Wars fought to maintain the right of the British to sell their opium in China. This Coronet paperback is only about the first war, from 1840-1842.
   The three authors are all British and that is probably why I don't connect with them too well. I connect well with some English historians, but percentage wise, I do better with translated French writers than with Brits.
    This book is so British that there isn't even a price for American buyers. All we get is that it's 1.50 pounds in the UK, $4.50 in Australia, $4.70 in New Zealand, 1.95 pounds in the Republic of Ireland, and $4.95 in Canada. I don't remember where I bought it but it was definitely on May 5 1983.

The Origins of the World War, by Sidney Fay – c) 1928 MacMillan – This hardcover is masterpiece in content and in physical construction. Its two books in one, a two-volume history of the origins of World War I by Harvard's Sid Fay. After page 550 there's some bibliography and then book two starts off on page one. The book is 1109 pages and opens up and rests flat at both ends so you can eat and read. The pages are not wearing down on acid. Its a beautiful physical specimen. I wonder what it cost back in 1928. In today's publishing business they don't make them this nice anymore ever, and if they did, this is a $45 book.
    Fay is of the mind that all sides were more of less equally to blame for the First World War. Germany catches a break in the long haul of his intensely precise and detailed scholasticism. Of course, the events of 1939-1941 made this book seem a little less a work of genius and insight. It turns out that the national sickness of German militarism was not something to scoff at. It not only was one of the origins of the First World War, it was the driving force in the origins of the Second.

Our Enemy Japan, by Wilfrid Fleisher - This book was published in February of 1942. Fleischer was the Tokyo correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune for more than a decade before the war. He also was the Tribune State Department reporter in the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor.
    As the title would indicate, Wilfred is writing in a slightly angry frame of mind. I read this to the finish about 26 years ago. I browse it now and then for pleasure and cross-reference. Fleischer wrote a follow up book in 1943 that I started and has been missing in action in my overcrowded library for years so I haven't finished it. As I recall, the second one was even more angry than the first.

The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1965 Oxford University Press
   This is a great 1,143 page book. Morison is one of the giants of the profession of US history, and deservedly so. But this book was a disappointment because as Morison became more biased and opinionated, the book became more than unpleasant to read. Over the long haul a lot of his bitterness when arguing his bias really piled up and I couldn't wait to get the book finished, which I did with extensive underlines and notes. This book owned me for at least five weeks. I don't regret reading it. Its very educational.
   His personal judgements are sold as the judgements of history.
   Sammy writes well, but does get snobby at times. How many insider nautical terminology analogies can I stand in one chapter?
    His take on the origins of the Civil War and the attack on Charles Sumner and the role of the Radical Republicans in Reconstruction is totally redneck. He thinks that the Abolitionist were as much to blame for the Civil War as slavery, and that the blacks were irresponsibly lazy after they won their freedom. It's very sad to see my WWII hero historian turn so mean on so many subjects.

Pacific War Atlas 1941 – 1945, by David Smurthwaite – c) 1995 – There's a lot more text here than the title indicates. The maps are very green and colorful and very military.
   The US gave a lot more fight recapturing Guam in 1944 than it did defending it in December of 1941. Best map of the Guam campaign ever. In fact it might be the only map of the Guam campaign ever.

The Path to Victory, The Mediterranean Theater in World War II, by Douglas Porch – c) 2004 – Farrer, Straus and Giroux
   Douglas is a Mediterranean-ophile. He is digging deep into the Mediterranean role in WWII and naturally coms to the conclusion that it was the key to winning the war and that the decision to focus the war effort there was a brilliant one.
   I agree with Basil Hart and John Keegan who both say that the Italian campaign was a major strategic mistake.
I read the first chapter on my porch. This is a new book. DP also wrote, The Conquest of the Sahara.

A Patriot's History of the United States, by Michael Allen and Larry Schweikert – c) 2002
    They mean of course a conservative history of the United States. The authors surprised me with their excellence on general US History. I was only expecting a polemic rebutting the liberal biased versions of American history that are out there today. Although that's in there too, this is a rich general history.
   Larry and Mike go after modern American hippie morals a little too much for my taste and promote religion more than I care for, but overall I agree with these guys and salute them.
Allen and Schweikert are the rebuttal to Howard Zinn. They help fill a current need for more balanced reporting in the history craft. L&M are passionate but they don't take cheap shots either, so a liberal could probably enjoy this book even while not agreeing with it.
   One of their issues is with the treatment of the Indians in American history books. That's all I am going to say about it.

The Peace Negotiations, A Personal Narrative, by Robert Lansing - c)1921 - Lansing was US Secretary of State between 1915 and 1920. This is his sour grapes story about his trip to Paris with the US delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference convened to iron out the details ending the First World War. It was a victors peace, of course. The representatives of Germany, Hungary, Austria, and Turkey had to sit in the corner with a dunce hat on.
   Lansing thought it was far more important for the US to sign on with the Peace Treaty and less important that we join the League of Nations, that failed early attempt at a United Nations organization. Wilson was completely adamant of the League of Nations and, in Lansing's view, the President's stubbornness on the League prevented our proper participation in the Peace Treaty. The USA never signed the peace treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War. We were still technically at war with Germany well into the 1920's!
Lansing is very bitter towards President Wilson for taking foreign policy advice primarily from his intimate friend Colonel Ed House. Secretaries of State's resentment about being bypassed in foreign policy decisions by less qualified persons is a common theme of American political history. Hull was bypassed by FDR in favor of Hopkins, Rogers was overlooked by Nixon in favor of Kissinger, and Haig resigned when he felt that Reagan wasn't listening to him either.
This is an important and very readable book but the man is miserable and it's sad.

A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn (1993) -
     All of American History is seen through the prism of class conflict, and we know which side he is on. This book has been revised many times and there is a hardcover out now that I believe includes the election of 2000. I'm three quarters of the way done with my edition that goes up to about 1990. My niece gave it to me. It was assigned to her as required reading in college.
   I really enjoyed this book, much more than I thought I would. Zinn tells a lot of stories. There is a lot of the hard work of a serious historian in here. He's no left-wing-big-mouth-know-it-all-who-actually-knows nothing-blowhard. Zinn will make you smarter even if you don't agree with his conclusions.
   It isn't, however a history of the United States. It's a brilliant vehement polemic against the behavior of the United States throughout it's history. It's citation after citation of the United States being in the wrong. And it is nothing but that. Few of the great events in American history are in here. The only thing that happened in World War II is that government oppressed labor, freedom of speech was crushed, the poor got poorer, the rich got richer, and the United States was only barely less racist than the Nazis. The only military even worth mentioning was the Allied air raids, and the nukes that destroyed Hiro and Naga.
    Pretty much everything Zinn says is true. But what he did was rip the United States to shreds by citing only the bad things for 700 pages, and then everyone tells me that this is the only history of the United States you have to read, if you only read one history of the United States. I don't think that's being very fair to the United States.
   For what it is, a fiery extreme left polemical interpretation of US History, it's a masterpiece. Zinn is a good writer, able to take long sentences with a lot of info, and keep the reading smooth.

The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale -
    What a stupid book. What the hell does this guy know? He doesn't have my problems. He must be a fool.
   This is one of the most famous books ever published in America. Its fun and worthwhile but a little on the religious side.

Present at the Creation, My Years at the State Department, by Dean Aecheson – c) 1969 W.W. Norton
   It's a shame that a book so important as to be just about a must read has to be written by an ultimate snob with a disgusting ego to boot. He's so windy that I don't know if I ever really grasp his opinion on anything.
   Aecheson was Secretary of State in the Truman years, and worked high up in the FDR war years too.

Presidential Campaigns, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. - c) 1984 – Oxford University Press
   Boller is ok. And I mean that the way Harry Truman used the term. Not ok as in "just ok". When Truman put the letters ok on a paper it was a high compliment. The origin of the term ok is relevant to this book. The most commonly accepted version is that is stood for 'Old Kinderhook,' the nickname of Martin Van Buren of New York State who won the Presidency in 1836. The Democrats used "ok" as a campaign slogan for 1836 and it stayed in American slang meaning good or fair, depending on whether you use it like Truman or like someone damning with faint praise.
    PFB has the typical pro-Democrat slant that most historians do, but he is such a fine writer that I don't let it bother me. PC is a mature pleasure.

President Kennedy, Profile of Power, by Richard Reeves c) 1993 – PP is extremely well-written, and a times extremely unfair. This may be the best book I've ever read about Kennedy, but Reeves has an overall negative motif towards his subject. You won't pick it up in any given three pages, but you will in any given 30.
   All the newer biographies ands studies of Kennedy have to get past a publisher that says, “Another book about Kennedy? Get outa here and stop wasting my time!.” So they solve it by digging up new dirt. At least Reeves does this without focusing too much on his personal affairs.
   What annoys me most about President Kennedy is that every time President Kennedy ever used curse words or dirty phrases, Reeves finds a way to incorporate it into the text. He turns John F. Kennedy into Andrew Dice Clay. It's not fair and who among us could survive such a painter? It makes me miss the good ol days when a reporter hears a Senator tell a critic to “go [expletive] yourself,” and then reports that “The Senator exploded, and told the man to “get the hell out of my office.” Now its the reverse. If there's some famous story that Kennedy said that “Krushchev is a crude thug,” a Reeves or a Perret comes along 40 years later and scours the globe until he can find someone who was there that says that what Kennedy really said was that “Krushchev is a [deleted deleted].” Of course there's always a chance that the clean version is in fact true and that the racy recall 40 years later is the actual embellishment. There's an even better chance that the story is better told in its cleaner version, the cursing a distraction from academic absorption, a reverse numonic device. When you “falsely” report that the senator told the man to get the hell out of my office, the focus remains on the issue that caused the outburst, not the rough edges of the unrefined senator. The other worst offender in force -finding swears at the highest levels is Bob Woodward.

The Rebirth of Russia, by Isaac F. Marcasson – c) 1917 – This little red hardcover is a first-hand account of Russia in between the Revolutions, although the author and the people of Russia didn't know it at the time.
   In March of 1917 the first Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsar and installed exiting new democracy. It was a euphoric time. But in October the Bolsheviks would launch a counter-revolution and install rightist tyranny under the guise of extreme revolutionary leftism. Things wouldn't be better under the Communists than they were under the Tsar, but as Isaac is observing and writing, no one knows that's coming around the corner. He captures the Russians in their moment of false joy, with the class in charge of the teacher, with privates refusing to salute generals on the streets of Moscow and workers deciding that they would tell the boss off and get a raise too.
   The color red was everywhere in Petersburg, like that meant a great deal in actual political change. People who died in street fighting were buried in red caskets. I'm sure that made them feel much better.
   Eagles were out of luck. Any statue of an eagle was covered in a red rug. The United States Embassy had to cover its eagles lest they be toppled and melted down by a Russian mob.
    Its a rare book. Marcosson is caught up in the Glasnost of 1917, about as much as his subjects are that he purports only to be reporting on. He is reporting on his own feelings too.

Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner – A masterpiece. The pro-Confederate revisionists hate this book. It's on Howard Zinn personal recommended reading list.
   Foner has a good zesty personality on TV when he's playing talking head in a documentary, but Professor Foner is best consumed in print. This is the bible for liberal revisionism of the Reconstruction legend. Thank God for Foner and Stampp. Zinn has to manipulate his facts to stay on a one way attack against the right and the rich, but Foner just lets the facts story do the talking without juggling them around so he can point fingers in conclusion. That's Zinn's style. Howard is a political WWF wrestler. Foner is pure scholar who lets his geek pencils of research do all the fighting, not just some of it.


The Record of America, by James Truslow Adams and Charles Garrett Vannest – c) 1935 – Revised edition I have is c) 1944 but it's probably just a new chapter, not a revision of any of the other work.
   I've always known that I do not like Truslow Adams, but Vannest is new to me. Charlie is a professor of history at Harris Teacher's College in St. Louis.
   This is a textbook for high school students with some push-pol quiz questions. They promote the redneck pro-south view of American history, the bitter post civil war history tone that only died down much later, around 1975.
   On page 382 there are “Questions from the text.” Here's one, #13 -

     “Describe carpet-bag, scalawag and negro rule in the South.”

On page 383 the student is assigned various essays,

    “IMAGINARY LETTER: You lived in South Carolina during
    reconstruction days. Write a letter to a friend of yours in the
    North showing how the “carpet-bag” and negro rule was ruining
    your state.”

Why don't they just ask the student to describe why the South should have won the Civil War?

The Red Decade, The Classic Work on Communism in America During the Thirties, by Eugene Lyons – c) 1941 - A lot of you think that the internal threat of Communism in America was and is an invention of “reactionaries.” But it was real, it was massive in scale, and it was controlled from Moscow. Lyons was there. This wonderful book is hardly the disturbed revisionism of a right-wing polemicist. If you think that Mccarthyism is the only historical angle on Communism in America worth remembering, then read this at your own risk. - Arlington House books.

Reign of the Ayatollahs, Iran and the Islamic Revolution, by Shaul Bakhash, c)1984 – This is a good book. Hash is a a good writer.
   Some might think that the 1984 copyright date makes this book less valuable, but I do not agree. I think that the political historic moment in time enhances it's value, rather than diminishes it.
    Shaul has a very big nose.

The Reluctant Admiral, Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, by Hirouyuki Agawa – c) 1969 – Apparently this guy's number one vice was gambling. He'd bet on anything. He'd gamble on the St Louis Browns to win the World Series, thinking that 75-1 was pretty good odds, considering that they have a good back-up shortstop. Yamamoto certainly gambled when he sent four fleet carriers to take Midway Island in June of 1942.
    Was it really necessary to take Midway Island? Not as far as I can tell. The Japanese were not planning to follow it up with the invasion of Oahu. They merely wanted to make sure that there were no further surprise attacks on Japan like the Doolittle raid of April 18. The Midway assault was offensive at face value, but really a defensive measure. The Coral Sea force that went to take Port Moresby in May was offensive in nature, but was a failure because too much resource had been diverted to the Midway plan.
    A Japanese admiral and admirer says that Yamamoto was always against the Midway plan, “make no mistake about that.” He refused to elaborate on exactly why.

Reminiscenses, by General Douglas MacArthur, General of the Army – c) 1964 – McGraw Hill
    Nice red and blue hardcover with texture and a five stars in a circle graphic logo.
   I have developed such a dislike for this man that I felt it was only fair to send away for his book and hear him tell the story. There are obviously some things to admire in the man, but there's a few other things too. He didn't get the derogatory nickname, “Dugout Doug” for nothing.
    This was a major seller, yet I have never seen it for sale in any used book store, flea market or yard sale ever. People who buy this book keep it. There's a few like that. Patton's memoir, War as I Knew It, is the same way. The only way to find it is to seek it out. It's not going to find you.
    We share the same birthday, January 26, and we both smoke a pipe.

Response to Imperialism, The United States and the Philippine War. 1899-1902, by Richard E. Welch, Jr. -c)1979 - Welch is going out on a limb when he calls it the Philippine War. Everyone else calls it the Philippine Insurrection.
   In the wake of the victory over Spain in 1898, the United States inherited control of the Philippines. But the Philippine people wanted independence, not a new overlord replacing the old. They rebelled, and the United States went to war with their "Little Brown Brothers" for three years.
There are some clear parallels between the current War in iraq and the Philippine Insurrection. In both cases, more soldiers died in the insurgency following the war, than had did in the war. In both cases we wanted to be benevolent imperialists, having it both ways. In both cases we were embracing some local factions against the insurgents, using divide and conquer. Both are guerilla wars after we had taken over a country, the only two like it. Some compare Iraq with Vietnam, but in Nam we had never won anything. We were always on the defense. Today, the insurgents are on the d in Iraq just like the Philippines in 1900.
    4,200 Americans died in the insurgency, and only 2,000 were wounded. That is a striking figure. Usually the number of wounded far exceeds the kia's. But this was testimony to the brutal nature of this conflict. Torture and dismemberment were practiced on both sides.
     The charismatic leader of the Philippine Rebs was a guy named Aguinaldo. His is a great story and he is one of the more important figures in American history. He was the bin Laden of his time, but a lot more honorable. The Yanks chased him all over the Philippines and when they caught him it was over.

The Revolutionary Age of Andrew Jackson, by Robert Remini - c)1976 - Excellent fast moving paperback by a readable guy. Remini likes to give the credit for all the progress of the era to the democratic party and AJ, its great leader.
   The knock on Jackson and his Democratic Party in this era, (besides his disastrous war on the Bank of the United States) was that he and it were racist. Though an opponent of states rights fanatics, Jackson was a friend fo slavery if ever there was one, and Jackson was as mean to the Indians as any President in all of American History.
    Remini tries to sweep bad Dem record under the rug with this explanation,

            "Women, blacks and Indians just didn't enter the
               thinking of these people when they argued for
               equality. To fault Americans of this period for
               failing to understand what the modern world
               means by equality is a pointless and futile
               exercise."

   By this logic, the Republican Party that was later formed (1854) in opposition to slavery was no morally better than the ante-bellum Democratic Party which heartily supported slavery. It's pointless and futile to take a discerning look at the slavery and racism records of the various parties in the era. Hmmm. Interesting.

Revolutionary Iran, Challenge and Response in the Middle East, by R. K. Ramazani – c) 1986 Johns Hopkins Press
   Ramazani is “Mr. Geostrategic.” Everything has to sound professorial. I paid $24 for this book when it was new. That is a rarity for me and I regretted the decision by the time I was up to page 25. It's easy to tell that I read it back in 86 because the notes in the margins are microscopic in font. I try to write a little larger now because my old notes are so hard to decipher, even for me. I can make out quite a few “not gw” notations in the margins of RI, which means not good writing. Sometimes I even see the notation “not gwk” which is even worse than “not g wr.” Not gwk means not good work. This guy sometimes gets the ultimately negative, “not g wr” and “not g wk.”
   I made it up to page 85 and quit. R.K. burned me for $24 because I forgot that the quality of the author is just as crucial as the quality of the material. I should have read the first 15 pages in the store, but I read too slow to do that, so sometimes, I make the bad buy. I'll jump to the chapter “Oil and War” and leave it at that.

Rise of the American Nation, by Merle Curti and Lewis Paul Todd, c) 1960 - My High School history book. - I loved this book in school but I didn't buckle down and do the studying I should have. I browsed it joyfully a hundred times but rarely if ever put in serious sits for pleasure or grades. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I finally read each and every page of this book from South Boston High School 1972 with fine tooth comb.
     I have come to realize that Curti is a rather famous historian, so this is no second class book. But I don't like the general tenor of these two guys.
   There's something negative in the air at all times somehow. They are definitely too patriotic. At 17 I scribbled in the inside hardcover a new title, Lies of the American Nation.
    The quiz section at the end of each subchapter, and the giant quiz at the end of each chapter are enough to make me forgive myself for not loving the subject more back in 72. Those nasty quizzes take all the fun out of learning.
    Can I move forward please to the next read? Do I have to stop and be chastised for what I don't remember? Can't I try and mix and match all the knowledge that I am accumulating, without having the rivers of knowledge clogged up by the dam of a quiz?
    Mr. Powers was my history teacher. He was good. Great voice, hard worker. But he didn't seem to take a personal interest in anyone ever.
    Overall, I had a great chance to get an early start on history studies and I blew it by being 17 and distracted. But I was definitely fascinated with it. I used to daydream all the time about all the studying I would do someday.
    I defaced almost all of the pictures and drawings in this big textbook by adding fake irreverent captions with a ball point pen. What's sad is that I did all that when I read the book in my late thirties.
    Here's a task for the student at the end of the Spanish-American War study.

          "The United States entered the war to free the Cubans. It
               ended the war with an empire on it's hand. Explain."

     Explain, but do not contest.

The Rise and Fall of Stalin, by Robert Payne - I can't find a copyright date on this Brookline Public Library hardcover but I'm going to guess 1973 and not look it up.
    I liked this book enough that I never finished it. Aren't there books so good that you don't want them to end? When that happens I just leave 40 or 60 pages to go and put the book away for years. The Marc Logan FB card book mark is on page 657. That way The Rise and fall of Stalin is always active and I can pick it up anytime for a fresh session.
    Payne is a good writer, but a payne to read sometimes. I don't mind a guy making outrageous statements on issues and events but when its done too often the license expires. Payne is pretty well convinced that Stalin murdered Lenin and has a chapter on the subject.
    But historian Louis Fisher writes that,

           "the detailed record of Lenin's illness ... offers no support
           for the sensational charge that Stalin poisoned Lenin."

    I spent a lot of time with this Bob Payne book and compiled a short paraphrase of each of the first 136 page in the fluff pages off the binders for the purpose of rapid review.
   With its many idiosyncrasies, Payne's writing style is very consistent in all his books. You know what you're getting with Payne. At times he seems like he's a little off his rocker. But who wouldn't be if all they did with their time was study the deeds of guys like Hitler and Stalin?
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer - c) 1960 – Simon & Schuster
I read the first 490 pages about 25 years ago and I still have about 630 pages to go. Shirer was one of the only (if not the only) American reporters who was living in Nazi Germany to witness the entire history of the Third Reich up till the end of 1941. He was the eyes and ears of America on the scene, so no matter what his opinions were, they are of maximum historical value.
     I left off with Hitler about to invade Poland, which is like walking out of a spy movie just before the chase scene. I also have Shirer's (pronounced 'shyrer') Midcentury Journey, but have never cracked it.
   This is like the Churchill six volume history of WWII. The fathers of baby boomers all have it on their bookshelf, but one in a hundred actually read it.
   Update: I've read another 200 pages and it gets better as the story heats up. Shirer in June of 1940 follows Hitler to the forest at Compiegne to witness the French surrender. He is less than 60 feet from Hitler and his generals and is looking at them through binoculars to see every wrinkle in their facial expression. Hitler is proud but bitter and his eyes turn to Shirer's binoculars. The author writes of the hate and intensity as their eyes meet through the glass. Then Hitler changes his expression and plants his feet wide apart in a gesture of power and control. William L. is the only American reporter on the scene, our only eyewitness to this chapter of history.

The Rising Sun, The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945
Vol I, by John Toland
    John Toland is a very good writer and doesn't waste my time. He twlls the story of WWII from the Japanese side of things, and the collective work of two books on one side of one war adds up to a valued work. A lot of history books list this work in their bibliography. This has a good balance of military and political detail.

The Rising Sun, The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936 – 1945, Vol II, by John Toland – c) 1970
   Took me 30 years to find Volume II after reading Vol I as a young man. There is a famous novel by the same title, but I try to forget that. Toland is a bit of a Blame America First guy on the racism issue. He completely forgets that the Japanese had their own notions of racial superiority and looked down upon the Chinese and Korans, to name two, as inferiors. The Japanese invented the word, “Chinks” as an epithet against the Chinese.
   Toland is a very enjoyable writer and in a hundred days I hope to get around to reading his book about the fall of Germany.

RN, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon – c) 1975 Grosset & Dunlap
   This is 1,094 pages of Nixon justifying his life. The first half of the book, about his childhood and early years in politics, I found very enjoyable. It made me like Nixon more than I ever did before.
   But as RN got into the politics of Agnew, the Vietnam War and Dick's bad relations with the press I went back to sort of not liking him, like I had my whole life. I never hated Nixon, but I never much liked him either.
   When RN gets into the Watergate section it slows down to boring and that's where I left the bookmark on page 778. RN is forever writing about Colson and Erlichman and I just put the book away.
   Watergate was the most boring major political story of all time, even worse than Iran-Contra.

The Role of the Bomber, by Ronald W. Clark – c) 1977 – Thomas Y Cromwell Company – 154 pages
    Role is a sleek medium sized hardcover with breathtaking photographs of bomber aviation wall to wall. Ronnie has some sharp text in here too, but the pictures are so overwhelming that it's hard to get past constantly browsing the work, and rarely reading it. If you are on a kick that 'I ain't gonna study war no more,' then this is not the book for you.
   My favorite part is the photo of the guy who hand-held and dropped the bombs from the back seat in the early part of WWI. That is one interesting job.

Roosevelt and Hopkins, an Intimate History, by Robert Sherwood, - c) 1948 –A truly great book -
   Harry Hopkins was a close advisor and friend of FDR and probably the second most powerful person in the FDR administration. he never held a cabinet post and never held an elective office, but he was above those types o the totem pole.
   This is one of the best damn books ever written. It is prolific, important, erudite, smooth, and often subtly humorous to boot. Rob Sherwood was a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt, a close inside member of the FDR New deal team. He loves his team and is shamelessly partisan, as he should be. His opinions and his stories are of vast historical value on page after page.
   After reading Ed Rollins for an hour, turning to this book is like going from kindergarten to Princeton Law School; from crass egoist simple writing, to a masterpiece of political literature.
    This book is ostensibly as much about Hopkins as it is about Roosevelt, but it is really an insider look at Roosevelt. Sherwood adds more by his personal observations about FDR than he does in elucidating his story about Roosevelt and Hopkins.


Russia, A History, by Sidney Harcave - c)1953 - Sidney of Harper College and SUNY (State University of New York) is great. This Harcave hardcover is an excellent book, well written. It's academically strong yet I have only had to look up one word in the 357 pages I have read so far. There are 310 to go.
The highest compliment I can pay any writer is to take their book to Las Vegas. I'm out there for eight days and like to pack light. I usually bring only two hard covers and a paperback. Since I drive to the Trop in Atlantic City I can bring a trunkful of books when I play there, but Vegas is a careful choice and I will not bring a book I haven't test driven first. I have to know I like and trust the author before they can fly to Vegas with me.
Harcave came to Vegas with me last year and we spent a lot of time together in the wee hours of the night in the employee cafeteria of the Tropicana Hotel where they serve bad coffee but at least its free.

Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin – by George F. Kennan. I read this book when I was 24 and liked it so much that I studied Russian history for the next ten years.
    I am 53 now and Kennan in one key way in my inspiration and idol. George F. wrote books well into his nineties.

Russia's Unfinished Revolution, Political Change From Gorbachov to Putin, by Michael McFaul – c)1901 Cornell – Michael is not very cynical. He takes all events in Russia at face value and has no suspicions about disinformation and stage-plays designed by the KGB.
    Nevertheless, this political history of Russia through then entire Gorby-Yeltsin era and slightly beyond fills an important gap. McFaul does us all a service be even attempting to tackle this complicated material.

Scandal, How "Gotcha" Politics is Destroying America, by Lanny Davis, Former Special Counsel to President Clinton - c)2006 - First of all, this is a great writer. This is an easy flowing brilliant essay on the problem of scandal-mongering in politics. Davis deserves the Medal of Freedom for even making a half-baked attempt to balance the criticism.

              "Personal attacks are okay if used by us for our
                causes, bad if used by them for their causes."

   Granted, he is much rougher on the right for attacking Clinton than he is on the left for attacking Reagan and Bush, but at least he makes an attempt at being bi-partisan. Lanny actually includes chapters in which he is excoriating the partisan left for trying to bring down decent conservatives. And this guy worked closely for Bill Clinton!
    He mentions my distant relative Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan who was hounded out of his office as Secretary of Labor under Ronald reagan in 1984. I still have the newspapers and the TV news broadcasts of the Ray Donovan scandal. I had always presumed that he was convicted of several charges. Lanny's book argues that the media monster today, combined with government investigative units, create a public judge and jury and that people get tried and convicted in the media long before they go to formal trial.
    It turned out Ray Donovan was acquitted on all charges three years after his name ruled the headlines for a week in 1984. But he had to resign in the middle of the initial media storm out of deference to serving his President.
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Secrecy and Diplomacy, by Admiral Stansfield Turner, former Director of Central Intelligence, c)1985 -
    When Turner first took over he got a short professional courtesy visit from George H. W. Bush, a former DCI. He criticizes the visit in the book,

        "George Bush exuded enthusiasm and admiration for the CIA.
         ... He expressed no concern about the recent exposures of
         abuses and did not talk about how to control them."

    Hey Stan, maybe that's because he wasn't asked. If this was what was on your priority list of things to talk about you should have said so and I'm sure Mr. Bush would have had something to say.
    Turner comes out against James Jesus Angleton in the great Golitsyn vs. Nosenko debate that rocked the CIA in the 1960's and 70's.
    These were two Soviet defectors that came over to our side just after the death of John F. Kennedy. Both were telling opposite stories about Soviet intentions and whether the KGB had brainwashed Lee Harvey Oswald when he lived n Russia. One was a genuine defector and the other was a fake, a double-agent sent here to discredit the other defector. Angleton believed in Golitsyn, but the CIA went with Nosenko. Many CIA personnel who disbelieved Nosenko were forced out of the Agency. You can rent the movie Yuri Nosenko, KGB, starring Tommy Lee Jones for a crash course.
    Look up Nosenko and Golitsyn for more detail. With all the stupid espionage movies we watch, why not investigate a fascinating real-deal spy vs. spy drama with major political implications?

The Shaping of America, A People's History of the Young Republic, Volume 3 – c) 1980 – Penguin
    Page Smith has written the most prolific general history of the United States ever typed. It is for the general reader and doesn't have all the quiz garbage to slow the fun and the story down, like all the well-written and brilliant textbooks.
    I like his writing, but he uses big words here and there and never cracks a joke in 6,340 pages, which is about what his nine volumes adds up to.
    Page mentions that the orthodox academia view of the history science is that people aren't supposed to write about the era they lived in because they are too emotionally involved and time hasn't sorted it all out yet. I couldn't disagree more. The one thing everyone has to offer the history science is the inside view of important events great and small, plus the social science.
   Page also points out how historians are supposed to write large books on small subjects so that the subject is put to rest and people have a definitive work to rely on. I don't agree with that concept either. You can write a 1,200 page book on Pancho Villa or King Phillips' War and some future scholar will find a hundred errors and suggestions expansion and improvement of the study. Too many historians think that Hugh Thomas wrote the definitive history of the Spanish Civil War so original scholarship is needlessly discouraged, and his boring book puts the SCW on a sideshow shelf.
   Page is saying that he is breaking a few rules by writing a large general history of the United States not for students in school.
   Few historians ever cite Page Smith as a source in their own work. The general narrative historian is a vulture.

A Short History of American Democracy, by John D. Hicks – c) 1943 – Houghton-Mifflin
   This is one of the best reading experiences I have ever had. Hicks is from the University of California at Berkeley, where I attended classes in 1976. All right, I'm exaggerating. I planned on doing my stand-up act in front of the entrance to Berkeley for spare change and then chickened out and kept right on hitchhiking up to Seattle.
   I read this pretty hardcover of 859 pages as a labor of love. I hear that some of the other historians didn't like Hicks because he wrote in an almost familiar and informal style.

A Short History of Mexico, by J. Patrick McHenry - c)1962 - I'm half-way done. McHenry is especially rough on Santa Anna, the man who led the assault on the Alamo. He describes him on page 94 as "an unscrupulous egoist." On page 104, McHenry unleashes the full broadside,

          " At the root of Santa Anna's many faults was his
           overweening conceit. He hungered after titles,
            honors, and prestige but never once took seriously
            the obligations that went with them. ... His spineless
            character was held up solely by pride."

    If he hadn't gone out and made himself ruler of Mexico, Santa certainly had a career waiting for him in show business.

A Short History of the Middle East, From The Rise of Islam to Modern Times, by George E. Kirk c)1955 (third edition) - A 272 page look at the subject from the politico-historical perspective of 1955. The first edition was written in 1948.
All in all I 'd much rather have a copy of his other book, The War in the Middle East 1919-1945

A Short History of the Philippines, by Teodoro A. Agoncillo - c) 1969 - I bought this paperback at the Harvard book store on January 4 1981 for $2.50. The cover price is $1.50 I've read almost half. But I carefully read the chapter called 'The American Record.' We took over the Philippines after the Spanish American War and gave them independence in 1945.
   The American record in running the 7,000 islands that make up the Philippines was definitely positive in some areas. Even left wing Philippinos concede that much. US control boosted education, sanitation, and political pluralism. The United States improved the lot of the Philippino citizen in these areas, no matter how wrong our years of occupation might have been in a larger sense.
   The native language is Tagalog which I mispronounced for 25 years until Alex Trebec said it on a Jeopardy episode. Accent apparently is on the second, not the first, syllable.
    The suffering of the Philippine people under three and a half years of Japanese occupation in World War II was 50 times worse than it was in four decades of American occupation.

Silent Coup – Amazing book! Nixon and Watergate actually made interesting. That had never been done before. All the Watergate books were boring. Not this one. Not at all.

The Six Day War, by Randolph S. Churchill and Winston S. Churchill – c) 1967 – Winston S. is the grandson of famed hero of the London Blitz. Randolph is the father and son between the Winstons. I like Randolphs' writing better than that of his famous grandfather
    There are very few general histories of the Six Day War of 1967 between Israel and its Arab enemies (btw Israel won.) This fills a library void and is a solid and readable effort by two guys who are a little biased towards one side. You know which side I mean.
    Churchill wasn't coasting on his name when he got this published. Winston S. was already on the scene on the Middle East for the three weeks prior to the war. He covered the Six Day War for News of the World.
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The Sovereign States, 1775-1783, by Jackson Turner Main (not to be confused with Frederick Jackson Turner) - c) 1973 – A fine book by a smooth writing scholar and a half. The states from 1775-1783 were genuine states (not provinces masquerading as states as today) united only for temporary political expedience. From 83 to 87 they became a Confederation and after that a nation. JTM is a writer to admire.

Southeast Asia, by Tillman Durdin – c) 1965 – Quiz: What is the only Southeast Asian country that has never been occupied by a colonial power?
   Southeast Asia is a New York Times Book, by NYT reporter Durdin. It's an interesting look at the region by the allegedly liberal Times. I say allegedly because the three chapters on Vietnam definitely take a 'let's stop these Commies' motif. A NYT book on Southeast Asia would never have the same attitude two years later. Tillman was typing as the first US Marines were landing at Da Nang. He could never have dreamed what was in store for American involvement anymore than his paper could.
    Tillman sometimes likes to waste my time with useless and needless descriptions of street scenes in Southeast Asian villages.
   Answer: Burma

The Soviet History of World War II, Myths, Memories, and Realities, by Matthew P. Gallagher - c)1963 -
   This large orange Praeger paperback is a 1963 look at the Soviet history of WWII in turn analyzed by the critical eyes of an American conservative scholar.
   The book is doomed. The pages show early traces of acid wear. I estimate that in 60 years it will be dust with a front and back jacket page left standing. It was once owned in 1967 by Karen Anne Dreisel who had nice penmanship.
   The Soviet accounts of World War II do not say much about the Katyn Forest massacre, nor very much about the unprovoked Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 when the world was outraged and Churchill wanted to send the British Army into action on the side of Finland but was only prevented from doing so by the refusal of Norway and Sweden to allow transit. They never mention that little story. They say nothing about the August 1939 Pact with Hitler.
   Owner Karen Dreisel reviews the book on the first page off the front jacket thusly'

                    "Typical, scholarly monograph, with
                      all the weaknesses of doing research
                      in Soviet History."    KD

     I presume she means the lack of access to Soviet records. I would love to read a Russian book on the same subject that has been published recently. How much of the revised post-Glasnost fall-of Communism version has admitted that past versions were sometimes in error?
    Any Praeger book is biased in a conservative way in favor of the United States and against the USSR. It was our version of Progress Publishers.

Statesmen of the Lost Cause, Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet, by Burton J. Hendrick. - c)1939 – Burton is a good writer though prone to snobby word dropping. I read his excellent history of the U.S. Constitution and now this one is even better. He recreates some fantastic Confederate history stories. I'm almost to the end and I don't want it to end. I'm having trouble deciding if Burton is a Southern born historian. I'll look it up after I finish. He's certainly not pro-Confederacy, but he's not a hatchet-man either.
   There aren't many histories of the Confederacy, and almost none on the political side. On the diplomacy of the Confederacy, even less. Most of the histories of the South in the Civil War are of the military heroes. Hendrick's book is a great piece of the Civil War learning puzzle.
   This is a masterpiece of enlightening historical literature.
   Some of Burt's snobby words include; divagations, ululations, circumambient, ultramontane, and sinuosities.
   The best story is how the South burned its cotton crops and refused to allow any exports to Europe because it thought it could thereby force Europe to recognize the CSA. Instead Europe found cotton in India and Egypt to replace the lost bolls and the Confederacy found itself without its only powerful resource. When the South changed its mind and tried to export it, the Federal blockade was strong. When that blockade was weak and the South could have got its cotton to Europe, the South didn't act.

Story of Nations, by Lester B. Rogers, Fay Adams, and Walker Brown – c) 1968 – Holt Reinhart
   USC! USC!
   The previous editions of this general world history for high school freshmen go all the way back to 1934. It was a successful textbook but the patchwork chapters probably make for a mixed tone. Each new wave of great events changes the way all of history is measured and judged, and revised general histories rarely adjust entire motifs from the original work as they update the events of recent times.
   I'm reading Story backwards. I started on page 667 and finished the book. 0-667 still to go. I wanted a new layer from the general historian on the world wars.
    The quiz sections are typically glum, but I've seen worse.
    The graphic design is not good at all, plus my copy is a little beat up. SN is too good to throw out and too beat to love.
    Lester Rogers was the Dean of the School of Education at OJ Simpson's University of Southern California.
   Fay Adams is a Professor of Education, also at USC.
   Walker Brown was the Principal of Alexander Hamilton High School, in Los Angeles.

Strangers in the Land, Patterns of American Nativism 1860 to 1925, by John Hingham - c)1963 - 'Nativism' is a political historical term for a combination of racism and placism that plagued America in its past.
Four times in US history the rednecks in the eastern seaboard cities started a major political movement to keep the foreigners out of the country, especially the ones that don't speak English.
    It's safe to say that a big dose of neo-nativism has been hot on the political agenda in the USA in the last couple of years. The illegal immigrants are are coming in from Mexico and the country is arguing about it a lot.
    The term 'nativism' came and went in the years that are covered by this book but the things it describes were part of America before and after these years too. Basically it's taking two ill-will instincts, patriotism and racism, mixing in a dose of placism (anyone from somewhere else is inferior and undesirable) and boiling the three up into a nasty political movement.
Nativism was most pronounced in the 'Know-Nothing' party of the pre-Civil War years.
    Hingham studied under the great Merle Curti, who co-wrote my South Boston High School history textbook, Rise of the American Nation.
I don't recommend Strangers because JH makes every point in the most difficult academic language he can devise. For example, to make the point that ignorant racists were using the American flag to justify their hatreds, Hingham writes,

        "While drawing on much broader cultural antipathies and
        ethnocentric judgements, nativism translates them into
        a zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctively American
        way of life."

     In my last reading session of 20 minutes with this book I had to look up the words 'protean', 'brutied', and 'penumbra.' The first and last one I probably should have known, but has anyone ever used the word 'bruited' in a conversation on this planet? I call that Professor Writer writing and I don't like it (Not to be confused with Johnny Writer writing which is another story.)

Teddy Bare, The Real Story of Chappaquiddick, by Zad Rust – c) 1971 - Western Islands
   This author is a complete idiot. The book starts off ludicrous and gets more ludicrous as it goes along. It takes interesting and suspicious facts and extrapolates them into a whole set of wild conclusions. TB is all about his hatred of all the Kennedys and his belief that they are part of a Communist conspiracy to hand over America to the Russians. Rust goes off the deep end with extreme paranoid fantasies about the Kennedys that he loses focus on the story of Chappaquiddick way too often and for way too many pages at a poo. We didn't pick up this book to read your political lectures, Zad. Stick to Chappaquiddick.
   This is a very distinct physical book, a thick large paperback with yellow tint-theme on the covers and the side binding.
   Guess who is the owner of Western Island Press of Belmont Massachusttts. None other than Zad Rust. He thinks this book exposes Teddy bare. He just exposes himself as a turkey.
    Update: Now it turns out that Zad Rust isn't his real name. The real author of Teddy Bare is hereby laid bare as Mike Sturdza. Not only that, his real name is Prince Michael Sturdza and he was once the foreign minister of Romania! It checks out, since Sturdza's political memoir is also published by Western Island Press of Belmont.
   I can understand his anti-Communist zeal, having seen his country conquered and colonized by Soviet Russia. But to tie in the entire Kennedy clan, and the entire incident of Chappaquiddick in the scope of the John Birch Society hatred of Communism, is a bit much. Here's a sample of Prinze Zad telling the story of Chappaquiddick,

“What happens in or to the United States, the last non-Communist big power, happens to all the non-Communist countries, large and small, but especially to those countries that are already in Communist bondage or about to be conquered by the Communist Conspiracy.
   This Force of Darkness has already brought the world very near to the point of no return on the road to total annihilation of the liberties of man and the independence of nations and to the enthronement of the Antichrist. If they hasten. today, to protect the man responsible for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, it is because, after the disappearance of his two brothers, they counted on him for the last push.”

    I recommend a book like this because it's worthwhile and entertaining to know exactly how the extremist mind works.

The Ten Thousand Day War, Vietnam 1945-1975, by Michael MacLear – c) 1981
   This book is based on a PBS documentary. Any questions? The North are his heroes in this book from start to finish.
   Mic-mac goes to endless quotes from others to validate his own slants. Write your own book. Don't be a quote jockey; be a writer.
   He goes out of his way to find Americans quoting the qualoty of the enemy, but never the reverse.
   “One US Special Forces soldier, Ivan Delbyk says from experience, ' I have to commend them: the NVA were some super soldiers.”
   But anything the same soldier said in defense or praise about American troops or policies or motives would never make the book. Ten Thousand is a relentless assault on fairness. Arrange the facts to fit your bias, and no one can accuse you of presenting false facts. This quote is from page 215. On that same page he reveals that “three out of for years” between 1968 and 1972, “the author saw Hanoi's leadership convene at Ba Dinh Squae Hall in the capital.”
   That says plenty about this guy and this work for me. Michael McClearly needs Ten Thousand slaps across the face.
   I've read 243 pages so far. This is an important book, a solid frame of reference for the standard left, yet respectable and academic work on the matter. This isn't some Jerry Rubin tirade from sloppy anti-academia. This a a mature educated observation about the events of the Vietnam War and comes to the same conclusions as any angry dopey hippie on the street. I can rebut most of his facts and even more of his conclusions, but he presents all as irrefutable facts more solid than granite.

Their Tattered Flags, The Epic of the Confederacy, by Frank Vandiver – c) 1970 – Harper's Magazine Press
The South wasn't so bad after all, eh Frank? Of course I hated this book and the author, but not half as much as I expected to. This is a prejudiced pro-South history of the Civil War, but not as extremist or vicious as I expected.
   Turns out Frank is a very well-respected historian and he has not taken heat for being a racist in his fine academic career. I say he is, and I say he is a Southern partisan posing as a detached scholar.
   He isn't partisan? This clown actually had the nerve to type up, “gallant is a particularly Southern word.”
   No it isn't.
   Dissembling is a particularly Vandiver word. The evil of slavery is never a factor in the entire book – never!


Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, by Captain Ted Lawson – c) 1943
    On April 18, 1942 the USS Hornet sent a squad of B-24 bombers off the deck of the USS Hornet. They bombed Tokyo. It was the first time the Japanese homeland was struck by enemy ordnance. It would not be the last. This is the story of that mission. The book was made into a movie.
    The bombers did not have the fuel nor the capability of returning to the carrier for a landing. They were supposed to continue on and land safely in friendly Chinese territory. Things didn't go according to plan, although the mission was a tactical success. I think it was actually a strategic success because is scared the emperor and his retinue half to death and forced them to alter their entire pacific strategy from offense to defense. You won't read that anywhere else, so take that with a barrel of salt.

Trial by Fire, A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, by Page Smith – c) 1982. I think he is a racist. I think he is a fine historian, and a good writer, but I've written some bad things about him in the margins on the race thing. He goes out of his way to quote illiterate slaves at their worst, saying something that shows their ignorance. His writing isn't racist so much as his editing. Pages books are always huge. As long as the subject is important like a war or a general history of any nation, I'm all for that. The bigger the better, as long as the writer doesn't get show-off with long sentences about absolutely nothing, which Page never does, but I just did.

The Tragic Era, The Revolution After Lincoln, by Claude Bowers – c) 1929 – Riverside Press
    He should spell it 'clod.'
   It takes some serious effort to be angry and bitter about every single solitary point made for 540 pages, but Claude made it happen for the Literary Guild of America in 1929 with this smelly and well-known (in its time) book, which is cited by many historians.
   What troubles me is not so much the amazing racist mean man and writer that Bowers is, what troubles me is how modern historians cite him in their notes and do not comment on what a racist and mean man he is. They hint that he is biased towards the South but it's always offensively genteel. Historians rarely call CB, (and a few others I could name) out.
    Bowers hates Sumner and Stevens and thinks the blacks were lazy. He rolls out every standard racist pseudo-intellectual rationalization for all Southern violence against blacks and carpetbaggers in the post Civil War era. He practically cheers when he describes vengeance from groups like the Knights of the White Camelia, or the Ku Klux Klan. He gives a little bit of lip service to the wrong of Klan violence, but that is just in passing, one time, just barely. For 40 pages he also says the North and the Blacks and the carpetbaggers sort of had it coming to them. Serves em right.
    The Dunning School was superseded, thank God, by a more liberal and enlightened version of the Reconstruction. But the history books didn't take a revised look back at the garbage that was said in the past, they only presented the revised version. Tearing past historians to shreds for their vile racism has never had its rightful place in American history studies.
   Not only is Bowers an inexcusable bitter divisive arrogant bigot, he isn't even a good writer! Bowers is difficult. At least his fellow racist historians like James Truslow Adams and W.E. Woodward were pretty good writers.
   I've read exactly 200 of TE's jerky pages so far. What a clod.
   More black people should read this book, and others like it, and weigh in on it. Works like this need more indecent exposure by decent people. It's important to know where our racist roots came from. Who spread the poison and what did it read like?
   If this was an obscure book, it wouldn't matter. It's wide acceptance makes it matter.

The Two-Ocean War, A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1963 – Atlantic Monthly Press – 586 pages
    I'm only 34 pages into the short version of his 15 volume history of the US Navy in WWII. It is not clear from the introduction whether he has used passages from the original multi-volume work or if this is an entire new manuscript. I wish he had made that clear.
   Morison is one of my only historian idols. TOW is a well-respected source for other later histories of the war. Books like this crowd up my house and I love it.

The Turbulent Life of Aaron Burr, The Great American Rascal, by Philip Vail c)1979 - Award Books left in a few blatant typos worthy of my home edited website, but other than that Turbulent is a solid piece of writing, and an unbeatable subject.
    You would have to be a bad writer to not write an interesting and compelling biography of Aaron Burr.
    Burr was the man who shot the man on the 20 dollar bill to death in a dawn duel at Weehauken, New Jersey in 1804. At the time he shot Hamilton, Aaron Burr was the sitting Vice President of the USA. Then he went on the lam when the a warrant was issued for his arrest for the crime of manslaughter.
A few weeks went by and the demand for his arrest faded. When the heat cooled, Burr returned to Washington D.C. and calmly strolled into the chair of the President of the US Senate and began conducting business as though nothing had happened. His aplomb so impressed everyone that the Senate looked around at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and then they too went back to business as though nothing had happened.
    Later on Burr tried to overthrow the government of the United States in a scheme to create a new nation in the frontier southwest. But Aaron was sharp enough that he left no hard evidence to prove his complicity. Burr was arrested in the southwest and hauled back to Virginia. Burr stood trial for treason. It was the greatest trial in American history, greater than the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, greater than Sacco and Vanzetti, and making chump change out of the OJ Simpson case.
   Thomas Jefferson led the prosecution and John Marshall led the defense.
   The prosecution never had a chance.
Burr throughout his 'turbulent' life was a close friend of James Madison.
When the world thought Burr was a scoundrel, Madison, a fine and honorable gentlemen, always remained his loyal pal.
    Burr is a bit less famous now in the ignoramus era, but from 1804 up until about 1960, the name of Aaron Burr was very famous. AB is on the Mt Rushmore of the villains of American
history.
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The Tyranny of Words, by Stuart Chase - Stu was a member of FDR's cabinet. This is the pioneer work in the field of 'semantics'. Chase is a literary genius who explains that almost all political arguments are derived from the inability of any two people to agree on the meaning of the words they are debating with. This is probably the most influential book I have ever read.

The United States, The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, and Daniel Aaron – c) 1957 Prentice-Hall
   This was a popular general history textbook that a lot of college freshmen had to read in the Dobie Gillis era. Hoffie, Miller and Aaron are three famous historians and this is a great book, especially strong on economics.
    The book does have a shameless pro-Democrat party bias that is almost inexcusable. If the Republican Party were that bad it never could have existed very long.
This very heavy hardcover has been a companion a few times. I've carefully read 625 pages. This is a classic American history textbook.

The United States to 1865, by Michael Kraus – c) 1959 – University of Michigan Press
   This is a good book, well-written, but a bit chauvinist. He is endless reaching to find quotes of Europeans praising Americans. I don't care for that. Overall, a very good general narrative history and I finished it from cover to cover, with notes.
   The U-Mich Press put out a beautiful hardcover series of general histories which still handle like brand new in the used book racks.

The United States of America, A History, by Bamford Parkes – c) 1967 - Knopf
    BP is not a famous historian but was a well-respected one from New York University. There is some liberal pro-Dem bias that goes with the NYU territory, but, that said, this is a fine piece of narrative work.
    I can't tell if this was schoolbook or not, as it is fairly friendly to the general reader.
    Parkes wrote Marxism, An Autopsy in 1939. He was 50 years too soon to declare Marxism over, but good for Bam for writing that book in any case.

The United States of America, A History Volume II – 1865 to the Present
by Dexter Perkins and Glynson G. Van Deusen – c) 1962 MacMillan
    Reading this book has been one of the great pleasures of my entire life.
    Both are from the University of Rochester. Dexter Perkins is the last word among historians when it comes to the Monroe Doctrine, so I knew this college freshman general US history would be good. I didn't expect it to be great.

United States Foreign Policy and World Order, by James A. Nathan, and James K. Oliver. c) 1985, This history of the Cold War from Truman to Reagan was written when that conflict was at its peak, just before Gorbachov came to power in the USSR.
   Here in America there was another cold war going on, a three-way war of words between those who thought the Soviets were to blame for the Cold War, those who thought both sides were equally to blame, and those who thought the fault was primarily with the United States. This book belongs to the last category.
   Nathan and Oliver don't even bother with 'Blame America First.' They blame America only! Their version of the Cold War is that the Soviets were eternally victims who feared encirclement, and were always being victimized by the aggressive and paranoid foreign policy of the USA.
    This book is so blatantly unfair to the United States on every page that I count it as a point against the University of Delaware to have hired them. Sure it's a heavily scholastic book, filled with a hundred source citations at the end of every chapter. They are good writers. But they are deliberately unfair and knowingly twist facts to fit their arguments in ways that spit in the face of the full truth. If you want to be a lawyer for the Soviet Union in the Cold War, fine. At least admit it. At least admit that you have no intention of giving your own country a balanced hearing. Don't pretend you're looking at all the facts on 100 different cases and coming to a strictly anti-US interpretation every time. How can that be scientifically possible unless you're insanely biased politically?
    These guys were of the type left holding the bag when the Cold War ended and even the Soviets admitted that their experiment had failed and embraced capitalism. The apologists (like these two scholar-warriors Nathan and Oliver) for the USSR were proven wrong by its demise, and the celebrations spoke volumes about who was the bad guy and the instigator throughout the Cold War.

The United States Since 1865, by Foster Rhea Dulles, c) 1959 – University of Michigan Press
    Foster is the less hated of the famous Dulles Brothers who backed Ike with their right wing whisperings in his willing ear.
    For a guy from such an offensive family, this is a fairly inoffensive book. It's very readable and I have neither liked nor disliked it a great deal. I'm up to page 146.
From the superbly packaged U-Mich History of the Modern World Series. Dulles is strong on labor issues.

The United States and World War II, Volume I, by A. Russell Buchanan - c)1964 - I found this at a used bookstore in Atlantic City and now I have to find volume II. This is the best history of America in the war I have ever read. This Buchanan fellow is a fine scholar and a first-rate writer. A total pleasure to read.
    A few months after I almost finished this book I was reading the general bibliography of a big general American History book. The authors cited this book as the best account ever published of America's role in WWII. Again, now I have to find volume 2.

Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington - c)1965, but it was written about 70 years before that.
    I postponed reading this book for decades because I was afraid it was going to be so 'step'n fetch-it' that it would make an unpleasant experience. After all, Booker T. was the opposite end of WEB Du Bois. The Booker was the turn of the century ancestor to ML King who through passive resistance wanted to "fill every jail in Mississippi" with black people. Du Bois on the other hand was the ancestor to Malcom X who would prefer to fill every graveyard in Mississippi with white people.
    One thing that all four have in common is that they are great writers.
Once I finally picked up my paperback copy of Up from Slavery I never put it down. I finished it in three days and I don't read that way.
   As for the Uncle Tom stigma, I'd say this man is hardly a playing a porter on a Three Stooges episode. Washington's story has nothing but dignity. It's hard for me to imagine any black person reading this book and being offended in any way by his passivity or subservience. I don't see that in here. Its only by comparison with the more rebellious Du Bois that Booker T. has earned his delicate name in Black history. 'We love him but.... .' Booker was wrong only in that he was so optimistic by nature. He trusted the future. He did not foresee the Jim Crow backlash that went on for 20 years after his book got published. If BTW had known how long it was going to take for blacks to achieve equality he might have been more militant.
    This book is inspirational. The man's spirit pours out through his writing. You will miss a great work, a great story, and a priceless contribution to American history if you never read this book.

U.S.A. The History of a Nation, Volume 2, by Richard Morris of Columbia University, and Richard Greenleaf, of the University of New Hampshire – c) 1969 – Rand McNally 1,147 pages
   I don't mind a history book being so heavy you could present it as evidence in a bad Perry Mason murder mystery movie as the weapon that killed the old lady. But I do mind it if the layout and design are trendy and poor. The maps are bad, the text is not spread out nicely at all, and the illustrations and graphs aren't much fun either.
   I don't have a problem with the writing in the 124 pages I've covered so far. They are halfway between lefty and redneck on Reconstruction, which is good enough, and they are one of the few writers who say that Johnson's Reconstruction plan wasn't as far from Lincoln's plan as history generally believes. I applaud them for that. They challenge the orthodox view that Lincoln's Reconstruction plan would have made things so much better and smoother.
   It's not a good physical book. The pages don't open up pleasantly. They are light glossed and open with an ugly noise. The cover art is simply ugly.

A Vast Conspiracy, The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President, by Jeffrey Toobin – c) 1999 Touchstone
   When I browsed this book in the store I presumed the title was sarcastic, but no. This author actually really thinks that the entire Monicagate scandal was a vast right wing conspiracy contrived to destroy Bill Clinton, just like First Lady Hillary said it was. Toobin actually believes it!
He actually rips in to “Izzy”Isikoff pretty good. Michael Issikoff, who broke the Lewinski story for Newsweek is now on my TV on NBC as a regular field reporter on important White House matters.
   Jeff Tobin attacks the credibility of Paula Jones and her husband Stephen as the foundation of his case. They were lowlife rednecks in search of easy gold and that settles the entire matter on Clinton's series of civil rights violations of various women.
   Toombs couldn't be a more sycophantic defender of Clinton if he were his lawyer.

Victory Through Air Power, by Major Alexander P. Seversky – c) 1942 – Simon & Schuster
    Seversky designed airplanes for a living, especially military airplanes. He believed in the ability of the four or six engine heavy bomber to win wars on their own with no help from Armies or Navies. To Severdsky, the future of all war was that only the planes would fight it, and only the planes would win it.
   This book would be comical if so many people didn't take these ideas seriously. A million civilians in cities died because bozos like this guy thought that terrorizing cities would end wars, and so were in a sick sort of way, merciful.
   But the power on both offense and defense was vastly over-rated for air power. The estimates of improved accuracy were always way off on the short side. By miles, we mean. At no point in World War II did big bomber power ever come close to equalling the expectations of even the moderate optimist.
   Seversky was a disciple of Billy Mitchell and we use the word disciple without reservation. Since Mitchell was proven wrong on air power in WWII, so was his disciple Severdsky. There are pages in here that are jaw dropping idiotic, but who knew at the time they would b proven so? People wondered if he was right. Are 7,000 planes of six engine bombers from Germany really going to destroy every city in America and then fly back to Germany without refueling, forcing FDR to sue for a negotiated peace? Is that really going to happen like this guy says it will? After Pearl Harbor people were ready to believe anything. VTAP was taken quite seriously in 1942, and a lot of money was spent in reaction to these ideas.
   Billy Mitchell and this guy were dead set against building aircraft carriers. They thought they were obsolete, a waste of money, and too vulnerable to sinking. Mitchell and Major Severdsky only advocated land-based four to six engine heavy bombers. These guys weren't even that fond of the fighter-bomber like the P-47 until they saw it being so effective late in the war. All they ever believed in was long range heavy strategic bombing which was always going to make the victim sue for peace.
   Allied bombing did plenty of damage and helped win the war. But if all the strategic air power money had gone into landing craft, the war would have been won six months sooner. If all that money had gone into fighter-bombers, and these planes were used in the old fashioned way, the war would have ended sooner. The war would have killed more soldiers and less women and children. The heavy bomber was supposed to do the end-around on the dead of war, bypassing the soldier and killing the families deep behind the lines. Good thinking, buddy. The ideas in Major Severdsky's book were not only cruel, even for war, they fell so short of the future reality that this one is Major comedy.
   Vic is certainly is a lively read.

Vietnam at War, The History 1946-1945, by Philip B. Davidson c) 1988 – Presidio
Davidson has written a very thorough military history of the war, paying special attention to balancing the scope on the entire time line. Most histories of the war treat the period from 1945 to 1955 as a prelude worth three or four pages, and the period from 55 to 61 as being worth 10 or 15. But Davidson maintains a steady and patient depth of coverage for the early years, the middle years and then latter ones all equally. The coverage of the early years is therefore very valuable.
   There are a lot of maps, which always pleases me. I actually paid nearly full price for this thick 811 pages. Nice looking book. This is a nice piece of work.

War in the Falklands, The Full Story, by the Sunday Times of London Insight Team -c)1982 - The compact hardcover on the war in 1981 between Argentina and Great Britian over the Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands.
   These blokes wrote a good book here. They're not too kind towards American efforts at mediation, and are especially rough on Secretary of State Al Haig. Reagan sent Al Haig to mediate and hopefully prevent this war, but according to the book was about "as helpful as a screen door on a submarine."
    My favorite memory of that war was the daily edict from the Pope declaring that peace must prevail. Yeah, okay Popsie, we'll turn those ships right around and head back to Britain. -- The Falklands are hard to find on the map. They're way off of southern Argentina and closer to Antarctica than anything else. But they were British owned. Argentina had some historic claim to them (like Sadaam Hussein who in 1990 claimed that Kuwait was "province 19" of Iraq) and took them by force. The Argies were nuts to think that Britain would not respond with war.
    There was also some 'wag the alpaca' work in play here. The leader of Argentina needed a foreign affairs distraction to keep from losing power. He lost his power and the war. The main writers were Paul Eddy, Magnus Linklater and Peter Gillman. ... .....Magnus Linklater?

War in a Time of Peace, Bush, Clinton and the Generals - by David Halberstam - c)2001 - This is the best and the brightest book of all the Halberstam tomes. There was an earlier book by him that won a Pulitzer but I can't remember the name of it.
   The world needed an expert study of Bill Clinton's relations with the military establishment and his conduct of military affairs in his 'time of peace.' The fact that Halberstam has an anti-military bias should not diminish the value of the contribution too much.

The Wars of America, Vol. 1: Quebec to Appomattox, by Robert Leckie – c) 1968 – Leckie definitely loves war, even and especially when he feigns being horrified by its tragedies.

Warriors at Suez, Eisenhower Takes America Into the Middle East, by Donald Neff – c) 1981 – This book could just as easily have been titled, Eisenhower avoids taking the United States into the Middle East. The French and British attacked Egypt in 1956 expecting the United States to back them up. The United States assuredly did not back them up and they had to back off.
   Neff is a good writer.
   The Suez canal Crisis of 1956 ended the careers of British and French colonialism. My comment about it at the time was “waaaaaa!” I was one.

Warriors of the Rising Sun, A History of the Japanese Military, by Robert Edgerton - c)1997 - This is more of a grand thesis than a history of the subject. Edgerton is an anthropologist by trade and puts his own touch on the story of WWII.
The one point that he most wants us to know is that prior to World War II the Japanese had a reputation for good behavior in war, relative to professional soldiers. They took care not to harm civilians in ways that impressed even neutral observers. Of course all that came crashing to a halt when the military cabal took over the country in the 1930's and then came WWII.
    Edgarton is blunt and honest about the extent and severity of Japanese WWII atrocities, and chronicles them as well as has ever been done. But he thinks the lowly Japanese soldier has taken a bum rap of sorts for the record of atrocities. It was the upper class that ordered this kind of terrorism in the military and the orders trickled down until the lowly private knew he had better well be cruel and murderous towards prisoners or else he would face violence himself at the hands of angry superior officers. Beat those prisoners private Ojkajima or we will beat you.
    The government leaders gave these orders to terrorize Asia. The infantry carried it out and took almost all the blame while the rich and powerful barons watched with feigned innocence. Much of the famous Japanese "fanaticism" was following orders from high up.
    The men had been trained for years, brainwashed into thinking cruelty was part of their duty as soldiers. Even elite Japanese fighter pilots tell of merciless beatings they received in training school for the slightest offense. The Japanese military was so full of cruelty that inflicting it on prisoners and civilians was not a big step.
    Robert is saying that we're not supposed to be mad at them for what they did, we are supposed to feel sorry for them. The perpetrators of Nanking were victims, you see.
   What I object to in this book is the author always condemning US atrocities in WWII outright, while Japanese atrocities get this massive apologism thesis. It's a complete double-standard. Maybe we can find an Americaphile Japanese anthropologist apologist to write a book defending the GI's who bayoneted wounded Japanese on Guadalcanal and explain away our sins too.

Where the Buck Stops, The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman – Edited by Margaret Truman – c) 1989 – I spent my entire life liking and admiring this guy until I read his two volume memoirs. Boy did that change my mind. The one politician of all time who blamed everyone else but himself for everything that ever happened on his watch as president and he is remembered ludicrously as the man with the sign on his desk that The Buck Stops Here.
   The title is misleading because is is really a history of the presidents by President Truman. It is no collection of his personal writing on all sorts of private and public matters. It was a manuscript being prepared as a book when Truman died in 1969.
   Truman is so conceited about what a great historian he is, and he isn't. “I've made quite a study of the Presidency,” he brags. I am not impressed at all, and I have read many of the greatest historians so i can compare the modest scholars with Mr perfect, who makes many mistakes with his history facts.
   Truman lists all the great presidents, and why. Then he makes another list of all the bad presidents, and why.
   Guess what? All the great presidents are Democrats, and all the bad presidents are Republicans. There's no credibility here with his analysis. As if he looked at each administration and came of an honest and fair conclusion. Woodrow Wilson is God, FDR is God, Andrew Jackson is Christ, and Dwight Eisenhower is the devil himself. TR is a bum, and so is Coolidge.
   Truman is the most bitter partisan president of all time and that is a fact. He is the one president who never ever even tried to get along with the opposition and took every opportunity to further polarize the splits in the parties for all the time he was in office.
   The extent that he reaches out to continually take cheap shots at President Eisenhower is conduct unbecoming of a political gentleman. Obviously he is just a very small man who is jealous and bitter because he left the White House one small step short of being tarred and feathered by the mass of Americans, while Ike was popular from the first to the last day of his presidency.
    Truman left in 1952 with the lowest approval rating in history and chose not to run for a third term when he could have because he knew he would lose. Ike left the White House in 1960 with strong approval ratings and would have beaten Kennedy or anyone else the Democrats could have put up, but could not run for a third term because a constitutional amendment had been passed making three terms illegal. So the petty nasty jealous little boy reaches out to say what a horrible president Eisenhower is, every other page. This vendetta is offensive. Here's one sample out of a hundred as he describes Ulysses Grant,

      Ulysses Simpson Grant's period in office seems to prove
      the theory that we can coast along for eight years without
      a president. Well, of course, we have recently done it with
      Eisenhower.

The whole book is like this. Truman includes a chapter called “Some Presidents We Could Have Done Without.” He should have had a chapter called “Ex-Presidents We Could Have Done Without” and based it entirely one man man named Harry. No one was good enough for Truman after he left office. He was like the mom for whom no man was good enough for his daughter. Truman did not even help his own Democrat brother John F. Kennedy win the White House in 1960, criticizing him as too young and inexperienced until Kennedy finally called a press conference and stood up to Truman saying that he would “not step aside, at anyone's request.”

White House Years, by Henry Kissinger - c) 1979 Little-Brown
    1,476 pages and I read each one slowly and most of them twice. It was a huge investment of time and I had to look up a lot of big words.
    On a one to ten I give this an eight. It should have been 550 pages shorter. He takes as long as humanly possible to make every point.
   Of course, I learned a great deal. Mr. Kissinger presents his side of the Vietnam War debate very well and I am persuaded on many of his most important arguments. This book changed my mind on his being a war criminal on Cambodia.
   I just wish he wasn't such a dupe fool about the fake Sino-Soviet Split. Hank buys it completely. It never once occurs to Doctor K that his opponents in the Cold and the Vietnam War might ever practice disinformation. It never even crosses his mind as a remote possibility.

William Henry Seward, by Thornton Kirkland Lothrup - c) 1896 – Words cannot express my admiration for the physical beauty of this book and just about everything made by Riverside Press in the era. To carry this book around and read it and know it is as sturdy as any new book is a treat. All of these “American Statesmen” series books are popular masterpieces. This treatment of the famed Secretary of State is no exception. Its great to have someone ask you what you're reading and then show them an 1896 copyright date hardcover, not a reprint and in mint condition.
   Seward was Lincoln's foreign affairs manager and intimate. On the night that Lincoln was murdered, an assassination attempt was made on Seward at his home.
   In the Andrew Johnson era, Seward purchased Alaska from the Russians. It was called “Seward's Folly.”

The Wilson Era, Years of Peace 1910-1917, by Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, 1913-1921 – c) 1944 – Chapel Hill
596 pages
   This is an extremely enjoyable work, but I need Volume II the war years. I am presuming there is one.
   The men around Wilson who worked closely with him and knew him best all loved him dearly. I'm up to page 98 and I'm liking Wilson more and Daniels too. This book includes an inside account of the Election of 1912 that is more detailed than the 1912 chapter in any history of Presidential Elections book. I plan to finish this one.

Winged Victory, the Army Air Forces in World War II, by Geofrey Perret – c) 1993 – Random House
   I already trust GP from having read A Country Made by War. I'm glad to see that his account of Billy Mitchell in the between the war years confirms all the debunking things I had already discovered about that legend.

Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him, by Joseph P. Tumulity - c) 1921 - 511 pages - This is an unbelievably good book. Its the inside portrait and story of President Wilson's years in office by his close friend and private secretary, Joe Tumulty. It's well written, has a good heart, and is infinitely informative. He really loves his subject and that impresses me more than anything else I have ever read about Woodrow Wilson.
   When the United States declared war on Germany in April of 1917, Wilson went from the Capitol back to the White House in a short carriage ride. A crowd lined the streets cheering him and waving flags. Back in the quiet of his office, alone at his desk with his pal Tumulty standing quietly by, Wilson looked up and said, "Don't they know what they're cheering for?" Then the president put his face in his hands and wept.
   Wilson never left us his White House memoirs, nor an autobiography. As I know Him is the closest thing we have to a first hand account of the Wilson Administration.
   When Tumulty' book came out, Mr. Wilson the hero of the story refused to read it.
   Wilson refused to write his memoirs. No mater how many people suggested it, Woody refused to chronicle his time as President. "I will not write about myself," he sternly snapped whenever the subject came up.
   History wishes he had. It's ironic that the only professional historian to make president did such a disservice to the science. The failure of the United States to ratify the Versailles Treaty or join the League of Nations probably had something to do with his not wanting to write the story of those years. Woody would leave that to hams like Lloyd George and Bob Lansing.

Working With Roosevelt, by Samuel Rosenman, c) 1952 – This is a fine book, by a good man and a great writer. What a pleasure. Sam was an intimate aide and top speechwriter (along with Hopkins and Sherwood) for Roosevelt.
    The downside of it is that it makes it hard to hate Roosevelt. Roseman's intimate portraits of Roosevelt the person, the politician, and the leaders are so sincerely positive, that his place as an American hero cannot be doubted, even by those who do not agree with how he over-enlarged the Federal government.

World History, Patterns of Civilization, by Burton F. Beers – c) 1990 – Prentice Hall
   This is a huge glossy hardcover textbook for eight graders. The maps are out of this world. It looks like a book that was written by five college professors, but it is the work of only one. 874 pages of the most beautiful colorful layout of all time. Too bad the quiz questions bring you back to earth. Prentice Hall made a masterpiece of schoolbook here. This is the kind of big fat heavy gorgeous book that that little black and white computer reader can't match. The smell between the pages, connect me with the first week of school when I knew how hard I was going to study this year (and of course didn't) - no Kindle reader can produce that.
   It might take time for people to appreciate that a pretty book full of stimulating info is a glory in itself, and the medium itself is half the fun of learning.
   The picture of Burt Beers in his study with his books all around him and looking up from one he is reading is endearing.

World History, People and Nations – c) 2000 – Holt, Rinhart and Winston
    WH is such a collaborative textbook that no one even gets an author credit. 20 different history professors are called “Content Reviewers.”
   This is a very expensive shiny, heavy, and awesome textbook for high school freshmen. I paid two bucks for it, but it looks like a $70 book by student pays his own way standard. Loaded with primo color pics and the maps are off-the-planet gorgeous. I have browsed this book for pleasure a hundred times and can't bring myself to read it and start marking it up.
   This book is a beautiful thing. The kids reading it have no idea.

World History, Perspectives on the Past, by Larry S. Kreiger, Steven L. Jantzen, and Kenneth Neill, led by Senior Content Consultant Dr. Lloyd Swenson Professor of History at University of Houston – c) 1992 – D.C. Heath
   I have three different huge colorful glossy textbooks titled World History, with a different subtitle by different authors. They look and feel exactly the same like some sort of franchised uniformity has been forced on the industry of school textbooks. It's a little odd how identical these three books are in layout, size and style. Even the maps look like the same company work.
   I discovered about 150 pages worth of water damage in this Kreiger, Jantzen, Neill thickie, so I've decided to knife out all the stellar maps and throw the thing away - Reluctantly, as this is a very nice book.

A World Transformed, by GHW Bush, Brent Scowcroft and Condaleeza Rice c) 1998 Knopf
   This is a very good political account of the foreign policy decision made in the Bush Presidency, with a special emphasis on the Gulf War of 1990-1991, a war I like to call The Kuwaiti Conflict.
   WT has a strange format. First Bush writes a couple of paragraphs, then Scowcroft writes about five paragraphs, then Condi Rice comes in with a sort of uncredited narrator role in bold print. Then Bush comes in with a short excerpt from his personal diary. Then they make the rounds again back and forth for 480 pages.
   I wish George Bush senior wrote a 700 page memoir on his own along the same lines. I think it would be a great public service, and he has neglected an important duty. George, please write an in depth foreign policy memoir, and include some chapters on everything that has happened in the Middle East since you left office. You did your duty in WWII and as President. Now instead of showing up at a disaster relief fundraiser, lets hear your very important take on everything. Hit the typewriter, big Poppy. The the world was indeed transformed on your watch. We need more than 125 collective pages out of you on it.

Year of Decisions, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman - Volume one of two - Harry claims to have read every book in the library of Independence Missouri when he was a boy. The publisher had to make a little joke in the jacket text about how Truman likes to brag a little too much.
    Books like these are so enjoyable and useful that I not only finish them, I'm sad to see them come to an end. Volume one is about his rise to the presidency and the cauldron of trouble he inherited at the end of World War II and beyond. There is a lot about the A-bomb.
   Truman once threatened to sock a writer in the nose for a bad review the guy had given his pianist daughter.

OTHERS

The Sino Japanese War 1937-1945, by Frank Dorn - The best war book I have ever read. Dorn is tops in my book.

Crusade in Europe, by Dwight Eisenhower - This was a huge best seller after the war and deservedly so.

Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore

Perestroika, by Mick Gorbachov

The August Coup, by Mikhail Gorbachov

Triumph of Freedom, 1775 to 1783

Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, by George F. Kennan

My Life, by Leon Trotsky

Peter the Great, by Robert Massie

The Decision to Intervene, by George F. Kennan

Life After Life, by Ray Moody

The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, by Jack Olsen

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Russian Revolution, by Rich Pipes

The Formation of the Soviet Union, by Rich Pipes

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