Try Almost A Miracle by John Ferling, your admiration of George Washington will grow, esp. after the war when he could have declared a dictatorship.

and, An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson, the first in his liberation trilogy and the best of the two book series, IMO. Knowing Atkinson, though, his third volume about Normandy and the Western Europe campaign yet to be published, will be his best.

All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz and I'm fine.

Current inventory of new stuff in the hotel room (the rest are in the back of the truck)

The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque by David Danow.

Euripides: Bacchae, the Cambridge translation. A good, solid translation, less ornate and flowery than some might like, but the text is so amazing. Changes your opinion of Greek plays entirely.

The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan by Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi

A bio of Alberto Santos-Dumont by Paul Hoffman.

Paints a really complete picture of the man and his times, especially in Paris.

Alberto Santos-Dumont was an expat Brazilian who was the first person to achieve controlled flight of any kind, with powered dirigibles (lighter than air). He was also probably the first civilian to wear a wristwatch (designed for him by Cartier), and the first guy to fly an airplane in Europe for any significant distance (about 800 feet in 1906).

He had no formal engineering training but was a heck of a character, and quite lucky as well since he logged hundreds of flights and had several accidents, none serious so far. I'm nearly done.

I still have not read the Eugene Bullard bio. I'll have more to say about that at some time in the future.

I read Kurt Vonnegut's "A man without a country" a few months ago. I thought it was too negative and hopeless, though it also has some very sharp humor and not a little wisdom.

Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes, is next to my side of the bed and has been there for a while. I started on it and it looks good, but it's not for reading when tired.

Of course not!

I enjoyed it, but I suspect it may have something to do with my being an immigrant and a former cricketer.

More Wagster!

I read Bob Dylan's autobiography this week. Tons of interesting anecdotes -- meeting Monk + Belafonte, etc. Plus you get Bob's thoughts on the civil war + civil war history. Not everything's written perfectly but there are great phrases and his ramblin ways made for a pleasurable read.

Also enjoyed Russell Bank's Rule of the Bone last week. I believe it was panned, but I thought the tale was honest + insightful.

I've read:

Churchill's memoirs, which are about Churchill and also some altercation with the Germans (just kidding, though I did read the abridged version to cut down on the bloviation).

Stephen Ambrose books are terrific.

I'm working through Richard Evans' relatively new history of the Third Reich.

With The Old Breed by E.B. Sledge was recommended here and is probably one of the first I'd rerecommend. Visceral, terse, powerful, candid, very human view of island hopping from the marine POV.

Read Elie Wiesel when I was way too young, don't believe anyone covers the holocaust better.

Spiegelman's Maus, also when I was pretty young.

Shirer's Rise & Fall.

Homage to Catalonia.

Beevor's Stalingrad.

From the top of my head. I've read a smattering of other things, but nothing else big that jumps out ofthe memory hole.

Any big recommendations? Any genre or level of specificity is fine. Memoirs, histories, bios, battle reviews, civilian life. Possibly literature, though I've read much of that too. As long as it's phenomenally good & worth reading, I'll give it a shot.

I still need to see Ken Burns' The War too.

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH

For about $5, The Narrative of Cabeza De Vaca. He wandered around Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas -- just about everywhere -- for nearly 12 years, naked half the time. Incredible narrative of what the US was like in the 1500s.

I'm also plowing my way through The White Castle, by Ornam Pamuk, a Nobel Prize winner. So far, I'm not terribly impressed -- magic realism with unreliable narrators is so 1975.

They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist...
-- General John B. Sedgwick, 1864

After my last little op, I decided to try going definitively off Advil, which I'd been taking daily for years. Needless to say, it sort of sucks, since everything now hurts, but in the month I've been off them, I've suddenly started writing compulsively, half a chapter a day in fact. That means my new novel should be finished by Christmas, hopefully. The problem with reading--and I still read about a book a day, as well--is that I'm so easily influenced by the styles of other writers and find myself trying to write like them. Especially if they're way better than me, which means I'm at the mercy of pretty much any new discovery.

But one genre is perfect. The British thriller, ca. 1960-1990. Hard-boiled, frantically-paced relics of the Cold War, with exotic adventure, seductive women, and brutal violence often thrown in gratis, their terse prose styles and witty dialogue keep me on target, as well as providing me with a gold mine of info about detonating bombs, for example, or killing someone with a fountain pen. Some of these authors are famous and can still be found in most libraries--Hammond Innes, Duncan Kyle, Desmond Bagley, Anthony Price, and Adam Hall, to name a few--but I've also happily found several dozen others of their kind lost in dusty paperback morgues. If anyone is interested in a fuller list, they need only ask.

"Nazi Literature in the Americas" was enough to pique my interest in Bolano. But I'm still pretty committed to trying my hand at "Infinite Jest," so one of these two is going to have to wait.

Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.