|
|
"Kettering: Master Inventor"
by Sigmund A. Levine
|
 Growing up in the Dayton suburb of Kettering, Ohio, there weren't a lot of local hometown heroes to lend us inspiration: The Wright Brothers, of course. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Col. Edward Deeds. OF these, Kettering may be the least known – not only to the general public, but to kids who grew up in Kettering. He's mostly remembered for the development of the electric starter for the automobile, making the new conveyance far more practical than it was when you had to hand crank the engine #150; a misfire of which could snap a grown man's arm. But as this slim 1960 biography of Kettering notes, he invented so much more than the electric starter: The first electric cash register, electric car head lamps, modern high compression diesel engines (making them practical for large trucks and railroads), air conditioning, refrigerators, automotive paint, the first unmanned aerial drone. The man held 186 patents. AS mentioned, this is not a deep dive biography – Rosamond McPherson Young and Thomas Alvin Boyd have both written more complete biographies. But for a look at the man's process of discovery and development, this isn't a bad place to start. |
|
"War As I Knew It"
by Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
|
 Published posthumously after his death following a traffic collision shortly after the end of Wolrd War II, this is more of a notebook than a finished memoir. It nevertheless provides a unique view into the mind of America's finest combat commander. His daily obsersvations jotted down in a notebook during the war offer insights into tactics, strategy and leadership. |
|
"Churchill: The Man of the Century"
by Neil Ferrier
|
 Oversized, but rather short, pictorial history of Winston Churchill's life and career. Nothing particularly noteworthy, but some private photos offer another glimpse at the man. |
|
"The Living Great Lakes"
by Jerry Dennis
|
 A fun travelogue that also turns into a natural history, much like William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways." Signing on as creaman on a modern sailing ship, and helping get it from Lake Michigan to Maine, Dennis uses his journey as a springboard to explore tens of thousands of years of natural, political and military history. The book is weakened a bit by a moralizing closing, in which he browbeats readers with conclusions the smart reader has already drawn naturally from reading everything up to that point. |
|
"Is Paris Burning?"
by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapiere
|
 A fascinating look at the liberation of Paris during World War II. Relying on interviews of both German defenders, and Allied liberators, as well as French Resistance members, this is a tremendous re-creation of what at the time was a very nerve-wracking time: Hitler had ordered Paris to be destroyed before the German Army withdrew, but the German officers in charge did not want to be known as having destroyed one of the great cities of the world. At the same time, the Communist Party wanted to use the liberation of Paris as an opportunity to seize control of post-war France from the democratic forces grouped under Gen. Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle's outwitting of the Communists saved the French from additional misery in the years following the war. |
|
"Please Pass the Guilt"
by Rex Stout
|
 The literary private investigator Nero Wolfe was already out of vogue before I got into high school. Still, when I saw a Nero Wolfe paperback at the friends of the library bookstore for a quarter - I mean, what the heck. And it's not bad, not bad at all. Wolfe, as laid out by Stout in the 1930s, lives well in a New York brownstone, keeps a full-time assistant, and prefers dinner and tending to his orchids to almost anything other than a good case. Forty years into the series finds Stout top of his game, with a TV executive killed by a bomb in his desk ... only it's not clear the bomb actually killed its intended target. Wwell drawn characters, a solid mystery, and the ending delivers as pormised. |
|
"White Eskimo"
by Stephen R. Bown
|
 A wonderfully detailed biograhhy of Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen. I'd encountered Rasmussen while reading Peter Freuchen's memoirs, and this book fully fleshes out Freuchen's friend. The half-Danish, half-eskimo Rasmussen is presented with his warts intact (he was a faithless husband and a distant father), but also gives him his due as explorer and anthropologist. Rasmussen travelled by sled from Greenland to Alaska, stopping and recording stories along the way and in so doing proved that the Greenland eskimo and Alaska inuit are one and the same people. |
|
