Patrick's comments (member since Jul 25, 2007)

Patrick's comments from the Our History group.

Conrad,

I was intrigued by your comment about McCullough's Truman. i read that book over a decade ago, and I really liked it, but I have always wanted the rest of the story. I have a lot of respect for many of the decisions Truman made, but I did feel like there was pretty more info on his business failures, his ties to the Kansas City political machine, and his response to pressures of McCarthyism that was left out. Can you recommend any other books that counterbalance McCullough's overly happy view of Truman? (I'd look through your Goodreads list but you have over 1100 books, man.)

Also, do you feel that McCullough's biography of John Adams is also a hagiograhic treatment of President #2? I found it interesting when the Adams book came out that McCullogh's current formula seems to be to write about Presidents who were pretty much reviled during the periods they were in office and sort of restore them to sort of prominence and glory in the mind of today's readers.

Great question, Meirav!

I have many favorites...but initially my vote is for Ron Chernow, author of my favorite book Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller.

His latest book was about Alexander Hamilton, and word is that he is writing a book about George Washington.

I always find Chernow witty and fun to read, and i enjoy his insights into the people and the subjects he writes about. His books are usually very long, but it is clear that he has researched his suject exhaustively, and provides the reader with plenty of footnotes and sources for us to check out his assertions.

I also am a huge fan of Stephen Sears, who write about the Eastern Theater campaigns of the American Civil War. He's covered McClellan's Peninsula campaign, Antietam, Chancellorsvile (my personal favorite for Sears), and came out with Gettysburg in 2003. Looking forward to see his next book (or books), when he finally starts to write about Grant.

Can't blame you for switching off to Catcher In The Rye...it's tough to read constantly about a subject that is very complex and that seems to defy progress, despite so many efforts to resolve the various conflicts.

If you enjoy Mila 18 and the Haj, I would lso suggest Exodus by the same author Leon Uris. They're all kind of long, but they are a great introduction to some parts of this problem, and they're a lot more readable and interesting than most of the non-fiction.

By the way, i would not feel too bad about what you think is yoru ignorance - most Americans have a hard time following what's happening over in the Middle East. You should feel good about yourself for following up on your reading of Thousand Splendid Suns with your efforts to find out a little more about what created the background for that book.

Leslie, what got you into military history? And which authors do you like on the Civil War and the Navy?

Peggy, I have had a professional interest in this area for a long time, and the more I learn about that region the more I realize how hard it is to really figure out what is going on over there. There are hundreds of little ethnic groups and Islamic sects in all those countries between Morocco and Pakistan that play some role in shaping the events we see on the news, and it gets really hard at time to understand what everyone's motivations are. Even our best government analysts find themselves hard pressed to figure it all out. But for a general idea of some of the complexity and a fairly readable book as well, I suggest you start with the Friedman book that Kevin recommended.

And I applaud your interest in trying to learn more about this are of the world. Best of luck with your efforts.

Peggy, here are two more recommendations for you, which I think try to fairly balance all sides of the story:

David Fromkin, A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE (subtitled The Fall of The Ottoman Empire and The Creation Of The Modern Middle East) - published in 1989

Albert Hourani, A History Of The Arab People - published in 1991

If you're looking for more current material on what the U. S. has gotten itself into over the last 20 years, please advise. I don't think I've seen a really good complete book published since the 1991 that ties all of the recent events together and presents everyone's point of view in a way that could be considered "fair and balanced," not to misuse that term. Every recent book I've seen appears to focus on only one aspect of the situation, be it terrorism, or the Iraq war, or the Israeli-Palestinian situation. These are all important on their own merits, but to get the big picture you have to see how all they tie together, or you run the risk of not quite understanding why the key players made the decisions they made, or reacted as they did.

You might consider buying the latest "Dummies" guide or "Complete Idiot's Guide" on the Middle East. No joke - I find these books very helpful when i am first starting to study or learn about a subject.

Hope you found this helpful. I look forward to seeing what other recommendations you receive in response to this inquiry.

Peggy, there are many outstanding books out there for Middle East history, but just about all of them are considered to subscribe to a "point of view" depending on who listen to, no matter what the intentions of the author.

That being said, we found What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis to be useful when we were trying to learn more about that region. It's about Islam, but you'll get a general history of the area from a Western perspective for the past several hundred years, and I think the author tries to be fair to all points of view. Plus it's relatively short and pretty readable.

Beirut to Jerusalem is a great book on the Israel-Palestine-Lebanon situation, but Friedman wrote it in the 1980's. However, the fundamental issues he describes probably haven't changed too much, just some of the tactics for both sides.

More recommendations later...

Great topic. I love biography, but the best authors include so much history to create the setting that their topic lived and worked in that it practically becomes a history book. Those are the best biographies.

To that end, I concur with Kevin above on Chernow's Alexander and also want to mention Chernow's TITAN on John D Rockefeller, which is my favorite long biography ever.

Caro is great but I think that he beats his point to death, and I get to the point where I say "we get it - Moses as a jerk and screwed people over - move on with the narrative." But I listened to the unabridged Power Broker on audiotape - maybe if I read it I would feel differently. Caro's Master of the Senate on LBJ is also really good, but suffers from the same excesses.

Other recommendations:

- Tim Pat Coogan on Michaelk Collins, a leader of the Irish independence movement
- Jospeh Frazier Wall and/or David Nasaw on Andrew Carnegie
- Townsend Hoopes's DRIVEN PATRIOT on James Forrestal (also good for a different look at Truman)
- the three volume series on Martin Luther King by Taylor Branch (of which Parting The Waters is the best)
- the Vince Lombardi bio by David Maraniss
- Carlos D'Este on George Patton
- James Robertson on Stonewall Jackson

Some of the short Penguin Lives biographies edited by James Atlas are also good for history, in particular Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse and Jonathan Spence on Mao Zedong (skip the ones about author or entertainers).

Mark,

I think your commentary is right on the mark. That's what makes history so fascinating to me as well...the collection of great characters and obscure events that are so important, and yet that no one knows anything about.

In the case of military history, I think there are enough afficianados out there who are so into specific subjects that over time good biographies will be produced. When military minded people aren't actually fighting or training, a significant number of them turn to reading, research, and writing to keep focused on their interest. And there will always be a market for it, since other military folks will want to see what the author had to say.

That is not really the case with political history, economic history, social history, and many other types of history...In those fields, the people who are fascinated by those subjects actually can practice in them on a daily basis, and if they do get around to writing anything it's usually their memoirs about the events they took part in.

Personally, I think the most fun way to learn history is the patchwork method you describe -- the alternative is the in-depth survey, like you get in college during freshmen year. Those course are usually uninteresting to most students because they are so broad, and because you don't really have the time to get too in depth on any one topic or person because you have to stay on schedule.

But if you start off with a general interest in one particular event or person and read up on that, then you might become interested in other people and events who are less well known to teh general public. I'm guessing that happened with your interest in Stanton - I assume that your interest in him came from reading a general biography of Lincoln or something about the Civil War. And in the course of reading that book or books, you developed an affinity for that guy, and wanted to find out what made him tick, and how his story ends after the Civil War. And thus another history buff is born.

As for Stanton, have you checked out Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Godwin? My apologies if you have. I just read it and it's OK on Stanton. My impression is that Stanton's role was also well covered in Lincoln's War by Geoffrey Perret.

But you're right -- there should be a more recent biography available for such an important figure in Lincoln's administration.

Conrad,

Your topics sound interesting. re #1 - where did the Lapitan people live? South-Central Pacific like the rest of the peoples you mentioned?

Forgot to include Napoleon. That whole period is pretty amazing.

I checked out the Wikipedia link...those look pretty funny.

Very well, then...in the same vein as JZ I recommend to you the series called Casca The Eternal Mercenary...through a ludicrous plot device, the main character finds himself a participant in nearly all of the violent history-making events of the last 2000 years. I go into more detail about this book and my opinion of it on the Books I Loathed group under the thread Shameful Passions...

and the wiki entry for more info is...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casca_Longi...

I will say that the authors attempted to make thse books as historically accurate as possible, up to a point.

Wouldn't recommend reading this in front of your politically correct friends either.

The Killer Angels is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel on the Civil War though is very well written. Much of the rest of that genre is crap, but this book is superb. I highly recommend it.

I love many types of history, and I am very happy that we have this group. Most of what I read and own is grouped by category on my book list, but I have a lot more to add. So, here is my short list, in no particualr order (and I would love to hear from anyone else who is interested in these periods and places):

(1) American political history - all periods, especially FDR
(2) American business history and biography
(3) Military history and theory
(4) Irish history
(5) Chinese history
(6) the American Civil War
(7) the American Revolutionary War period
(8) the China-Burma-India theater in WW II (especially Stilwell's and Wingate's campaigns)
(9) the history of scientific discovery
(10) the history of the American West
(11) the movement to get American women the vote
(12) American Indian history
(13) the American civil rights movement
(14) the history of Nazi Germany,Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China (not a fun topic to read about, but we need to understand what happened in those times/places and why they got so out of control)
(15) the history of historical research methods and interpretation
(16) American labor history
(17) American urban history and the history of specific cities
(18) the history of California