DWD's Reviews

A compelling look into one of America's (misunderstood?) icons Published in October 2011 by Macmillan Audio Read by Daniel Oreskes Duration: 11 hours, 9 minutes John Brown is one of those well-known yet elusive figures in history. He is literally in all of the American history books, but most people know almost nothing about him except for a few headline snippets like "Bleeding Kansas" and "Harper's Ferry" and "Slave Revolt." More knowledgeable readers may remember he used a sword to kill pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and worked with several prominent anti-slavery figures before his raid into Harpers Ferry, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and that his raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry was an utter failure and undoubtedly proved that he was insane. Or, was he? And, was the raid really a failure? Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising is an excellent biography of John Brown as well a well-rounded look at the politics...

Very readable history Paperback edition published in October 2011 by Regnery History 392 pages of text. 434 pages total. Kozak was inspired to write LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay by a quote from a college lecturer: "You might not agree with his politics, but if you have a son serving in combat, you want him serving under someone like LeMay." (p. 389) Personally, LeMay has always been a caricature of a general in the periphery of the story the World War II histories and pieces of historical fiction I have read. Kozak does a masterful job of dragging LeMay into the spotlight and showing us the man, not just a caricature or a non-entity on the sidelines. General Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) Kozak tells of LeMay's hardscrabble childhood, his determination and his ability to maneuver in an impersonal bureaucracy, be it Ohio State University or the United States Army - he could always find the way up. In a way, the story of LeMay in the Air Force is t...

Published in 1991 by Tor. The Eagle and the Raven is an odd effort in many ways. Coming in at just 211 pages of text (plus about 20 pages of appendices), this is a tiny Michener book. It is even more tiny when you consider that 28 pages of this book is a forward by Michener and about 20 pages of the book are taken up with blank pages between chapters and illustrations. This Michener paperback was published in 1991 by Tor, a publishing house best known for its sci-fi and fantasy offerings. I would imagine that they just wanted to cash in on the Michener name since he was in the midst of a real hit streak with such books as Alaska , Caribbean and  Poland becoming best-sellers. Tor calls this book a novel, although only a few pages really qualify as a novel, with inserted character dialogue that was most likely created by Michener. The rest of it is really best described as a comparative biography. While not the best of historical works, "The Eagle and the Raven" provi...

Published in 2005 by Simon and Schuster 944 pages   "No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read." -David McCullough When I read a history book I realize that there multiple types of history books out there. Setting aside the ones that are designed to distort history (such as holocaust denier literature) there are still several styles of history book. They range from the small topical books that offer a brief overview to the more popular histories such as those that David McCollough specializes to definitive works - the type of work that others will refer back to for decades to come. Lincoln's Cabinet - 1861 Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is just such a definitive work. It checks in at 754 pages of text with more than a hundred pages of 8 font footnotes. It took her 10 years to produce this book and it is a work of which she can be proud. It is exhaustively researched and documented. However, that...

Published in 2005 by the Indiana Historical Society. 153 pages Based on a true story, and full of relevant historical photographs, Captured! A Boy Trapped in the Civil War fails to deliver on action in many ways which will make it less attractive to the 10-14 year old (estimated) target audience.. Camp Morton in Indianapolis It concerns a 14 year old boy named Johnny Ables who was captured by Confederate soldiers and pressed into service as a wood hauler. Ironically, those Confederate soldiers are themselves taken prisoner and Johnny is mistaken as a young Confederate soldier and is sent to prison camp ( Camp Morton ) in Indianapolis. Although it will find a place on my classroom's bookshelf, I can only give this short volume 3 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Captured! A Boy Trapped in the Civil War. Reviewed on April 17, 2007 <br /> <img src="http://wms.assoc-amazon.com/2...

  A bit of nostalgia Published 1959 by Random House 180 pages Many, many years ago Random House published a series of more than 100 books called "Landmark Books". These were short histories of a little more than 150 pages that were long on action and short on historical analysis. Francis Marion (1732-1795) The Swamp Fox Nevertheless, these were this history teacher's first introduction to written history. The library in Hope, Indiana had a whole shelf of these books and I happily read about Daniel Boone and the Alamo and John Paul Jones. I happened across this one at a middle school library clearance. The book delivers as I remember - lots of action and not much into the motivations of Francis Marion and the others who hid in the swamps of South Carolina with him and fought the British Army. That's okay, though. It's aimed at middle schoolers/upper elementary students and they don't care much for analysis anyway. Better to get them an appea...

A fun introduction to American history for young children Published June 2011 by Big Tent Books Illustrations by John W. Ewing 32 pages My Best Friend, Abe Lincoln is a children's book (ages 5-8) that creates a fictional account of the adventures of Abraham Lincoln and his best friend as a child in southern Indiana. The best friend, Sam Harding, is entirely made up (as the book makes clear) but the story is based on known details of Lincoln's childhood (for example, Lincoln called the school of his sparse formal education a "blab" school and this book does too) and includes details that would have been common to almost all children of the frontier. The illustrations should be very approachable to all children since the illustrator, John Ewing, is a former Disney illustrator and he uses a familiar Disney-esque style with his characters. I thought his interpretation of young Lincoln's face was interesting - I had never considered how Lincoln's distinctiv...

A little book about a big man (Would you like a little sci-fi with your politics?) Published by Quirk Books in January of 2012. 248 pages. Okay, let's get the ridiculous part of  the book out of the way. Yes, Taft 2012 is based entirely on a silly premise: What if William Howard Taft disappeared from history the day Wilson was inaugurated and arrived in the year 2011 and fired up everyone's imagination to run for president again in 2012? But, setting that aside, what if Taft were alive and well today? What would he think of the United States 100 years after it rejected him for his re-election bid? If you love The Twilight Zone or those Harry Turtledove time-traveling books and you are interested in politics, this one will satisfy. William Howard Taft (1857-1930) I liked the book because I liked Heller's characterization of William Howard Taft. It's not hard for this overweight reviewer to sympathize with our fattest president (he got stuck in the preside...

Very good Published by Audioworks in 1999. Read by the author, Stephen Ambrose. Duration: approximately 3 hours on audio cassette. Abridged. Ambrose's stories of male friendship in Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Sons, Pals would be good in any format, but why read what Ambrose wrote when you can hear him read it to you? There is the added benefit of hearing Ambrose's emphasis on a phrase, his light-hearted tone in some areas and, even more important to the emotional punch of some of the stories, hearing his voice break at particularly touching moments (perhaps the most touching was a comment that is highlighted in HBO's Band of Brothers . A veteran of Easy Company is asked by his grandson, "Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?" "No. I served in a company of heroes.") Stephen Ambrose (1936-2002) Ambrose focused on the friendship he and his brothers share, his friends from college, from work, the friendships of Lewis and Clark, Dwight E...

Published by NAL Hardcover in 2005 320 pages An enjoyable memoir of  Dick Winters ' life, mostly focusing on his time in the military. Dick Winters is one of the main focuses of the splendid HBO mini-series Band of Brothers and the Stephen Ambrose book by the same name. Throughout, Winters gives open and honest assessments of fellow officers and soldiers, and training levels of replacements soldiers and Korean War soldiers. Dick Winters (1918-2011) I have not yet read Stephen Ambrose's book B and of Brothers but am a giant fan of the mini-series. Dick Winters re-tells this story with the focus on his own experiences. The Nixon-Winters and Stobel-Winters relationships are explored a bit more in-depth than are presented in the TV program. The pacing of the non-military aspects of his life is generally very good, with the exception of one page early that goes into too much detail about his family background. This reflects the fact that the author is a...

A beautiful book. Recommended for map lovers and hard-core Civil War buffs. Published by Rutledge Hill Press (Thomas Nelson) in 2004. 48 pages   Thomas Nelson's Rutledge Hill Press publishing division has created a lovely book that tells a simple narrative of the Civil War focusing on the importance of maps in the war and the men who made them. The cover of the book is designed to look like a leather bound canvas portfolio, much like a mapmaker's sketchbook of the era. The text of the book is beautifully printed on high quality paper. I appreciated the fact that the publishers included lots of pictures of everyday soldiers - not just the same old posed shots of the generals and politicians. Lincoln and McClellan after Antietam There are 32 removable maps included as well. The removable maps are stored in between the pages. The publisher has printed on only one side of the thick paper pages and then glued the blank sides together on the edges to make an e...

Easily the best biography I read this year. Published in 2011 by Regnery History. Bully! The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt is exactly the kind of book that will ensure that printed books will always have a place, no matter how many e-readers are sold. This is an absolutely beautiful book. It has a satisfying heft, it is printed on high quality paper (think coffee table book quality) and is chock full of political cartoons from an era when many political cartoons would have been full color and the size of an entire newspaper page. This book inspires the reader to flip through the pages, browse a bit, admire the art and do a little reading. A larger, better reproduction of this cartoon appears in the book.  I included it as a sample of the beautiful artwork . Fortunately, Rick Marschall's text is every bit as accessible and enjoyable as the cartoons he has chosen to illustrate the hyperactive, hyper-productive, hyper-successful life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th...

A refreshing perspective on the Founding Fathers Published 2011 by Regnery History I am an avid reader of American history and one of my favorite areas to study is the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers. There is no shortage of books about the build up to the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War and Washington, Jefferson and Adams (as of late) but there is a real scarcity of books about the difficulties experienced by the Articles of Confederation government and the debates that led to the creation of the Constitution. Of course, there are the famed Federalist Papers and the lesser-known Anti-Federalist Papers but not much written as a study. James Madison (1751-1836) In Founding Rivals , DeRose tells the story as a parallel biography of Madison and Monroe - two Founding Fathers, two future presidents, both close friends of Thomas Jefferson. This is more than a bare bones biography but there were times that I found myself wanting more such as when De...

An interesting, well-written biography Published: 2011 by Thomas Nelson I've read several of the biographies in Thomas Nelson's "The Generals" series and found Pershing: Commander of the Great War to be the best of the bunch so far. The book is well-written, flows nicely and really gives the reader a feel for the bristly personality of "Black Jack" Pershing. Perry introduces us to Pershing, a man who wanted to be a teacher, maybe a lawyer,  but accepted an appointment to West Point because he could not afford to pay for school himself. Pershing was not particularly interesting in being a soldier, but found that the lifestyle suited him. Pershing's early service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War taught him plenty of lessons about the need for proper supply lines that he took with when he commanded the American army in Europe in World War I. World War I General  John J. "Black Jack" Pershing Pershing also served as an observer...

A Fascinating Investigation into American History Published 2008 by National Geographic Scott Reynolds Nelson went on a search to see if there was a real John Henry that inspired the songs and the legend of the man with the hammer who beat the steam drill in a contest. First and foremost, this is a book written for children, but it was interesting to this grown up as well. The topic was interesting, the pictures are great - lots of real pictures from the past of men on railroad work crews with their equipment. Nelson goes on to explain how the songs were used by work crews not just for entertainment but to keep time while moving tracks and pounding on spikes. Lastly, he explains, step-by-step how he makes his investigation. This could have been extraordinarily boring, but Nelson keeps it interesting. He actually creates a sense of tension as he tracks down his information. John Henry statue near Talcott, West Virginia Nelson does come up with a potential source of the legen...

Absolutely Fantastic Original Radio Broadcast by NPR Duration: 3 hours Published 2011 by HighBridge Audio NPR's American Chronicles: World War II is a 3 hour collection of 27 stories broadcast over the radio network from 1982 to 2010 around the topic of World War II. Atomic mushroom cloud over Nagasaki This collection is not designed to introduce the reader to the war or to its causes - it assumes the listener has a basic grasp of the facts. But, what it does do is delve deeply into certain topics that are associated with the war, such as the life of Londoners during the Blitz, the story of a young Japanese man who was in an internment camp, the Doolittle Raid, Bill Millin - the "Mad Piper" who played the bagpipe for his Scottish regiment as they landed at Normandy (because tradition demanded it), women on the home front, artists who may have used their skills to help the Americans to trick the Germans and an interview with one of the pilots of the plane ...

An interesting, disorganized read Published 2011 by Regnery Publishing David P. Goldman's How Civilizations Die is an ambitious study in demographics, history and cultural legacy that attempts to predict the future of Western Europe, the Middle East and the United States. In a way it is a less humorous version of Mark Steyn's After America , except that Goldman takes in the same data and comes up with radically different conclusions. Goldman writes a monthly column under the pseudonym of Spengler at Asia Times Online , a fact that Goldman assumes his readers know before they open the book and a fact I did not know (it's on the dust cover, but I had set aside the dust cover). I kept wondering who Spengler was and why Goldman was quoting him so liberally and did not get the joke until the second-to-last page of the book. Throw in a chaotically arranged beginning to the book with lots of wonderful points arranged in an apparently random fashion and this reader was frus...