Good day bookies! It's wet here in West Tennessee, but with Memorial Day being tomorrow it seems a good time to blog a bit about some forthcoming WW2 books, as well as some loose clutter form my recent unplanned sabbatical.
*** Anthony Beevor is one of the more respected World War II historians working now, otherwise, the news that there is yet another book on D-Day and the liberation of France would pass by without comment. I mean, at some point we get it, right? The Allies invaded France, fought hard to get ashore and eventually overwhelmed the bad guys. How many more details can there be to flesh out yet another book on the subject.
However, I'm not calling foul on this one for two reasons: First, the book I am currently reading is Shattered Sword: The Untold Battle of Midway which I resisted reading for several years because, let's face it, how much more of Midway's story could possibly be untold, right? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot of it. So if it's true for Midway who knows, it might also be true for D-Day.
Second, Beevor is a really fine historian who is not usually content to simply regurgitate what others have written. If he thinks there is a fresh story here to tell then maybe there is. I'll sure give him a chance to show me.
Beevor does D-Day
--- Monday, May 25. Update. Beevor is quoted in British newspapers as saying that Allied bombing of French cities post-D-Day is almost a war crime. What utter rubbish. After reading this nonsense, Beevor comes across as a revisionist clown who is re-writing history because of his own political agenda. Some say he is only doing this to draw attention to the new book, but I can tell you that after reading his comments I have to assume the book is slanted by this crap. Count me out.
*** With tomorrow being Memorial Day, it seems appropriate to mention another new book on World War II, this time the memoir of a US fighter pilot who was shot down and fell into the hands of the SS and found himself at Buchenwald. Unlike places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald not not a death camp per se. It was a work camp, supplying slave labor for German industry, but the difference is only one of degree. Surviving Buchenwald was highly unlikely.
It was not a place captured military personnel were usually sent and Joe Moser found himself there along with other American fliers and barely escaped death. His story is told in the book A Fighter Pilot in Buchenwald, a book aviation buffs would probably enjoy.
Surviving the worst
*** Booksellers have always known that one of the biggest problems in the industry are forged signatures. By and large this doesn't apply to the lesser valued titles, books that sell for less than a couple of hundred dollars, because forging a book to sell it for $50 or so just isn't worth it. That's not to say it can't happen, just that it's rare. Used booksellers in West Tennessee that I know, and who shall remain nameless, are aware that a probable forger has been operating in a southern state for many years now. (Is that vague enough for you? Good. I love writing this blog but lawsuits aren't part of the plan.) I've talked to people who claim they know people who claim they know employees who did the actual forging.
Maybe, maybe not.
Anyway, legitimate dealers are always happy to see forgers charged and convicted, thus the following happy link, wherein a bad guy pays the piper for his crimes.
Bad guy takes the fall for forgeries
*** A sequel to Catcher in the Rye? Yep, it's true. Bet you didn't know that. Of course, it wasn't written by J.D. Salinger but you take what you can get, right? Except John David California's 60 Years Later Coming Through the Rye has caught Salinger's attention and, more importantly, the attention of his lawyers. Can you say lawsuit? This could be interesting, though, because it appears that Mr. California (I get this mental image of a big guy in Speedos, which is not an image I wanted to have) has done his homework in avoiding infringement. This one might be worth following.
Salinger isn't happy, or so we hear
*** I would put this next blogbit under the category of 'There is so much data flow happening that my brain can't pay attention to things I really would like to pay attention to.'
I'm a Sherlock Holmes fan. Not a buff, I don't read every scrap out there written by just anybody, I haven't joined my local chapter of the Giant Rats of Sumatra, but I do really enjoy the character. So, how is it that I didn't know Robert Downey, Jr., was making a new Sherlock Holmes film, one that appears from the trailer to be right up my alley? Just too much to keep up with in a world that is far too joined-at-the-hip. Information overload, indeed.
Sherlock Holmes to the Rescue
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
From out of the shadows
Hiya Bookies! You see the date on this blog, but this introduction is being written on May 23. Yeah, I know, three weeks. Ridiculous. Life intrudes.
*** Building on three weeks ago(!) thoughts on treasure hunting, a man prowling through an antique store dug up what might be the original formula for Dr. Pepper. A ledger filled with formulas stuff from the Waco, Texas drug store where Dr. Pepper was invented and first sold, is expected to bring between $50-75k at auction. Neat stuff.
But what struck me about this story is that the guy paid $200 for the ledger and expected to sell it for up to five times that much on ebay. First, who pays $200 for an old ledger and expects to make $1000 on it? There's something fishy here, because I've been doing this a long time and antique ledger books filled with columns of debits and credits are not exactly in hot demand. Now, it did say 'Castle's Formulas' on the front, so perhaps there is a market for such a book, but to pay $200 for it on the front end you would either have to know exactly what you were buying, or to be a damned fool. I suspect this buyer knew precisely what he was getting when he bought it and all of this 'gosh aren't I lucky stuff?' is a smokescreen to get publicity.
Or maybe that's just me being cynical because it hasn't stopped raining here in West Tennessee for days now. Dank weather, dank mood. Bring on the sunshine!
Dr. Pepper doesn't sound so tasty in its original form
*** A rich vein for future historians, me included, comes as the Czech Republic publishes a cache on heretofore unpublished records of the German occupation of Prague and the Prague Uprising in 1945. If they are translated into English this is something your friendly neighborhood bookseller would love to see.
New Records from behind the Old Iron Curtain
*** There are some moments when you realize just how cosmopolitan was the effort in defeating the Axis during World War II. Today's obituary is one such moment. In Jack Good's long resume are such diverse experiences as helping break Germany's Enigma code and helping Stanley Kubrick dilm 2001: A Space Odyssey. We will miss such men, even if we don't know it.
So long to another good man
*** World War II was the first war in which one of the combatants, Germany, made the conscious decision to embed photographers with combat units. The PK, or Propaganda Korps, are the reason we have so many amazing photos from the German side of the war. But the German obsession with photography didn't stop with the PK, the individual German hauled his Leica around too. The Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces, had regulations about what you could and could not photograph. Of course, like soldiers the world over, the Germans were no more likely to follow regulations than any other, and so we have private photos the soldiers took about parts of the war the high command would rather not have been memorialized. And now Spiegel has selected the most illustrative of these in book form.
Ordinary Germans looking at World War II
*** Building on three weeks ago(!) thoughts on treasure hunting, a man prowling through an antique store dug up what might be the original formula for Dr. Pepper. A ledger filled with formulas stuff from the Waco, Texas drug store where Dr. Pepper was invented and first sold, is expected to bring between $50-75k at auction. Neat stuff.
But what struck me about this story is that the guy paid $200 for the ledger and expected to sell it for up to five times that much on ebay. First, who pays $200 for an old ledger and expects to make $1000 on it? There's something fishy here, because I've been doing this a long time and antique ledger books filled with columns of debits and credits are not exactly in hot demand. Now, it did say 'Castle's Formulas' on the front, so perhaps there is a market for such a book, but to pay $200 for it on the front end you would either have to know exactly what you were buying, or to be a damned fool. I suspect this buyer knew precisely what he was getting when he bought it and all of this 'gosh aren't I lucky stuff?' is a smokescreen to get publicity.
Or maybe that's just me being cynical because it hasn't stopped raining here in West Tennessee for days now. Dank weather, dank mood. Bring on the sunshine!
Dr. Pepper doesn't sound so tasty in its original form
*** A rich vein for future historians, me included, comes as the Czech Republic publishes a cache on heretofore unpublished records of the German occupation of Prague and the Prague Uprising in 1945. If they are translated into English this is something your friendly neighborhood bookseller would love to see.
New Records from behind the Old Iron Curtain
*** There are some moments when you realize just how cosmopolitan was the effort in defeating the Axis during World War II. Today's obituary is one such moment. In Jack Good's long resume are such diverse experiences as helping break Germany's Enigma code and helping Stanley Kubrick dilm 2001: A Space Odyssey. We will miss such men, even if we don't know it.
So long to another good man
*** World War II was the first war in which one of the combatants, Germany, made the conscious decision to embed photographers with combat units. The PK, or Propaganda Korps, are the reason we have so many amazing photos from the German side of the war. But the German obsession with photography didn't stop with the PK, the individual German hauled his Leica around too. The Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces, had regulations about what you could and could not photograph. Of course, like soldiers the world over, the Germans were no more likely to follow regulations than any other, and so we have private photos the soldiers took about parts of the war the high command would rather not have been memorialized. And now Spiegel has selected the most illustrative of these in book form.
Ordinary Germans looking at World War II
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Treasures, revisions and outrages
Good day bookies! Stand by for news and comment.
*** Who doesn't love stories of treasures lost and found? I do, for sure, and when I read about charities that have been given rare and valuable books it makes me wonder if the donators knew what they were donating. Anyway, the attached story is one such, and gives me yet another reason to want to make a book pilgrimage to England and Scotland.
Rare books left on doorstep in Edinburgh
*** Franklin Roosevelt is often held up by liberals as their vision of the nearly perfect president, just as Ronald Reagan is cited by conservatives as their template for greatness. In FDR's case one of the biggest stains on his presidency was the charge that he was indifferent to the plight of Europe's Jews as the Holocaust swept millions of them away. It has been very hard for his defenders to make a case otherwise, but a new book attempts to do just that.
The new book Refugees and Rescue makes the claim that FDR tried, starting in 1938, to allow tens of thousands of German and Austrian refugees to come to the US or Palestine, but that he was thwarted by those who didn't approve. Your friendly neighborhood bookseller hasn't read this book so he can't say how compelling the evidence might be. He can, however, say that, to contradict the rather mountainous evidence against FDR on this issue, the book will have to be pretty convincing.
Did FDR really try to save the Jews?
*** When I first logged onto the internet, when was that? 1993? 1994? It's been a long, long while. But whenever that long ago universe-changing event occurred, the first message boards that I encountered were on AOL. You paid per minute back then for internet access, AOL charged a monthly fee, but boy, what you got in return! You had instant access to people all over the world who had the same interests as you did. It was all quite grand! And AOL was leading the way. I know that I was posting there in 1997 and am pretty sure the beginning was before that.
In those days everybody was on AOL, including authors and other famous people. The Hardboiled board, a board devoted to Hardboiled PI fiction, featured as one of its posters Anthony Bourdain, whose novel Gone Bamboo, was current. He was just as funny then as now, maybe not quite as confident. But that's not the point of this entry, which is, in fact, a rambling bash of the idiots running AOL.
See, that board and all of the others I posted on were recently wiped out by the cretins whose task is apparently to destroy AOL once and for all. And, for the record, John Donahoe has nothing to do with it. This is a completely separate group of numbskulls.
Boards that were 12-14 years old, boards that were, in internet terms, historical classics, are now gone forever. And with them went a large chunk of whatever audience AOL had left. Now it's just another sterile site with nothing in particular to offer. Might as well be Yahoo. Without the traffic, that is. Who makes these decisions? Who sits in an isolated office somewhere and decides that whatever audience your site still has needs to be alienated? I don't know. Nor do I care. Whoever it is should be fired immediately, but the reality is they will probably get a huge bonus.
There is no requiem for what was lost, no mourning for the glory that was AOL. What a shame. What a damned shame.
*** Who doesn't love stories of treasures lost and found? I do, for sure, and when I read about charities that have been given rare and valuable books it makes me wonder if the donators knew what they were donating. Anyway, the attached story is one such, and gives me yet another reason to want to make a book pilgrimage to England and Scotland.
Rare books left on doorstep in Edinburgh
*** Franklin Roosevelt is often held up by liberals as their vision of the nearly perfect president, just as Ronald Reagan is cited by conservatives as their template for greatness. In FDR's case one of the biggest stains on his presidency was the charge that he was indifferent to the plight of Europe's Jews as the Holocaust swept millions of them away. It has been very hard for his defenders to make a case otherwise, but a new book attempts to do just that.
The new book Refugees and Rescue makes the claim that FDR tried, starting in 1938, to allow tens of thousands of German and Austrian refugees to come to the US or Palestine, but that he was thwarted by those who didn't approve. Your friendly neighborhood bookseller hasn't read this book so he can't say how compelling the evidence might be. He can, however, say that, to contradict the rather mountainous evidence against FDR on this issue, the book will have to be pretty convincing.
Did FDR really try to save the Jews?
*** When I first logged onto the internet, when was that? 1993? 1994? It's been a long, long while. But whenever that long ago universe-changing event occurred, the first message boards that I encountered were on AOL. You paid per minute back then for internet access, AOL charged a monthly fee, but boy, what you got in return! You had instant access to people all over the world who had the same interests as you did. It was all quite grand! And AOL was leading the way. I know that I was posting there in 1997 and am pretty sure the beginning was before that.
In those days everybody was on AOL, including authors and other famous people. The Hardboiled board, a board devoted to Hardboiled PI fiction, featured as one of its posters Anthony Bourdain, whose novel Gone Bamboo, was current. He was just as funny then as now, maybe not quite as confident. But that's not the point of this entry, which is, in fact, a rambling bash of the idiots running AOL.
See, that board and all of the others I posted on were recently wiped out by the cretins whose task is apparently to destroy AOL once and for all. And, for the record, John Donahoe has nothing to do with it. This is a completely separate group of numbskulls.
Boards that were 12-14 years old, boards that were, in internet terms, historical classics, are now gone forever. And with them went a large chunk of whatever audience AOL had left. Now it's just another sterile site with nothing in particular to offer. Might as well be Yahoo. Without the traffic, that is. Who makes these decisions? Who sits in an isolated office somewhere and decides that whatever audience your site still has needs to be alienated? I don't know. Nor do I care. Whoever it is should be fired immediately, but the reality is they will probably get a huge bonus.
There is no requiem for what was lost, no mourning for the glory that was AOL. What a shame. What a damned shame.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Making headway
Good morning bookies! Stand by for news and comment.
First, the ongoing drain on my time and energy may be coming to an end. Let's hope so. At the least I'm making headway. If anyone ever asks you to be executor for an estate, think twice before you say yes. I had no idea how much time, effort and willpower it took.
*** The new issue of iloveamysterynewsletter is posted. I have a couple of reviews in it, and now a link back to this blog. also, I'm changing the descriptive header at the top to something a bit less accurate and a bit spiffier. Given the choice between content and spiffiness, I'll pick spiffiness every time.
*** The Nebula Awards were given out last weekend. For those who don't know, the Nebulas are awarded to Science Fiction writers based on the votes of fans, kind of like the People's Choice Awards, as opposed to the Hugos, which are more like the Oscars. M.Scott Edelman is a longtime SF writer/editor and here's a link to his blog from that weekend: Edelman does the Nebulas. Some great photos there, as well.
*** Sadly, it should be noted that Thomas Deitz has died. Dietz was young, 57, a well known SFF writer and by all accounts a good guy. I'm sorry I never had the chance to meet him.
Thomas Deitz
*** I find this next item fascinating. Why do people are publications spend so much time, effort and space on negative book reviews? If the book is wretched, why waste your breathe going on about it? It's a really good question.
For example, the second worst book I've ever read is The Da Vinci Code. Complete and utter rubbish, not only because of its idiotic 'research', I can stretch willing suspension of disbelief pretty far, after all, but moreso because of the hideously poor writing involved. Dan Brown has never met a cliche he can't use at least a dozen times, and the book buying public seems to crave more of this. So why do people like me feel the need to go on and on about it? I think the article makes some good points about that very thing.
Why bother bashing books?
*** Here's a book I want to read about an event I didn't know happened. Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo. It seems that after he left office, Truman and wife Bess, and nobody else, went on a 2500 mile road trip across America. Imagine such a thing! You're hanging out eating breakfast at a diner, dead tired after getting off work in the bicycle factory, and in walks the former POTUS and his wife to grab supper. Incredible. And yet, apparently, quite true. This may be one of those 'I've got to look this book up' books.
Harry and Bess go for a drive
First, the ongoing drain on my time and energy may be coming to an end. Let's hope so. At the least I'm making headway. If anyone ever asks you to be executor for an estate, think twice before you say yes. I had no idea how much time, effort and willpower it took.
*** The new issue of iloveamysterynewsletter is posted. I have a couple of reviews in it, and now a link back to this blog. also, I'm changing the descriptive header at the top to something a bit less accurate and a bit spiffier. Given the choice between content and spiffiness, I'll pick spiffiness every time.
*** The Nebula Awards were given out last weekend. For those who don't know, the Nebulas are awarded to Science Fiction writers based on the votes of fans, kind of like the People's Choice Awards, as opposed to the Hugos, which are more like the Oscars. M.Scott Edelman is a longtime SF writer/editor and here's a link to his blog from that weekend: Edelman does the Nebulas. Some great photos there, as well.
*** Sadly, it should be noted that Thomas Deitz has died. Dietz was young, 57, a well known SFF writer and by all accounts a good guy. I'm sorry I never had the chance to meet him.
Thomas Deitz
*** I find this next item fascinating. Why do people are publications spend so much time, effort and space on negative book reviews? If the book is wretched, why waste your breathe going on about it? It's a really good question.
For example, the second worst book I've ever read is The Da Vinci Code. Complete and utter rubbish, not only because of its idiotic 'research', I can stretch willing suspension of disbelief pretty far, after all, but moreso because of the hideously poor writing involved. Dan Brown has never met a cliche he can't use at least a dozen times, and the book buying public seems to crave more of this. So why do people like me feel the need to go on and on about it? I think the article makes some good points about that very thing.
Why bother bashing books?
*** Here's a book I want to read about an event I didn't know happened. Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo. It seems that after he left office, Truman and wife Bess, and nobody else, went on a 2500 mile road trip across America. Imagine such a thing! You're hanging out eating breakfast at a diner, dead tired after getting off work in the bicycle factory, and in walks the former POTUS and his wife to grab supper. Incredible. And yet, apparently, quite true. This may be one of those 'I've got to look this book up' books.
Harry and Bess go for a drive
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