Literary historical fiction: C.M. Mayo’s Last Prince of the Mexican Empire
Highly recommended to readers of historical fiction drawn to either a mother’s relentless quest to regain her child or to a convincing example of self-delusional hubris among the on-high.
Read MoreBest histories and biographies read during 2015
First post in a good while. Been busy polishing up my manuscript, The Girl in the Iron Box: Tucson’s 1934 June Robles Kidnapping, & the Myth of J. Edgar Hoover’s Infallible FBI, and sending it off to a publisher for consideration. More on this in a future post. Here is my annual list of best biographies and histories read during the previous year. As in recent years, I have been reconnecting with aspects of European (including Beatles!) history that held my interest prior to my own turn to writing Southwest Borderlands history. Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, Vol III: 1705-1708. This 4-volume biography, certainly Churchill’s finest work of history (rather than memoir), just keeps getting better and better. Winston’s ancestor, John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, was condemned to live in interesting times, never more so than...
Read MorePart III of III: How Many Books Did Winston Churchill Write?
In 1974, in Sword and Pen: A Survey of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, author Mannfred Weidhorn listed 33 books written by Winston Churchill. This was nine years after Churchill’s death, so you’d think the listing would be comprehensive. But it isn’t. There are more. Here we go. 1940: Addresses Delivered in the Year Nineteen Hundred and Forty to the People of Great Britain, of France, and to the Members of the English House of Commons, by the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. (1940) Includes five speeches, including the “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech, and the “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” speech. Only 250 copies printed, but it’s a book! 1941: Broadcast Addresses to the Peoples of Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia, and the United States, by the Prime Minister of the...
Read MoreHow Many Books Did Winston Churchill Write – Part II
Winston Churchill was a busy man. He gallivanted around the British Empire as both British cavalry officer and, simultaneously, war correspondent, sat over the course of seven decades in Parliament, holding virtually every cabinet post in the British government, from First Lord of the Admiralty to Prime Minister (twice), and saved the world from Hitler in a way no other person on the planet could have done. He wooed prospective brides, downed mass quantities of champagne, painted hundreds of canvasses, smoked uncounted big cigars, and flew three-quarters of the way to the moon (well, its equivalent, by air, to direct the British war effort and negotiate with FDR and Stalin). He also wrote. By one account, he “produced thirty-three titles in fifty-one volumes. [They] consist of eighteen collections of speeches, one of newspaper articles, four of war dispatches, two...
Read MoreHow Many Books Did Winston Churchill Write?
Suppose you wanted to read, or decided to collect, all the books written by Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. Statesman, politician, soldier, writer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and generally regarded as the man who saved Western Civilization. How many titles would you read? How many volumes? How many would you have to purchase? Well, google, go to this website listing or that, count the titles, count the volumes, and you have your number. Or do you? Ah, it all depends on which definition of “books written by Winston Churchill” you accept. With the understanding that you might come up with something completely different, here’s what I found: Winston Churchill wrote 33 books in 51 volumes. He also wrote 38 books comprising 58 volumes. That is, unless he wrote 43 books in 72 volumes, or maybe 73....
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