Note: I'm having some eye trouble, so please forgive the typos. From now on maybe it will only be recorded books. jb
David Baldacci. Zero Day. © 2011 This is John Puller #1. He’s an army warrant officer and CID
operative, the son of Lt. Gen John Puller, who has dementia and still thinks he
has a command, and younger brother of Robert Puller, a nuclear scientist in
prison for life for treason. Puller is
dispatched to Drake, West Virginia to investigate the murder of an army
intelligence officer. It quickly becomes
7 murders. Near Drake there is a
concrete dome 3 feet thick and larger than two football fields. It was constructed some 50 years early when
the USG shut down some kind of secret facility on the site. If it’s mentioned early, it has to be a
player in the novel. Think nuclear, of
course. Mason, the intelligence officer
to whom Puller must report for this assignment, tells Puller that there have
been two transmission in Dari from somewhere around Drake. No middle eastern looking people have been
seen anywhere in the area. As Puller
works with a local police sergeant, a woman named Sam Cole, the reader learns a
little about strip mining, a nasty mine owner, and the mostly unemployed local
population. The book got good reviews
and I guess the ending is a surprise, but I won’t be reading Puller #2. Puller is too good at hand to hand combat;
Baldacci seems fixated on army procedures; and the whole thing seems sort of
simplistic and predictable. September
2015
Robert M. Edsel. The Monument Men. © 2009 The movie was good but the book is so much more. I loved Edsel’s Saving Italy and this one completes the story. It seems incredible that the Nazis put so
much effort and so many resources into stealing the art of Europe, and it’s
almost as amazing that our military men at the highest levels bought into US
efforts to save and return as much of it as possible. They didn’t provide the Monument Men with much
in the way of resources like Jeeps and staff, but they did cooperate. The best story here is that of Rose Vallard,
who was a minor staff member at the Jeu de Palme and managed to stay on when the
Nazis took over. She kept track of the shipments
and when Paris was liberated worked with the Monument men to track them
down and recover them from their hiding
places in mines and caves. In one case
she was able to get a whole trainload of art works shunted to a siding while
the Nazis were evacuating Paris, so that the art works never went to Germany at
all. I’ve traveled widely in Europe and
admired so many works on site and studied them and taught classes about
them. It never occurred to me that masterworks
like the Ghent altar piece or Michelangelo’s Madonna in Bruges had once been
hidden in places like salt mines and came close to being destroyed by vengeful
Nazis as the war drew to a close. August
2015.
`G.J. Meyers. The Borgias, the Hidden History. ©
2013 The Borgia family must have the worst
reputation in history, and few have questions whether it is deserved. The family was Spanish, but it was the
Borgias who move to 15th C Italy during the Renaissance who earned them
their infamous place in history. The four main characters here are Alonzo who
became Pope Calixtus III; Rodrigo, who became Pope Alexander VI; Caesare, who became a cardinal in his teens
and then left that exalted office to become a military adventurer, the Count of
Valentois and married to a relative of the King of France, Duke of Romanga and
a man in and out of favor with the Spanish, Neopolitan and French courts; and
Caesare’s sister Lucretia, who was briefly married to one of the Sforza’s and
then married Alonzo D’Este which eventually made her Duchess of Ferrara. The amount of intriguing and betrayal among the noble families of Italy is almost
beyond belief. I wish I had kept count
of the political murders as I went along.
The Borgias were accused accused of many murders, but perhaps only Cassare was actually guilty. Murder was routine
in the politics of the time, but along with murder, the Borgias were accused of
every kind of immorality including incest.
Supposedly Caesare and Lucretia and their siblings were sired by Alexander,
and he was accused of an incestuous relationship with Lucretia. Much of this was not written about until they
were all dead and close study of historical records make it clear that Caesare
et al were Alexander’s nephews and nieces, who he took in in accord with custom
when their father died. Along with the
Borgias, the reader gets a nice summary of the political action in 15th
C Italy among its great families, the Pope and the Papal States, the then great
kingdom of Naples, Ferdinand and Isabella and King Louis XII of France, who
wanted to add Naples to his holdings as a jumping off place to reconquer
Palestine and become King of Jerusalem.
I think Meyer made his case that the Borgias were about as amoral as
their peers. Their main problem may have
been that they were Spanish. One final
note, Lucretia, who was supposed to have been an accomplished poisoner along
with her sexual depravity, became the
perfect duchess in Ferrara, beautiful, charming and much love and admired by
all. She has many descendants among today's European royal families. September 2015
Jeffrey Rogers. The War of 1812. © 2006 This seem to be an audio book only. It is is a pretty good summary of this nearly
forgotten and totally unnecessary war. One thing mentioned that we tend to forget is
that Jefferson, for all his other accomplishments, stripped the Federal
Government of most of its functions. This
left Madison having to start from scratch to try to mount a defense. At some point Jefferson did propose universal
military training, but he was thinking of Greek citizen soldiers rather than a
unified and permanent military establishment.
September 2015
Harlow Giles Unger. John Quincy Adams. © 2012
John Quincy Adams had so many accomplishments that it would take pages
to just list them. Read this book and
you will get a new take on just about everything that happened in American
history from the Revolution to the 1830s. Adams seems to have had a hand in everything,
representing us abroad, negotiating treaties, acquiring Florida, the Monroe
Doctrine. He was an elitist, in that he
thought voters and their government servants should be intelligent and
educated, but he was a serious advocate for the rights of everyone and one of
the earliest outspoken opponents of slavery.
As far as elitism goes, maybe he
had a point. How is it that so many blue
collar people are strong supporters of the party of trickle down economics? September 2015
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