The Real Charlie

I Am Starting Another Post With The Word "I"

Books tend to be streaky things for me. I'll read a bunch of good books in a row, then slog through some boring crap, then read a bunch of good ones, back to crap, repeat ad nauseum. I am either in the midst of or at the end of a good streak as follows:

The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson. An excellent, thorough account of the Second World War in Italy and Sicily, one of the most forgotten theaters of the war for Americans (although not the most forgotten: that would be China-Burma-Indian). He won the Pulitzer for his previous book in this series of three on America and the Second World War in Europe -  it focused on North Africa. This is excellent. If you or someone you know likes military history, this is the book this year.

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg. A brilliant, detailed, exquisitely researched book with a premise almost too strange to believe: thousands, perhaps 150,000, men of Jewish descent, many classified as "mongrels" under Germany's hateful racial laws, fought for Germany in the Second World War. Many of them also fought like hell for the "privilege" of doing so. If you think that you understand the Holocaust, and the true evil and foulness of Nazism, read this book and know more than you imagined possible.

Better by Atul Gawande MD. I heard Dr. Gawande speak not long ago and was given this book as a gift at the event. A gifted writer whose careful, clear and touching descriptions of  the practice of medicine and surgery in particular remind me why I never could do what he does for a living. Bonus: I realized upon reading the acknowledgments that Dr. Gawande probably treated my father a few years ago - he and his partner are among the few surgeons in Boston who perform a particularly tricky procedure that cured my dad of an immensely painful problem.

My next two books are about hedge fund managers and a Kinky Friedman mystery. Those are two different books, I assure you. I'll report back soon.

Reading Up A Storm

I rarely post about books here, partially because I am not able to spend as much time as I would like reading. I get Barron's read cover to cover every weekend, I read a lot online, and that is usually it. A few times a year I pick up something, usually a serious World War II era history or military history book and blast through it in a few days. I read so fast (800+ words per minute) that it can make buying everything that I want to read a costly enterprise, so I end up borrowing a lot of books from my father, who has similar tastes to what I mentioned above, but lacks some of my other reading interests.

For our recent vacation Abby and I picked up a few sharable books, which I have been reading first as she slogs her way through the waning pages of Bleak House. They are:

The Overachievers: a nice but not too deep look at the lives of driven and pressured kids at Walt Whitman High School in Maryland, the arch rivals of my wife's not-so-beloved alma mater Winston Churchill High School. I went to college with a lot of kids like this. A good cautionary tale for the parent of a future teenager.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk: a really super book about the mathematical and philosophical innovations during the late renaissance (and a few elaborations later) that allowed people to quantify and put a price tag on risk taking in business and science. Highlight: discussion of the Franciscan monk Luca Pacciloi, who described and promoted double entry bookkeeping. Yes, accounting wasn't handed down to us on golden tablets like the Book of Mormon, it was actively marketed by an Italian monk who taught Leonardo Da Vinci his multiplication tables. Cool stuff.

Fun Home: This was the best book by far. I read Alison Bechdel's comic strip "Dykes To Watch Out For" in the local alternapaper in college. I liked it enough, but it didn't exactly speak to my experience (although it did capture every stereotype in greater Amherst/Northampton). This is different. She tells a sad, hard and beautiful story about family, love and secrets in a wonderfully non-linear way, full of humor and irony. She captures some truths about growing up and encountering your superhuman parents as very human people that should ring true for a lot of adult children of parents. And she expresses a side of the father-daughter relationship with a certain grace that I have never seen before. And the drawings are wonderful and moody. I recommend it highly.

By the way, you'll note that the links above point to BookSense and then to my local independent bookseller. Amazon helped kill WordsWorth in Harvard Square, my first employer and a place that was very good to me, so this is an Amazon-free blog. If you want these books go to a real independent store in your community and buy them from real people.