"Where Is Joe Merchant?"
by Jimmy Buffett
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 I'd read this when it first came out, and remember enjoying it. Actually, I remember thinking it wasn't fair that someone who could write and sing popular songs and get rich off doing so could also write a best-seller. When Buffett passed, I decided to re-read it. Enjoyed it even more the second time. It's a splendid adventure mystery - equal parts Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. Joe Merchant is a famous rock star who has disappeared, and a down on his luck pilot in the Florida Keys agrees to help his sister track down what happened to him. |
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"A Gathering of Old Men"
by Ernest J. Gaines
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 After recently watching the made for TV movie made from this novel, I decided to re-read it again. AS with most such efforts, the book is superior to the film - although the film isn't bad. The ending in the book feels more natural, however, and the drawing of the characters is allowed to take the proper time. |
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"The Unsubstantial Air"
by Samuel Hynes
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 An interesting look back at the American pilots who flew and fought in World War I. The author uses diaries, letters home and newspaper clippings to trace the routes young American men took to get into the British and French flying services early in the war, and then those who either joined the U.S. Air Corps or who saw their U.K. unit absorbed into the American force. There are few if any aces here; many of the men profiled flew only a few missions. Others were bomber or reconaissance pilots. And a good share of them didn't survive the war - or even flight training. A bit dry at times, the book nevertheless provides an informative look at the day-to-day reality of what the press of the time presented as unending glamor. |
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"The Bastard Brigade"
by Sam Kean
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 Well-told account of the effort by the Allies to hinder and slow the Nazi atomic weapons program. It includes a detailed telling of the sinking of a Norwegian ferry carrying valuable heavy water supplies. |
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"Beyond the Call"
by Lee Trimble with Jeremy Dronfield
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 Athor Lee Trimble was recording his father's World War II memories on audio tape when his father let slip that he'd been in Russia during the war. Before his father passed, Trimble learned that he'd flown rescue missions into Soviet-held territory to rescue American GIs whose POW camps had been liberated by the Red Army - but not repatriated. Declassified government documents confirmed his father's tale, and Trimble and co-author Jeremy Dronfield weave it all together into a fantastic story as riveting anything any spy novelist ever dreamt up. |
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"Valor in the Bulge"
by Lawrence Cortesi
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 The pivotal Battle of the Bulge in the last winter of the European campaign of World War II, as told through the memories of the men on the front lines. Rather than the top-level tactics of Patton and Eisenhower that blunted the German offensive, this book tells the story of the battle from the enlisted men and junior officers who carried out those orders. |
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"To the End of the Earth"
by John C. McManus
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 The third and final entry in McManus' series on the U.S. Army in the Pacific during World War II, this volume has the same strengths and weaknesses as its two prdecessors: It shines a light on an oft-overlooked campaign of the war, gives soldiers their due compared to their Marine brethren who usually get all the credit, and is well-researched and well-written, drawing on diaries, letters and official unit histories. But it is diminshed by the author's repeated instances of virtue signalling his disapproval of the values or behavior of those he writes about - men and women who, by his own account, were far more impressive whatever their personal shortcomings. |
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"Seized"
by Max Hardberger
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 A fun adventure memoir by a man who earned his living, at least partially, by illicitly freeing ships that had been seized in foreign harbors by governments that don't necessarily play by the rules. Some of his escapes are pretty harrowing - but when you're sailing out of places like Haiti, Honduras and other such ports of call, officially you're a thief. That he is free and alive to tell this tale speaks to his skill. |
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"Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates"
by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger
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 A well-written history of the first foreign-policy crisis of the young United States, when the Barbary pirates demanded tribute to allow our merchant ships transit the Mediterranean. Drawing on letters and diaries of the U.S. sailors who fought the North African kingdoms to ensure fredom of the seas, this history blends both top-level diplomacy and front-line action. |
