Top Reads
Your picks via the site’s Amazon links this month continue to delight and inform:
Death in the Silent Places Peter Hathaway Capstick. A look at some of history’s Great White Hunters, including the audacious Bwana who took on WWI Krauts in East Africa. Warning, not PC! Gets good reviews. Here’s one from a reader at Amazon:
Capstick does it once again. This book takes you along with some of the most famous and infamous hunters ever to walk the planet. He starts with John Patterson, the killer of the Maneaters of Tsavo. Find out just how close the lions came to winning! Next is Chauncey H. Stigand, a pig iron tough SOB who was a military master, and a big game hunter. Find out how tough he was when a rhino ripped of his left pectoral and he walked unaided 10-15 miles before lying down! Then meet P.J. Pretorious, the one-man wrecking crew of the German war machine in East Africa. He did every thing but shoot the guns to sink the Konigsberg the famed German war ship, as well as capturing an entire German column. Next is Sasha Seimel, perhaps the only white man ever to hunt jaguar with only a spear!
OK, I’m in. He had me at “Death in the Silent Places.” How come I never heard of this guy? Amazon commentary notes that today’s handwringing eco-consciousness can’t keep a good death-defying anti-PC storyteller down. More titles from Capstick, who apparently is himself no slouch as a Great White Hunter. Death in the Long Grass; The Man-Eaters of Tsavo; Death in the Dark Continent; The African Adventurers: A Return to the Silent Places, Death in a Lonely Land: More Hunting, Fishing, and Shooting on Five Continents. And from the Capstick library, this classic: Teddy Rosevelt’s African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist.
Moving on, one of my all-time favorite reads …
Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson Dean King. Great choice. King brings together the first-hand accounts of Royal Navy swabs and officers in the Napoleonic Wars. The death of Nelson, the audacious exploits of Cochrane in HMS Speedy, wary tars dodging press gangs in wartime London, as reported by those who went there, did that. Truly great. For some context, try Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle, 1803-1805 Alan Schom, on Napoleon’s bid to invade England how Nelson put an end to it: The greater naval campaign of which Trafalgar was only the climax. Also, the Napoleonic must-read, The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle Between Britain and France: 1789-1815. That’s 900 pages of land-and-sea context that reads like a novel, by the masterful Robert Harvey, whose Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain is another must-read. If you want to keep your feet dry and still dive headfirst into the Napoleonic Wars, of course, you can’t go wrong with Barbero’s The Battle: A New History of Waterloo.
What looks like a great science series for kids, “Let’s Read and Find Out,” with Christmas coming up:
How People Learned to Fly True Kelley (in case Kelley didn’t address it, here’s a kids book idea: Why People Learned to Fly.)
Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean Arthur Dorros
Look Out for Turtles! Melvin Berger
What Will the Weather Be? Carolyn Croll
Learning is great! Be sure to read the kiddies some Capstick at bedtime.
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 Lawrence Wright. This got a site reader’s thumb’s up, apparently goes very deep, and gets this rave from local fave Dexter Filkins:
“Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing… He has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawhiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive… O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing—and heartbreaking—to learn how close it was… The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail… Great stuff.”
Speaking of Filkins, if you haven’t read The Forever War yet, what are you waiting for? It’s the Dispatches of our time. In other war reads hot this month:
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam Lewis Sorley. I gotta get this one.
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One David Kilcullen. The book by one of the guys who wrote the book on what the United States did in Iraq and ought to be doing in Afghanistan. Australia’s gift to a world at war.
Blown Francine Mathews. A former CIA analyst’s spy thriller with a femme fatale heroine. The focus on a Tim McVeigh-like neo-nazi plot seems a little off-topic at this stage in the 21st century, if not downright Napolitan, though. In other Nazi business, a period-piece thriller in occupied Paris, The Alibi Club. Here’s another title by Mathews, The Secret Agent, based on the life of extraoradinary former OSS agent Jim Thompson, who remained active in Bangkok after the war while reviving the Tahi silk industry prior to his mysterious disappearance in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands.
Still hot: Fit for Combat: When Fitness is a Matter of Life or Death JD Johannes. The site’s runaway bestseller has now sold 21 copies. Related titles that did well include The Complete Guide to Navy Seal Fitness, Third Edition (Includes Free DVD): Updated for Today’s Warrior Elite. Awaiting your reader reviews and progress reports.
Your purchases help support the site. Speaking of which, note X’mas ads.
Topics: books
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:26 am Comments (1) on Sunday, November 15, 2009
One Response to “Top Reads”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
November 15th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
[...] The top reads at Amazon — and they are not politically correct, via Jules Crittenden. He is an educated man; non-Ivy [...]