Reading 2014

SnakAmerican History

Bliv bruger af LibraryThing, hvis du vil skrive et indlæg

Reading 2014

Dette emne er markeret som "i hvile"—det seneste indlæg er mere end 90 dage gammel. Du kan vække emnet til live ved at poste et indlæg.

1jztemple
jan 8, 2014, 4:31 pm

Finished Hoover Dam: An American Adventure by Joseph E. Stevens. Excellent book, very well written and highly recommended.

2Jestak
jan 8, 2014, 6:03 pm

I'm currently reading The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Quite good so far.

3homeschoolmom
jan 10, 2014, 1:57 pm

I've just downloaded George Washington's Secret Six. I'm looking forward to it

4jztemple
jan 19, 2014, 1:35 pm

Finished Race to the Top of the World: Richard Byrd and the First Flight to the North Pole by Sheldon Bart. Good story telling, but marred by a lack of maps. Well written but could have used a better technical proofreader.

5jztemple
jan 20, 2014, 11:33 pm

6Billhere
jan 22, 2014, 1:32 pm

Does Bart say Byrd actually did it? I just read One Summer by Bill Bryson and apparently there is a fair amount of doubt about whether Byrd actually made it to the North Pole.

7Schneider
jan 22, 2014, 7:30 pm

Just received Robert Klara's book The Hidden White House. I think it is oddly intriguing, and I am fairly excited to get into it.

8jztemple
jan 24, 2014, 11:14 pm

Finished The Reporter Who Would Be King: A Biography of Richard Harding Davis by Arthur Lubow. Excellent book, very highly recommended.

9Jestak
feb 2, 2014, 12:42 am

I recently finished Reagan's Comeback by Gilbert Garcia and have started The Hopkins Touch by David Roll.

10jztemple
feb 3, 2014, 4:46 pm

Finished Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan by Del Quentin Wilber. Excellent book, very well written.

11waitingtoderail
feb 4, 2014, 8:24 am

Just read Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fisher and I highly recommend it.

13jztemple
feb 16, 2014, 4:09 pm

Finished Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West by Stephen Fried. Excellent book.

14jztemple
mar 7, 2014, 11:18 pm

Just finished D.W. Griffith: An American Life by Richard Schickel. Excellent book, highly recommended.

15Jestak
mar 8, 2014, 1:03 am

I am now reading George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis.

16RedEyedNerd
mar 10, 2014, 5:47 pm

I recently read Chicago: confidential! (published 1950).
Although Jack Lait puts sensationalism above research (he doesn't refer to any sources) the book is an interesting who was who of the Chicago underworld from the 1890s to the 1940s. It inspired me to look up roughly a hundred of those figures in wikipedia and to go to all the places via GoogleEarth - only to find almost all of them turned into parking lots or replaced by shiny highrises.

17Jestak
mar 22, 2014, 5:54 pm

Finished the Kennan biography, which was excellent, and now I've started Flush Times and Fever Dreams by Joshua Rothman.

18SteveJohnson
mar 22, 2014, 10:16 pm

Just finished Richard Henry Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast." I'd never realized it was non-fiction, a detailed look at a Harvard grad's two years as an humble sailor on board a classic sailing ship in the 1830s making the trip from Boston around Cape Horn to the west coast to spend a year in pre-U.S. Spanish California collecting 40,000 cattle hides. Really captures the feel of life on a sailing ship of that era, particularly the arduous trip around the Cape in winter gales and ice floes.

22Jestak
apr 16, 2014, 9:31 pm

Currently I'm reading A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II by Maury Klein. I'm about 150 pages in and it's very good.

23jztemple
jun 16, 2014, 8:18 pm

Finished Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst by W. A. Swanberg. Superb book, highly recommended.

24Jestak
jun 18, 2014, 1:17 am

Current reading includes Roosevelt's Centurions by Joseph Persico and Rule and Ruin by Geoffrey Kabaservice.

25Jestak
jul 3, 2014, 9:00 pm

26southernbooklady
jul 3, 2014, 10:12 pm

I finished American Nations -- interesting, but he goes too far -- and Banned in Boston, which is an interesting account of how censorship operated under the Watch & Ward Society.

27jztemple
jul 4, 2014, 4:31 pm

Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers - I gave up on this after two hundred of the six hundred pages. While the history was very good, the author was repeated throwing in his own opinions about politics and other subjects and I just finally got tired of his haughty attitude.

Just finished My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy by Nora Titone. Excellent book, highly recommended.

28homeschoolmom
jul 8, 2014, 12:25 pm

30Jestak
jul 11, 2014, 9:46 pm

I've started A Disposition to be Rich by Geoffrey Ward.

31jztemple
jul 17, 2014, 12:31 am

33homeschoolmom
jul 28, 2014, 12:25 am

I'm taking an american colonies class along with a survery of american history so I'm reading Red, White, & Black and What Hath God Wrought. The first book is by Gary Nash Not sure why the touchstones are pulling up Jane Eyre for that.

34Jestak
jul 30, 2014, 3:38 pm

I've just started William Cooper's Town by Alan Taylor.

35jztemple
jul 31, 2014, 10:52 pm

Gave up on Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend by Gary L. Roberts after getting about half way through. It's a case of the writer seeing a lot of trees and missing the forest; the amount of detail about Doc's movements and conversations is overwhelming, but there's not much in the way of broad strokes of summaries of overviews. Recommended only for those who really, really want to know everything that is known about Holliday.

36jztemple
aug 6, 2014, 2:04 pm

Finished The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift. Very well written, although I wish it was a bit more technical and less about the personalities.

39jztemple
aug 15, 2014, 1:04 pm

40Jestak
aug 17, 2014, 3:01 pm

I've just started The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein. Very good so far.

42jztemple
aug 24, 2014, 1:10 am

44Jestak
sep 9, 2014, 9:22 pm

I've moved on to The Fall of the House of Dixie by Bruce Levine.

47jztemple
okt 9, 2014, 5:04 am

Just finished The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1897-1909 by William Reynolds Braisted. Academic but pretty interesting.

49rocketjk
nov 22, 2014, 3:07 pm

I just discovered and signed up for this group. Here are the books on American History I've read so far during 2014:

The Great Debate Between Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts edited by Lindsay Swift
Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael A. Hiltzik (It would be interesting to compare this book with the one jztemple read on the same topic (post #1)
Black and Blue: the Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys and the 1966 World Series that Stunned America by Tom Adelman *
Bill Haley by John Swenson **
The Joy of Keeping Score by Paul Dickson *

* Assuming baseball history counts for the purposes of this group
** Assuming American music history counts for the purposes of this group

50Jestak
Redigeret: nov 22, 2014, 9:19 pm

I'm now reading Justice Brennan by Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel.

51jztemple
nov 22, 2014, 9:54 pm

>49 rocketjk: Welcome to the group!

As far as I'm concerned, pretty much any history is welcomed in this group. I'm always interested in what history other folks are readying.

53rocketjk
dec 7, 2014, 1:55 pm

I finished Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience by Howard Simons. This is a wonderful, dense, collection of oral histories covering much of the length and breadth of the American Jewish experience from immigration through much of the 20th century.

54jztemple
Redigeret: dec 9, 2014, 6:42 pm

Now reading The Colonial Wars (The Chicago History of American Civilization) by Howard H. Peckham.

Also just back from a trip to Colonial Williamsburg for their Grand Illuminations opening weekend. Made a point to stop by the bookstore in the visitor's center and was happily surprised to find several large sections of significantly discounted history books, not just colonial or even American history. Picked up ten nice books discounted from 50% to about 80%. And you can visit the bookstore without paying any admission, it's free access to anyone.

55Jestak
dec 9, 2014, 4:24 pm

My current reading includes America's First Great Depression by Alasdair Roberts.

56socialian
dec 9, 2014, 7:18 pm

57jztemple
dec 11, 2014, 6:26 pm

Finished The Colonial Wars 1689-1762 by Howard H. Peckham.

58Jestak
dec 21, 2014, 5:21 pm

60rocketjk
dec 28, 2014, 2:49 pm

I'll be finishing up 2014/starting 2015 (probably) with Lincoln's Men: the President and His Private Secretaries by Daniel Mark Epstein.

61SteveJohnson
jan 1, 2015, 10:11 pm

Just finished Havana Nocturne, by T.J. English, a look at how the Mob took over gambling in Cuba in the 1950s, but were kicked out by Castro's improbable revolution (I say improbable because Fidel had failed numerous times and probably should have been killed or executed on several occasions). Nice reminder of how corrupt the Batista regime was in light of current events.

Before that, I slogged through all four volumes of Motleys' United Netherlands, some 2,000 pages. Learned a lot about how folks in The Netherlands realized that they really didn't need kings (Philip I of Spain, Henry Navarre of France) or queens (Elizabeth) or popes, setting a precedent for the U.S. and others a few years later. It's a bit dense, but Motley obtained the secret records of correspondence among Elizabeth and her generals and Philip and his as well, so he can offer insights into their true motivations as contrasted to their public remarks. The wars were nasty, brutal affairs with horrid conduct on the Spaniards' part in particular, but the Dutch combination of a robust merchant fleet that could both fight and bring in revenues via trade plus a citizenry broadly united in a common goal proved to be too difficult for the Royalists. What is surprising is how often both Philip and Elizabeth failed because they were unwilling to spend the money necessary to back up their military ambitions.

62rocketjk
jan 2, 2015, 2:35 pm

Lincoln's Men: the President and His Private Secretaries by Daniel Mark Epstein turned out to be quite good. On to 2015!