Good reads

[cashead]

The Gunslinger has always been part of a fantasy series.

It's like saying "I really enjoyed Lord of the Rings as a travellogue, but the fantasy stuff really lost me."

[paddy no 11]

The Gunslinger has always been part of a fantasy series.

It's like saying "I really enjoyed Lord of the Rings as a travellogue, but the fantasy stuff really lost me."

Not what I said really, the first 2/3 of book 1 is a western

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Following on from Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, I smashed through a ton of reading in preparation for the Normandy battlefield study. The Rifles Are There: 1st and 2nd Battalions The Royal Ulster Rifles in the Second World War by David Orr and David Truesdale was next to shyte, but since the actions of these two battalions were the focus of our study it had to be read. Having access to the Royal Ulster Rifles' museum archives was a true eye opener since it became abundantly clear that Orr and Truesdale merely harvested the archive and threw the results into a book to which they added next to nothing.

Anthony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy was OK but falls a long way short of his magisterial works Stalingrad and Belin (But nothing that he has written has come close to either of these superb histories). It is, nevertheless, a very accessible account of the campaign from landings to breakout and if that's what you're looking for it is a good choice.

Dan Harvey's Bloody Dawn: The Irish at D-Day is a collection of personal stories dredged from across the entire invasion and is somewhat misleading in its title. The only two Irish battalions in the invasion force came ashore long after dawn and their first day in France was far from Bloody (That was soon to change). If you have no interest in the Irish then there's no point picking this one up; even if you have, there are better things to do with your time.

In order to gain a perspective from the German side I dipped into two books edited by David Isby, namely Fighting the Invasion: The Germans at D Day and Fighting in Normandy: The German Army from D Day to Villers Bocages. These books are simple collections of commanders' reports but given that this is effectively primary source material from the likes of Keitel, Guderian and Blumentritt, it is pretty good stuff. Again, unless you are looking for the detailed perspective they are not worth burrowing into.

By far the best book I read in preparing for the battlefield study is Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe. I gave it five stars on Goodreads and that is not something I do often (Perhaps two or three books a year, often none). It is up there with the other two books that I would consider essential to understanding D Day and the Battle for Normandy, namely Carlo D'Este's Decision in Normandy and John Keegan's Six Armies in Normandy. My review for Goodreads is:

This book is essential reading for any serious student of modern war and for anyone hoping to understand the strategic nuances of the Anglo-American alliance's war against Germany and the laying of the foundations of the Cold War. It is superb. Australian war correspondent Chester Wilmot's credentials are impeccable (He landed with the British 6th (Airlanding) Brigade on the evening of D-Day) but he stays clear of the tactical trip-wires in this unsurpassed and magisterial examination of the United Nations' operations in North West Europe. His sources, which include the post-capture testimonies of senior German officials and officers, transcripts of the Nuremberg interviews, recovered fragments of the twice-daily conferences held by Hitler with his senior military staff and personal interviews, give his account a balance that few have since achieved. Suggestions that The Struggle for Europe is Anglo-centric are simple nonsense (I have yet to meet an Australian that would give the English any benefit of doubt); Wilmot is clinical in his collection and assessment of evidence and entirely unbiased in his narrative.

He does not shy away from criticism of Montgomery and Churchill, but their all too apparent human frailties did not mean that they were always wrong just as their all too apparent human qualities did not mean that they were always right. That Eisenhower was probably the greatest leader of a military coalition that the world will ever see does not make him faultless, but Wilmot deals with Ike with the same dispassionate measure as he does with the other key players. He rightly points out that Patton's relentless aggression probably did as much strategic harm to the Allied campaign in western Europe as it did operational good, and that Bradley, while superb in command of an Army operating on the Normandy battlefield shaped by Montgomery, was virtually witless in command of an Army Group when faced with the daunting challenge of shaping the battlefield himself following the breakout.

The real value in this essential book lies in its command of the socio-economic as well as the military factors that played their tightly interconnected roles in determining the strategic direction of the final year of the Second World War - and in doing so it does not forget Stalin and the Russians. Those reviewers who have condemned The Struggle for Europe as Anglo-centric may wish to go back and read its last hundred pages and ask themselves whether our post-War world might perhaps have been a little safer had Roosevelt adopted a little more Anglocentricity at Yalta.

There are some superb histories of the Normandy campaign that tell the stories of the soldiers who fought and provide wonderful operational narratives. If you are looking for that then The Struggle for Europe is not for you. But if you want to know why they fought when and where they did, then you must read this book.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Continuing the reading surge in the wake of my Masters I rattled through Saul David's Victoria's Wars: The Rise of Empire in a couple of days. I had heard of, but not read anything of David's and wanted to get a better understanding of the Crimean and Indian campaigns since the British Army was disproportionately Irish during most of the 19th Century. This book offered that and more, but didn't quite breach the line between a good general narrative and worthy critical history. OK but not great.

It did point me to Christopher Hibbert's The Great Mutiny: India 1857, which was excellent and gave me more of what I was after. The Mutiny was a brief but savage period in the shared histories of Britain and India and one in which the Irish played a significant role. Hibbert's book is accessible to the general reader and still manages to subject the key players to critical scrutiny. Well worth searching the Advanced Book Exchange to get hold of a copy. Hibbert's book, in turn, made me reach for my bookshelves and pull down J G Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur. It is an even greater rarity, with shelves bulging with unread books, to go back to one previously read, but The Siege of Krishnapur is so good I couldn't resist. It is easy to see why it was short-listed for the Best of the Booker. Stunning in its exploration of the religious and moral controversies that occupied the Victorian mind, it is a beautifully written indictment of imperialism in all its foulest glory. Set against the back-drop of the Mutiny, it brings to the reader some superb characters, each painstakingly constructed in Farrell's sumptuous prose. Read this one.

I have been meeting with a group of former republican and loyalist paramilitaries under an organisation known as The Fellowship of Messines and one of their number, a cracking bloke who served a couple of terms in Long Kesh and carries around a few bullet holes, handed me a copy of a small book edited by Cathal Donaghy and put together by The Connaught Rangers Research Project from West Belfast. The 6th Connaught Rangers: Belfast Nationalists and the Great World War is far from being a polished history, but it is both different and highly significant. It draws together a number of short essays on the Belfast nationalists who served in a battalion of the British Army during the Great War. The new vigour and empathy that the Decade of Centenaries has brought to Ireland's interest in her Great War soldiers cannot diminish the courage that was needed to champion this too long hidden part of northern nationalism's history; there are still those in Ireland who disclaim this part of their heritage and would use violence to suppress it. Drawing on contemporary newspapers and personal letters The 6th Connaught Rangers tells the stories of some of the men from west Belfast who chose to fight in khaki. It explores why they chose to do so and what those who came back faced in an Ireland torn asunder by its own war. The contributing authors are all nationalists - some of them republicans - and their interpretation reflects a nationalist viewpoint. This is vital to any full understanding of the often mythologised narrative of the Great War and how it remains such an emotive and often divisive issue in Northern Ireland today.

I read Margaret MacMillan's Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World as an extension of my Great War literary pilgrimage. It deals with the peace conferences that culminated in the peace treaties with the defeated nations of the First World War. I know I bang on about good history but, as with Wilmot's book in my previous post, I run out of superlatives to describe MacMillan's Peacemakers - it is simply one of the best history books I have ever read. If you want to see the foundations of today's fucked-up Middle East being laid, then read Peacemakers (It is now on the shelves in Waterstones under the title "Paris 1919").

I was in County Galway last weekend and Mrs WG came back from a rummage around the village shop (In which she had spent many childhood summers), now derelict. She was armed with vast quantities of old china, but her cousin had brought me a deeply mildewed copy of Bobby Sands' One Day in My Life. This is a shameless play on Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich and recounts a day in Sands' life while on the blanket in the H Blocks. It is brutal, it is savage, it is horrifying - but it is also undiluted propaganda and must be considered in light of its times. There is much to admire about the courage and commitment of Sands and the other Hunger Strikers even if, like me, you struggle to find anything to admire about the actions that put them in prison in the first place. One Day in My Life gives you all of the first bit and not one shred of the latter. I read it in a single sitting and, if you can get hold of a copy, there'd be no harm in having a read yourselves.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

To continue catching up, Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish was a cracking novel, though I have to admit that there were times it lost me. Set in Van Dieman's Land (Tazmania) in the mid 19th Century is follows the pretty mental ramblings of a transported inmate. There were passages of sublimely savage (and gruesome) humour, while others left me thinking WTF! This is nowhere near as emotive as his wonderful Narrow Road to the Deep North, but it is still pretty good.

A purely professional indulgence took me back to John Horsfall's Say Not The Struggle, his account of the Dunkirk campaign, in which he served as the commander of D Company, The 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Fusiliers. For me this book (The first in a trilogy) is treasure. It is understated but chilling; humorous and tragic. It might mot have a wide appeal, but I can't recommend it highly enough.

On the recommendation of a friend of the Mrs, I got myself a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. The friend is a Russian emigrée, who has come to the UK vie exile in France towards the end of the Cold War; she is now teaching at Methody, where she is the entirety of the Russian department. I can see, therefore, why she would feel such empathy with Nabokov's eponymous Russian emigrée, who has fled via France to become professor of Russian at a modest American university. I couldn't find a hook in this book at all and while I finished it so I could say that I had if asked, I got nothing from it other than a sense of relief at having reached the last page.

[cashead]

Currently reading Underground by Haruki Murakami, about the Tokyo Subway sarin gas attacks in 1995.

Also reading Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings by Lars Brownworth.

Enjoying both.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Ian Kershaw's The End: Germany 1944-1945. I think I reviewed Kershaw's To Hell and Back a couple of years ago. It was quite superb and having always been intrigued as to how and why Germany fought on following the catastrophic military reverses of 1944 it was no struggle to reach for the same author's The End. Kershaw set out to answer these very questions and did so with recourse to his usual impeccable research and easy narrative style. Sadly his publishers and editors didn't quite measure up to the same standards and what should have been capped at around 200 pages, dragged on relentlessly for twice that (And another 150 of end-notes and index).

The reading is grim and everytime there is danger of the reader feeling any shred of sympathy towards those Germans who found themselves at the less than tender mercies of the Red Army, Kershaw intercedes with evidence of German savagery towards their hapless and helpless victims, which continued up to and beyond the surrender. The usual suspects are shown for the irredeemable shits that we know them to be, while even those who tried to distance themselves from the Nazi regime are exposed as willing participants in its murderous activities almost to the very end. I remember Speer's interviews on the World at War and thinking that he came across as the only high ranking minister at the centre of Nazi power, whose obvious genius was not wholly tainted by their crimes; wrong there. So too, Dönitz who we have long been led to believe was the so called 'clean General' who lost no time in making the surrender once Hitler killed himself; wrong again. So too, Kesselring, held as the only German field marshal to surrender his front (Italy) while Hitler lived; he may have signed the document, but only on the first (False) news of Hitler's suicide and he insisted that the surrender must not take effect until Hitler's death was confirmed. Utter shits the lot of them and deserve to be consigned to the detritus of human history.

[paddy no 11]

Reading a steaming pile of shit called in the rogue blood by James Carlos Blake

Comparisons been made between this and blood meridian are ridiculous. One is lyrical ultraviolence the other a meritless litany of violent acts. Avoid at all costs

[paddy no 11]

A doctor's war by Aidan McCarthy

WW2 account as a POW in Asia/Japan, great read (for a west brit!) 5/5

[paddy no 11]

City of bohane by Kevin ryan........loved a few of his short stories so decided to go for the novel.

Sort of an apocalyptic peaky blinders set in the west of Ireland, he's a good writer but couldn't get into the setting or the violence which wasnt present in his short stories 3/5

[SerjeantWildgoose]

A bit of a back-log of stuff I have read.

James Taylor's Guilty But Insane: J C Bowen-Colthurst; Villain of Victim? was a fascinating read. Captain Bowen-Colthurst was convicted of a number of killings during the Easter Rising, most infamously the summary execution of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. I have always regarded him as an utter shit, but this book promised to examine the case of temporary insanity. It did so, but not convincingly. My view of B-C has not changed. He was mad, right enough; but no more so during Easter week than during the rest of his miserable life. Worth a read.

Bernard MacLaverty's Gracenotes. Bored to tears with this one. Never came close to being nearly as good as its hype.

Charles Townshend, The Republic: The Fight For Irish Independence 1918-1923. It is the definitive history and does what it says on the tin. Townshend is a superb historian and this is his writing at its very best. If you read one history of this seminal period in Ireland's history, make it this one.

Orla McAlinden's The Flight of the Wren. I read Townshend's history in preparation for a presentation I was giving to a symposium in Fermoy and one of the other speakers, a quite superb woman, gave me a copy of her highly acclaimed and deservedly decorated novel. This would not ordinarily have been something that I would have taken down from the shelves, but I was hugely impressed by the detailed historical accuracy that formed the fabric of this book. Perhaps not one for the carnivores on here, but you wife or daughter would enjoy it.

Heinrich Böll's The Train was on Time. A novella following the fates of three German soldiers returning to the Eastern Front from their leave. This was a really good book and I am surprised that it has not found a wider readership. It will take you about an hour to read, so one to tuck into your day-sack to while away a train journey or flight.

Siobhan Fenton's The Good Friday Agreement. I reviewed this on Goodreads, so have simply pasted that review into here.

The principal strength of this book is its narrative style, which gives the social and political complexities of Northern Ireland an accessibility to a broad audience. Sadly, this is also its principal weakness. As countless journalists and historians (And not a few secretaries of state) will testify, these complexities defy simplification and form an impenetrable minefield of conflicting narratives and unfathomable nuance.

Fenton lays a very basic foundation of events leading up to the Belfast - or Good Friday - Agreement. In the space available to the author, it is only possible to provide the most superficial of background, but the events chosen by her, and those omitted, will inevitably form the basis of some form of bias in the eyes of any reader involved or associated with The Troubles. She does well to examine the Agreement in light of the collapse of power sharing and BREXIT, not least in exposing just how little Little England knows or cares about Northern Ireland and its fragile peace.

Where the book falls down in my view is its examination of the most crushing impediment to lasting progress; dealing with the legacy of the past. Fenton falls into the trap of the predominating narrative in respect of the current bias of judicial inquests. She gets there by first, and correctly, questioning the credibility and impartiality of the Historical Enquiries Team, but then lurches to the opposite extreme in peddling the equally partial view, that the only people set to benefit from the establishment of a comprehensive system for dealing with the past are soldiers and policemen.

The facts of this matter are that there is a statutory obligation upon the state to investigate all killings and not just those in which the state is believed to be involved. In Northern Ireland today there is a list of some 52 judicial inquests on the 'to do' list. These involve some 94 killings, of which 51 are known or thought to have been killed by security forces. Thus some 54% of pending inquests are associated with killings involving the security forces, while the security forces (Army and police) were believed to be involved in fewer that 10% of killings during the troubles. By contrast only 17 killings, or 18% of those currently scheduled for judicial inquests, are believed to involve Republican paramilitaries, while the same group are believed to be responsible for 54% of all killings during the troubles.

The £55 million of funding to clear this cycle of inquests was finally secured in March 2019, but over the 6 years that it will take to complete this tranche of inquests, the narrative will persist that the security forces were responsible for the majority of the killings, while the political successors of those groups which were responsible for the vast majority of the violence are able to weaponise victims and escape the difficult questions regarding the complicity of those who they now represent.

[paddy no 11]

The search for the lost city of Z David Grann - cracking adventure yarn they type of thing I cant get enough of. Lots of good detail while keeping the story moving 4/5

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Quite a bit to catch up on since my last post.

Good Stuff

Maurice Walshe's Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World 1918 1923 was an easy read and while a long way short of definitive, was a highly accessible and entertaining rattle through the War of Independence and Civil War. David Murphy's Ireland and the Crimean War was also good, but also fell short of the definitive benchmark; it offered an opening insight but there is a real need for deeper research that was not satisfied. I recognise that both of these books serve a niche interest, but both are worth a read.

Louis de Berniére's Birds Without Wings is a great read. Set in a small Turkish town during the early decades of the 20th Century it brings the same mix of superb characterisation, a gripping and brutal storyline and beguiling prose that can be found in all of his novels. This is one to spend your book tokens on (A must read for Rowan if he still sneaks in for a look around). I am a devoted fan of Graham Greene and re-read The Comedians to give myself a bit of a treat. Set in Haiti with Papa Doc Duvalier in his pomp and the whole place in the grip of the Tontons Macoute it is one of Greene's best.

Two collections of short(ish) stories also banged my gongs. Julian Barnes' The Lemon Table is a wonderful collection of stories about the onset of old fartery. It was funny, tragic and, for one well down the transitional route, a comforting enlightenment. Read it if you are starting to think about turning 50. Colum McCann's Thirteen Ways of Looking was marginally the best of this bunch. Irish-born but a New Yorker by naturalisation, Mccann is a true master of the novelist's craft. This collection of one novella and three superb short stories should warrant the highest praise but I feel that I have given 5 stars to too many books already this year, so it loses out. Fans of Irish literature or modern Americana, if they haven't read McCann yet, must.

OK, but nothing to rave about

Richard Grayson's Belfast Boys: How Unionists and Nationalists Fought and Died Together in The First World War. The blurb hails Grayson's research as novel and to an extent it is; he has waded through the local newspapers to provide the meat of a hugely entertaining work that focusses on the men from Belfast who went off to fight in the Great War. Unfortunately the newspapers of the Great war period were no less partisan that their modern counterparts and no more worthy of being regarded as purveyors of historical fact.

Paul Harding's Tinkers. This is a Pulitzer winning novel and I ought to have enjoyed it a great deal more than I did. I had to look back at the reviews to remember what it was about and I only read it 8 weeks ago! Meh!

Bollocks!

Maurice Hennessy's The Wild Geese: The Irish Soldier in Exile. My review from Goodreads:

Even if one acknowledges that the subject matter of this work is simply too vast to capture in a couple of hundred pages, Maurice Hennessy's book barely scratches the surface and is little more than a thinly woven tissue of poorly researched anecdote.

With later chapters given up to the Irish in the Americas, wives of those who served in European armies and even the two Irish 'brigades' in the so-called Boer wars, this overly romanticised and desperately misleading book fails to give more than passing mention to the many hundreds of thousands of Irish soldiers who served in the army of Ireland's closest if unbeloved neighbour. It is a matter of measurable and undeniable fact - though those bent on pushing the divisive narrative continue to expend their energies in attempting to deny it - that many, many more Irishmen have worn the red and khaki of the British Army in defence of the British Empire than ever picked up the sword against it.

I am surprised that Hennessy, a former British colonial officer, a wartime officer of the Nigeria Regiment and university lecturer could make such trite observations as to suggest that the totally southern Irish regiments of the British Army, were of suspect loyalty simply because their ranks were filled with 'nationalists'. The ranks of today's close-knit Royal Irish Regiment contain many Irish nationalists (I would have counted myself as one when I served), but the proven loyalty of that Regiment is no more nor less than that of the old Royal Irish (18th of Foot), The Connaught Rangers (Despite the events of 1921), The Leinster Regiment, The Munster Fusiliers and The Dublin Fusiliers. The simple fact is that the Irish regiments of the British Army (And indeed the Irish soldiers who swelled the ranks of almost every other regiment in that army) were by extreme, and continue to be, the most potent and important manifestation of the Wild Geese spirit.

That the author seemed unable to distinguish the Faugh O'Ballaghs [Sic] from the Enniskillen (page 104) is so rudimentary an error (The Faughs are the Royal Irish Fusiliers, a quite separate and distinct regiment from the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers) suggests a true paucity of research and makes one wonder what other inaccuracies he has embedded in the fertile minds of his unsuspecting university students. Hennessy suggests, on page 200, that a list of reports on officers refers to some 27th regiment of the United States army, whereas they quite famously refer to the subaltern officers of the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment.

The main body of the work focuses on the many nobles who flew to Europe and made themselves comfortable in the courts of France, Spain, Austria and Russia while offering far too little evidence of the thousands of listed soldiers whose miseries and torments gained far lesser reward while buying what bloody glory was to be had at Fontenoy. That the nobles who led them did so in the name and service of their own English king, is passed over all too briefly and leaves the unwary reader with a misinformed and misrepresented version of the facts.

In his concluding chapter Hennessy asserts that, "If history is to be really valuable, then it must be devoid of sentiment." He is guilty of failing his own test.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Hey Sarge. Reading Ronan Fanning "Fatal Path" good read so far.

Finally got round to reading it, Brian. I have to say that it took some considerable effort, but also have to say that it was worth it. Not so much an Irish history, but rather a British political history of the crisis. I really don't get what all of the controversy was about and suspect all of the nonsense about revisionism was purely for publicity.

There were a few things that I found worthy of argument and one or two of his 'facts' that were just plain wrong, but otherwise I thought it a worthy addition to the historiography of the times. Having said that, I'd struggle to recommend it to anyone other than nerdy aul hoores like me and you.

[paddy no 11]

Killers of the flower moon by David grann - great read, think he could have done a bit more with it but still 4/5

Scorcese is making a film of it

[paddy no 11]

The Kong tiki expedition- thor heyendahl

6 scandis attempt to sail from Peru to polynesia on a few balsa logs to prove that polynesia was populated from the Americas, super stuff

[Numbers]

The Kong tiki expedition- thor heyendahl

6 scandis attempt to sail from Peru to polynesia on a few balsa logs to prove that polynesia was populated from the Americas, super stuff

The documentary film about the Kon-Tiki expedition won the 1951 Oscar for Best Documentary so maybe worth a look:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_(1950_film)

[paddy no 11]

Ah super, cheers numbers

[paddy no 11]

Lords of finance by liaquat ahamed

Super read 5/5

Looks at leadership of 4 major world economies up to and during the great depression and the inevitable rise of fascism in Europe

[Puja]

Looks at leadership of 4 major world economies up to and during the great depression and the inevitable rise of fascism in Europe

Which one?

Puja

[paddy no 11]

Looks at leadership of 4 major world economies up to and during the great depression and the inevitable rise of fascism in Europe

Which one?

Puja

Germany

[paddy no 11]

Gomorrah by Roberto saviano, superb 5/5

[morepork]

Gomorrah by Roberto saviano, superb 5/5

Cheery fucker aren't you?

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Gomorrah by Roberto saviano, superb 5/5

Cheery fucker aren't you?

He was a right pain in the arse when he read the prequel.

[paddy no 11]

Gomorrah by Roberto saviano, superb 5/5

Cheery fucker aren't you?

Nothing like a bit of misery morepork, I'm balancing it out with the art of meditation by matthieu ricard