Friday, January 30, 2015

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer is the extraordinary story of the Battle of Samar, the last full scale naval engagement in history. In it, some of the smallest ships in the entire U.S. navy faced off with the full strength of the Japanese navy, including the Yamato - the largest battleship every built.

Admittedly, the book begins a bit slowly, as Hornfischer provides painstaking details on each ship and the men who crewed her. However, once the real action begins, Hornfischer leads the reader into the heat of battle with such precision and clarity that I could practically see shells exploding just off the page.

More amazing - and terrifying - than the battle itself, though, is the aftermath of the battle in which well over 1,000 men find themselves bobbing and floating in the shark-infested waters off the Philippines. As one survivor said at the time, "My contract with the navy was to fight the enemy, not sharks." Perhaps he should have read the fine print.

Ultimately, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors is as much the story of the naval wars that were so much a part of World War II as it is the story of the Battle of Samar. Just as Flyboys should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the air war in the Pacific, so should this book be required for those seeking to understand the naval battles.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Jackrabbit Junction Jitters

Jackrabbit Junction Jitters is the sequel to Dance of the Winnebagos, which I read over the holidays and pegged as a "guilty pleasure," pleasurable enough to add the next Ann Charles mystery to my reading list. J-cubed, if you will, picks up where Dance left off. Harley and Ruby are about to be married and Claire and Mac find themselves embroiled in another mine-related mystery.

The strongest part of this book is the addition of two new characters, Claire's sister, Katie, and her mother, Deborah. The family dynamics - and fireworks - provide some of the more amusing incidents in Jitterbug Junction. That said, much of the plot requires entirely too much suspension of reality to be a really great read. I noted in my review of Dance that one of the big weaknesses of that book was that Claire frequently decisions that beggar belief; it's evidently a genetic trait her sister shares. The biggest difference between the first and second book in this series is though is that the first features a more compelling mystery, which makes up for the book's other weaknesses.

In the end, Jackrabbit Junction Jitters  is more guilty than pleasure.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Thanksgiving, 1942

Thanksgiving, 1942 picks up where The First Christmas of the War left off, more or less. The oldest boys - Jonathan and Joseph - enlisted together, after Joseph's high school graduation, and are headed home now, their first visit since they left.

Just as in the previous book, mom Irene is determined to pull off a feast the family will remember for years, ration books or no. Joseph and Jonathan are consumed by thoughts of the fairer sex - and the war that awaits them, while Thomas and Charlene have their own teen angst. Seven-year-old Ruthie  is a side note (again).

Still, the Colemans are likeable people and the story is light and easy and draws the reader in. As I said when I wrote about First Christmas, Alan Simon has created a real family and tells their story with warmth and humor and a side of sass. It is unfortunate, though, that the writing contains so many mistakes as to be absolutely distracting. It is difficult for me to recommend this book, as with the last one, simply on account of the sloppy editing.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

I tried to remember when I saw the title of this book: weren't Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr the guys who dueled each other? Yes, yes, they were. But that was after they teamed up to defend Levi Weeks against charges of murdering a fellow boarding house lodger. (Which was after decades of antagonizing one another, which is why even at the time, Weeks's legal team raised eyebrows. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Twenty-year-old Elma Sands walked out the front door of her Manhattan boarding house the Sunday before Christmas, 1799, and disappeared. Nearly two weeks later, her body was dragged from the depths of one of the city's wells and the murder pinned squarely on carpenter Levi Weeks.

Weeks's older brother, Ezra, is one of the most prominent builders in Manhattan - and Hamilton and Burr both happen to be in his debt, literally, for variously commissioned projects. The elder Weeks wastes no time ensuring that his brother's counsel is the finest ever assembled in the city - and the fine counsel, in turn, wastes no time conducting their own investigation of the gripping case.

Duel with the Devil is non-fiction storytelling at its finest, on par which such works as Flyboys and In the Garden of Beasts.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

Richard Rubin's The Last of the Doughboys is easily one of the best books - fiction or non-fiction - that I have read in a very long time. Last year I read, and liked, The Long Way Home (David Laskin), which tells the stories of a dozen European-American immigrants who return to the old country as soldiers in Uncle Sam's army. That book makes a perfect companion to The Last of the Doughboys, not least because the latter actually includes first-hand account from two of the immigrant soldiers in that book: Samuel Goldberg and Anthony Pierro. (Which means that not only did those two survive the war, but survived it by longer than all but a handful of their fellow veterans - in the U.S. or anywhere else.)

Rubin and Laskin obviously differ in the scope of their work. Laskin set out to describe the immigrant experience while Rubin, in telling stories of what centenarians and super-centenarians remain from that war, by necessity also explores not only explores the American experience in war, but America's experience at war. Rubin has done an incredible about of research on everything from Tin Pan Alley to Alien and Sedition Acts and the veteran experience, particularly in the throes of the Great Depression. He has also spent considerable time walking the battlefields and villages of France, visiting the tiny museums chock full of old canteens and buttons, taken the time to study the layout and maintenance of the many cemeteries that still bear witness to the War to End All Wars.

It helps that those who have lived for 100-plus years have lived, to a man (or woman, in a couple of cases), full and fascinating lives. The family of one lived on what Rubin posits may have been the only integrated street in New Orleans - or the South for that matter - and was neighbors with Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson fame. Others were among the first to open "Indian Country," better known as Oklahoma, or to see  a "flying machine" in action.

The stories, not surprisingly, speak for themselves and yet, what Rubin adds to the recollections is simply done so well that his interjections and asides are part of what makes the book so great - as with his comments when a 107-year-old woman asks him if he remembers the "old coal wagons, you know, the ones driven by a horse."

If you read nothing else about World War in the U.S. - or even the later battles on the Western Front, period - read The Last of the Doughboys. Rubin's book is just that good.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

The First Christmas of the War (The Coleman Family Saga Book 1)

It's 1941 and the Coleman family has been looking forward to Christmas all year. The Great Depression has finally ended and Gerald and Irene are looking forward to giving their five children a long-awaited "perfect" Christmas with plenty of presents under the tree and a veritable feast. And then, December 7, 1941, the day that shall live in infamy. Now, Gerald and Irene must face the fact that 19-year-old Jonathan and 17-year-old Joseph will, no doubt, join the fight - with 14-year-old Thomas only a few years removed from the same possible fate. Still, the family is determined to make this a special Christmas.

Alan Simon's story itself is excellent. A bit of sweetness, a bit of humor, a touch of sass, the parents seldom without a cigarette in their grasp, the mother with a never-ending list of chores and tasks to be completed each day. The First Christmas of the War feels like America, 1941. (And also 1951...I couldn't help but think of old I Love Lucy episodes on occasion.) I did have two big gripes with this book, though.

First, it needs some serious editing. From missing commas (dates, city-state combinations, etc.) to run-on sentences to "dawning gas masks" (I'm pretty sure Simon meant for everyone to be "donning gas masks"), the mistakes are glaring and distracting. Second, as a type of introduction, I suppose, Simon introduces each character, along with the major plot points for that person. For example, of Charlene, the intro states, "The third child in the family and the oldest daughter, Charlene has just become secretly engaged at the age of sixteen..." Since this is a major plot point, it's unclear to me why Simon chose to unveil so much before the reader has even reached the table of contents.

Monday, January 12, 2015

How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

Ruth Goodman's guide to Victorian living starts a bit slowly, but she has created a fascinating portrait of life during the reign of Queen Victorian (1837-1901). Her research into everything from the evolution of corsets to the changing height of men's top hats is painstaking and precise.

As she notes frequently, Goodman has not only researched Victorian life, but she has undertaken to live for prolonged periods of time an entirely Victorian life. In this sense, How to Be a Victorian shares a commonality with A.J. Jacobs's Year of Living Biblically, yet Goodman's experiences have a much more authentic feel to them. I don't recall Jacobs sharing recipes for shampoo and toothpaste. At first, I thought the asides about Goodman's experiences wearing the various articles of clothing or working different types of farm equipment were off-putting, but I changed my mind pretty quickly, deciding that her anecdotes provided color commentary, if you will, and brought further life to what could have been a very dry topic.

The book is organized like a day: our Victorian wakes up (cold house), dresses (in roughly 14 layers), uses the toilet (a hand dug outhouse, most likely), sees to breakfast, children and chores (wives and mothers only, of course) or work (here she provides glimpses of both factory and agricultural work), dines further (although all but the very wealthiest Victorians lived in constant hunger), and prepares for bed. Within the framework of a single day, Goodman explores gender roles, fashion, technology and transportation, illness and death, and many other topics. The book is also generously illustrated throughout, providing further assistance to the 21st century reader trying to visualize the difference between early-Victorian and late-Victorian stoves, for example.

Anyone with an interest in Victorian England or simply changes in daily life over the past 200 years should find How to Be a Victorian especially interesting.

Friday, January 9, 2015

I Shall Be Near You

Rosetta Wakefield cannot bear the thought of her husband, Jeremiah, enlisting in the Union Army. When he and his friends do anyway, she decides to join him, presenting herself as Ross Stone to the men and officers of the 97th New York. Jeremiah is not best pleased, but then Rosetta never has been a conventional kind of girl. Together, then, they embark on the Union campaigns of 1862, from Second Manassas and Antietam, to places without name.

Although I Shall Be Near You is completely dissimilar in style and content to The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, my mind kept returning to the latter, and specifically to the men joining up en masse (in this case, the British Army circa World War I) for a "great adventure" only to get far more than they bargained for when it came to fighting the war.

Erin Lindsay McCabe's I Shall Be Near You is a magnificent story that pulls the reader along. The Wakefields, like the majority of soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, were neither educated nor wealthy, and McCabe captions their lives perfectly in her language and tone. The supporting cast of characters, particularly enlisted man Will, are genuinely sympathetic.

Five stars.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II


I should have read the reviews on Amazon before I bought this book. If I had, I would have known that, while the subject matter - the life and times of World War II spy Vera Atkins - has tremendous potential, but that William Stevenson jumps around too much, focuses too much time and attention and surface-level details, and ultimately attempts to cover too much ground.

Vera Atkins is the primary focus of the book, of course, primarily in the opening chapters when Stevenson reconstructs her early life as the Jewish, Romanian Vera Maria Rosenberg. In later chapters, it becomes difficult to remember that this is a biography, and not a history of counterintelligence work in England - or of the underground World War II resistance movements in continental Europe.

Compared to other World War II intelligence-focused books (The Irregulars and Operation Mincemeat come to mind, the latter being especially interesting and readable), Spymistress falls disappointingly short of the mark.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton


Laurence Bartram is a church expert. In this role, he travels to Easton Deadall Hall at the request of his Great War pal, the architect William Bolitho, who has been hired to do a bit of restoration on the old chapel, and has discovered remarkable geometric patterns set into the floor. Before proceeding, William wants Laurence to see what he can make of it. While at Easton, Laurence is drawn into the family's tragic history: the only heir, 5-year-old, Kitty, disappeared one night before the war, never to be found. The patriarch was killed in the Great War, at the head of his men - which amounted to nearly every man from their small village. Laurence soon learns to accept nothing at face value, a lesson worth repeating when a body is found inside the ancient church whose secrets he has come to study.

Part Agatha Christie, part Downton Abbey, Elizabeth Speller's The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton is a pleasure to read. The story and characters are very much a product not only of its time - veterans of the Great War struggling to move forward - but of the very specific location Speller has chosen for Easton Hall - the low rises around Avebury. (Though neither here nor there as it relates to this book, what I remember of Avebury is the vast number of sheep ambling among the stones and the attention required, therefore, not to step in their excrement.) The story is well-constructed, the characters interesting, the resolution satisfactory. I ask little else of my mysteries; I enjoyed this one tremendously.