NANCY R'S 50 BOOKS READ IN 2016

[Jill]

Nancy, here is your new thread in 2016. Happy reading in the new year.

Our Required Format:

JANUARY

1. by Winston S. Churchill
Finish date: January 2016
Genre: (whatever genre the book happens to be)
Rating: A
Review: You can add text from a review you have written but no links to any review elsewhere even goodreads. And that is about it. Just make sure to number consecutively and just add the months.

[Nancy]

JANUARY

1. by Bob Woodward
Finish date: 24 January 2016
Genre: US History
Rating: A-
Review: President Nixon and Alexander Butterfield stride across the cover. Nixon, uncharacteristically, is smiling and looks relaxed. Butterfield, hand in pocket, looks guarded. The book tells us why.

Butterfield comes across as a man given to extremes of enthusiasm and of dislike. Butterfield, assistant to H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's unofficial chief of staff, first meets Nixon some three weeks after his 1969 inauguration. Nixon mumbles inarticulately and Butterfield leaves feeling like a zombie, quite a comedown from his earlier elation at being offered the "job opportunity of a lifetime". It gets worse. Nixon is rude and profane on their second meeting a day later, and Butterfield is now sure he is going to turn his back on the golden opportunity.

Butterfield's idealism and his mildly histrionic personality leave him ripe for disillusion, and this embitterment and a strong moral compass culminate in his firing the smoking gun ("I was aware of listening devices") that leads to the discover of the "smoking gun" tape.

Woodward's book is the result of a series of reunions / interviews he and Butterfield had in 2014 and 2015. The discussions have a bit of the quality of veterans swapping war stories 40 years after the armistice. Woodward doesn't shy from probing Butterfield for motivation, and Butterfield responds with seeming candour.

Butterfield hauled off a few cars full of documents when he moved to the FAA in 1973, a relocation that startles us today but which seems not to have been an uncommon practice among Nixon's departing staffers. Many of these memoranda, notes and minutes of secret interviews are reproduced in the appendix to the book. Although we've long known about some of the incidents they chronicle, reading the original documents for the first time is frisson inducing.

Just when you thought there was nothing more to learn about Nixon's five year assault on the Constitution, a book like this comes along and leaves you wondering...

[Donna]

Nancy wrote: "1. by Bob Woodward
Finish date: 24 January 2016
Genre: US History
Rating: A-
Review: President N..."

Great review, Nancy.

[Nancy]

FEBRUARY
2. by Marilyn Johnson
Finish date: 01 Feb 2016
Genres: Social science, anthropology, history
Rating: B+
Review: A composite portrait of contemporary archaeologists emerges, a bit unsteadily, from Johnson's collection of short pieces of journalism. Above all and unremarkably in the 21st century, they are reluctant and savvy marketers. They are passionate about the field, as who wouldn't be when the financial rewards are paltry. And they are increasingly flexible about what kinds of sponsors and partners in preservation they will accept.

Johnson is indulging her own early passion for "digging in the sandbox" in researching and writing this, and the result is exuberant and a bit scattered. Prominent in her introductory chapter is a comment on recent scientific advances and exciting new technologies that should send the profession forging ahead. But the rest of the book underplays these breakthroughs. There isn't a newly discovered site or a shiny new gadget in evidence in the rest of the book. Of course the book is about the diggers, not the sites or the tools, but an excursion into the world of tomorrow would have been welcome.

The book has an enticing bibliography and lots of website references. Johnson has two other books on historians: one about obituary writers and one about librarians. I enjoyed this one well enough to seek out the other two. Can we look forward to one about genealogists?