Tag: war

Band of Brothers

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Ambrose, Stephen E. Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne From Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

If it seems as if I have been reading a lot of war books lately it’s true. Last month it was a World War II narrative to commemorate the flag raising on Japan’s Iwo Jima. This month, to celebrate “Hug a G.I. Day” on March 4th, I read Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose. It makes sense because it wasn’t like reading someone else’s version of the same account. The men in Band of Brothers were fighting across Europe instead of the Pacific. Same war, a much different story.

If Stephen Ambrose wrote about every event in history I would read it. I wish he had written all my textbooks in high school. No matter the subject Ambrose makes it real, he makes it come alive. It isn’t some dry account that drones on like Charlie Brown’s teacher. He not only makes it interesting, he makes it human. War, on the surface, is about defeating the enemy; doing whatever it takes to win each skirmish in an effort to be the final victor; to win the entire war. Human emotion, especially in the aftermath of it all, gets lost. Ambrose points out the lesser-realized aspects of war – fear, regret, sorrow, but most of all, survivor guilt. This often happens mid-war when soldiers have the opportunity to first realize with shock that they survived that grenade strike and then moments later remember those who didn’t. Comrades who were standing beside them just moments ago.
I think the section that best sums up Band of Brothers is from pages 202-203: “Combat is a topsy-turvy world. Perfect strangers are going to great lengths to kill you; if they succeed, far from being punished for taking life, they will be rewarded, honored, celebrated. In combat men stay underground in daylight and do their work in the dark. Good health is a curse, trench foot, pneumonia, severe uncontrollable diarrhea, a broken leg are priceless gifts.”

Strange example of hope: Lieutenant Welsh carried his reserve parachute throughout Normandy in the hope of sending back to his best girl, Kitty so that she could make a wedding dress out of it. Kudos for Welsh for having the optimism to think he was going to survive the bloody campaign but double kudos for Kitty if she actually made a thing of beauty out of something that symbolized such violence.

Probably my favorite “character” of the entire book was Captain/Major Richard Winters. Throughout the entire war he remained true to his men and true to himself. An example: “Winters stayed in Albourne to rest, reflect, and write letters to parents of men killed or wounded” (p 109). A seven day pass entitled him to go sight seeing or carousing to blow off steam. Instead he chose to reflect on the events of the war…my kind of man.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “World War II Nonfiction” (p 253).

Flags of Our Fathers

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Bradley, James. Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam, 2000.

The reading of Flags of Our Fathers was very timely. February 19th marked the anniversary of the famous flag raising on Iwo Jima, Japan. The first word that comes to mind when I think about Flags of our Fathers is respect. This was a book written with the utmost respect, not only for the author’s own father, but for the other five men responsible for raising the flag on Japan’s Iwo Jima. Everyone knows the photograph born of that historical event but not many can name the six men involved. In fact, even fewer would guess there were six men there. Unless you scrutinize the photograph, at first glance, there are only four. James Bradley, with the help of Ron Powers, brings to life all six men. He  brings them out of historical obscurity and into present-day focus.

Favorite lines (if there can be such things in a book about war): “The fatigued boys knew what lay in store when the winter sun rose again” (p 177). I liked this line for it’s sense of foreboding.
“And then the heroes of the day began literally stand up and be counted” (p 183). This sentence sounds so benign, so harmless on its own.
“On this night, the madman in the haunted house unleashed all his ghouls” (p 191). Again, such a simple sentence but the horror behind it is unimaginable.

Book Trivia: Clint Eastwood directed the movie version of Flags of Our Fathers in 2006.

Author Fact: James Bradley traveled to Iwo Jima with his mother and siblings to the very spot where his father helped raise the American flag.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter simply called “World War II Nonfiction” (p 254).

March ’12 is…

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What is March 2012 all about? Hard to say . Or as they say on Monhegan, hard tellin’ not knowin’. Fitting I suppose for a reading project still in limbo. I’m still reading books off my own shelves and borrowing books from my own library. To those not in the know that sounds strange, but there you have it.

Here are the books I *think* I’ll be reading in March:

  • A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (baptized James Ngugi) ~ in honor of March being African Writers Month
  • Little Town in the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder ~ in honor of the Dakotas (series was started in January)
  • Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101 Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest by Stephen Ambrose ~ in honor of March 4th being “Hug a GI Day.” Since I don’t have a GI to hug, I’ll hug a book about World War II.
  • Lord of the Rings: Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien ~ in honor of New Years (series was started in January)
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte ~ in honor of March being National Literature month.

For the Early Review program for LibraryThing – I never got the February book so we’ll see if it comes in March…Incidentally, I just checked the LibraryThing website and I was awarded a March book as well. Now the race is on to see which book makes it here first.

February ’12 was…

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Considering the tumultuous way 2012 started February was a bit gentler and definitely easier to get through. I think celebrating a birthday definitely helped. It’s always good to have something to celebrate!
Here are the books read (or listened to) in February:

  • Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough ~ in honor of President’s Day (even though this had very little to do with Roosevelt being president of anything). This was an audio book and a real pleasure to listen to.
  • Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban ~ in honor of Hoban’s birth month. This was an oversized kids book!
  • Personal History by Katharine Graham ~ in honor of February being Scholastic Journalism month and this was all about Graham being involved with The Washington Post for nearly 60 years. This was a book left over from the Public Access to Library Services program.
  • Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien ~ a continuation of the series that I started in January. I have two more books that I will read through March and April (Two Towers and Return of the King).
  • A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark ~ Another audio book that was extremely funny.
  • Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley with Ron Powers ~ in honor of the day in February (the 23rd) that the American flag was raised on the island of Iwo Jima in Japan.
  • Blues Dancing by Diane Kenney-Whetstone ~ in honor of Black History month AND Valentine’s Day. Yes, it was chick lit, but yes, it was also very good.

For the fun of it I read Book Lust To Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers by Nancy Pearl ~ a gift from my sister.

I also did a little housekeeping and realized I never reviewed The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m not sure how that happened, but it happened. So, while I didn’t read it this month I am including it in the list.

Zimmerman Telegram

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Tuchman, W. Barbara. The Zimmerman Telegram. New York: Viking Press, 1958.

I can only imagine how popular this book must have been in its day. The First Great War was not a distant memory at the time of its publication. In fact, the events of World War I were probably still fresh in everyone’s mind having just survived the Second World War. I know The Zimmerman Telegram was required reading for at least one political science course at my college.

Probably the most compelling thing about Tuchman’s writing is her ability to make even well-known history as compelling whodunnit mystery. Written as smoothly as a novel The Zimmerman Telegram recounts the events leading up to the United State’s involvement in World War I starting with a telegraph written by Arthur Zimmerman to Imperial German Minister in Mexico Von Eckhardt. This telegram was  proposing a partnership between Germany, Mexico and Japan to form an allegiance against the U.S. Intercepted by the British, it is important to point out that the U.S. was reluctant to join the war until provoked by this telegram.

The line that summed it all up for me (and was ironically enough on the first page),”Mute and passive on the paper, they gave forth no hint that a key to the war’s deadlock lay concealed in their irregular jumble” (p 3).

Disclaimer: I wasn’t supposed to read this until 2013 but I felt so bad about abandoning A Distant Mirror that I wanted to read something else by Tuchman before the month was over.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Barbara Tuchman: Too Good To Miss” (p 225).

To What End

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Just, Ward. To What End: Report From Vietnam. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968.

Disclaimer: I threw this on my December list because somewhere I got the idea that Ward Just was born in December. Not so. He was born in September (so I have been told), so this was a mistake in the timeline.

Ward Just’s To What End is his first book and is a first hand account of the Vietnam War. As a journalist he begs the question everyone wanted to ask (and is still asking), “what business does the United States have fighting this war?” The entire time you are reading To What End you never lose sight of the fact that Just is a writer and not a solider. He views the war always from the point of view of plot, “there was a book as good as Farewell to Arms in the stories, if you had the wit to see it and the imagination to generalize from it” (p 165). And generalize Ward does. He doesn’t bother to cover all aspects of the Vietnam War, just the parts he is directly involved it. He doesn’t include an index because he doesn’t want to complicate the telling with too much detail. He has been advised to keep it short for the same reason. The end result is a quick straightforward commentary.

Striking lines: “It is the first war where an academic could walk about undisturbed (and relatively safe) and probe and take soundings” (p 79), and “The Vietnamese laugh both from amusement and embarrassment and you can never tell which” (p 102).

Author Fact: Ward Just born in September. I need to commit that to memory.

Book Trivia: To What End is Ward Just’s first book.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called ” Ward Just: Too Good To Miss” (p 135).

Johnny Tremain

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Forbes, Esther. Johnny Tremain: a Story of Boston in Revolt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

This is another one of those “reread a few times” books. I can remember having a crush on Johnny when I was 13 or 14. I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t think the idea of 18th century garb was what got me. But, there was definitely something about goody boy Johnny with his artisan ego that appealed to me.

Johnny Tremain may not be the most creative of titles for Esther Forbes’s John Newbery Medal award-winning book, but it’s most appropriate as it tells the story of two years in the life of fourteen-year-old Johnny Tremain. Johnny is one of several silversmith apprentices living with the Lapham family in Boston, Massachusetts. The year is 1773 and silversmiths are in high demand. Johnny is the most gifted artisan for someone so young and he knows it. The other apprentices are jealous until one day there is an accident and Johnny’s right hand is badly maimed by molten silver. Ultimately, he loses his place with the Laphams and must find other means of employment. It isn’t long before Johnny finds a second calling. He is good with horses and becomes a dispatch rider for the Committee of Public Safety. This job brings him into the company of important men like Samuel Adams and John Hancock. It is at this point where famous events in history like the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington are woven into Johnny’s story. Fact and fiction are seamless.

Favorite lines: “Human relations never seem to stand completely still” (p 173) and “Green with spring, dreaming of the future yet wet with blood” (p 255).

Author Fact: Forbes was a Massachusetts woman.

Book Trivia: Johnny Tremain won the Newbery Medal in 1944.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Historical Fiction for Kids of All Ages” (p 114).

Three Came Home

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Keith, Agnes Newton. Three Came Home. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1947.

This may sound a little strange but I was able to finish this in the time it took to a baseball game to start and finish (no extra innings), a movie to be watched (127 minutes) and a man to get a vasectomy. In other words, no time at all was taken to start and finish Three Came Home. Besides being extrememly uncomplicated I liked it and I think that made it all the easier to buzz through.

Agnes Newton Keith is what you would call “plucky.” She is a straight shooter even in the presense of pain and suffering. As prisoners of war from January 19th, 1942 to September 11th, 1945 Keith, her husband Harry, and their infant son George are held captive by the Japanese on the island North Borneo. Because of Keith’s reputation as a writer (previously publishing a book called Land Below the Wind) Keith is commissioned by Japanese Commander Major Suga to write “The Life and Times of an Internee” as proof his prisoners did not suffer in captivity. He wanted to convey actual happiness. Keith writes an account for Major Suga but at the same time she needs to tell her truth. Three Came Home is her written-in-secret journal of nearly three years as a prisoner. It documents not only her survival but her determination to be a good mother to George and a good wife to Henry.

Despite being a “war memoir” Three Came Home is not without humor. Case in point, Keith is trying to diaper her child and “misses” describing the outcome as “an aborginal phallic decoration” (p 16). Ouch!
Above all else Keith remained true to the idea that all people are good and only circumstance makes us bad. “I believe that while we have more than we need on this continent, and others die for want of it, there can be no lasting peace” (p 317).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Living Through War” (p 156).

In Country

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Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985.

In Country is deceivingly simple. The language is so straightforward and uncomplicated you think it was originally written for children. Here’s the scoop: 17-year-old Samantha Hughes acts obsessed with the Vietnam War. She lives with her vet uncle and pesters him daily about the possibility of Agent Orange reeking havoc with his health. He has bad acne on his face and strange headaches. Despite having a boyfriend her own age Sam also starts to fall in love with a local mechanic, another vet. To the average witness Sam’s fixation with all things Vietnam is borderline mania, but Sam has good reason. The father she never knew was lost in the war. He died when she was only two months old. He never came home. No one knows very much about him and if they do they aren’t saying much. As a result Sam feels her entire existence is shrouded in mystery. After being rejected by the vet and reading her father’s journal Sam decides she needs a change of pace. She loads her uncle and paternal grandmother in her clunker car and travels from Kentucky to Washington D.C., to The Wall. There the entire family finds some sort of closure.

I had to come back and modify this review because I forgot to point out the best thing about this book. Sam has another obsession – music. I love the way the hits of the 80s, especially Bruce Springsteen’s album ‘Born in the USA’ ground the reader and orient him/her to the timeframe of the story.

Author Fact: Bobbie Ann Mason wrote criticisms and short stories before writing In Country, her first novel.

Book Trivia: As a best-selling novel In Country was made into a movie in 1989 and starred Bruce Willis. In Country is even studied in high school English classes.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Maiden Voyages” (p 159). Pearl liked it enough to mention it again in another chapter called “Teenage Times” (p 216).

Lord of the Flies

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Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigee Books, 1954.

What high school English lit teacher hasn’t put Lord of the Flies on his or her syllabi? What student hasn’t read at least one excerpt from this book? I shudder to think classrooms have moved to the movie version, but if that means Golding’s story lives on, so be it.

This could be called the most chilling sociological experiment of all times (besides Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game.) What happens when you take the most prim and organized society (proper English boys from a prep school), hand it the suggestion of chaos and violence (they are escaping a nuclear war), then leave it to its own devices without guidance (a deserted island without adults)? All normalcy goes out the window when the boys try to build their own hierarchical, structured society. In a Darwinian approach some boys, the strongest & smartest, rise to the top while weaker boys become scapegoats and victims of paranoia. In the beginning the group is held together by necessity. They recognize the need for fairness and organization, especially if they want to be rescued. But all that vanishes when the younger boys become increasingly convinced there is a monster on the island. No amount of rationalizing can calm them. Fear and violence escalates until there is no turning back. All calm is lost to tragedy.

Probably the most frustrating part about the book was something very deliberate on Golding’s part. When the boys are finally rescued the Naval officer is embarrassed by the children, especially Ralph’s emotional breakdown when remembering how it all fell apart. You want the officer, the adult, to be more understanding, to take the boys more seriously.

Book Trivia: Lord of the Flies influenced musicians like U2 and Iron Maiden and sparked television parodies but a full length movie has yet to be made.

Author Fact: Golding won a Nobel Prize for literature.

Favorite line: “The group of boys looked at the conch with affectionate respect” (p 128).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “100 Good Reads: Decade by Decade (1950s),” (p 177).

June ’11 was…

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What a weird month June ended up being! I wanted to stop borrowing books from other libraries while mine went through a transition period with it’s catalog. I chose one book to read, And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hoover Santmyer which I thought would take me the entire month of June. How wrong I was…about everything. First, the migration is delayed so I could have borrowed books from other libraries. In that one instance the library stayed the same while everything else changed: the entire building has had every light bulb changed, I’m in the process of hiring two new people (and an architect for a complete overhaul of the library’s layout), in September I will have three staff members working nights, only two people are in their same offices, and I even got new furniture. What a difference a month makes. I was also wrong about finishing And Ladies of the Club. I was bored to tears. So I moved on to:

  • Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan in honor of D-Day on June 6th, 1944.
  • Atonement by Ian McEwan in honor of June being Family month.
  • Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe in honor of June being National Short Story month.
  • Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler in honor of Food Week

Not a huge month for reading. I spent a lot of time focusing on life in the here and now…

 

Longest Day

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Ryan, Cornelius. The Longest Day: June 6th, 1944. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1959.

I think people view history as a boring and tedious subject because they forget that flesh and blood people are often the backbone of historical events. Ancestors who could have been the reason for their very being. Cornelius Ryan didn’t forget that the importance of D-Day didn’t lie in how it happened but whomade it happen. In his introduction he makes it clear that The Longest Day is not an military account of June 6th, 1944 but “a story of people…” within a 24 hour time span. The detail and clarity with which Ryan writes about seemingly ordinary men and women makes The Longest Day extraordinary. I thoroughly enjoyed Ryan’s straightforward style.

Line that grabbed me: “Now on this great and awful morning the last phase of the assault from the sea began” (p 239).

Author Fact: Two things – Ryan was born on June 5th (ironically so close to D-Day) and he died a cancer victim.

Book Trivia: Longest Day was made into a movie in 1962. Ryan wrote the screenplay and it starred John Wayne and Richard Burton.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “World War II Nonfiction” (p 253). Pearl calls it a “classic” and suggests following up with Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far and The Last Battle.

Feb ’11 was…

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February was a strange, strange month. On the one hand, my birthday (which was good), yet on the other hand, many different family dramas (not so good). Other oddities include getting robbed, the roof leaking, a mysterious flat tire, and lots of great PT (what’s different?). My list of books for the month included some behemoths – two over 700 pages long. It took me longer than expected to get through my list because I also got an Early Review book from LibraryThing and I decided to read a few “off-list” titles. February was also a month of personal challenges (yay for physical therapy and the return to running for real). I can’t forget to mention that!

  • Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter ~ in honor of National Civil Rights month. This was a nice blend of didactic and personal.
  • Big Year: a Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik ~ in honor of February being a bird feeding month (as apposed to watching). Funny, funny, funny.
  • Night Soldiers by Alan Furst ~ in honor of Furst’s birth month. This was really heavy, but I actually got into it.
  • Belly of Paris by Emile Zola ~ in honor of Charles Dickens (writing style is similar). Word to the wise – don’t read this when you are hungry. The food descriptions are amazing!

For the Early Review Program with LibraryThing I finally received and read My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe. I’m still waiting for a second Early Review book from LibraryThing.

  • Runner’s World The Complete Book of Running: Everything You Need To Run For Weight Loss, Fitness and Competition by Amby Burfoot. I picked this up because someone had given me a gift certificate for B&N and I wanted to get something I would keep for a very long time.
  • It Must Be..(a Grand Canyon Trip : Drawings and Thoughts From a Winter’s Trip From Lee’s Ferry to Diamond Creek (December 19, 2010 – January 2, 2011).. by Scott P. Barnes ~ this was such a surreal read for me! I’ve always wanted to see this author’s name in print.

Night Soldiers

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Furst, Alan. Night Soldiers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988

I have to admit this took me a little time to get into. The story starts off in 1934 with a violent bang. Khristo Stoianev is a Bulgarian teenager who witnesses the brutal beating and subsequent killing of his younger brother, Nikko. Nikko, only 15 years old, was used as an example of a growing power. Using this tragedy as a vehicle for change, Khristo is drawn into the NKVD, the Soviet intelligence service. From there he is sent to serve in the Spanish Civil war (although it is curious to note during his training he was taught English and French, not Spanish). Meanwhile,the political arena is heating up. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are arm wrestling over real estate in Eastern Europe. Stalin is starting to purge the undesirables and this is to include Khristo so he flees to France.
Furst paints a stunning picture of eleven years of Eastern European history complete with French underground guerrilla operations, lavish love affairs, the never ending quest for power and multidimensional aspects of war.

Most telling line, “But these were political times, and it was very important to think before you spoke. Nikko Stoianev spoke without thinking, and so he died” (p 3).
Favorite line, “The nasty scene at the Finnish embassy refused to leave his mind, and he and Andres had decided to drawn their war in a bottle of Spanish gin” (p 161).

Author fact: Alan Furst was born on February 20th, 1941. He has an ongoing love affair with Paris.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called  “World War II Fiction” (p 253) even though WWII isn’t the focal point of the the story.

Citizen Soldiers

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Ambrose, Stephen E. Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army From the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 -May 7, 1945. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Stephen Ambrose has the uncanny ability to take you back in time. His words pick you up and carry you hook, line and sinker, back to June 7, 1944 and forward through the great and terrible World War II. However, Citizen Soldiers is not a dry account of strategic war maneuvers. It is not a blah blah blah play by play of how Germany’s armies moved along the western/eastern slope while the Allies pushed further north or south. Those things did happen but Citizen Solders is more than that. It’s as if you have been dropped in the middle of hand to hand skirmishes or have the ability to eavesdrop on Hitler’s frequent phone arguments with a subordinate. You get to know people, places and events as if you are talking to the soldiers themselves, dodging bullets in the snow-covered country side, and witnesses skirmishes first hand. For once, the photographs and maps included do not make the storytelling vivid, they only enhance the words.

The version I read included an afterword where Ambrose talks about the reactions he has received upon publishing Citizen Soldiers. To me, this afterword was humble and gracious and yet, had an air of protective authority.

Things that made me go hmmmm. Little reminders that WWI and WWII were not really that far off. For example,  “There [Stoob] discovered that he had been wounded in the same small French village as had his father in 1914 – also in the head and leg” (p 111). There were also moments of humor: “Cooper examined the wreckage in the train and was surprised to find that invaluable space had been taken up with women’s lingerie, lipstick, and perfume, instead of desperately needed ammunition and food. “The Germans apparently had done a good job of looting all the boutiques in Paris when they pulled out”” (p 112), and “In Paris the whores put away their English language phrase books and retrieved their German versions” (p 205).

Author fact: Stephen Ambrose was born in the month of January, hence the reading of this book at this time.

Book Trivia: Citizen Soldiers was a New York Times bestseller.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “World War II Nonfiction” (p 253).