If you like it, I highly recommend David McCullough’s bio of him. Well-researched and very readable.
I finished Blood Moon by Sandra Brown. A decent mystery about a series of abductions of teenage girls in Louisiana, but unfortunately much of the narrative focused on the relationship between the male detective and a female reporter. I’m not a prude by any means, but the sex scenes were a bit over the top. Plus, the ending was incredibly weak. I don’t believe I’ll read any more works by this author.
Next up: Deadbeat by Adam Hamdy
Starting today on The Butcher’s Masquerade, #5 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
Back in January I read the obit for Thomas Perry, the author of the Jane Whitefield series, so I went through all of those during the spring. Been rereading the first 9 volumes of the Outlander series - wishing the author would get the lead out and finish #10. It’s been almost 6 years. Just started “The Secret of Secrets” by Dan Brown. Meh so far, but only a few chapters in.
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History Moudhy Al-Rashid
A look at what the ancient texts of the Middle East, recorded on clay tablets in cuneform, tell us about life in ancient times, from the epics of Gilgamesh to the mundane details of the case of a man accused of stealing sheep.
Pretty interesting all in all. I wish it had included at least a few illustrations.
Finished Rex Stout’s Tecumseh Fox mystery Double for Death. Not thrilled.
On to The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong. It’s the story of the Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc, who in 1972 had torn off her napalmed clothes and ran naked down the street, one of the iconic images of the Viewtnam war.
I have been on a kick of rereading entire runs of comic series that I first read long ago. Last month I reread all of Invincible. This month I reread Irredeemable by Mark Waid and now I am working through all of Astro City.
I’ve finally gotten around to reading David Weber’s ‘Honor Harrington’ series. Currently about halfway through A Call to Vengeance, the third book in the ‘Manticore Ascendant’ sub-series by Weber and Timothy Zahn. They’re pretty good, but there are oddities like his use of the Brit term “ratings”. And he seriously overuses the word “hatches”, which always disturbs my suspension of disbelief when I picture people entering a compartment through the deck or the overhead instead of walking through a door. Overall I much prefer Drake, Bujold and Stirling.
Finished Harry S. Truman, by Margaret Truman, which had lots of interesting historical anecdotes; and Turn Homeward, Hannalee, by Patricia Beatty, which is a children’s historical novel about southern mill workers who are sent north by order of Sherman during the Civil War so that they can’t work for the Confederacy. It’s based on a true incident, and is well-written.
Next up: Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney; and How to Mars, a science fiction novel by David Ebenbach.
Could be why he died a little early at age 62. He steadfastly refused healthy habits, eating what he pleased, drinking and smoking until his heart just gave out.
And I finished his A Life on the Road. I did read this about 30 years ago, give or take. An excellent book regardless of whether you are familiar with CBS News’ “On the Road” segment. His memoirs of his early life as a journalist and his time “On the Road” for the show. A fascinating read. If the chapter where Kuralt meets an old Russian dentist in Moscow in 1988, who regales him with how American POWs saved the lives of him and many other Soviet POWs in a Nazi camp, does not bring a proud tear to your eye, you just may not be human.
On a side note: In both of these two books of his I’ve read, this one and the earlier On the Road with Charles Kuralt, he mentions a Montana woman named Patricia Shannon he met in Reno, Nevada shortly after the Martin Luther King Jr assassination in 1968. She was the impetus behind building a park in honor of MLK in a poor section of Reno. He does not go into their relationship, but Wikipedia tells how after his death in 1997 it was revealed he had ended up keeping her as a mistress all those years, unbeknownst to his main family. He paid for her tuition for design school and financially supported her and her three children. Left her some property in his will too. This is an arrangement I’m very familiar with, as it is quite common here in Thailand. It’s a little more formalized here, with the mistresses called “minor wives,” or mia noi, and enjoying a semi-legal status. My own father-in-law had a whole second family and mia noi of his own. His main family consisted of four children – one son (the eldest) and three daughters, of whom my wife was the youngest. His second family was a mirror of that, with three sons and a younger daughter. It was all open and aboveboard, and this second family even attended my wife’s and my wedding in Bangkok 32 years ago. And when he died, the family uncovered evidence that the randy old goat might have had even a third family squirreled away somewhere, but that was never determined for sure. But I digress.
Next up is General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman, by Ed Cray. But I cannot start it until next month. We are moving upcountry at the end of next week and will be busy with the move. Settling down permanently in a nice little resort town on the Gulf of Thailand coast of the Malay Peninsula, 2-1/2 hours south of Bangkok. I’ll have to pick up this book once we’re all settled in next month.
Seconded. A wonderful book.
Francois Mitterrand and Charles Lindbergh had secret second families, too.
Lindbergh had secret second, third, and fourth families. Two of his mistressses were sisters.