Current Reading: September 2021

I finished the mostly excellent history The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. The subtitle for Larson's latest is "A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz," which is a pretty good description. This is a history of the first year of Churchill's time as Britain's wartime Prime Minister. I was mostly already familiar with the circumstances of the Battle of Britain, but Larson, in focusing in on this one year and in the Churchill family's experience of the event, adds a lot of detail that was new, and interesting, to me. The details about Churchill's key advisors, what they accomplished and how they supported Churchill, for example, worked very well for me, as did the descriptions of Churchill's desperate attempts to encourage Roosevelt to do as much as he could, in the face of very stubborn American politics and isolationism, to support England's war effort. The horrifying narratives about individual nights or the Blitz, where the bombs fell on particular nights, what damage was done during each raid, and how diarists described the events, helped to transform the Blitz for me from a general impression of calamity, fear and death to a succession of individual desperately fearful events. In other words, I had come to think of "the Blitz" as a single event rather than a years-long series of individual nights of terror. Another strength of the book is its depiction of Churchill as an individual during these times, as seen through the eyes of the people who worked with and for him, and also the depictions of the ways in which the English people rallied around him.

Nearing the end of Ancient Battle Formations.

It's a curious book that I feel falls between audiences: it's too idiosyncratic to be recommended to the general reader, too unacademic to be suitable for the specialist.

>2 AndreasJ: Thanks for posting about that book. I've put it on my wish lists since I'm a miniatures and computer wargame player from way back with an interests in Ancients.

Finished Panzergrenadiers to the Front!, which purports to be a history of the Panzergrenadier Division "Brandenburg," but which offers big hunks of semi-digested extracts from other sources in lieu of trying to wrest some meaning out of this unit's wartime service. This is apart from some bland commentary on personal motivation and what seems to be a low-key effort to maintain the "good" German army/"bad" Waffen-SS mythology of the Cold War. The author mostly seems to have a reputation as a collator of documentary materials, so the book is probably acceptable from that perspective

Just finished Jeff Shaara's The Eagle's Claw: A Novel of the Battle of Midway. Very typical Shaara, making it a story from the POV of both sides. He did include one person from US Intelligence, on the HYPO team, which was a perspective I had not seen in such detail before.

Appsrently didn’t mention Rome and the Enemy here, which I finished earlier this week. It’s about Imperial Roman strategy from Augustus to Alexander Severus, and I found it quite good.

Wrapped up Portuguese Fighter Colours 1919-1956, which I mostly picked up a few years ago because it was cheap, but the authors do tell an interesting story about the desperate efforts of Lisbon to procure combat aircraft for the country's defense.

>5 Karlstar: Funny, I never thought of mentioning military fiction here, but I like the idea, so I'll mention now my recent reading of Shiloh by Shelby Foote. It's a short, well written, research-based novel about the bloody American Civil War battle of the title. Like the Shaara mentioned above, Shiloh is told from multiple views, Union and Confederate, officer and enlisted. Quite good, I thought. It was written in the 1950s, though, and I'm not sure whether Foote's research has held up over the intervening years.

Finished up Southern Gambit this evening, a really excellent examination of why the final British offensive to quash the American Revolution failed.

Completed reading With the Camel Corps up the Nile by Count Gleichen, a firsthand account of the Gordon Relief Expedition of 1884-85 from the perspective of a young officer of the Guards. Very interesting and enjoyable.