Current Reading : 2018

Received yesterday, finished today an excellent Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael Leinbach.

Completed an interesting The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. I was surprised by the number of innovations that came from Bell Labs in the twentieth century.

Completed a very interesting The Fast Times of Albert Champion: From Record-Setting Racer to Dashing Tycoon, An Untold Story of Speed, Success, and Betrayal by Peter Joffre Nye.

Also finished my nighttime Kindle book, Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West by Christopher Knowlton. Unfortunately, this is more of a survey rather than an in-depth history and so skimmed over too many subjects without going into the kind of detail I prefer.

Completed our latest car book, The Blizzard of '88 by Mary Cable, the story of the storm of April 1888 with a focus on New York City. Pretty good.

And finished my Audible book The Witch of Lime Street: Seance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher. I listen to my Audible books most mornings when I go out for my four mile walk; need a lot of motivation to do four miles!

And I completed a truly excellent book, Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White. Much more than just a pop history, it also intertwines the story of the National Reconnaissance Office and how their assets were used to verify the integrity of the heat shield. Very highly recommended.

Finished a very, very short The Army moves West: Supplying the Western Indians Wars Campaign by Robert A Murray. The Amazon store page doesn't show number of pages, which is 28, including covers and a couple of blank pages, although the text on each page is double column. It shouldn't take more than an hour to read. The book(let) consists of three essays, one on steamboats, one on wagons and the third on packmules. The essays are interesting and well-written, but definitely only an introduction to the subject.

I just finished The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis on Audible. Very interesting story, well told if a bit cerebral. The narration by Robertson Dean was brilliant and made it more enjoyable.

I've begun The Armies of Labor: a Chronicle of the Organized Wage Earners by Samuel P. Orth. This book was originally published in 1919 and is part of the Yale Chronicles of America series. Orth was a professor of political science at Cornell when he wrote this book. So, this is a book about the history of the American labor movement written almost 100 years ago.

I have been working on Perilous times : free speech in wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the war on terrorism since the first of the year. It is not bad but so far nothing outstanding. I am not going to make a final judgement on it yet, we are only up to WWII and so far the four periods of conflict Stone has looked at, the tensions here during the "half war" with France, the US Civil War, WWI, and WWII and no pattern has come up.

Finished a short but well written Amazon Single, Speed Girl: Janet Guthrie and the Race That Changed Sports Forever by Stephan Talty. This is one of their Kindle in Motion eBooks, with embedded animation and video that can be viewed on some devices.

And finally completed Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott. An excellent, comprehensive history of the raid, including the events that lead up to it and what happened afterwards. Although I had read The Doolittle Raid: America's Daring First Strike Against Japan by Carroll V. Glines years ago, I learned a number of new details from this new book.

Finished a short but very interesting An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy.

Completed an interesting, if a bit dry From the Missouri to the Great Salt Lake : An Account of Overland Freighting by William E. Lass.

Completed my latest Kindle book, Grierson's Raid by Dee Alexander Brown.

Completed a short but interesting Cable Car 1873-1973 by Christopher Swan and others.

Finished a short and not very satisfying Howard Hughes: Aviator by George J. Marrett. Written in an anecdotal style that never seemed to go very deep into any particular aspect of Hughes, his aircraft or his business endeavors.

Completed a delightful Fill 'er Up: The Story of Fifty Years of Motoring by Bellamy Partridge, published in 1952.

Finished listening to Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre by Thomas A. Bogar. Very well written and interesting, it contains a wealth of information about the American theater in the second half of the nineteen century.

Got through Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power by Kevin Peraino. The author spent much more time on other persons than Lincoln. Also it felt drawn out with the author re-iterating his points over and over.

Finally gave up listening to The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life by Margaret Guroff. The book was a bit too shallow at times and then meandered off on a chapter on magazines, advertising and consumerism. Happily Audible gave me a refund.

Finished an excellent Hell Before Breakfast: America's First War Correspondents Making History and Headlines, from the Battlefields of the Civil War to the Far Reaches of the Ottoman Empire by Robert H. Patton.

Finished listening to an excellent The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer — The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb by James Kunetka. The book also covers in great detail the building up of the Los Alamos site and the development of the atomic bomb. Highly recommended, also the Audible narrator Malcolm Hillgartner is excellent.

Finished a long and rambling Ethan Allen: His Life and Times by Willard Sterne Randall.

I know this isn't the correct place to ask this question, but I assumed you would all know, and aside from adding books to my library I am completely unfamiliar with how LibraryThing works. I would like to add books to my currently reading list and also books I've finished reading. I don't know how. Could someone please direct me?

I have this book I will add it to my list of "to be read". Could you please tell me how to do that? I am having some trouble trying to figure out how to add things to the "to be read" and "currently reading list". Any help would be appreciatedl

Dear irregular yankee, go to the book in your library. When you are on the book's page you will see "Book Collections" about two inches from the top. Hit the drop down button. It will give you several options including putting the book in the to read category or currently reading.

Completed listening to an excellent Sonic Wind: The Story of John Paul Stapp and How a Renegade Doctor Became the Fastest Man on Earth by Craig Ryan. A well constructed biography of a very interesting person.

Finished an interesting, if academic and a bit slow, Canals For A Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790-1860 by Ronald E. Shaw.

Today I will start Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry

Finished an interesting Mad Jack Percival: Legend of the Old Navy by James H. Ellis, part of the Library of Naval Biography series from the Naval Institute Press.

While normally I wouldn't post about a book on sale, the Kindle version of Washington's Immortals: The Untold Story of an Elite Regiment Who Changed the Course of the Revolution by Patrick K. O'Donnell is on sale today for $1.20 USD, a lower price than even the usual Kindle sale price of $1.99.

I finished the excellent history Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the first origins of the concept of separation of church and state in American (and English) political/religious though, 100 years before Jefferson and the rest of the founders of the American republic.

Completed a well written Beat the Last Drum: The Siege of Yorktown by Thomas Fleming.

Finished an excellent Lincoln's Admiral: The Civil War Campaigns of David Farragut by James P. Duffy.

sorry, wrong thread!

I've been slogging through Gustavus Myers' History of the Great American Fortunes (Modern Library, 1933) which at 700 dense pages is tough sledding, but very rewarding. The book was first published in the early 1900s so what happened in the late 1800s was relatively recent history to Myers, who was a social reformer (Socialist? Muckraker? The terms had very different meanings then than now). He looks at how the great capitalists of U.S history made their fortunes and concludes that it was almost always by fraud and thievery, but that was the way the system worked in those days. Much of his research is from long-forgotten Congressional investigations that showed how the Astors, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Sage's, Fields and others bribed and stole their way to immense fortunes while the great mass of Americans struggled to make ends meet and were thrown into jail if they committed any small crime. Astor became rich sneaking large quantities of liquor into Indian territory to debauch the natives and convince them to sell his agents furs at low prices that he could peddle abroad for immense riches, then invested that cash into Manhattan real estate where he made huge profits building tenements jammed with immigrants. Much of the book is about how the leading capitalists of the day made their fortunes in railroads, bribing state governments to give them millions of acres of land at minimal cost, plus funding from the state or the public, which they then defrauded by setting up their own construction companies who sold services to the railroads at exorbitant rates or by issuing bonds way beyond the value of the railroad and then paying bondholders (themselves) excessive dividends. It's the sort of thing that you weren't taught in H.S. or most college U.S. history classes that tend to gloss over the period between the Civil War and WW1 as too complicated to explain. And then I started C. Vann Woodward's classic Origins of the New South and realized he has the same theme, how folks like Gould and Sage and other industrialists allied themselves with the emerging business interests in the post Civil War South, as opposed to the often more radical planter/rural interests, to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 and end Reconstruction. Once again, it is railroad fraud and the accompanying theft of mineral rights in places like north Alabama (railroads were given millions of acres of federal or state-owned land adjacent to the rail lines as an inducement to build the rails) that drives the transition to the "New" industrialist-friendly South." And of course, the folks who back these ventures argue that the alternative is for the Negroes and Northern Carpetbaggers to return to return and strip power from white folks, most of whom, as tenant farmers renting their land, have no education and no real prospects themselves.

Completed an interesting, but rather long Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White by Paul R. Baker. This book might appeal more to those who have a bent towards architecture and art.

Finished listening to an excellent Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern.

>35 rocketjk: That is one of my favorite books. And Roger Williams is on my list of historical people I'd love to have dinner with.

>42 southernbooklady: Yes, it was quite good, and definitely an eye-opener for me, as I knew very little about Williams beforehand.

Finished an interesting Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation by Dean Jobb.

Finished listening to the Audible version of America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve by Roger Lowenstein. Very interesting, well written and narrated.

Completed a so-so The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America by Eric Jaffe. A somewhat shallow popular history, which really didn't address that much "lost history".

Finally gave up about three-fifths of the way through The Life and Legend of Jay Gould by Maury Klein. It's a very good book, but the main body is 500 densely packed pages and it deal a lot with stock transactions, lawsuits, directorship changes and general wheeling and dealing. That involved a lot (I mean a lot) of names and since I've never been good at remembering names and have gotten worse as I've gotten older, I finally had to give up as it was starting to become a blur to me.

It is, as I said, a very good book. Gould has been painted a a villain stock manipulator uninterested in the industries he owned, but this well researched book shows him as an empire builder in railroads, telegraphs and other businesses. The author uses excerpts from older biographies and newspaper stories at the start of each chapter to show how Gould has been represented in the past and then delves into detail to show that often Gould was misunderstood or misrepresented. The author doesn't make value judgements since as he notes, no man is a hero or a villain to his biographer.

Completed an interesting Air-conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960 by Gail Cooper.

Finished listening to Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World's Fastest Clipper Ship by Steven Ujifusa. Very good.

Completed Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules: The San Antonio-El Paso Mail, 1851-1881 by Wayne R. Austerman. Very interesting western history.

And finished listening to Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America by Brian McGinty. Pretty good book, although perhaps padded a bit.

Completed Tom Paine's Iron Bridge: Building a United States by Edward G. Gray. Kind of interesting, it focused on Paine's interest in bridge building, specifically iron bridges.

Finished listening to Race to Hawaii: The 1927 Dole Air Derby and the Thrilling First Flights That Opened the Pacific by Jason Ryan. Reasonably good, although the author padded it a bit with lots of background.

Finished a couple more:

First, our car book (my wife reads to me as I driver), Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans by Gary Krist. Reasonably good, although because it tried to cover such a large period of time it skimmed a bit in places.

And secondly, in hardcover, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick. Superb history, very readable and I learned quite a lot.

>53 jztemple:, I read a similar type book by Bill Bryson that expanded on the race to include many other happenings that year. One Summer: America, 1927 Very well written (Lately I have been enjoying his historical books much more than his travel books - lots of fun and doesn't take himself too seriously)

jztemple, Hello. A question. Are we able to add Audible (books on tape) to our Library? Thanks

Yes, I have added books from Audible to my Library, but to do so I had to first go to the Amazon product page for the book. When the Audiobook format is selected, down in the Product details section the ASIN is displayed. When you enter that number (actually is it usually in an alphanumeric format) into the search box on the Add book page in LT, you'll see an eBook version of the book over on the right that you can select. This might sound like a lot of effort, but with some copy and paste keyboard shortcuts it has become second nature to me.

Just for my own sanity, since I might have more than one format of the same book, I use the tags "Audible" and "Kindle" for the appropriate formats.

Thank you, appreciated!!

Finished Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum by Edward T. O'Donnell.

I have to get back in the habit of stopping by here. The last book I mentioned reading was way back in February. Since then I have read,

American Uprising, a very readable book on an interesting topic but I would call it a "popular history", not as documented as I would like but as Rasmussen points out the story was suppressed by the slave owners.

The Kerner report : the 1968 report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. I found a copy after hearing about it's 50th annaversery on NPR. Nothing ever changes, we are doomed.

To End a Presidency Tribe is right, impeachment is scary, you never know what the presidents supporters will do so unless the situation gets dire, Congress needs to do their job and hold the executive branch in line.

Innumeracy : mathematical illiteracy and its consequences Not as old or as powerful as How to lie with Statistics but I found it enlightening.

White fragility I thought my eyes were open. It turns out they wern't really. Great book, the more it offends you the more you need to read it.

Manufacturing hysteria : a history of scapegoating, surveillance, and secrecy in modern America. Like Perilous Times and so many other histories it just shows that nothing ever changes. We are lead like sheep by those immoral enough to try.

Currently I am reading Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court nomination that changed America. LBJ convinced Justice Tom Clark to step down so he could appoint Marshall. He did that by using his son, Ramsey Clark, as a lever. Does that sound familiar to anyone else?

I finished On Watch, Elmo Zumwalt's fascinating, if extremely detailed, memoir as his time as Chief Naval Officer during the Nixon Administration. It was not really written as a history, as Zumwalt wrote it very soon after the events, and as a memoir the book is neither as balanced nor as objective as one would want from a traditional history. Nevertheless, read from this remove, time-wise, On Watch comes across as vivid reflection of many of the issues of the 1970s, especially as experienced from within the military establishment and from within the Nixon/Kissinger bizarro world.

My more in-depth comments on both books, especially the latter, can be found on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Finished listening to an interesting Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain's Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour by Richard Zacks.

And still on our cross-country trip, we finished listening to Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution by Todd S. Purdum. Excellent!

Finished listening to the final book we started on our trip, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution by John Oller.

I finished the excellent Day of Infamy, Walter Lord's minute-by-minute account of the attack on Pearl Harbor, published in 1957.

Completed reading a rather good How the Post Office Created America: A History by Winifred Gallagher.

Finished listening to an excellent The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles by Gary Krist.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean about the fire at the 1986 LA Central Library. I've always loved her journalistic writing style and appreciate that she keeps the story about the subject not about her. Very interesting so far.

Finished an excellent Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program by David Stumpf, and the next day I finished the companion The Titan II Handbook: A Civilian's Guide to the Most Powerful ICBM America Ever Built by Chuck Penson. I picked up these books, as well as a reprint of the official Dash One, on a recent trip to the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona, which I highly recommend visiting.

I finished the very interesting The Grandma Stubblefield Rose: The Life of Susan Stubblefield, 1811-1895 by Edna Beth Tuttle and Dennie Burke Willis. Susan Stubblefield was born in upstate New York in 1811. She moved progressively west with first one husband, then another (both were drowned). Then, with her third husband and extended family, she went across the continent from Missouri to California in a covered wagon. The family settled eventually in Anderson Valley, Mendocino County, CA, in 1858. I live in Anderson Valley now, and reading this book is part of my ongoing project of reading frequently about the history of the region. This is a self-published book, a fictionalized account drawn from diaries and written by two of Stubblefield's great-great grandchildren. The Stubblefield rose was a small rose bush given to Susan upon her first wedding day by her own mother. The plant had been brought from France two generations before that! Stubblefield brought the plant with her across the country until she eventually gave it two her own daughter. It is used here as a symbol of the continuity of family even withstanding the vast miles of distance that can open up as children travel away from parents.

Completed Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West 1830-1890 by Peter Pagnamenta. Well written and interesting.

Finished The Curse of Beauty: The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America's First Supermodel by James Bone. Started off well, but then the author kept going way off topic on some barely related subject. It was a three hundred page book that could have been pared down to two hundred pages and made a lot more readable. Not recommended.

Finished listening to Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit by William Knoedelseder. They say you never want to meet your heroes and it turns out, sometimes you wish you hadn't read about them. Turns out that while Harley Earl was a great car designer, personally he was, in many ways, an asshole. Oh well.

Completed my lasted Kindle book, The Electra Story: The Dramatic History of Aviation's Most Controversial Airliner by Robert J Serling.

Finished Hello, Everybody!: The Dawn of American Radio by Anthony Rudel, a narrative history of early radio, from the twenties to the early thirties. Very well written and a fun read.

Completed an excellent Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129 by Norman Polmar. Polmar is a serious naval historian, meaning this book has been pretty much overlooked while Red Star Rogue sold like hotcakes, even though it was (to put it mildly) a load of dingo's kidneys. Or at least that's what I think :-)

Finished Rough Riders: Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy Regiment, and the Immortal Charge Up San Juan Hill by Mark Lee Gardner.

Completed an excellent Where Right and Glory Lead! The Battle of Lundy's Lane, 1814 by Donald E. Graves.

I finished Groucho: the Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx by Stefan Kanfer. This a well-written and fascinating (if not always pleasant in subject matter) biography of an enormously influential figure in American (and world) comedy in particular and culture in general.

Finished an interesting, if somewhat disjointed Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York by Thomas M. Truxes. While the focus is on New York City, the theme of the book is the illicit trade carried on by the British American colonies with the French during the French & Indian War (aka the Seven Years War). It jumps back and forth in time a bit, but there is a Chronology in the back of the book that helps out. There is also large cast of characters to keep track of, but again there is a Glossary of Persons in the back. There is also a Glossary of Terms and a final section of Statues, Proclamations, and Orders in Council. Definitely recommended if you have an interest in Colonial America and especially those circumstances that lead up to the Revolution.

Finished a short but very enjoyable Comstock Commotion : the Story of the Territorial Enterprise and Virginia City News by Lucius Beebe. The Territorial Enterprise was an early newspaper in territory that later became Nevada, famous for its outlandish editorials and stylish writing; it is where Samuel Clements (aka Mark Twain) got his start as a newspaperman. The book was published in 1954, a couple of years after the paper was revived by the author and his partner who were also responsible for a number of books about railroads, the West and other subjects. Lucius Beebe was quite a character in his own right and has a marvelously breezy yet quite literate style that sent me to the Internet a few times to look up words and references that were probably more well known sixty plus years ago. Very highly recommended.

Today I'm going to start The Life of Andrew Jackson by Marquis James, winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for History. I'll be a while, as the book, really two volumes republished together, checks in at almost 800 pages.

I finally finished The Life of Andrew Jackson by Marquis James. This detailed biography, actually two books republished together as one volume in 1937, won a Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1938. It is very detailed (786 pages worth), well written and quite fascinating for anyone with an interest in American History. However, it is a product of its time in that James white-washes almost entirely Jackson's duplicitous and in many cases murderous actions towards Native Americans, both as a military leader and as president (the Trail of Tears, for example, is not mentioned other than as what is implied to be a benign forced movement of Indians from Georgia and Florida to west of the Mississippi) and James actually comes up with a short but jaw-dropping defense of slavery. So in the reading I learned about Jackson's life and times, and also was reminded about what attitudes would still have been in 1938.

Is there a new thread?

>84 cindydavid4: Not seeing one. Guess we could use one!

New thread started!

jztemple: I was just reading through all these very old posts and noticed yours about Grierson's Raid. Isn't that about the campaign where the soldiers all rode mules? I enjoyed that story as well. And I love to read Dee Brown. He is one of my favorite authors.

I don't believe that the troopers on Grierson's Raid were mounted on mules, certainly not with all the terrain they covered, but it's been a while since I read the book.

I like Dee Brown as well. The first book of his I read was The Galvanized Yankees which I just happened across at a used book store. The recruiting of Confederate prisoners to serve as Union troops on the Indian frontier was something I had not read about before. It led me to seek out more books of his.