Best 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...
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How 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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Reading the Wars of the Roses: The Original Game of Thrones
Let us… tell sad stories of the death of Kings (Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act III, Scene 2) Take away Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, the superhuman White Walkers, and their the zombie-like minions, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has a lot in common with England’s Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), an epic event Martin himself has identified as a key historical inspiration for his fantasy saga. Both stories involve complex, multi-generational, personal, dynastic, and military conflicts for multiple thrones. The Kings of Plantagenet England were also the sovereigns of Wales, Lords of Ireland, and, though the claim was already hollow by 1455, the asserted Kings of France. Both sagas, the fictional and the historical, have delicious characters aplenty, including tragic heroes, brutal, malevolent villains, ambitious, greedy, fractious, and scheming nobles forever changing their colors, and women...
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Ten Best Histories and Biographies Read During 2014
The list begins with Napoleon: A Life, the best book I read in 2014, and certainly the most impressive literary achievement among all the books listed. Runner-up is A Misplaced Massacre, a mesmerizing example of creative non-fiction. The final eight are listed in chronological order of subject matter, from ancient to modern. *NAPOLEON: A LIFE by Andrew Roberts: My library contains some 250 books on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. I thought I’d read virtually everything worth knowing, but I devoured this sympathetic and yet eyes-wide-open biography. Across 800 pages, Roberts weaves the Corsican’s personal and public lives into a coherent whole, no small achievement considering the subject was a giant who towered over a continent for two decades. Roberts’ Napoleon is fresh from the get-go, as he presents the boy as voracious reader, soaking up the adventures...
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If you read only one book about Churchill
THE CHURCHILL FACTOR by Boris Johnson (Riverhead Books, NY, 2014) Mayor of London Boris Johnson, like Churchill a journalist, historian, and rogue elephant of a Tory politician, has produced a wonderfully chatty book on Sir Winston Churchill. Not a cradle-to-grave biography, it’s instead an illuminating study of what it was that made Churchill different. Not just different from every other British politician or world statesman of the 20th century (and beyond), but the only man who could have saved democracy and its benefits for all peoples in 1940. And did. Johnson attacks his subject thematically, and with great dollops of humor. His chapters open with an evocative scene that introduces some revealing aspect of Churchill’s character. Johnson visits the graveyard of Winston’s nanny as a way of answering a question, “Was he a nice guy.” Yes, Johnson tells us...
Read MoreChanneling Elvis: How Television Saved the King of Rock ‘n Roll, by Allen J. Wiener
Earlier this year, author Allen J. Wiener asked me to read his manuscript on Elvis Presley’s television career, and to provide a cover blurb if I liked the book. I am neither an authority on Elvis nor on television history, but I said, “sure.” I was not only a fan of Elvis’s music, but, as a college disc jockey during the 60s and 70s, I played his music, even when his better songs of the period (e.g., the Jerry Reed penned songs U.S. Male and Guitar Man, 1967-68) missed the Top 40 and were considered particularly unfashionable in psychedelic San Francisco. I found Wiener’s book to be a very remarkable study. The blurb I submitted ran 340 words long because I could not stop gushing. Of course only a relatively few words made it to the cover blurb. I let Allen...
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