Book Recommendations

I don't usually give book recommendations.  I read a lot and like a lot of different kinds of books.  I tend to gravitate to historical novels, mystery novels, biographies, and history books.  My thinking is that people like different things and my recommendation may or may not be relevant to their interests.  Something I like someone might thing is not very good at all.

But I've read several books lately that I've really liked and since this is my blog, what the hell.  I'll just put them out there and let the reader decide.  Now let me emphasize that these are just three books among many that I've read over the last several months, but they are standouts.  They are also a bit more consequential than the latest Lee Childs or John Sandford mystery.  If you're interested in what I like in those genres, I can provide if you shoot me a note.

Anyway, here are three books that I've recently read and really liked.  You might check them out.  If you like them, great.  If not, well then you and I don't have the same tastes.  Different strokes for different folks!

1.  Churchill:  A Life 
     by Martin Gilbert

Written by master historian and authorized Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert, this masterful single-volume work weaves together the detailed research from the author’s eight-volume biography of the elder statesman, and features new information unavailable at the time of the original work’s publication. Spanning Churchill’s youth, education and early military career, his journalistic work, and the arc of his political leadership, Churchill: A Life details the great man’s indelible contribution to Britain’s foreign policy and internal social reform.
Offering eyewitness accounts and interviews with Churchill’s contemporaries, including friends, family members, and career adversaries, this book provides a revealing picture of the personal life, character, ambitions, and drives of one of the world’s most influential and remarkable leaders.

2.   Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crises
      by J. D. Vance

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class through the author’s own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.
The Vance family story began with hope in postwar America. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

3.  This Kind of War:  The Classic Military history of the Korean War
     by T. R. Fehrenbach 

I saw this book listed on Secretary Mattis' required reading list and thought I'd try it.  You can't find a better book that details the horror, the futility, and the craziness of war.  Updated with maps, photographs, and battlefield diagrams, this special fiftieth anniversary edition of the classic history of the Korean War is a dramatic and hard-hitting account of the conflict written from the perspective of those who fought it. Partly drawn from official records, operations journals, and histories, it is based largely on the compelling personal narratives of the small-unit commanders and their troops. Unlike any other work on the Korean War, it provides both a clear panoramic overview and a sharply drawn "you were there" account of American troops in fierce combat against the North Korean and Chinese communist invaders. As Americans and North Koreans continue to face each other across the 38th Parallel, This Kind of War commemorates the past and offers vital lessons for the future.