The Johnny Bingo Awards - 2024

 My Favorite Books of this Reading Year

Once again, it is time for the least-anticipated literary awards of the year…The Johnny Bingo Awards!

These prestigious awards are awarded annually in a variety of categories that change constantly.  There is only one constant, one rule, which I've been using for nearly 20 years:

Eligible books are those I read this year (see below for full list). It could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BCE or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe.  As long as I read the last paragraph before the ball drops in Times Square, it can be a winner.

The literarily literate among you understand that “the blind Greek poet in the 8th century BCE” refers to Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey.  This week it was announced that the acclaimed director Christopher Nolan’s next project will be a movie version of The Odyssey, starring Tom Holland and Zendaya.  The social media reaction to this was filled with so much literary ignorance it made me want to strap myself to the mast…

On to this year’s awards!

Best Historian at Capturing BIG Subjects in a Single Volume

Andrew Roberts 

When it was announced that Ridley Scott would be making a film about Napoleon Bonaparte, I was nervously excited.  I knew from Gladiator that historical accuracy wasn’t exactly Scott’s strong suit, but still – the chance to see a master filmmaker put things like Austerlitz and the invasion of Russia on screen…

The film was awful but its release inspired me to brush up on my Napoleon and that’s how I came across Andrew Roberts.  His Napolean: A Life is a masterpiece.  Scott couldn’t skillfully fit 22 action-packed years into 3 hours of celluloid, but Roberts splendidly tells the entire story of Napoleon’s life and era in fewer than a thousand pages.  

It was so good I read his single-volume history of WWII, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, and I can say with confidence it is the best single-volume history of this enormous subject I’d ever read.  It might be subtitled “Hitler Could Have Won the War if He Wasn’t Such an Ideological Idiot.”

I intend to work my way through Baron Roberts’ (yes, he is a Baron) entire bibliography over the next few years.  

Best Book by Someone I Hadn’t Read Yet

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin

It seems much of the book-loving world has read Zevin’s Tommorow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – but I went back a few years and sampled one of her earlier works.  An absolutely charming book written by, about, and for book lovers.  

Best Old-Fashioned Novel by an Underrated Novelist

The Ocean and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story

Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin has had a curious literary career.  Early on, he took the expected steps of the Next Great Writer: acclaimed short story collections, regularly published in The New Yorker, the breathlessly reviewed debut novel (A Winter’s Tale), and the breakthrough novel (A Soldier of a Great War).

Then he seemed to fade from cultural view.  Partly it’s because he had politics well out of step with the literary gatekeepers – he is a passionate supporter of Israel’s right to existence (even served in the IDF) and was revealed to be a speechwriter for Bob Dole.  But it’s also because the next few novels didn’t live up to the promise of his earlier works. Often it seemed like a powerful literary gift was being wielded in the service of unworthy plots.

The Ocean and The Stars was, for me, a return to form.  It is  an old-fashioned novel about honor and courage and love, and a welcome respite from the cynical solipsism of the modern literary novel.

Best History Book About a Subject of Which I was Shockingly Ignorant

Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

Michael Korda

Current historical events often influence my history reading.  For example, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 inspired me to finally pluck that unread biography of Peter the Great from the shelf (and it won a Johnny Bingo that year!).

The Israel-Hamas war had me brushing up on the origins of the Middle East’s manufactured map, and made my realize how little I knew of T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia.

I don’t know if Korda’s 2011 work is the best biography, but it is thorough, well-written, and has the advantage of being written late enough to capture some recent history.  (and, unlike earlier biographies, late enough to be frank about Lawrence's, oh what's the right word, unusual sex life).

There is so much to Lawrence's life.  He was a critical figure - for better and worse - in the making of the modern Middle East.  And you'll learn much about the unique situation the passing of the Ottoman Empire created, and how it led to the creation of problems that plague the world today.

But it is also one of the great adventure stories of all time, and perhaps a story about the first truly global celebrity.  At the heart of it is the endlessly fascinating figure of T.E. Lawrence.  If I ever get to host one of those ‘if you could invite anyone’ dinner parties, I’d be hard-pressed to not offer a seat to Lawrence of Arabia.

Best Book by the Best Writer

The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy

As I age, and my heroes pass, this blog runs the risk of turning into an Obituaries pages.  Two of my last three posts have been tributes to Pete Rose and Dickey Betts.  And yet, I never quite got around to writing an homage to my favorite writer, Cormac McCarthy, who passed in June of 2023.

In some ways, his career arc was the opposite of Helprin’s.  His first 5 novels were praised in obscure literary journals, but found no readers.  His fifth novel, the much-acclaimed Blood Meridian, had a small press run of 5000 copies.  

But then he went on a run.  His Border trilogy found a much larger audience, and the first book (All the Pretty Horses) was turned into a Matt Damon movie.  In 2005, No Country for Old Men became an Oscar-winning Coen Brothers movie, and 2006 The Road was picked for Oprah’s book club and won The Pulitzer.  This notoriously difficult writer had, against all literary odds, become a mainstream success story.

And that was it.  Or so it seemed.  For the next decade and a half Cormac fans waited.  And then, in late 2022, McCarthy published not one, but two linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.  Six months later he was dead.

One night, not long after McCarthy's death, I sat on my deck with a bottle of Basil Hayden, a Montecristo cigar, and Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece album - and contemplated the career of Cormac McCarthy.  As the bottle emptied and the ashtray filled, my thoughts got more profound, and I was struck with an epiphany about the role of the artist, and how The Passenger and Veedon Fleece were sister works of art that encapsulated both of the careers of these Great Artists, and perhaps even explained Art.   I jotted a bunch of notes down in my phone, stream-of-consciousness style,  bursting with intellectual energy.

Apparently I didn’t save it.  Oh well.  

Hopefully my kids will remember that I have a first edition of Blood Meridian, and while I hope they pass it down through the generations, if they ever get in a tight financial bind, it might be worth something some day.

 Honorable Mention

Here’s the full list of books I read this year, along with some quick comments on other favorites…

Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts

The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy

Two Nights in Lisbon, Chris Pavone

The 39 Steps, John Buchan

Running Blind (Jack Reacher #4), Lee Child

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle,Stuart Turton

Without Fail (Jack Reacher #6), Lee Child

Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy

Dave Barry Turns 50, Dave Barry

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, & Happiness, Morgan Housel

Sometimes I give out an award titled "The Book Most Likely to Make My Wife Kick My Shin Under the Table", because I go on and on about lessons learned.  This is one of those books.

The Power of the Dog: Power of the Dog Book 1, Don Winslow

The only reason I didn't honor Winslow again this year is that I gave his book The Force an award last year, and wrote about him with some length.  But this is even better than The Force.

The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton

Red Sparrow: Book 1 of Red Sparrow Trilogy, Jason Matthews

The Summer Game, Roger Angell

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, William Goldman

A great read about screenwriting and moviemaking - or at least, screenwriting and moviemaking in the 70s and 80s.  Particularly recommended if you loved Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, Malcolm Gladwell

The 6:20 Man (6:20 Man #1), David Baldacci

The Innocence of Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts

Dress Her in Indigo: (Travis McGee #12), John D. MacDonald

The It Girl, Ruth Ware

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Daisy Jones & The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid

A fictional oral history of a Fleetwood Mac-like band.  Excellent book, I should have given it a JB!

Swordpoint: The WWII Collection, Max Hennessey

Samuel Adams: The Revolutionary, Stacy Schiff

Adams is on the short list of Underrated Americans, and Schiff is on the short list of underrated historians.  For more on Schiff, see my previous post about the Benjamin Franklin series on Apple TV.

A Discovery of Witches (All Souls #1), Deborah Harkness

I'm two books into this series and I haven't experienced this kind of thrill around vampires since Anne Rice's heyday.

The Edge (6:20 Man #2), David Baldacci

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

The Resurrection Walk (Lincoln Lawyer #7), Michael Connelly

The Ocean and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story, Mark Helprin

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, Noa Tishby

The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, Keith Law

Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, Michael Korda

Flashman (The Flashman Papers 1), George MacDonald Fraser

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle #1), Ursula K. Le Guin

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King

Case Histories: Jackson Brodie 1, Kate Atkinson

In Sunlight and in Shadow, Mark Helprin

Think Twice: Myron Bolintar #12, Harlan Coben

The Lion's Game: John Corey #2 , Nelson DeMille

Not DeMille's best - it should be a few hundred pages shorter and perhaps have a more wrapped up ending.  But DeMille passed this year, and he gave me many hours of reading pleasure.  The outpouring of support on social media from the giants of thriller writers suggest he was also a beloved and generous man.  Long Island really produces some winners.

Shadow of Night (All Souls #2), Debora Harkness

The Collector (Gabriel Allon #23), Daniel Silva

Books in the Time of COVID-19

A Top Ten List

We can’t go out and socialize.  There are no sports on TV – and thus no fantasy teams to track.  The gyms are emptying.  Hollywood has shut down production.

What will we do with our free time?

There are all sorts of activities to fill the day, of course.  Video games and board games, puzzles and podcasts.  You can learn to juggle or tango or speak Portuguese.   

Or – you can read.  

As a public service I’ve put together a list of entertaining books.   This is not a list for hardcore book readers – or, if you’ll allow me a moment of literary snobbery, it is not a list for people who got the reference in the title of this post.   Most of these books haven’t won a coveted Johnny-Bingo Award.

Rather, it is a list for the casual reader, one who knows the wonderful feeling of a great read but can’t name many authors beyond Grisham, Rowling, Patterson, and King.

Some of these books are light, fun, frothy.  Some are a bit weightier, but still page-turners.

Here we go:

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

The greatest Western ever written.  Yes, it is long, nearly a thousand pages.  But don’t be daunted by its length.  If you watched 73 episodes of Game of Thrones you can handle a thousand-page book; just treat each chapter like an episode.  And the pages fly by – cattle drives and saloon fights and horse rustlers and Indians and – at the heart of it all, Woodrow Call and Gus McRae, two of the greatest characters in literary history.

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

Let’s move to non-fiction now, and this extraordinary tale of a catastrophic climb of Mount Everest.  

Mild spoiler alert: early in the book we learn a major character doesn’t make it, but even though I’d known this for hundreds of pages I was still shaken when it actually happened.  This is reporting + storytelling at its finest. 

The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara

A thousand pages is too long?  Then warm up with this 370-pager about the battle of Gettysburg.  You’ll bounce all around the battlefield and experience the personal stories from Union cavalrymen and Confederate generals and foreign observers.  You’ll learn about the most important battle in American history but be so captivated the whole time you won’t even notice you’re learning.

  

Positively Fifth Street:  Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker, James McManus

If you like poker, this is the book for you.  The author got paid by Esquire magazine to go to Vegas and cover a murder trial.  And not just any murder trial, but the murder of Teddy Binion, whose seedy old casino was the original home of the World Series of Poker.  McManus takes his writer’s fee and enters the WSOP.

It’s part murder trial reporting, part memoir of his run in the tourney, part history of poker.  Awesome stuff.

The Winds of War/War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk

Okay, this one’s a big one again.  Not one, but two long books. 

Herman Wouk conveniently places members of the Henry family all over the world during (and before) the Second World War.  If you want to learn all about that global conflict while immersed in a rip-roaring yarn of a family saga, this is your book(s).

Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson

Your trip to Europe was cancelled.  Want to travel there vicariously with a hugely entertaining and witty writer instead?  Bryson's got you covered.

Who’s Your Caddy? Looping for the Great, Near-Great, and Reprobates of Golf, Rick Reilly

The noted Sports Illustrated wit spent a year caddying with everyone from PGA pros to Vegas golf hustlers.  He caddied for the blind golf champion and Jack Nicklaus.  He caddied for Donald Trump and Deepak Chopra.  He even caddied at the Masters. 

A fun read for anyone who loves golf or used to look forward to reading the back page of SI.

The Myron Bolitar series, Harlen Coben

I read a lot of crime series.  Maybe all of them.  And this isn’t the best one.  It’s not even the 9^th best one.   BUT –I have a lot of friends who never read books but only watch sports and listen to sports radio, and this might be the series for you.

Myron is a former college basketball star whose NBA career was derailed by injury.  He becomes a sports agent – and, like those ridiculous 1970s TV series like Hart to Hart where ordinary citizens get involved in crime-fighting escapades - Myron is constantly having to save his clients from some evil villain. 

They are fun and funny and have just enough darkness in them to save them from being too frothy.

The Princess Bride, William Goldman

You’ve seen the movie.  Now read the book!  William Goldman is a screenwriting legend (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) but he wrote TPB as a novel first and a screenplay writer.  And the novel is as charming and delightful as the movie.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Read the first 5 pages.  If you love it, you will love all five books in the trilogy (not a typo).  If you hate it, put it down.  This is not for you.

What Not to Read

The Passage Trilogy, by Justin Cronin

This vampire-horror sage about a bat-borne virus that leads to a near-apocalypse…well, unless you’re a masochist, maybe wait on this one.

Happy Reading!

The Johnny Bingo Awards - The 2010s

My Favorite Books of the Decade


Authors, agents, publishers, and readers: it’s time for the 2019 Johnny Bingo Awards!

Wait, what’s that you say?  I didn’t give out the 2018 Awards?  Or 2017, 2016…jeez, when was the last time I did these things?  2009?!  Well, that’s embarrassing.  I have long mocked the Nobel Prize in Literature for their curious choices, but at least they remember to give out their awards every year (whether the winner shows up or not is another question entirely).

There’s only one option here:  claim it was my intention all along to skip ten years and hand out The Johnny Bingo Awards for the Decade!

These awards have flexible rules.  Indeed there is only one that matters (to which I will make a slight update):

“The Johnny Bingo Award(s) have one judge – me – and one rule: all eligible books must have been finished by me this year decade.   It could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BC or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe. As long as I read the final paragraph before the calendar turns, it's eligible.”

I’m going to do this Oscar style: start with some fun awards, then get into the long weird section, and close out with the big ones.  And away we go:

Best Rock & Roll Book
The 2010s brought us a lot of books about classic rock.  I read the “The English Guitarist Memoir Trilogy” (Keith Richards’ Life, Pete Townshend’s Who I Am, and Clapton: The Autobiography).  I enjoyed Pamela Des Barres’ delightful groupie memoir, I’m With the Band.  And Stephen Hyden's Twilight of the Gods was...well, I don't know what it was exactly - part memoir, part classic rock history, but mostly hanging out with a smart and interesting guy who has thought entirely too much about classic rock and what it means to people of a certain age.

But the winner here is The Trouble Boys: The Story of the Replacements.  Bob Mehr’s chronicle of this brilliant but self-destructive band has all the sex, drugs and rock and roll the genre promises.  And it has one of my favorite components of rock books – encounters with other musicians (in particular, the members of REM, who are a steady presence as competitors, counterpoint, and comrades).

It also gave me what I was really looking for: an insight into the creative process.  Townshend’s book does that too, but in a self-consciously intellectual way.  Clapton’s music is ultimately too derivative – his inspiration is other musicians – to provide creative insight.  And Keith Richards, bless his pirate soul, seems to have no earthly idea where the music comes from.

But these drunken nuts from Minneapolis were true artists, and the journey with them was fascinating.

Best Book from a Binge Read
The 2010s brought us binge-watching, and perhaps not coincidentally I did some binge-reading this decade.  Not on authors, but on subjects.

Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal sent me down a Cambridge Five Spy Ring rabbit hole.  T.H. White’s Once and Future King inspired a quest to learn everything I could about King Arthur and Arthurian legend.  (Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles is a wonderful imagining of how a possibly historical medieval warlord could’ve evolved into the English legend).  And Sherlock Holmes – wow, did I go full Sherlock this decade.   I read every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, and numerous non-canon Sherlock books by everyone from Michael Chabon to Caleb Carr*.

*  I highly recommend Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian.  Moore published this exceedingly clever novel in 2010, then four years later won the Academy Award for writing The Imitation Game, starring none other than Benedict Cumberbatch, my favorite on-screen Sherlock.

But my most rewarding binge was on Alexander the Great.   And the winner here is Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy (Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games).   Reading Renault's work alongside more traditional biographies (and a bit of Arrian) makes you wonder how Oliver Stone could have possibly made such a boring movie from such thrilling material.

Sidebar
I read hardcovers, eBooks on a Kindle, eBooks on an iPhone, and I listen to audiobooks.  I consider all of this to be "reading".  For example, I listened to the entire English Guitarist Memoir trilogy on audiobook, which I highly recommend.  Pete Townshend reads his own book, and he comes off as much more self-effacing and able to laugh at himself than I suspect he would in print, where his tendency to pomposity would be more obvious.  And Keith Richards' audiobook is a delightful mess: it starts with Johnny Depp, who must have gotten bored halfway through.  Then a replacement bloke with a cockney accent jumps in.  Then Keith decides, what the hell, I'm gonna read a few chapters!   It's all so...Keith.


Best Stephen King Book Not Written By Stephen King
Upon its publication in 2010, Justin Cronin’s The Passage was immediately compared to The Stand.  Followed by The Twelve and The City of Mirrors, King himself called it “a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction.”


Worst Stephen King Book Written By Stephen King
I read a lot of fantasy series this decade.  A Song of Ice and Fire (which you may recognize as Game of Thrones).  All 15 books of The Wheel of Time.  Lev Grossman's The Magicians.  His Dark Materials.  The aforementioned Once and Future King*.

So I thought, hey, Stephen King is one of the great storytellers of modern times.  Let's give his fantasy series, The Dark Tower, a shot.  It must be good.

Spoiler:  It is not good.

*  Arthurian legend is the foundation story of all modern fantasy stories, from The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Harry Potter. And let's be clear: Star Wars is fantasy, NOT science fiction.  It has knights and swords and magic and princesses.  Obi-Wan Kenobi is Merlin and Luke is Arthur.  In the prequel trilogy Yoda is Merlin and Anakin is Arthur.  And in the new trilogy Luke is Merlin and Rey is Arthur.  Got it?  Good.  


The Book Most Likely to Make My Wife Kick Me Under the Table
There's a certain kind of book - non-fiction, well-written, a colon in the title, and a Big Idea at its heart  - that will make me talk about it for months afterwards.   Eventually, I'm out to dinner with other people and am rambling on for entirely too long about how ancient Romans used memory palaces to commit multi-hour speeches to memory and - thwack! - my wife will deliver a well-placed blow to my shin. 

Here are the nominees:

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
David Epstein

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Joshua Foer

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Steven Pinker

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won't Stop Talking
Susan Cain

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan

If you're an introvert and want to understand yourself better OR an extrovert who lives and works with introverts and wants to understand them better, read Quiet.

If you think the age you live in is the worst ever and am open to being proven dramatically wrong, read Better Angels.

And if you really want to get kicked under the table, read Moonwalking. 


Sidebar
I've kept a book log for 19 years, which is how I'm able to do this ridiculous "awards" program.  But I'm sure these awards are suffering from recency bias.  For example, I just read The Passage trilogy  so it's top of mind.  But back in 2012 I read a novel called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.  I remembered loving it.  I remember it was kinda sorta about baseball and college.  I remember it was beloved by critics.  But alas, I don't remember anything else about it.

If I had just read it, it probably would have won a coveted J-B Award.  Alas, it just gets a quick mention here.

Best Books I Didn't Actually Read
Over the course of several Christmases Santa brought me The Landmark Thucydides, The Landmark Herodotus, and The Landmark Caesar.  These are beautiful books, objets d'art, that present ancient historical texts in a setting for non-scholars.

For example, The Landmark Thucydides presents a translation of  The Peloponnesian War, complete with maps and introductions and same-page footnotes.   But it also includes a dozen essays by noted scholars on everything from naval warfare in the 5th century BCE to the structures of Athenian government.

I haven't read all the ancient texts from end to end.  But they are books I pick up, read an essay, read some passages - the Athenians' disastrous invasion of Sicily, the Spartans at Thermopylae - and move on.  Perhaps in retirement I'll really dig into these things.


Best Novel
Let's be clear:  every book in this category is better than The Passage and the Replacements book and pretty much everything else.  A great novel is hypnotic - when lost in its pages you miss train stops and meals and deadlines - the world stops around you.  It makes you think and it teaches you things about humanity and philosophy and morality and history and everything that matters.

As Hilary Mantel, one of this year's nominees said, "A novel should be a book of questions, not of answers." 

The nominees are:

The Son
Phillip Meyer

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Anthony Marra

Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders

A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan

Wolf Hall
Hillary Mantel

Matterhorn
Karl Marlantes

Since I have a bias for history wrapped up in literature, particularly history that I'm dreadfully ignorant of, the coveted JB Prize goes to Wolf Hall.  The first book in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, it stands alongside Robert Caro's biographies as a masterwork about how power is gained and wielded.  And it's a helluva story too.


Best History Book
Let's get right to it:

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume IV
Robert Caro

Speaking of Robert Caro's biographies...

I assume there are people will read all 4000 pages of Caro's monumental biography of LBJ (he's at 4 volumes and 3000 pages now).  I doubt I'll be one of them.  

But this volume, covering his last years in the Senate through the assassination of JFK and the first tumultuous year of his Presidency, covers a fascinating period of American history told by a master historian.

Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
Allen Guelzo

What elevates this from a good battle history to a great work of history are the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of little stories he tells.   Stories of valor, tragedy, folly, humor.  Stories of generals and privates, but also of the citizens of a Pennsylvania town that was visited for 3 days by an inferno of death.

Among all these portraits and stories emerges a coherent narrative of this enormous battle. 

Paul Revere's Ride
David Hackett Fischer

Sometimes the legend is true.  Sometimes the truth is even more interesting than the legend.

Paul Revere's midnight ride achieved its legendary status thanks to Henry Wadworth Longfellow's famous poem ("Listen, my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.")  What followed was a century of revisionists correcting Mr. Longfellow.

But Fischer rescues the true story, and it is a damned good one.   (He did the same thing for Washington in Washington's Crossing and corrects the myth of American's "Puritan founding" in The Seeds of Albion.)

Grant
Ron Chernow

If Robert Caro isn't our finest biographer, perhaps it's Ron Chernow?

I don't expect this book to get the same Broadway musical hit treatment as his 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, but it may be a better book - or at least, a more interesting subject.

Grant's reputation doesn't need reviving - and yet Chernow does just that.  He makes you realize he was a greater military strategist than he is often given credit for; nothing like the butcher he is often accused of; and a far better President than historians usually accord him.

And it's a great read taking you everywhere from pre- and postwar Mexico, antebellum California, gilded age New York, a grand tour of Europe - and of course, the great battlefields of The Civil War.

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-45.  Volume 3 of The Liberation Trilogy
Rick Atkinson

When An Army at Dawn, the first volume of Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy came out in 2002, it was clear that the Second World War had found its Bruce Catton.  Just as Catton focused on the Army of the Potomac in his great trilogy (Mr. Lincoln's Army, Glory Road, A Stillness at Appomattox), Atkinson zeroes in on the Allied triumph in Europe.

The Guns at Last Light is the concluding volume of this great work, and is the winner of the Johnny Bingo Award for History.


LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
Two of my writing heroes passed away this decade.

Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe became my writing hero early in college. "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" opened up my eyes to what non-fiction writing could be. Then I read "The Right Stuff", and all of the pyrotechnics from his earlier work was gone, and its absence made me realize how good the work was - indeed, how one might go about doing this. If you want to write well, forget all of the books about writing; just read "The Right Stuff" and pay attention.

And then he thought, after proving himself as possibly the greatest non-fiction writer of the century, what the hell, he'd write a novel. 500 years from now, when historians and cultural archaeologists want to know what the greatest city in the world was like before the internet changed the world, they need only read "Bonfire of the Vanities".

(If you care about the novel as an art form, read his essay, "Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast".)


Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is almost certainly the writer I've been reading the longest.  I was checking out 52 Pickup and Hombre from the Farmingdale Library bookmobile as a kid.   I read nine of his books this decade - the last one, Fire in the Hole*, in 2013.

*  Hollywood has always loved Leonard.  Hombre was turned into a Western starring Paul Newman.  52 Pickup was a Roy Scheider movie.  And Fire in the Hole is a collection that includes the story that inspired the excellent FX series Justified.   My favorite movie from an Elmore Leonard book is the wildly underrated Out of Sight.

The best way to honor Elmore Leonard is to share with you his ten rules of writing.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Well, that's it for the Johnny Bingo Awards.  See ya in 2030.  Happy Reading!

The 2009 Johnny-Bingo Awards

The suspense is over. It is time for the 2009 Johnny-Bingo Awards, given annually to the Best Books Read by Yours Truly this year.

(Go here for last year’s awards)

The award is named for the first book I remember calling my favorite – something about two boys, a dog, and a bank robber. Or maybe it was two bank robbers, a boy and a dog. Or maybe two dogs…anyway, the point is that I am the judge, jury and executioner for this, the last major literary prize handed out this year.

Okay, maybe it’s not such a major prize. But given the way the other literary prizes have been operating this year, I think I have a chance to pass them in prestige.

Take the Nobel Prize in Literature (please). This year the Nobel folks took a lot of heat for their selection of President Barack Obama for the Peace Prize. But that head-scratcher obscured the fact that the Nobel Prize in Literature went to Herta Muller, a Romanian writer so obscure that the response even in Romania seemed to be “Yay!!! Um…who?”

The Nobel Lit folks have made it clear that they despise American literature and are determined to give Nobels out to every obscure novelist on earth before the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, or Joyce Carol Oates grace their stage. The National Book Award on the other hand is, you know, the National book award. For Americans. It states quite clearly in their bylaws that the nominees be American.

Well, here are the nominees for this year’s National Book Award in fiction:

- Colum McCann, an Irishman born in Dublin, currently residing in New York.
- Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian who moved to America in 1992.
- Marcel Theroux, son of the American writer Paul Theroux, who was born in Uganda and now lives in London.
- Daniyal Mueenuddin, who grew up in Pakistan and Wisconsin, lives in the southern Punjab, and is currently spending a year in London.
- Jayne Anne Phillips, born in West Virginia and now living in New Jersey.

Can I get a “USA! USA!” chant?

The J-B Rules
I’m not as sophisticated as those other folks. I don’t read obscure Romanian novelists, I’ve never heard of Daniyal Mueenuddin, and am frequently seen with a paperbook thriller in my hand. I’m also ashamed to admit that most of the books I read are written by (gasp!) Americans – and the worst kind of Americans, the ones that are born here, live here, and write about here. Insular bastards. (Maybe I should call these the Johnny-Jingo Awards. The Bonny-Jingo Awards?)

The Johnny-Bingo Award(s) have one judge – me – and one rule: all eligible books must have been finished by me in 2009. As I said last year, it could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BC or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe. As long as I read the final paragraph before the calendar turns, it could be a winner.

Let’s look at our finalists:

Best New Crime Novelist
Famed restaurant journalist Peter Romeo was surprised – maybe even embarrassed - to hear I had never read Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos and pressed copies of their novels on me. I also read the newcomers Josh Bazell and Stieg Larson and tried out Stuart Woods for the first time. The first three get the coveted Keatang recommendations but we can only have one winner in the category and it is…Dennis Lehane! (please hold your applause till all the winners have been announced)

It was a tough race and I suspect that Mr. Pelecanos and I will be spending a lot more time together. But if you like your crime novel heroes hard-boiled, wise-crackin’, and existentially dark, Lehane is your guy. Be prepared though – the capacity for evil in his bad guys, not to mention his good guys, will make you weep for humanity.

Best History Book about Post-War America
I read a lot of history but they tend to cover that short period between 500 B.C. and 1945. I’m less interested, for reasons I can’t defend, in books about the post-war period. But this year I took two plunges into the 60’s (An Unfinished Life: John Kennedy 1917-1963 and Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965) and one into the 00’s (Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan).

One thing about history books about the 1960’s…there is a lot of sex! JFK makes Tiger Woods look like the Dali Lama. And MLK – well, this is a worshipful book about the Reverend but there are transcripts from his hotel room romps that made me blush. You don’t see this in books about the Founders. Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton both got around but were fortunate enough to do so before tape recording and the FBI.

Pillar of Fire is the greater book of the three and destined for a long shelf life. But I too often got lost in the huge cast of characters and couldn’t find my way out. The book assumes knowledge of racial politics of the period that I don’t have. Horse Soldiers is a terrific story and I heartily recommend it – especially if like me you are sick and tired of the media’s treatment of America’s soldiers as either villains or victims. This is a story of true American heroes. But the writing is a little bit hokey.

Unfinished Life gets the nod. Biographer Robert Dallek doesn’t shy away from the glamorous (and sordid) stories about the Kennedys, but at its heart it’s a study of the Cold War at its peak, and the important role JFK played in it.

Best Book in an Unclassifiable Category
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is Harry Potter meets Less Than Zero meets The Narnia Chronicles. If that sounds like something you might like, you will.

Christopher Moore’s Fool is King Lear with "gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, spit infinitives, and the odd wank". If that sounds like something you might like, you will.

I enjoyed Fool, but the nod here goes to The Magicians.

Best Big Ideas Book
The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb is one of those books whose big idea – that human history is shaped more by huge unforeseen events rather than occurring in a predictable flow – is one that I totally bought, even if I bickered with Taleb in the margins along the way.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan is one of those books whose big idea – that large-scale modern food production does more bad than good – is one that I totally disagreed with, even though I enjoyed nearly every page of the book.

Nod to Taleb, since his ideas, unlike Pollan’s, are unlikely to lead to global starvation, not to mention federal regulations telling me to eat my locally-grown organic spinach.

Best Book of the Year
And the winner of the Johnny-Bingo Award goes to…none of the above! Scanning over my book log for the year, I keep coming back to Freedomland, a 1998 novel by Richard Price.

Price is one of those writers whose every sentence is so damned good, you give up any hopes of writing a novel yourself. It’s not just the quality of the prose though; underneath that graceful prose is knowledge born of hard-earned reporting. But it’s not just knowledge, gracefully presented. There is wisdom in Price’s work.

The folks who give out Nobel Literature prizes claim American novelists are insular. Freedomland is proof they are wrong.

Congratulations to Mr. Price, who is not only the 2009 Johnny-Bingo Award winner, but the most underrated American novelist working today.

The 2008 Johnny Bingo Awards

Yes, it’s time for the least-anticipated literary awards of the year – the Johnny Bingo Awards!

The nice thing about being judge and jury for an award nobody cares about is I can change the rules every year without protest. And I’m changing the rules again. Last year I gave out a bunch of different awards in different categories. And in the years before that I simply gave out one award. But this year I’m going to name five finalists and then pick a winner. (That’s my plan now anyway; it could change in a few paragraphs)

Luckily, no matter how ridiculous I make it, I can't make it sillier than the Nobel Prize in Literature, bestowed annually on obscurities and mediocrities, the only qualification being that the winner not be American.

This award too has only one criterion – for a book to be eligible, I had to have finished reading it in 2008. It could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BC or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe. As long as I read the final paragraph before Dick Clark’s puppeteer walks him through the New Year’s Eve Countdown, it can be a winner.

But before we hand out this year’s awards, I’d like to say a few words about books I don’t read.

A Few Words About Books I Don’t Read
I don’t read books written by people who got famous doing something different. So you’ll see no sensitive novels by Ethan Hawke or counterfactual histories by Newt Gingrich. Kirstie Alley’s How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Confidence: Reluctant Confessions of a Big-Butted Star might be a literary masterpiece, but I’ll never know it.

I don’t read current events books. Perhaps I’ll expand this thesis in a larger post, but I don’t think current events lend themselves well to book form. First, not enough time has passed for perspective. And second, events have a way of overtaking the book. I tried to read George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate last year, and while parts of it were excellent, as I got to the last few hundred pages it was clear that the Iraq he was writing about was different than the one that existed by the time of my reading. So I stick to magazines and newspapers for the events of the day.

I don’t read memoirs, particularly memoirs by people who’ve led massively self-(and others) destructive lives, but who’ve now put all the pieces together and found wisdom. Somehow I’ll muddle through life without their wisdom.

I don’t read books by Mitch Albom.

Apparently I don’t read books by women. This isn’t a policy but it appears to be the truth. I didn’t read a single book written by a woman in 2008. I did better in 2007, thanks to Barbara Tuchman and J.K. Rowling. Considering how much I enjoy the works of those two women in particular, as well as the histories of Catherine Drinker Bowen and Doris Kearns Goodwin, I may have to correct that.

Which reminds me – I don’t read books that everybody else is reading. I’ve been a fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin since before she became a television star and I’ve read more Lincoln books than most, but I’ve kind of avoided Team of Rivals because everybody else is reading it. I will read it eventually, but long after the rest of the world has lost interest.

There are all kinds of exceptions to these “rules”. I’ll read Mark Bavaro’s new novel because one of the best presents I got this Christmas was an inscribed copy of it. I read Bill Bryson’s Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir because it was written by Bill Bryson.

I also read Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father*, which breaks most of my rules: it’s a memoir, it’s a current events book (sort of), it’s written by someone who doesn’t write books for a living, and it’s a book everybody was reading. But I was very interested to read a book written by a Presidential candidate long before he was one.

* a mini review: it started out fascinating and impressive, but became dreadfully boring and self-absorbed. Hopefully not a harbinger for his Presidency…

There is no exception to the Mitch Albom rule.

So, without further ado the five finalists are:

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1845
Daniel Walker Howe

We tend to think of the years between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War as boring. Not as boring, perhaps, as the Era of Obscure Bearded Presidents (1872-1896), but still pretty boring.

Yeah, Andrew Jackson was a colorful guy, but everyone else seemed small by comparison – dwarfed by the shadow of the Founders (Adams and Jefferson died in 1824) and the specter of the Civil War (Lincoln, Lee and Grant walked the earth, but few knew who they were.).

Even the 2nd most famous guy of the period, John Quincy Adams, was the less famous son of a Founder who can’t even get a monument on the Mall.

But Howe – who has the great gift of weaving diplomatic, political, and economic history into a compelling whole – shows that the period was, as the sub-title says, transformational.

(For an excellent review on WHGW, go here.)

Duma Key
Stephen King
As I said earlier, I tend not to read things everybody else is reading. Thus, I’ve read very little John Grisham and Stephen King through the years.

But this year, in separate acts of airport desperation, I bought Grisham and King paperbacks. The Grisham book – The Brethren – was entertaining but nothing special; it was like one of Elmore Leonard’s lesser works, peopled with quirky Florida lowlifes. But Duma Key grabbed me by the collar and wouldn’t let go.

It’s odd that King is still considered a horror novelist. The Shawshank Redemption, based on a King novella, is by one measure the most popular movie ever made – and there is not a supernatural moment in it. The same is true of Stand By Me, based on a King short story. But I guess it’s hard to shake the image left by books/movies like Carrie, Cujo, and Pet Semetary.

Duma Key is about a middle-aged guy who – like King – was severely injured in an accident. While recovering he discovers he has untapped powers as a painter – well, for a description of the book go here. All I’ll say is that King’s genius stems in part from his storytelling, in part from his ability to tap into our fear – but mostly from his understanding of human emotion.

I realize I might be banned from the unofficial book snobs’ club, but what King is up to in his later years just might be called literature.

The Spies of Warsaw
Alan Furst
Speaking of popular fiction that borders on literature…

There are some authors who sell only a fraction of the books John Grisham sells, but whose fans are even more devoted. Furst’s novels, all set before or in the early years of World War II, has a devoted following and I number myself among them.

The books are formulaic – one or more Europeans, recognizing the impending calamity of war with Germany and presented an opportunity to do something about it, do something about it. Gauloises are smoked, cafes are visited, and Polish countesses slip into bed with French naval attachés.

But Furst’s novels prove that formulas executed with literary style and thorough historical research are as impressive as any higher-brow work.

Blue Latitudes: Sailing Boldly Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horowitz
I think of myself as a knowledgeable guy, historically speaking. But reading Blue Latitudes, I was shocked at how ignorant I was of the accomplishments of James Cook.

Most discoverers happen upon their discovery – the Hudson River, America – and, if they survive, tend to stay in that part of the world looking for more stuff or head home to enjoy their fame. But Cook travelled all over the world, to places untouched by Europeans, multiple times. New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, parts of Alaska. He circumnavigated the globe multiple times and covered 140 of the 180 degrees of the earth’s longitude.

But most people don’t know Captain Cook from Captain Hook. Tony Horowitz, former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of Confederates in the Attic, sets off to find out why. Part travelogue, part history, Horowitz re-traces Cook’s voyage, and interviews just about anybody he meets along the way in search of Cook’s story and his legacy.

Cook’s is a great story – and Horowitz is wonderful company for the telling of it.


Corelli’s Mandolin
Louis de Bernières
You know the old phrase, “the book was better”. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was a terrible Nicolas Cage movie, but this is an excellent novel, set on a small Greek island during the Second World War.

It’s kind of hard to describe, but check it out here.


And the winner is…hmmm….well I liked all of them, obviously. But none are books I’ll be talking about five years from now. I’ve already forgotten what The Spies of Warsaw is about (that’s the problem with formulaic fiction – no matter how good it’s executed, the details slip away).

Oh, I’ll give it to What Hath God Wrought. Congratulations, Mr. Howe. You must be proud.

American History Class

A friend recently asked me to create a little curriculum for him - everything he should read over the course of a few years to have a solid handle on American history. I thought I'd share it with you.

This list does not intend to be comprehensive. It is a mix of scholarly works, popular history, and historical fiction. And there is no doubt that I've missed many many wonderful books. Looking over the list I notice that I don't have any David McCullough, who I admire, but I have two books from Stephen Ambrose, who I have mixed feelings about. What can I tell you?

Finally, I would describe this list as middle-brow. A very serious reader may see I've included a fairly pulpish book about the battle of Thermopylae rather than the works of Herodotus, and scoff derisively. But this list isn't for post-grad students - it's for the general reader.

ANCIENT HISTORY

Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
Steven Pressfield

I know. I said this is a list of American history books, and I'm leading off with a novel about Greek history. But American history is really the story of representative government, or as Lincoln would put it, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. That starts with the ancient Greeks.

And democracy was nearly strangled in its cradle. The mighty autocratic Persian Empire invaded Greece early in the 5th century BC. The Greeks – really a collection of city-states - banded together to defeat them. This war was immediately followed by the Golden Age of Athens (Socrates, Pericles, Aristotle, the Greek dramatists). If this war had gone differently, the whole course of human history may have gone differently.

This is an entertaining and informative novel about the most famous battle of that war – in fact, one of the most famous battles in all of human history. (And yes, it is the battle dramatized in the movie "300".)


COLONIAL HISTORY

Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
Or

The War that Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War
Both by Fred Anderson

Okay, skipping ahead 2200 years…The Seven Years War, more popularly known here as the French and Indian War, led to the American Revolution as surely as World War I led to the WW II. It was also, in the words of Winston Churchill, truly the first world war.

As Americans, we think of the French and Indian War as a minor conflict in the woods of Western Pennsylvania, the lakes of upstate New York, and the cliffs of Quebec. But that was only part of a much larger war that included Frederick the Great fighting epic battles in Western Europe, and French and English armies clashing as far away as India and South America.

These books mainly focus on the North American part of the war, however, and how it ignited the flames that led to the American Revolution.

Both are by Fred Anderson. I read the first, the definitive book on the war. It is a longer, scholarly but very readable treatment of war, its political and military aspects. It is one of my favorites, but probably goes into more detail than most readers want. The second book is his scaled-down popular version of the first, which I haven’t read.


REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

John Adams and the American Revolution
Catherine Drinker Bowen

There are so many tremendous books about the American Revolution, it is difficult  to narrow it down. But I’ll start here. Scholarly historians have issues with this book, which is a sort of novelistic history. I choose it for three reasons:

1. To understand the Revolution, you need to understand the period from the end of the Seven Years’ War to the Declaration of Independence, and Adams was the man in this period.

2. No book better captures the drama of July 2-4, 1776.

3. I dig this book, and its my list.


Washington’s Crossing
David Hackett Fischer

The colonists have declared independence; now all they have to do is defeat the mightiest army on earth. How did they do it? This book answers that question as well as any other. Fischer and James MacPherson, two great historians, are editing a series called “Pivotal Moments in American History”, and in this book Fischer argues Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware was one of those moments.

But it's about much more than that battle. It is about how Washington built an army, held it together, and yes, defeated the mightiest army on earth.

It’s also about myth and history. In the last few years, academic historians have attacked icons like Washington and Lincoln, arguing that too much credit has been given to Dead White Males. Fischer, taking the famous painting of Washington’s Crossing as a starting point, argues that sometimes the myth is true.

Miracle in Philadelphia
Catherine Drinker Bowen

Independence is declared; the British have been beaten. Now all that is required is a government.

This book is a dramatic re-telling of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

(The link above is to a beautiful hard-cover edition that can be purchased online cheaply.  Like most book lovers I lament the struggles of independent bookstores, but at the same time it's wonderful that you can find many of these books used, even in hardcover, at incredibly low prices.)

Founding Brothers
Joseph Ellis

This is more a collection of essays than a unified history, but great stories are told about the major founders: the Hamilton-Burr duel; the dinner at which Jefferson and Hamilton negotiated the location of the Capitol; the ups and downs of the 50 year friendship between Jefferson and Adams. The essay on Washington’s Farewell Address is particularly good.

My favorite period in American history is the 1790’s, the period after the Constitution up to Jefferson’s Presidency. This book tells some of the great stories from that period.


The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789
Robert Middlekauff

What I’ve done with the 4 books above is cover the 3 key parts of the Revolution: the pre-Revolutionary period, the War itself, and the creation of a government. But I’ve skipped huge parts, mainly through my somewhat eccentric choice of the Fischer book. Fischer’s telling of Washington’s Crossing illuminates the entire military story of the Revolution, but it doesn’t tell it. So if you just read the 4 books above, you’ll still be short on facts about Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Yorktown, and the other key battles.

On the other hand, you can skip all four books and just read this one. This is a volume of the outstanding Oxford History of the United States, and is a well-written and thorough account of the period covered by all 4 books.


BETWEEN WARS I
Undaunted Courage
Stephen Ambrose

The Lewis & Clark Expedition was an historically insignificant event.

They failed in their primary mission to find a Northwest Passage (because it didn’t exist); the path they took to the West was so arduous as to be completely useless to future pioneers; and the naturalist work they did wasn’t published till long after it would have been useful. In short, they did not open the American West.

But as Ambrose says, "the Lewis & Clark Expedition was the greatest camping trip of all time, and the greatest hunting trip." Worth reading for the adventure alone.

The Life of Andrew Jackson
Robert Remini

The towering figure of the antebellum period is Andrew Jackson. He is also the most entertaining. And few historians dominate their subject matter the way Remini does Jackson. This book is the single-volume condensed version of his definitive 3-volume bio.

It has everything: backwoods adventures, frontier gunfights, Indian fights, the thrilling Battle of New Orleans, a ruffian in the White House, and a fundamental change in the perception and practice of American democracy.

The Gates of the Alamo
Stephen Harigan
Another historical novel about gates…this one about what is arguably the most famous battle in American history.


THE CIVIL WAR

Battle Cry of Freedom – The Civil War Era
James McPherson

I’ve told many people over the years – if you read one book about the Civil War, make it this one. It’s an extraordinary historical achievement, covering everything that is important from the end of the Mexican War (which reignited the slavery debate) to the end of the War. An excellent narrative by one of our greatest historians.

The Killer Angels – A Novel of Gettysburg
Michael Shaara

My favorite historical novel. Read it. (Also, the basis for the great TV movie "Gettysburg").

Lincoln
David Herbert Donald

There are so many great Lincoln books. I'm partial to a book called Lincoln's Virtues. I love Gore Vidal's novel. And of course, there are many wonderful books that highlight certain parts of Lincoln's life - like Garry Wills book about the Gettysburg address. But Donald's book is probably the best single-volume biography that captures the whole life, and isn't dauntingly long.

A Stillness at Appomattox
Bruce Catton

This is the 3rd volume of Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy, covering the final year of the Civil War. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, it is worth reading for the surrender scene alone.


BETWEEN WARS II

Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn
Evan Connell

Using Custer at Little Big Horn as a focal point, Connell tells the story of the Plains Indians wars. He is a novelist writing history, and it is beautifully written and a bit idiosyncratic. But I’ve read a fair amount of books about this period, and this is my favorite.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Edmund Morris

Forget about history books – this is one of my favorite books, period. TR’s life before the Presidency was amazing; Park Avenue socialite, cowboy, war hero, city cop, writer, politician. And Morris is a stunningly brilliant writer. (And, apparently, the basis of an upcoming Scorcese/DiCaprio flick. Not Morris, the book...)


THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The Guns of August
Barbara Tuchman

This doesn’t really qualify as American history, since it’s very specifically about the start of the Great War, and the Americans didn’t show up until 1917. But it’s one of the finest history books I’ve ever read, particularly the first half which focuses on how the war ignited.

The First World War
John Keegan

If you want to know about the entire war, then this is the book to read, from the finest military historian of the 20th century.

All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque

By now, you know my fondness of learning history through fiction. This is probably considered the greatest war novel ever written.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929 – 1945David Kennedy

This is another book in the Oxford History of the U.S. series. It takes a gifted historian to cover, in a mere 900 pages, virtually all of American history from the stock market crash to the surrender of the Japanese on the deck of the U.S. Missouri. Like the McPherson and Middlekauf books above, if you read one book, make it this one.

At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
Gordon Prange

The genius of this book is that it tells the Japanese side of the story as well as the American – and the Japanese side is much more interesting. The Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor – arguably the biggest strategic blunder in the history of warfare – is told side by side with the planning and execution of the attack – arguably the greatest tactical success in the history of warfare. The politics, the backdoor diplomacy, and of course, the attack itself, are all marvelously told.

War & Remembrance
Herman Wouk

Another novel. Wouk tells the story of WWII through one family, the Henrys, who conveniently have family members located in every theater of the war, including the concentration camps. The highlight of the book is the account of Midway.

The Liberation Trilogy:
Volume I: An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa 1942-43,
Volume II: Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944
Rick Atkinson

It appears that Atkinson is the Second World War’s Bruce Catton. Catton was a journalist turned historian who wrote two brilliant trilogies of the Civil War. Atkinson is a journalist turned historian who is writing a trilogy about the U.S. military in the European theater of WWII. The first book, focused on the least known part of the war, was outstanding, and the second fulfilled the promise of the first. I can’t wait for the third, which will obviously go from D-Day to Berlin, and will presumably feature the word “night” or “evening” or “dusk” in the title…

Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany
Stephen Ambrose

I’m not a huge fan of Ambrose’s. I find his writing to be a bit melodramatic. But this is a terrific book, because it is based on terrific research. Ambrose has interviewed thousands of soldiers, and tells the story through their stories – amazing, extraordinary stories – and does so in the larger context of the war in Western Europe.


Post-War Period

Sorry, I’m not your guy for this. I’ve never read a book about JFK or Eisenhower’s presidency or the Korean War or the Vietnam War or the Cold War. Volume II of Taylor Branch’s biography of Martin Luther King sits on my bookshelf unread. (I can never quite bring myself to read multi-volume biographies. I like to wait for the condensed single-volume.) I’ve been told by many people that Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” is the greatest book about the wielding of political power ever written, but it remains on my “someday” list.

So I’m going to go ahead and recommend a book I haven’t read:

Great Expectations, The United States 1945-1974
James T. Patterson

Yet another volume in the Oxford History of the United States. I’ve read 3 volumes in this series, so I can vouch for the quality of the series. It did win the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 1997. And the critics loved it: The Wall Street Journal called it “a tour de force” and the Washington Post said "One can hardly imagine a better overview of American life during the Cold War, the struggle for civil rights, and the debacle of Vietnam.”

Hmm…maybe I should take my own advice and read this one…

Update (7/3/2013):  Since writing this, I've read several books on the post-war period, including Volume II of the MLK biography and Robert Dallek's biography on JFK.  You can find my comments on those books here.  I also read Robert Caro's latest installment in his LBJ masterpiece, The Passage of Power.  Still haven't delved into Vietnam (though I've read some excellent novels like Matterhorn, The Quiet American, and the wildly underrated novels of Charles McCarry).  But The Bright Shining Lie is on my list.

The Johnny Bingo Awards

It is time for the annual Johnny Bingo Awards, in which I honor the best books read by me this year. Eligible books could have been published at any time - all that matters is that I read it in 07.

Johnny Bingo is the first book I ever remember calling "my favorite book". I can't recall the details now, but I think it had a bank robbery, two kids, and a dog. Normally I just pick one winner, but this year I'm going to have some new categories...

Best History Book
A tough choice this year, as usual.

I learned the most from Mayflower, the National Book Award winner from Nathaniel Philbrick. It is about far more than the ship; it covers the founding of New England from the Pilgrim's start in England, their exile in Amsterdam, through King Philip's War 50 years after Plymouth Rock.

I finally read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman's masterfully written account about the causes and opening battles of WWI, and it lived up to its considerable advance billing.

But the award goes to The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. This is Volume 2 of Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, and it will be the definitive book on the European theater of operations in WWII for years to come. While we wait for Volume III, I encourage you to read the first two volumes.

Best Genre Fiction
I was introduced to Harlan Coben 's Bolitar novels this year, and they made me laugh. I read two of Daniel Silva's book on Gabriel Allon, the art restorer-assasin, and found them to be the most intelligent thrillers this side of Alan Furst.

But the nod goes to Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer. I've been a fan of Connelly's Harry Bosch novels for years, but I couldn't quite love them. I like my genre fiction leavened with wit, and Bosch's world was as dark as his namesake's paintings. The Lincoln Lawyer, featuring defense attorney Mickey Haller, had all of Connelly's brilliant plotting and dialogue, and certainly had its dark side. But it was also fun to read.

Biggest Disappointment
Like most longtime Cormac McCarthy fans, I didn't like The Road quite as much as his legions of new fans did. But it was still a powerful book, and not deserving of this dubious award.

The nod here goes to Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier's long-awaited follow-up to Cold Mountain. I'd tell you what it was about, but I've forgotten already...

(One who didn't disappoint, by the way, was JK Rowling, who blew me away with the final installment of the Potter series.)

Best Literary Fiction
As I look over my book log for the year, I can see I've been a bit of a lazy reader. Lots of history, yes, but far more genre fiction than literary fiction. Still, I think Martin Amis' brilliant House of Meetings would have taken the title, even if I'd read nothing but lit fiction.

Lifetime Achievement Award
It was a sad day indeed when I read the final page of Blue at the Mizzen, the 20th and final book in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. This extraordinary series of books follows Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin around the world's oceans and continents throughout the grand sweep of the Napoleanic wars. Collectively, it may be the greatest "book" I've ever read. I envy those who have yet to read it.

Congratulations to all the winners. I'm sure you'll treasure this moment.

Previous winners
2001: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama
2002: The Lord of the Rings (all 3 books), J.R.R. Tolkien
2003: The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis
2004: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
2005: The Iliad, Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
2006: The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien