What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

[death tribble]

The follow up to the above written nine years later Between the Woods and the Water wherein Patrick traverses Hungary and Rumania. If you have read the first book then you will like this.

[Cygnia]

"The Ultimate Book of Imposters" by Ian Graham

[Sociotard]

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

 

About public shaming and mob mentality in the social media age.  Worth reading!

[death tribble]

Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man by Hugh Sebag Montefiore.

This covers the British fight against the Germans when they invaded and the retreat and evacuation of the army. It also covers the aftermath and the extraction of other British troops thereafter.

What is it with the Germans murdering Belgian civilians ?

The massacres by German troops of British soldiers is covered.

The famous halt order as well. Reasoning is given that it was not Hitler but the generals who gave the orders to halt not just once. Part of it was to do with the unexpectedly heavy resistance and counter attacks by the British and to allow the troops up catch up with the infantry. Then there is the terrain and the fact that the general wanted to go after the Allied armied south of them for which they would need all their tanks, so it was going to be left for the infantry.

There is always new stuff. Like the fact that the German plans for the invasion of the Low Countries fell into the hands of the Allies due to a mistake by a German pilot and his passenger in January 1940. It raises the question of whether this was considered to be a fake and if not would the Germans alter their plans in light of the capture of the plans.

One of my grandfathers was with the BEF so this is a must read book for me.

[SKJAM!]

Empire of Sin by Gary Krist, a history of New Orleans' seedy red light district "Storyville" from roughly 1890 to 1920.   Shows what happens when reformers think racial egalitarianism is one of the bad things they need to fix.  http://www.skjam.com/2015/06/25/book-review-empire-of-sin/

[Cancer]

A New History of Life by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink. A good and as readable as possible (i get lost at times in the rapid-fire comparisons of geologic periods whose names I am unfamiliar with) up-to-date recap of what it says ... Includes a discussion of the origin of life and how we know what we do, and then the chemical and biological development of the Earth's near-surface. Changes in atmosphere composition, primarily oxygen but also CO2, are hugely important for the evolution of life throughout life's history, and that includes the single-celled domains and the macroscopic animals and plants of the last 600 million years.

 

If you are a top-down simulationist who toys with creation of sci-fi game worlds and intelligent races ... you really want to read this. Lots of grist for the mill here.

 

Oh, and the anthropogenic modifications of the atmosphere are not dwelt upon here but the are mentioned, and the ramifications are more terrifying than you are used to thinking even for the greatest pessimists.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

I'm reading about three different books right now, and the first to finish was

 

 

 

Love this book. LOVE this book. This is the kind of stuff I really get off on. Can't wait for the inevitable sequel.

[L. Marcus]

He's a peculiar man, that Randall Munroe.

[Burrito Boy]

I recently read An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi. Now I know what you people mean when you use the term "straw man". All this time I thought you were scarecrow fetishists.

[death tribble]

Ardennes 1944 by Anthony Beevor. The story of the Battle of the Bulge. It seems rather anti-climatic for some of it giving the impression that the offensive was doomed from the start. It takes in the Hurtgen Forest fighting and then the planning of the campaign. Also the disastrous falling out between the Allied commanders. Overall it does Bradley no favours at all. But the 82nd Airborne get a look in which is something I did not know.

[death tribble]

The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus.

 

Although there are bits missing this is highly entertaining. The reign of Tiberius is given what amounts to character assassination while Claudius and Nero come off better, even though Tacitus does not like either of them. 

[Cancer]

Hundred Days by Nick Lloyd, about the campaign that ended World War I. He opens the book on 18 July 1918 (which is hard on the heels of the last German attack on 15 July, which failed badly), with Mangin's Tenth Army (featuring the 1st and 2nd US divisiions) beginning an offensive causing the first stages of German retreat.

 

As the author says (and from what I have seen I agree with him) the final Allied offensive is very scantily treated in existing works. There are many, many books on the beginning of WW1, rather fewer about its end, and then another superabundance of books about the beginnings of the "peace", the Versailles Treaty and what came after. Each combatant nation has its own reasons for that lack of treatment (recounted in this book).

 

Boiled down very briefly, once the Germans started retreating, Allied pressure never allowed them to stop. Chief reasons for this are

• The Germans shot their bolt in their attacks in the spring of 1918; they had concentrated their best men into the Stosstruppen units, in which a disproportionate share of casualties were taken, and the army was depleted far worse than one might think.
• The blockade was very effective, throttling imports of most supplies, especially food, to the Central Powers. Russia had capitulated, but the productive parts of it, ceded under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, were still in such chaos that agriculture had not really been resumed on anything but a subsistence level, so the new conquests did not "pay off" in the time they had them.
• Germany's allies, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, and Bulgaria, were used up and they too started collapsing in the 2nd half of 1918, which contributed more pressure on German morale and siphoned off resources from Germany in trying to prop them up..
• New Allied tactics, chiefly developed by the Australians under General Monash and the Canadians under General Currie. Tanks were part of it, but only part; suppression of German air reconnaissance, detailed staff work in marshaling forces at the points of attack; careful deception to prevent detection of the buildup; then a massive bombardment begun only minutes before the infantry started moving. This enabled the return of surprise to the battlefield. Finally, there was recognition that an attack could make progress for at most a week before the inevitable disorganization and depletion of needed supplies rendered it unprofitable; the months of bullheaded "sausage machine" sustained attacks into an enemy who was ready for them were ended.
• The last German attack started on 15 July and had obviously failed by the 17th. The first Allied offensive began immediately, on July 18, before the German High Command could reallocate forces and other resources away from the failed attack.
• Entry of the Americans, who were raw, inexperienced and underequipped, but came in such numbers that they could man almost exponentially growing sections of front. This released the used-up French Army to reconstitute a (much smaller) force capable of attacking. The statement is made that by Armistice Day, the French were active on only forty miles of the entire front.
• Entry of the Americans also made for a drastic superiority in material among the Allies, though paradoxically not directly in the American army. Entry of the US in 1917 made American financial strength and natural resources immediately available to the British and French war industries, which sustained a much higher output than the blockade-strangled German ones, so the Allies had a greater total of artillery pieces and overall supplies, not to mention a virtual monopoly on tanks.
• Influenza, which came in two strains. The second one, which was the strain that killed 50 million worldwide by the end of 1919, only started claiming lives in the autumn. The first strain started in June, and hit everyone, not lethally, but did incapacitate completely for eight to ten days. In the civilian UK, flu cases were 2000 to 3000 per month during the spring, but in June alone 30,000 cases were reported. On both sides rather more than 100,000 men were made unavailable to noncombat illness for some interval during that final 95 days of the war. Sick men require as much logistical support as able ones (less in the way of weapons, but more in the way of food, housing, and medicine), and when you are advancing you can leave them behind in fixed hospitals; if you are retreating, getting the sick safely away from the front is doubly difficult.

Finally, the concentration of political power into the German high command meant that the civilian oversight wasn't there. The "home front" was strangled as much or worse than the military, and Ludendorff and Hindenburg gave little or no attention to domestic or international politics until it was too late. Among the Allies, domestic politics meant these nations were not so completely exhausted when the last cards were being played in late 1918.

[Burrito Boy]

Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience With Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate by Gary J. Byrne

 

I'd recommend this to everyone.

[death tribble]

The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby.

An account of the battle from the start of the war to its end showing what was happening on both sides. How the convoy system worked and how things were missed that could have brought the battle to a swifter end and some of the poor decisions involved. The one thing that came out that I did not know was that the Germans had cracked the British codes and were thus able to move against the convoys.

[death tribble]

A Night to Remember by Walter  Lord. Said to be the definitive work on the sinking of the Titanic. It is concise and absorbing ixing facts and the recollections of the survivors. Well worth a read.

[Cancer]

Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation by Timothy J. Jorgensen

 

Jorgensen is a radiation biologist, and his professional interests are in public health questions related to radiation.

 

The book opens with drawing an analogy between electricity and radiation as received by the public: raw initial enthusiasm, then fear of the unknown and poorly understood, then acceptance as the risks involved become familiar through experience. (That last hasn't quite happened for hard radiation.) Then the stories most physicists are well acquainted with: Roentgen, Becquerel, the Curies, Rutherford, not quite getting to the Manhattan Project.

 

Then he goes into radiation-related health history, including the strange diseases of miners, the tragedy of the Radium Girls, and so on. Then an introduction to treating cancer with radiation, followed by a fairly detailed discussion of the effects of the Hiroshima atomic bomb attack, which opens with a characteristically blunt sentence:

It's no small feat to drop an atomic bomb from an airplane and not fry your own ass in the process.

Then comes a discussion of that effects of radioactive fallout, starting with the compounded mistakes of the US's Castle Bravo H-bomb test, which had a yield almost 2¹⁄₂ times expected, the wind patterns surrounding the test did not go as predicted.

 

That's where I am now in the book. Chapters yet to come include radon in homes (in the US), genetic damage due to radiation, concentration of radiation among fish at the top of the food chain, and nuclear power accidents. There are some minor errors (he gets the surface temperature of the Sun wrong at one point) but this is well worth reading if you have any interest in radioactivity-related public health questions. There is neither scare tactics nor denial here, and that makes it unusual in our era of control-populace-through-(mis)information.

[Cancer]

Just finished Hidden Figures (2016 book, not movie!) by Margot Lee Shetterley. Full disclosure: the author is on campus here tomorrow for an event sponsored by the university that employs me. Second disclosure: I use the word "blacks" here to refer to people for whom the the most popular label now seems to be African-American; my usage here is as in the book, which is probably mainstream usage in the era about which the book tells. Third disclosure: in case it's not obvious, I am male, extremely white, and I grew up during the latter half of that same era (I was 7 years old at the time of Martin Luther King, Jr's "I have a dream" speech in D.C.).

 

It is an account of the black women working as the "West area computers" (mathematicians and engineers) at Langley (NACA's/NASA's R&D site in Virginia) during and after WW2, through the '40s, 50's, and '60s, the account largely ending with the end of Project Apollo in the early 1970s, against the backdrop of institutional racism and sexism -- and the civil rights movement -- in the US and Virginia in that era. Intelligent, determined women pursuing careers they loved, jumping on opportunities which sprang up new with the onset of the war and the establishment of the military-industrial complex. I'm a geek, so I would have liked to have seen more about the actual mathematics and computational tasks that the women performed (there isn't an equation in the book), but this "elephant in the room" -- that it is acceptable to gloss over technical competence and assume that mathophobia is an appropriate cultural standard -- is left unacknowledged in the book. On a very high level, comments are made about the problems in aerodynamics and (later) orbital mechanics on which the women worked.

 

I find it interesting to compare this book to We Could Not Fail by Richard Paul & Steven Moss, published a year earlier on a strongly comparable subject; its undertitle is "The First African Americans in the Space Program" and focused perhaps exclusively on the black men in the newly-formed NASA facilities at several sites in the Deep South, chiefly Cape Canaveral. Figures is, in some ways, "sanitized", omitting some of the flat-out barbaric features of the institutionalized racism in the South, which Fail explicitly mentions. For example, I don't think the word "lynching" appears in Figures, while in Fail one of the first points raised is that Florida led the nation in per capita lynchings early in the 20th Century, and black men in particular were always at risk of grisly murder at the hands of a mob. Figures does describe the two-tiered segregated higher education system that existed nation-wide, and the institutional dearth of opportunities for those blacks who did make it through the highest educational tiers.

[Cancer]

Building the H Bomb A Personal History by Kenneth W Ford, © 2015. The author is a physicist, one who was not involved in the Manhattan Project that built the first A-bombs, but one who joined the team working on the fusion bomb in 1950.

 

He has some comments to make about the abrasive Teller and the less abrasive Ulam, both of them brilliant, and where the credit ought to lie for the theoretical breakthrough that underlies all but the very earliest fusion bombs. Scrupulously referenced, it touches on the post-WW2 political background as well as the concepts behind the bomb and the activities in overcoming the barriers to producing the working, plane-deliverable H-bomb.

 

In a preface, he comments that the US Dept of Energy is of the opinion that the book contains some secret material, but it's clear that all those (non-secret) references are there to show that all the technical, if not personal, details he mentions were already in unclassified publications. This includes, amusingly, a couple of Soviet documents that might be things that the physicist-spy Klaus Fuchs betrayed to the Soviets from his position at Los Alamos prior to his arrest in early 1950.

 

A worthy addition to the literature about the Cold War at the dawn of the MAD era, it's not as comprehensive as it could be. I suspect that a really comprehensive history of the race to the H-bomb from 1945 to 1952 (when the Ivy Mike test of 1 November 1952 proved the concept worked, and literally removed the islet of Elugalab from the surface of Earth) has yet to written, and won't be, until all the participants in that development are safely dead and the political tenor in the US is less polarized. Sadly, I don't expect to see that work in my lifetime.

[Cassandra]

U-Boats Destroyed.

 

It's a book listing all the U-Boats destroyed in both World Wars.

[Old Man]

Building the H Bomb A Personal History by Kenneth W Ford, © 2015. The author is a physicist, one who was not involved in the Manhattan Project that built the first A-bombs, but one who joined the team working on the fusion bomb in 1950.

 

If you haven't already, consider reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.  It stops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and you probably are already familiar with a lot of led up to that, but it's an extremely well written and enjoyable read.

[Cancer]

That book is priceless, and I read it long ago and still own that copy.

 

This one restricts itself to the H-bomb, inasmuch as possible.

[Cassandra]

The Real Jimmy Carter by Stephen F. Hayward.

 

It says a lot that Walter Mondale was the voice of reason in that administration.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Two Years Before The Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr.  Incredibly informative book about serving on a clipper ship in the mid 1800s, around the cape to California, and back after some work loading and unloading goods.  Amazing story based on his diary and notes.

[Cancer]

I've seen that recommended several times, but haven't tracked it down when I had the time to read. Someday....

[st barbara]

 "Dig Here !" by Thomas Penfield. If you want to go treasure hunting in the American south west then this is the book for you ! 81 lost treasures (mines. outlaw loot and other buried treasures). in California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.