What Are You Reading

[AmateisGal]

Last night I finished reading The English Spy by Daniel Silva. It's the latest installment in the Gabriel Allon series. Very good.

 

[AmateisGal]

Finished reading Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War by Dale Maharidge. Pretty good.

 

[Harp]

Henry Tudor on the other hand...

His son the VIIIth certainly had cold blood for murder.
...caught a few episodes of The Tudors a few years ago in of all places, Vegas.
The actress who played Anne Boleyn, Natalie Dormer completely captured the lady's personality.
And so gorgeous.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Victory And After," by Earl Browder, an 1942 analysis of the war from a CPUSA point of view. While Browder is entirely too optimistic about the prospects of postwar cooperation between the US and the USSR, he does quite accurately predict the much of the long-term impact of Anglo-American imperialism, and the trends that both US political parties would follow during the postwar era, notably the embrace of Southern segregationist Democrats by the Republican Party -- which would come to pass in Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968.

Browder also eats a big juicy helping of crow in addressing the CPUSA's shifting positions during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but uses the opportunity to insist that nothing he did or said during that period was in any way more dishonorable than any utterance ever made at any time by Martin Dies. He also disproves the belief that Communists have no sense of humor by thanking the Federal Government for giving him an opportunity to, at last, study the political situation in the State of Georgia at close range, with full protection from those Georgians who had banned him from the state in prior years -- a reference to the eighteen months he spent at the Atlanta Penitentiary as a guest of Uncle Sam for passport fraud.

 

[newsman]

A book by a guy who was on the Bismark...when it was sunk...about the sinking!

 

[DNO]

His son the VIIIth certainly had cold blood for murder.
...caught a few episodes of The Tudors a few years ago in of all places, Vegas.
The actress who played Anne Boleyn, Natalie Dormer completely captured the lady's personality.
And so gorgeous.

The whole Tudor line seemed a little inclined to the violent side! I thoroughly enjoyed The Tudors. Mmmm...might be time to dig out those DVDs, if my wife hasn't donated them somewhere!

The Richard III book was an interesting read, by the way.

 

[DNO]

A book by a guy who was on the Bismark...when it was sunk...about the sinking!

I picked that one up earlier this year but I haven't read it yet. I have a hard time resisting naval history.

 

[Harp]

The whole Tudor line seemed a little inclined to the violent side! I thoroughly enjoyed The Tudors. Mmmm...might be time to dig out those DVDs, if my wife hasn't donated them somewhere!

The Richard III book was an interesting read, by the way.

I need to see all of The Tudors.
Finding the grave was quite an archeological score.
______________________

Stealing America, Dinesh D'Souza. An insider account of United States vs. Dinesh D'Souza, a Machiavellian twist to justice.

 

[HistoryCopper]

I'm currently reading the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light). I'm only on the first book in the series, but it is excellent thus far. I'm sure the others will be as well.

 

[AmateisGal]

I'm currently reading the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light). I'm only on the first book in the series, but it is excellent thus far. I'm sure the others will be as well.

I've heard very good things about this. I have the last one, I believe, so need to get the other two. He is also an excellent speaker. He spoke at the 2014 International WW2 Conference at the National WW2 Museum. It was terrific.

 

[AmateisGal]

Just started The Lake House by Kate Morton. She is an exquisite writer and this is her newest. Got it for Christmas from hubby.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ I've been intrigued by that one as well, but haven't bought it yet. I can't wait to hear your thoughts on it.

I'm currently reading "Ametora" by W. David Mark which explores how post WWII Japanese teenage boys and men came to adopt American "Ivy" dress (think chinos, button-down shirts, blazers, etc.) and jeans. It might sound narrow or boring, but it is pretty fascinating as American dress was sold - nothing organic going on here, this was not grass roots like when USSR kids discovered jeans - by a true Japanese acolyte of classic American clothing. Mark's does an outstanding job of putting this event in the broader context of post-war Japan's social, cultural and economic challenges and successes. I'm about 80 pages in, but the chapter on how one Japanese manufacturer tried to "weather" his jeans like "the American ones," is hilarious as he not only ruins his factory's washing machines but those of a commercial laundry which he ultimately bought to make peace with the laundry.

 

[Fading Fast]

From "Ametora" (see post above for description) - tell me this isn't channelling Lizzie: "The Heibon Planning Center team [a small Japanese clothing and culture magazine publishing team in the late '60s/'70s made up by young, American-culture-loving Japanese] all grew up devouring discarded American mail-order catalogs - a medium they believed was the ultimate representation of life in the U.S. As Kobayashi [one of the Heibon editors] explains it, 'You could understand the entirety of American life from the Sears-Roebuck catalog.' They imagined American families snuggled around the fireplace, flipping through the pages and dreaming of a better life."

 

[LizzieMaine]

" They imagined American families snuggled around the fireplace, flipping through the pages and dreaming of a better life."

Or, in my grandfather's case, looking for a cheap deal on a new truss.

Seriously, though, I strongly recommend David L. Cohn's 1940 study of the Sears catalogue, "The Good Old Days," which despite the title is not an ode to fireside nostalgia, but a careful consideration of what the first fifty years of Sears could tell us about America's evolution into a consumer society. He was the first writer to really take mail order catalogues seriously as a sociological tool, and all who have done so since owe him a considerable debt.

 

[Harp]

Leigh Montville, Ted Williams, The Biography of An American Hero

 

[LizzieMaine]

Excellent book, but as I was reading it I expected at any moment that Dave Egan would rise ferociously from his grave in indignation at the title.

 

[Harp]

John Mortimer, Rumpole of the Bailey
A Silk looks back on a life at the Bar.

 

[vintage.vendeuse]

I just finished I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, the author of 101 Dalmatians. (ICTC is nothing like.)

A very enjoyable read with a fascinating narrator.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Over the course of the last 2 years (with other books thrown in, of course) I finished reading all 8 "Bruno Chief of Police" books by Martin Walker. Not sure how I got sucked into the series, but I am indeed sucked-in. The series is basically about a good natured, very justice/fairness-minded policeman who's beat is the very small French town of St. Denis, located in the Perigord. Murders and criminality abound and he is always solving cases and locking up bad guys... at least when he is not cooking up magnificent meals for his regular circle of friends and pulling corks from wonderful bottles of local wine. He also spends a good deal of time riding his horse in the woods or hunting or attending various village celebrations. Then there is "the Brigadier", a shadowy big-wig in the French intelligence service who is always dragging Bruno into covert affairs of State. And let's not forget Bruno's love life: He longs to find "Ms Right" and settle down and have a family, but he always seems to fall for free-spirited, career-minded beauties who rake his heart over the coals and then decide that country life is not for them. Bruno's cases often deal with the ghosts of WWII, etc. Some of the books are better than others. It doesn't matter: I'm hooked. Book #9 will be coming out next summer. I am already looking forward to it.

 

[AmateisGal]

Over the course of the last 2 years (with other books thrown in, of course) I finished reading all 8 "Bruno Chief of Police" books by Martin Walker. Not sure how I got sucked into the series, but I am indeed sucked-in. The series is basically about a good natured, very justice/fairness-minded policeman who's beat is the very small French town of St. Denis, located in the Perigord. Murders and criminality abound and he is always solving cases and locking up bad guys... at least when he is not cooking up magnificent meals for his regular circle of friends and pulling corks from wonderful bottles of local wine. He also spends a good deal of time riding his horse in the woods or hunting or attending various village celebrations. Then there is "the Brigadier", a shadowy big-wig in the French intelligence service who is always dragging Bruno into covert affairs of State. And let's not forget Bruno's love life: He longs to find "Ms Right" and settle down and have a family, but he always seems to fall for free-spirited, career-minded beauties who rake his heart over the coals and then decide that country life is not for them. Bruno's cases often deal with the ghosts of WWII, etc. Some of the books are better than others. It doesn't matter: I'm hooked. Book #9 will be coming out next summer. I am already looking forward to it.

I had not heard of this series! It sounds interesting. Will check it out.