What book are you reading?

I'm finishing up a great book written by one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.

This is Douglass' third and last autobiography, which covers most of his life.

 

Thanks, Jack - I may have to read that myself.

I've read the memoirs of the Habsburgs' greatest general, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who might be the most underappreciated military leader in Western history.

 

Yup. Marlborough's great partner. We had the chance to tour Eugene's palace outside Vienna a few years back.

 

Nice.

 

Those of us of Hungarian ancestry are forever grateful to Prince Eugene for ending nearly 150 years of Ottoman control in Hungary.

 

Yup, although Hungarians' sentiments toward the Habsburgs remained, shall we say, ambivalent.

 

Yep, we were always treated like poor relatives.

 

Hungarians aren't the only ones.

Eugene's victory at Zenta and the Treaty of Karlowitz that followed it marked an enormous turning point in Western history.

 

I was buying my wife a couple William Faulkner novels for her personal collection and decided to read Light in August, which is one of the novels that earned Faulkner the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is probably the most beautifully written book I have read since Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which is a strange thing because the story line and some of the characters in Light in August are so brutally harsh. The contrast between the two is striking and at times jarring throughout the entire novel.

 

This is timely...



I highly recommend this book. It's a great summary of radical Islam right up to 9/11.

 

I just finished reading "The Arms Maker of Berlin." It's a novel based on the efforts of a present day historian tracking down information on a wealthy German industrialist who had been first a teenage resistance activist and then a collaborator during the Nazi terror in Europe. I read it particularly to learn more about the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the student resistance group the White Rose. That's a time period I'm very interested in.

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Gilles Kepel wrote a great history of the Modern Islamist movement, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, from Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood (c. 1920s) forward, but for the ideological stuff you have to read all the way back to Islamic scripture and the career of Muhammad.

 

In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War by Alice Rains Trulock.

 

He had a pretty good career after the wat as well.

 

Music is History by Questlove.

 

The Everything Guide to Understanding Socialism: The political, social, and economic concepts behind this complex theory

 

I need to find a good book to read this fall. I am in the federal jury pool for a few months and they say if called, bring something to read because there is going to be a lot of sitting around time for that windfall of 50 whole dollars a day.

 

Upon hearing the sad news of David McCullough's passing I decided to pick up my copy of 1776 and read through it again. What a wonderful historian and writer...

David McCullough: America’s Storyteller
https://www.realclearhistory.com/ar...d_mccullough_americas_storyteller_849167.html

 

Heat 2. Picks up where the original movie left off. Worth a read if you liked the movie Heat.

 

Finishing up Gordon Wood's Pulitzer Prize winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution which examines the enormous changes that took place in American society during and after the revolutionary period. The author does an outstanding job of debunking the narrative that the American Revolution was a conservative revolution, when in fact it radically overturned the feudalistic society that existed during the Colonial Era. This is arguably the best book I've read on the American Revolution, and it helps explain why similar revolutionary groups in Europe, such as the Levellers (John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn & Co.), failed to establish a republic in England a century earlier. Highly recommended.

 

A good book that addresses the barriers to productive communication and techniques to mitigate them in order to become a more persuasive orator.

 

On my fiction reading list. I look forward to reading it.

 

Currently re-reading Wilson, a biography on, well, Woodrow Wilson. Although the biographer does show his liberal bias, the prose is clean and crisp, making for easy, enjoyable reading; plus, there is a wealth of detail about the man who was fundamental in the Progressive Era and whose ideas are fundamental to modern American liberalism.

 

I've read both his books on John Adams and Harry Truman.

One of the most interesting things about McCullough was that he was a luddite: despite word processing software, he was prolific with an old-fashioned typewriter.

 

That's interesting about McCullough sticking with his old typewriter. When I started re-reading 1776 I was reminded of what a great historian and writer he was. The book opens with George III's visit and address to Parliament where he declared his subjects in America in rebellion, and his account is so vivid and detailed you could picture yourself being there. As you know, he had a wonderful knack for humanizing his histories - they weren't just a stale recounting of historical facts and dates.

I've also read his biography of Adams and it's very good. One of these days I'm going to have to hunt down a bio of his son John Quincy, who was a remarkable man himself.