Crittenden’s Boutique Right-Wing Warmonger Bookshop & General Store
You’ll notice the Pajamas Media ads at top and at left have been replaced by Amazon widgets. This is because PJM has discontinued its blog advertising network, of which I was an arm’s length member.
My non-exclusive contract paid less than the usual deal, but allowed me to pursue other advertising relationships. I never did the math to figure out whether that paid off over the last two years. Probably a wash, except that I retained freedom of action, and today, when other sites may find themselves cut loose without existing ad arrangements, I’ve got established and loaded Amazon and Blogads accounts.
The Amazon commissions and Blogads fees produce sporadic pocket change. They allow me to make periodic donations to my friends at Freedom’s Zone who maintain this site, keeping them in beer and helping them keep some of the more oppressed corners of the world blogged up. The income also helps keep the wife at bay (see text with PayPal button at left), though frankly she isn’t easily impressed.
So here’s the deal. I bloviate, ruminate, reminisce, engage in cruel mockery and link to things. You click, read, laugh, cry, comment, or get bored or annoyed and go elsewhere. Pretty straightforward, no strings. If you like the arrangement, please consider patronizing advertisers and making your Amazon purchases through the widgets and links you’ll find in the margins and sometimes in posts.
Thank you very much for reading, and for your support of the site.
One other thing. This Amazon gig is great because it has enabled a new form of self-expression. Crittenden’s Boutique Right-Wing Warmonger Bookshop and General Store. Come on in, poke around. There’s something for everyone.
From prior posts:
A Combat Vet’s Reading List. My good friend Larry Gwin, former US Army captain, Silver Star, Purple Heart, XO of Alpha Co., 2/7 Cav, 1st Cav, veteran of the Ia Drang battles of 1965 and author of “Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir,” spent many years trying to understand war and find some context for his own horrific combat experience by exploring war literature. It is useful exercise, because in this manner the combat veteran may learn from other people, find commonality in what they write, ease the alienation and find his or her place in history. It is an important part of the post-combat normalization process. Make that post-combat normality transcendence process. There is a risk of obsession, but if that is an issue, take it up with your shrink.
In any case, Larry got bored one morning, drafted his quick combat reading list, and emailed it. A couple of his buddies, on an email list that runs from Guadalcanal through Korea and Vietnam to Petraeus’ Baghdad staff and the Afghan Counterinsurgency Academy, added to it. Larry’s list first:
The American Revolution:
1776, by David McCullough
The Winter Soldiers, Saratoga, and Decisive Day, by Richard M. Ketchum
Rabble in Arms, by Kenneth Roberts
The Civil War:
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The Last Full Measure, by Jeff Shaara
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
Army of the Potomac Trilogy, by Bruce Catton
Gettysburg, by Stephen W. Sears
World War I:
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, by Siegfried Sassoon
Good-Bye to All That, by Robert Graves
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell
World War II:
The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer
The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat
The Thin Red Line, by James Jones
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
D-Day, by Stephen E. Ambrose
Citizen Soldiers, by Stephen E. Ambrose
Goodbye Darkness, by William Manchester
With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge
A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, by James D. Hornfischer
Wings Of Morning, by Thomas Childers
Stalingrad, and The Fall of Berlin 1945, by Antony Beevor
Korea:
Chosin, by Eric Hammel
The Coldest War, by James Brady
The Coldest Winter, by David Halberstam
Vietnam:
Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, by Bernard B. Fall
A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
We were Soldiers Once…And Young, by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
Other Wars/Classics:
The Iliad, by Homer
The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great, by Steven Pressfield
The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan (Ireland, 1776)
War and Peace, by Count Leo Tolstoy
Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March, by Adam Zamoyski
Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden
The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
Another 7th Cav Ia Drang vet who hasn’t said whether I can use his name, so remains nameless, reached back into his unit’s history:
Son of the Morning Star, by Evan S. Connell
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen Ambrose
Here’s another Nam combat vet’s addition:
Achilles in Vietnam, by Jonathan Shay
Two more Nam vets add:
King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict, by Eric Schultz
Paul Revere’s Ride, by David Fischer
Dak To, by Edward F. Murphy
The Long Gray Line, by Rick Atkinson
A Vietnam Psyops vet adds:
WW II:
Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible, by John McManus
The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of WWII’s Most Decorated Platoon, by Alex Kershaw
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission, by Hampton Sides
Vietnam:
The Cat from Hue, by John Laurence
Chickenhawk, by Robert Mason
Iraq/Afghanistan:
Generation Kill, by Evan Wright
In the Company of Soldiers, by Rick Atkinson
House to House, by David Bellavia
On my part, a big shout out re Herr, Filkins, Sajer, Fall, Beevor, Childers, all excellent must-reads of war, among so many other good ones listed above. Here’s my own quick list, omitting those already listed:
The Jewish War, by Flavius Josephus
Harold and William: The Battle for England, A.D. 1064-1066, by Benton Rain Patterson
The Crusades, by Jonathan Riley-Smith
The Shield and the Sword, by Ernle Bradford (Knights Hospitaller of St. John, from Jerusalem to Great Seige of Malta)
Henry V, by William Shakespeare
Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson, edited by Dean King
The Battle: A New History of Waterloo, by Alessandro Barbero (My review here, with a little about Gwin and company.)
Retreat from Kabul: The Catastrophic British Defeat in Afghanistan, 1842, Patrick Macrory (basis of the first Falshman novel)
Here Is Your War, by Ernie Pyle
The Face of War and Travels with Myself and Another, by Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway’s squeeze/major war correspondent)
Guadalcanal Diary, by Richard Tregaskis
Fighter Squadron at Guadalcanal, by Max Brand. (The product of interviews with 212th Marine fliers on leave in 1943, recovered and published 50 years later)
Behind Bamboo, by Rohan Rivett (An Australian war correspondent/POW’s account of captivity on the Death Railway)
Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose
Danger’s Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her Maxwell T. Kennedy. Review of my friend Max’s book here.
Five Years to Freedom, by James N. Rowe
Thunder Run, by David Zucchino. A battlefield acquaintance, who wrote the definitive, authoritative account of the taking of Baghdad in April 2003.
Martyr’s Day, by Michael Kelly. Also, not exactly a war book, Things Worth Fighting For, edited by Max Kelly, his widow. (Help support the family of a fallen war correspondent, my passing battlefield acquaintance. Buy his books.)
One Bullet Away, by Nate Fick
Blood Stripes, by David Danelo
A Terrible Love of War, by James Hillman (A Jungian shrink recognizes that the human animal is wired for war)
For a good time, read:
Holidays in Hell, by P.J. O’Rourke
All of the Flashman novels, by George MacDonald Fraser, starting with this one.
More from current wars, starting with the Robert Kaplan shelf:
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Kilcullen: The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
Ricks:
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005
Making the Corps: 10th Anniversary Edition with a New Afterword by the Author
Donovan Campbell: Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood
Craig Mullaney: The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education
The Bulge:
Battle of the Bulge: Hitler’s Alternate Scenarios Peter Tsouras (alternate histories, what could have been, by military historians)
Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible John C. McManus. Fellow Heraldo scribbler Jay Fitz of Hubblog fame raves about this one, on the heavy fighting by small units that held while others ran or surrendered. They fought, died and were sometimes overrun, but slowed the German advance and bought time for the 101st to arrive at Bastogne. This one was also highlighted by one of the vets on A Combat Veteran’s Reading List.
The Bitter Woods: The Battle of the Bulge John S.D. Eisenhower. Study of German, American and British command highly rated by Ambrose, apparently evenhanded despite dad’s role.
Panzer Leader Heinz Guderian. (Pictured in Crittenden’s Bulge post with that fat pig Goering and the Austrian carpet chewer. Guderian was deemed by U.S. authorities to be clear of war crimes over Soviet objections and went on to a career as an author while his son, a Wehrmacht panzer officer, became a general in the Bundeswehr. Here’s a German historian’s Guderian site with some of his favorite sayings, some worth stealing, like the one in the Bulge post cited above: “Man schlägt jemanden mit der Faust und nicht mit gespreizten Fingern.” You punch with the fist and not with the fingers spread.)
Achtung - Panzer! Heinz Guderian
Panzers in Winter: Hitler’s Army and the Battle of the Bulge Samuel W. Mitcham Jr.
Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Contributions in Military Studies) Martin van Creveld
Jochen Peiper: Battle Commander, SS Leibstandardte Adolf Hitler Charles Whiting, on the SS commander whose men carried out the massacre at Malmedy.
At the Crossroads: SS Colonel Joachim Piper and the Ghosts of Malmedy Danny Sherrill Parker
The Malmedy Massacre John M. Bauserman
The Battered Bastards of Bastogne: The 101st Airborne and the Battle of the Bulge, December 19,1944-January 17,1945 George Koskimaki
Patton and the Battle of the Bulge Michael Green
Patton’s Panthers: The African-American 761st Tank Battalion In World War II Charles W. Sasser
Panther vs Sherman: Battle of the Bulge 1944 (Duel) Steven Zaloga
11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 Stanley Weintraub
Seven Roads to Hell: A Screaming Eagle at Bastogne Donald R. Burgett
Noville Outpost of Bastogne: My Last Battle Don Addor
Infantry Soldier: Holding the Line at the Battle of the Bulge George W. Neill
The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of WWII’s Most Decorated Platoon Alex Kershaw
And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II Evelyn Monahan (unclear whether this includes the Bulge, but what the heck, nurses don’t get much historic notice)
Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany Stephen Ambrose
The Ardennes: The Battle of the Bulge, Hugh M. Cole
A Tour of the Bulge Battlefield William Cavanagh
Band of Brothers magnificent depiction of the Bulge and other battles, has the benfit of being entirely factual (DVD)
Battle of the Bulge Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw. Hollywood’s version. (DVD)
American Experience: The Battle of the Bulge David McCullough (DVD)
Christmas Memories - 1944 — The Battle of The Bulge Veterans (DVD)
WAR STORIES WITH OLIVER NORTH: THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE (DVD)
Hitler’s Last Gamble: Battle of the Bulge Bill Cain (a graphic history)
BATTLE OF THE BULGE (Images of War) Andrew Rawson (photos)
Nobody Comes Back: A Novel of the Battle of the Bulge Donn Pearce (novel)
The Angel of Bastogne Gilbert Morris (novel)
Finding Your Father’s War: A Practical Guide to Researching and Understanding Service in the World War II U.S. Army Jonathan Gawne
A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge Charles B. MacDonald.
Guderian, Creator of the Blitzkrieg Kenneth John Macksey
A Blood-Dimmed Tide: The Battle of the Bulge by the Men Who Fought It (Dell World War II Library) Gerald Astor
Nuts! The Battle of the Bulge: The Story and Photographs Wenger, Goldstein and Dillon;
Company Commander: The Classic Infantry Memoir of World War II Charles B. MacDonald
Battleground, for an old school grunt’s eye view from Hollywood
In other business, Philip Jose Farmer:
Won’t be down to breakfast. One of sci-fi’s greats. A good appreciation at Reason.com, by a scribbler who read PJF in his teens and doesn’t know how they’d play in adulthood. I read a lot of Farmer in my 20s and 30s. Played fine. Still think about a lot of his strange and haunting ideas, his love of humanity, its triumphs, follies and foibles, and the lessons he imparted as he toyed with them.
If you don’t know Farmer, Reynolds recommends you start with To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Sounds about right. First in the Riverworld series, one of the most magnificent literary gimmicks ever devised, allowed Farmer to game out history, society and his favorite characters and themes from both, amid high adventure and mystery. It’s What Would Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain & Julius Caesar Do, with Hermann Goering as an annoying holier-than-thou evangelist. And because it’s Farmer, of course, a Neanderthal.
The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth and The Gods of Riverworld continue the series.
Farmer fueled my own fascination with the mystery of the Neanderthals with his short story, “The Alley Man,” about the last Neanderthal, living on the fringes of our own society, a ragpicker doggedly seeking what the humans stole from his people.
Some more Farmer:
The Green Odyssey Don’t worry, no lecturing. “Green” is the scoundrel who is the main character, asail to adventure on a “wind roller” across a vast prairie.
Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke
Venus on the Half-Shell and Others, a collection in which PJF acknowledges authorship of the notorious Kilgore Trout novel ”VOTHS” and others.
Dare. Dunno this one, but a new edition is due out, looks good.
Image of the Beast, PJF’s 1960s sci-fi porn epic.
Strange Relations, on human-alien love.
Pearls From Peoria for the diehard PJF fan, odd scraps and hard-to-find material from all aspects of his career.
Advanced beyond books? Tired of handling inky pulp and dog-earing pages? Maybe Kindle’s your thing. Reviews and comment:
Future of newspapers? Maybe in some form. That’s the Kindle buzz. A variety of reviews follow, including one from a pal who is a reader here. No techno-geek, he’s a crusty old Vietnam vet.
Bob emailed recently that he has married his Kindle to his iPhone, wanted to know if I knew about any of this:
My wife Rosemary gave me an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I don’t think I would have bought it for myself but, once I had it and used it… it has grown on me. It is just so convenient and very easy to read. I must like it because I sprang for a 4Gb SD card to plug into it, so I think I can now carry around two or three thousand of my favorite trashy books.
Then, today, I stumbled across news of a new iPhone App named Kindle. Free from Apple. So I downloaded the App to the iPhone I’ve been using for a year or two, which I think is a terrific piece of gear. Told the App who I was. It flashed a list of the books I have purchased from Amazon in the past for my Kindle and axed me which one I wanted first for the iPhone. I told it to give me Gwin’s book, “Baptism.” Two minutes later Baptism was on my iPhone, open to the last page I had read on my Kindle a month or so ago. I read a dozen more pages, turned off the iPhone, opened the Kindle and Baptism was there, already open to the last page I had just read. All free, or at least previously paid for.
On the Kindle you click a button to turn the page; on the iPhone you just flick your finger across the screen and the next page scrolls in sideways from the right. Neat-o. Very clear and crisp, with a choice of font sizes.
So now I can keep a library on the Kindle, a contraption smaller in size than most hardcover books, and do my offsite reading whenever and wherever I want on the iPhone that is always in my pocket. This is good stuff. The scary thing is, there has to be even better stuff in the pipeline.
Wicked scary. I love being scared like that. Screaming rollercoaster plunge scared. A pay-for-content vehicle that people rave about. Some thoughts on that after these user reviews. I have yet to lay hands on one, but I’m intrigued.
Randy Neal at Knoxviews shows you in detail what it looks like and how it works. Looks cool.
My initial reaction after playing with it for a few minutes: “This is a remarkable thing.”
Knoxville’s existential brunchist Russ McBee:
My Kindle arrived a couple of days ago, and I haven’t been able to put it down since … Its convenience is only surpassed by its readability; the Kindle has almost completely eliminated the eye strain I would get from reading a standard LCD display for hours at a time.
When I turned it on for the first time, it automatically downloaded the books I had ordered while waiting for it to arrive. I sat down to read at about 6:00 PM, and the next thing I knew, it was 11:30 PM. I felt no eye strain at all after that marathon. There is no way I could have spent that much time reading on an LCD without my eyes complaining.
McBee explains the technological differences, discusses ergonomics and concludes.
For me, the Kindle is a liberating technology; the almost total elimination of eye strain, the ease of use, and the availability of vast amounts of content through Amazon’s Kindle Store have given me a refreshed and rejuvenated hunger for reading, and I’m grateful for that.
… Although the subscription prices for some titles may be debatable, it’s important to note that all Kindle content is free of advertisements. For me, that automatically commands a premium.
I haven’t subscribed to a daily paper in about 15 years … so I’ve kind of startled myself by taking out a Kindle subscription to the Washington Post …
This is a point I think newspaper publishers might be missing: people who subscribe to the Kindle edition probably aren’t likely to be subscribers to the dead-tree version. I think they’re likelier to be people like me, who have been reading the free edition of the paper on the Web for years now.
Jack Lail at Random Mumblings:
… we’re at version two. Most technology products don’t really get prime time until version 3. Hey, I’m not into the Kool-Aid so far as to believe it’s the answer, but it could one be one of many needed answers.
Reynolds, from whose site I surfed into the above reviews:
… what might save newspapers? Well, I’ve been reading the Financial Times on the Kindle 2, and I’ve found it quite enjoyable, and, surprisingly, have found myself reading the paper in depth in spite of the Kindle’s okay-but-not-great newspaper navigation setup. It’s easy to read, you don’t get ink on your fingers, and there’s nothing to throw away or recycle when you’re done. Driving back from DC yesterday, I let the Insta-Wife drive a good deal and spent several hours happily reading things on the Kindle and I like it a lot. And it lasted the whole trip with plenty of battery power left, though I really didn’t use it much while in DC. I’m planning on subscribing to some other newspapers, as I find the experience of reading news on the Kindle better than I expected.
In more formal reviews, CNET product review offers the good, the bad and the bottom line. Technroll here.
OK, one bad quickie review from my wife, the author.
I tried one out at a book club the other night. I hate it. There’s no cover. It’s like having sex with a blow-up doll.
Yes, dear. I know, the romance of print. It’s kind of how I feel about sailboats and 747s. Sometimes I like to feel the wind and spray. Other times I need to get across the ocean fast. This thing sounds a little more pleasant than being jammed in a can full of strangers at 30,000 feet … which now that I think of it, sounds a lot like the Internet.
Anyway, honey, I’m a tabloid man. We’re not above appealing to people’s cheap lusts. We’ve been speculating in my ink-on-pulp business for a while that a reloadable, portable reading device that approximates the newspaper experience in a more satisfying way than a Blackberry screen, coupled with a easy electronic distribution and subscription system, is the future. Amazon apparently has all three. I suspect it needs to get cheaper … $359 is still a little dear for me and I suspect a lot of others these days. I suspect it also needs to be more portable … something you can roll up and swat flies with.
Then, there’s the question going forward of whether ADHD nation is going to need more than a twit or a txt worth of content on any given subject. That probably favors tabloids like the Boston Herald more than august institutions like the Washington Post and Financial Times cited by Kindle reviewers above, but I’ve always considered that one of the great contributions of the Internet, text messaging, all that, is that it got kids reading and writing again. Eventually, most of them will have careers, kids, mortgages. Then they’ll want to read more. Maybe they’ll even be interested in syntax, spelling.
Hold everything. Jim Romenesko at Poynter emails with an issue that wants ironing out:
Kindle has a BIG problem the way it is now. I subscribe to the WSJ through it and there’s not a single update through the day. That makes no sense considering the Kindle is “always on” and news orgs can push content to it around the clock. A major disappointment at this stage.
Make an issue that wants irony out. Sounds like it may be mimicking the print experience too well.
As my boss said about this Internet thing and our industry’s self-cannibalizing efforts to get a foothold on it, if you don’t eat your lunch someone else will eat it for you. Shameless opportunism: Like Kindle? Get yours here. By the way, to the reader who recently bought one, thanks for the business. Let me know how it’s working out for you.
Any and all book/product suggestions welcome. Comments below. We aim to please. Make Crittenden’s Boutique Right-Wing Warmonger Bookshop and General Store your Boutique Right-Wing Warmonger Bookshop and General Store.
Topics: A Right-Wing Warmonger's Boutique Bookshop, blogs, books, literary, money, shameless opportunism, shameless self-promotion
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:28 pm on Wednesday, April 1, 2009
5 Responses to “Crittenden’s Boutique Right-Wing Warmonger Bookshop & General Store”
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April 1st, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Impressive reading list. I especially like the links to Farmer, as I read many of his stories many years ago. Now seems like a good time to reread.
April 1st, 2009 at 1:21 pm
[...] See also, Crittenden’s Boutique Right-Wing Warmonger Bookshop & General Store [...]
April 1st, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Whew…. remind me to discuss with you the advantages of incremental marketing in order getting to positive cash flow.
You editor. Me publisher.
But kudos on the Farmer…. it takes a real fan to know about the Brian Kirby sci-fi porn of the ancient era. Wrote one for him myself.
April 1st, 2009 at 10:23 pm
A book I’d like to suggest to your Korean War list is “The Last Stand of Fox Company”.
And, in addition, a background book, “First to Fight” by Gen. Krulak.
First to Fight isn’t a battle history book, it’s an insiders view on the history of the USMC. It applies to Last Stand of Fox Company through the chapters that deal with how close the USMC came to extinction after WW2, and how desperately short the Marines were on functional equipment and trained personnel when the call came for them to deploy to Korea.
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Ordered and thank you.