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What Are You Reading Right Now?

I'm a member of Audible. You can pick any book once a month.
But they have some out of print books free to download.
My last three freebies were the memoirs of WWII German soldiers and airmen told fron their perspective.
I can tell you, the Eastern (Russian) front was a tough go for them.
 
 
Forgotten Soldier?

Incredible book. And a side of WW2 not many people know.
 
The Southern Trial by Peter O'Mahoney. It's part of a four book series. A good friend and I are also discussing Barbara Pym, whom she has never read, and a series of books she has recommended to me that I have never read, The Thursday Murder Club Mysteries by Richard Osman (a series of four) so I may be reading and discussing these authors, too.
 
I just finished reading (yes I know I start all my "reviews" this way) How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Foregiveness by Harold S. Kushner. Just as I did with When Bad Things Happen to Good People, I am giving this a "five." Judaism admits of many points of view on many subjects and Rabbi Kushner's views on many topics align comfortably with mine. He puts it into words better than I can.

I am familiar with his view, for example, that the exit from the Garden of Eden reflects mankind's evolution from being just a higher level of mammal into something unique and important. This is but an example. An excellent book both for Jewish people and those that want to understand Jewish and human perspectives on vital matters.
 
I read When Bad Things Happen To Good People many, many years ago. I think I may have been in college. I was impressed by it, however. I do not remember reading your review on it, @JBG. This is not the kind of thread I read like a novel; I just slip in and out and see what anyone has written recently. I am sorry I missed your review, though.
 
I read When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Paperback) by Harold S. Kushner in 2013, before I was posting reviews. The book is an excellent discussion of G-d's role or lack thereof in day-to-day life in Jewish terms. I have come to agree with most of the book's precepts, that G-d's role is limited to setting up the world, giving humans more powers than animals or plants, and then letting go. G-d does not cause or prevent cancer or other horrible deaths. By coincidence Rabbi Kushner was apparently the Rabbi that married my natural parents in February 1955. The reason I say "apparently" is that my mother told me he was the Rabbi and a substitute for another Rabbi. I have my doubts because he was a month or two shy of turning 20 at that point. Now a rabbinic student can fulfill this role but apparently not then.

It possible that another Rabbi, the one who was supposed to officiate, filled out the paperwork and that (soon-to-be) Rabbi Kushner went to the Hampshire Hotel in NYC to officiate a ceremonial iteration of the actual, legal wedding.
 
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I just finished reading The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human. I strongly recommend reading this book. Nevertheless, i'm only giving you the three. There are nuggets of gold buried in the book, as well as stretches of hysteric writing and excessive polemics against the COVID vaccine. I agree with the book to the extent that the lockdowns were caught I fe unnecessary, dehumanizing and very destructive of people with little power to resist. I also agree that people should have questions and resisted, especially as it became clear that there was not going to be any reopening after the initial two weeks to “flatten the curve."

Essentially, the author has the zeal of the converted. Formerly on the far left of the political fringe, she shifted almost to the far right. As good and as useful as much of the material is, her political zealotry And fostering of some conspiracy theories takes some of the worthwhile enjoyment out of the book. To get education in anti lockdown hues I recommend the book that I read about two weeks ago, Blindsight is 2020 by Jessica McCullough.
 
I just finished reading A Man of Iron; the Turbulent Life and Improbably Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik. His final words "I have tried so hard to do right” (link) sum up his life. He is best known for being the only president to serve two non-contiguous terms, and the first Democrat elected after the Civil War. He is indeed not well known for events or achievements during his presidency.

There is much interesting both about the book and the man. Perhaps a person who serves so many positions without moral blemish should be notable. In those days as now, scandal in one form or another swirls around presidents and other prominent politicians. In fact, by the time his terms of office ended, he was clearly a man of the past. It is unfortunate that nowadays as in his days, such virtue is rewarded backhandedly or not at all. The role of the federal government is vastly expanded from his days, and he was dealt with in the headlines a lot less than modern presidents.

His example and integrity should be better known and rewarded.
 


The Penultimate Truth by Philip K Dick. I think my bookstore has me figured out. They know I buy a PKD book all the time, so they always stock another one that I havent read yet, and so I end up buying it. Damn them!

This one is a post apocalyptic tale about a group of people whove been living underground in a fallout community shelter for over a decade, building robots to send out onto the surface to keep fighting WW3, but... things might not be what they seem. If this sounds like the plot for a ton of Hollywood movies and TV shows like Fallout and Silo, thats because it is... only PKD did it first!

The first chapter, in which someone is dictating words to an AI computer thats eerily reminiscent of ChatGPT blew my mind away. To think that PKD thought this up back in the early 1960s is just mind-boggling. Sadly though, it kinda goes downhill after that. In the end, its not his best book and the stodgy writing once again makes it a tough slog, but I think its still worth anyones time purely because of the awesome ideas he thought of well before everyone else copied them into cliches. Rating 7/10
 
I have almost finished The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman and I have devoured it. It is very clever and I have been extremely amused by the writing. The characters are well drawn and the plot is zany, but its just being so well written that makes it fun to read. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading; it is a very easy read.
 

I liked that one too.
 


Set mostly in the year 1804, this book sheds light on an often overlooked period of American history. While we all know about the famous duel, the setting, and the actions of our Founding Fathers in the post war period, make for fascinating reading.
 


Sheridan's Secret Mission: How the South Won the War After the Civil War

by Robert Cwiklik / Harper / 2024 / 240pp

This book diocuments how President Grant used former Union Army hero General Philip Sheridan to counter increasingly violent white supremacy groups in the South during Reconstruction. The parallells between then and now are striking. Accusations of "rigged" elections by Democrats (who are today's Republicans), Donald Trump borrowing from the Andrew Jackson playbook to provide white supremacy groups such as the White League permission to begin a guerilla war against Reconstruction, and a legal system with its share of corrupt and racist judges... for example, the Colfax Massacre of 1873. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, white policemen and White League militiamen attacked blacks holding a meeting in the Red River town of Colfax. About 70 blacks were killed (many after they had surrendered) and 40 taken prisoner ... and executed that very night. 97 white men were indicted in New Orleans federal court. Federal authorities, due to budgetary constraints, only brought 9 to trial and of these only 3 were convicted. On June 27, 1874, US Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley threw out the 3 Colfax convictions ruling that the murders were a state problem rather than a federal one and beyond the reach of the 14th Amendment.

Addendum: The SC ruling in the United States v. Cruikshank case (1875) meant that the federal government would not intervene on paramilitary and group attacks on individuals. It essentially opened the door to heightened paramilitary activity in the South that forced Republicans from office, suppressed black voting, and opened the way for white Democratic takeover of state legislatures, and resulting Jim Crow laws and passage of disfranchising constitutions.

Joseph P. Bradley - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org
 
Threegoofs said:
Forgotten Soldier?

Incredible book. And a side of WW2 not many people know.
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Guy Sager. I have both a hard copy and a audible version. Incredible book. An endless agony. The Red Army keeps coming like a terrible, relentless bad storm.
 




I am a member as well. At this point I have 111 titles in my library and 4 credits waiting. My problem is I never get round to canceling subscriptions. Audible is awesome. Its a fun way of doing books I read long ago.
 
I just finished reading The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History by Boris Johnson. Yes, that Boris Johnson, who was later a much less long serving or consequential British Prime Minister. Obviously, Winston Churchill was his hero, but he was many other people's heroes. For example, his grandson, who said: "You know, in many ways he was quite a normal sort of family man." After this quote, Boris Johnson states:
I am wavering on whether to give this book 4 or 5 stars. I suppose I will give it 4 stars. The book come of like many other biographies of great leaders, verges on hagiography. I suppose this is inevitable because cover unless you are writing about a criminal or a horrible person, you write it out people who you admire. The book does not have some of the ills of most such books, which is to spend an undue amount of time on early life, which is usually quite unexceptional.

Boris Johnson does an extremely good job of laying out his greatness, without ignoring some of the shortcomings of the subject personally, or the mixed results of some of his initiatives. He obviously“hit the English language to war” (my statement coming at the authors) and earned him himself a place in history. Arguably without him, the world would have been dominated by two ogres, Stalin and Hitler. To that, we owe an immense debt. Is the crystal clear in this book.

The book also makes clear his intense ties to the United States and his love of this country.
 


The Gaunt's Ghost series
By Dan Abnett

I just finished the last book in the 15 book series of Gaunt's Ghosts.

It's quickly become one of my favorite fiction series, not really because of my WH40K fandom, but because they didn't need to be great for me to like them, and they were in fact great.

I've watched some interviews with Dan Abnett after I completed book 15, since I didn't want any spoilers, and found it rather amazing that he was basically winging it through the whole series. The 15 book story arc is well thought out and paced, complete with foreshadowing that might take several books to come to fruition, and he did it not really knowing himself what was going to happen next.

Also, I think that is probably why the books were so good. Abnett was given free reign to develop the story as he wanted, and so he created an entirely new and unique part of the WH40K galaxy that never existed, and characters and planets, all to the point where he was essentially writing his own sci-fi universe that happened to include WH40K window dressing.

It's an excellent series of books about a group of front line soldiers fighting in a seemingly unwinnable campaign against a brutal enemy. In some ways I liken it to the TV series Band of Brothers which was a dramatization of a book that was more of a history tome than a dramatic narrative. In Gaunt's Ghosts you have the dramatization, but occasionally it is interspersed with quotes from imaginary history books written after the events discussing the key events in the campaign.

All that said there are the very occasional winces when it appeared that Abnett was not all that versed in the fictional technologies of WH40K... but I can count on 1 hand the times it happened, and all of them were Abnett not seeming to be all that familiar with laser weapons. A sniper doesn't need to adjust for windage with a laser, for instance. That said, I guess it can be confusing since WH40K has weapons where lasers are the propellant of a solid round, so *shrug*.

So anyway, if you want to get lost in a brutal, violent universe interspersed with the bizarre, some palace intrigue and a bit of warp magic, I highly recommend the Gaunt's Ghosts series.

You don't need to be a WH40K fan to enjoy them.
 
I'm working my way through the "modern" era Velgarth books, by Mercedes Lackey. Just finished the last of the Arrows trilogy, and should start By The Sword sometime tomorrow. Then will come the Mage Winds trilogy, the Mage Storms trilogy and the Owl trilogy. The whole series is pretty damn good, although I think I Winds and Storms, and the 8 books dealing with Mags and his family (set between Last Herald Mage and Arrows) the best.
 
I'm gonna ugly cry with this one, I know.

 
I'm embarrassed that as an avid romance novel reader, I haven't read anything by Jane Austen. I decided to start with Emma. I think it's ............... *cringe* ............. boring.
 


Maggie O’Farrell is a great writer, this is probably her most famous novel.
 
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