Books I read in 2021, Part II

In 2021 I read 18 books, and earlier this month I posted the first six of the dozen that had the most impact on me. Here are books 7-12 on my list of favorites.

7. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams #1954. This play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Big Daddy and the machinations swirling around his fortune and his alcoholic sexually ambivalent favored son, Brick and his dissolute wife Maggie. She speaks wisdom that is applicable to our polarized country one year out from January 6: "Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant . . ."

8. The First Wave: D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in WW2 by Alex Kershaw #2019. Extraordinary heroism at work on the five invasion beaches and beyond by men who were the tip of the spear that pierced the Third Reich and destroyed fascism in the world, at least until it reared its ugly head here on home ground during the last enabling, potentially fatal presidency. When I visited the five beaches with the aid of a paid guide in 2019 with friends, it cracked us up when the guide referred the three beaches (Sword, Juno and Gold) stormed by the Britsh and Canadians as "the Commonwealth beaches." When I stood on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest beach to secure and a very near thing, I was standing on a place of now-lost American exceptionalism.

9. Das Reich by Max Hastings #2013. The bloody tale of the blood-soaked trail left across France by this elite SS Panzer Division as it made its way from garrison duty watching the coast in Southern France to the raging battle in Normandy after D-Day. Traveling mostly at night to avoid Allied air interdiction in the daylight, it took 10 days to arrive at the battlefield because the division stopped to exact terrible retribution upon innocent civilians almost every time it was attacked in any fashion by the French Resistance enroute--expending murderous German fury over the lost war on the hapless and helpless French population.

10. 1776 by David McCullough #2005. The book dragged on a bit as it covered a bewildering cast of colonial characters while it described the important events of the fashioning of our nation like Lexington and Concord, the Battle of Bunker Hill and finally Washington forcing the British to withdraw from Boston by maneuver rather than battle.

11. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy by Ian W. Toll #2006. An interesting account of the early growth of the US Navy from gunboats guarding the rivers and coastline of the nasceant United State building warships able to challenge British warships in proper one-on-one situations and to project American power overseas, especially against the Barbary Pirates.

12. "A Few Acres Snow" The Saga of the French and Indian War by Robert Leckie #1996. A French minister consoled the French king who was lamenting losing Quebec and the upper Mississippi Valley to the British during this war by describing the loss as merely a few worthless acres in a winter wasteland while France still controlled rich sugar-cane islands in the Caribbean. How did that work out for the French?

The other six books were hardly worth mentioning but I did glean a few factoids and interesting tidbits from each of them, I suppose.

2021 Books--A half dozen

 I lost control of my blog in late 2020 and wrote about 60 posts in a nearby blog which now I can't locate.  C'est le guerre.  I seem to have found a tenuous route back to my original blog so copied straight from a FB post last year here are the half dozen most impactful books of the 18 I read last year.  I like summarizing lists.

In 2021 I read 18 books, the most I'd read since before I retired five years ago. In the next two days I'll list the dozen books that had the most impact on me.

Fifteen of the books were histories of some sort, focusing upon WW2 and the American Revolutionary War mostly but I also read a book on the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, the French and Indian War and the Civil War. One book was a play--I try to read a play a year--one book was a biography of an artist with lots of pictures of his drawings so it went down easy, and one book was literature, not fiction but literature as I try to limit any made-up story I read to be a classic as long as I usually only read one fictional tale (non-play) per year.

1. As I lay Dying by William Faulkner, #1930. I love Faulkner. Everybody should read Faulkner. Such scathing disapprobation of the racial inequities in the South, but also such love for its uniqueness. And its strong women, what depictions of them! There's subtle humor that's occasionally laugh-out-loud in them, like when the poor white trash family in this book can't afford to take an adult family member to the doctor when he breaks his leg, they try to fix it themselves by making him a cast out of concrete. But first they have to persuade the store owner to break open a 25-pound bag to sell them 10 cents worth of cement, which he finally does to get this noisy, smelly out-of-town riff-raff out of his store. Having a cement cast does not do the injured family member any good, it turns out. I suppose it was worth a try, in a poor-man's canny self-help sort of way.

2. The Conquering Tide: War In The Pacific Islands 1942-44 by Ian W. Toll, #2015. My Dad fought in the Pacific War with the First Marine Division at two horrific battles and was training to be in on the invasion of the Japanese mainland in 1946, with its projected one million American casualties, before we dropped the bomb which finally caused beaten Japan to surrender already. Sorry, but not sorry at all about that.

3. Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific 1944-45 by Ian W. Toll, #2020. The Americans ruthlessly and relentlessly brought the ruthless and implacable Japanese to the peace table just before the Russians' cynical, opportunistic and cheap land grab garnered a prized Japanese island for themselves and communism. The ensuing Cold War would never have been the same. The section on the peaceful occupation of Japan itself made the book fascinating and worthwhile.

4. The British Are Coming! The War For America 1775-77 by Rick Atkinson, #2019. Volume One of the Revolution Trilogy by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Liberation Trilogy (WW2, ETO), which I read last year. I can't wait for volumes two and three to come out.

5. Stars In Their Courses, The Gettysburg Campaign June-July 1863 by Shelby Foote #1994, 1963. This is a "book" lifted straight out of Foote's magisterial Civil War Trilogy and deposited whole as a history of the Gettysburg campaign, with all of its star-fated actors, Lee who lost the war on the afternoon of Pickett's Charge, Meade who steadfastly defended his high ground that couldn't be taken but just as steadfastly refused to come out of his redoubt and attack a defeated foe and therefore consigned the nation to another two years of bloodletting, Reynolds who died after setting the Union line in its winning position, Ewell who hid behind the words "if practicable" in Lee's order of the first day to attack the reeling enemy and knock him off of his dominant position and therefore failed to unhinge the Union line while it was still possible and assured the loss for the Confederacy of the key battle in North American history. I read the massive trilogy back in the nineties and still remember it as a great read, even if written from a Southern POV. Every American adult should know something, or more, about the Battle of Gettysburg, it is where slavery was doomed to die in North America.

6. The Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-42 by Ian W. Toll #2012. The desperate first two years of WW2 in the Pacific, at least until the Battle of Midway changed the course of WW2 in five minutes on June 22, 1942 when American dive-bombers from the US carriers Enterprise and Yorktown arrived simultaneously over the attacking Japanese fleet by happenstance from different directions and battle groups and sank three of the four Japanese carriers in the enemy's taskforce in the most momentous five minutes of WW2. Japan never seriously regained the initiative again during the war, just as Nazi Germany never seriously regained the initiative again after the Battle of Stalingrad was fought to a standstill in 1942, before the Russians annihilated the overextended and encircled German Sixth Army in January 1943.

Pickleball and . . . literature?

 For 75 minutes on Saturday morning I practiced PB with a friend, volleying, serving and returning, and backhands. "Yes! " would ring out in mock triumph as she put yet another slant shot off to one side of the court causing me to run way over there for a weak, lunging return, and then hit the wide-open court as I desperately tried to reverse course and run back into the play. I would hit volley shots at her that would handcuff her between forehand/backhand stabs at the ball and laugh as she quixotically looked at her paddle that had just failed her by trying to return a chicken-wing shot off its narrow banding edge. In between faux triumphs we would discuss Rick Atkinson's fascinating opening volume in the Revolution Trilogy which we both are reading, The Redcoats Are Coming. "Atkinson has a felicity for turning history into literature," says the Washington Post. No score was kept, only momentary scores were settled. I love pickleball.

Sunday, as showers threatened and the sky spit raindrops, I showed up at general PB Drop-In and filled out a 4-some on a water-slicked court hoping to quickly get in a couple of games before a deluge made playing untenable. I thought I was being handy by immediately filling out a 3-some even though our two opponents were half my age and the best players (one by far) of the 12 toilers playing on three courts. The game went quickly as Pen put his wicked spin serve onto the wet court where it sliced wickedly away off the moist veneer of the hard court and weak lunging rally returns were put away decidedly by Player at the Kitchen Line with triumph aplomb. We went up for faux "good game" platitudes at 1-11 and I drolly said, "Work up a sweat, you two?" The losing two of us expectantly waited for Pen and Player to split up with us in some more equitable matchup that would, you know, be more fun but Pen and Player wanted to remain together. Okay. We became a mere ballboy and ballgirl for game two chasing down smashed winners so they could thereupon perform more spectacular kitchen putaways and spin-serves that actually curved wickedly in the wet-laden air from "out" to "in." Quickly dispensing with the false platitudes at the net following the 0-11 shellacking (Pickled!) I kept on going, got into my car and drove home to finish reading my depressing Thomas Hardy novel where the heroine gets hanged for murdering her rapist and her husband, the perfect man, runs off with her sister, equally beautiful but half his age, at the exact moment that poor Tessie is strung up for her "crimes." "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess." There was more profit in reading those lines than playing those games. I hate pickleball.