The Best of 2013

As best I can figure, I read 64 books this year, all but a couple of them cover-to-cover. Using the same 15% rule that I used in 2012 and 2011, I should select the 9.6 best books - so the following, in the order I initially read them, are my top 10 reads from 2013. I should note that a few themes jump out as me as I look over my list: disease (typhoid, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and zoonotic) and war (the Civil War, the Lincoln County War, World War I, World War II ) chief among them. So perhaps next year I ought to strive for a more cheerful selection. In any event, happy reading!

Good Book
(reviewed January 4, 2013)
David Plotz's hilarious take on the Old Testament. There is also an element of the serious, as well, when Plotz summarizes Judges 11:  Do you not hold what Chemosh your God gives you to possess? So we will hold on to everything that the Lord our God has given us to possess." As Plotz concludes, "And there, my friends, you have practically the entire history of Israel, of the Middle East, and of planet Earth, in two short sentences."

The Guns of August
(reviewed January 10, 2013)
 Barbara Tuchman's tome on the opening days of World War I is mesmerizing, masterful, and mighty depressing. The crux of the book is the many failures - diplomatic and military - that ultimately led to four years of unrelenting bloodshed across Europe, and eventually the world. I have read more World War I books than I can remember and only The Beauty and the Sorrow comes close to matching The Guns of August.

After Appomattox: How the South Won the War
(reviewed February 7, 2013)
Stetson Kennedy believes you should reconsider what you probably think that you know about the end of the American Civil War: North wins, South loses, and the rest is just details. Andrew Johnson, in one of his finer moments (of which there were to be enough for Congress to impeach him), sent a messenger south to inform the generals stationed there that the president was "for a white man's government, and in favor of free white citizens controlling the country" (p. 45). Using a decade of such incidents as his foundation, Kennedy builds and supports the argument that the end result was as though Grant had surrendered to Lee at Appomattox and not the other way around.

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
(reviewed February 19, 2013)
David McCullough has clearly done an almost-unfathomable amount of research - on the Suez Canal, the history of Panama, early engineering and railroading technologies and techniques and American imperialism (add Panama to the list of places Teddy Roosevelt took by storm), to name a few of the areas he visits in great, but highly readable detail. Path is 600 pages of everything you ever wanted to know about the Panama Canal and many things you never knew you wanted to know.

A Man in Uniform
(reviewed March 10, 2013)
Kate Taylor's little mystery centered around the Dreyfus Affair was one of the first, and best, fiction books I read this year. The idea is a mysterious woman comes to a relatively small-time lawyer whose family has extensive military connections, pleads that Dreyfus is innocent and charges him with not only gaining an appeal for Dreyfus, but with finding the real spy. It has the makings of a great mystery wrapped in the packaging of 20th century Paris.

Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time
(reviewed July 21, 2013)
Mark Adams visits Machu Picchu the way the Incas did. On foot. No facilities. Serious off-the-beaten path adventuring. And then he weaves his own adventure together with that of the "discovery" of Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham III and with the colonization of Peru by the Spanish some 500 years ago. Taken together, this could be a circuitous, hard-to-follow read, but it's remarkably well done, humorous, insightful, and informative. All told, Turn Right at Machu Picchu is some of the best travel writing I've ever read.

The House at Tyneford
(reviewed July 30, 2013)
Natasha Solomons probably could not have created a more tragedy-laced, heartstrings-tugging, tear-inducing story if she had tried to. "Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us have lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly." - notice pinned to the door of Tyneford Church by departing villagers. In her author's note, Solomons informs the reader that Tyneford is based on Tyneham, which was requisitioned by the British army in 1943 and to which not a single resident was ever allowed to return.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
(reviewed August 24, 2013)
David Quammen is my favorite author. In Spillover, Quammen has set out to understand the origins of any number of diseases that transfer from animals to people. He provides a detailed examination of some of the better known ones - such as AIDS, ebola, and yellow fever - as well as ones I certainly had never heard of: Nipah, Hendra, and Marburg virus to name a few. In the process, Quammen criss-crosses the planet, from Bangladesh and the Congo to Washington, DC, and the Outback, speaking with molecular biologists, immunologists, epidemiologists and the like, rendering their science-speak into understandable, and highly readable, prose. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is who I want to be when I grow up.

Somerset
(reviewed September 17, 2013)

Leila Meacham's prequel to Roses was probably my favorite fiction read this year. Somerset is the meandering story of the generations of Warwicks, Tolivers, and DuMonts, who form the backbone of both books, as they make their way from the antebellum south to the untamed lands of Texas. The star of the story is Jessica Wyndham, a girl-woman of, some might say, misplaced passions who is at the heart of all that follows. This is storytelling as it was meant to be, it turns gently unfolding and  soaring and always difficult to put down.

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
(reviewed November 17, 2013)
Robert K. Massie has created a meticulously researched and engagingly written portrait of Russia's last female ruler. Of all the biographies I read this year - Lady Almina, Countess of Carnarvon; Hetty Green; and Gertrude Bell to name a few - that of Catherine the Great was certainly the most complete, most thorough, and largely because of the subject, the most interesting. After all, the reign of Catherine the Great was notable for its length as well as all she accomplished - partition of Poland and victories in the Crimean, for example. Not bad for someone who entered the world as a minor German princess, may or may not have murdered her husband, and had, ahem, no legitimate claim to the Russian throne.