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Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 6:59 pm
by The Creeping Spleen
"The Missing File" by D.A. Mishani. A missing persons/detective novel set in Tel Aviv.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Sat Aug 04, 2018 10:43 am
by ninatoo
'Treblinka' by Jean-Francois Steiner. I'm reading it because many years ago my father loaned me this book but I was too young to fully understand what it was all about. I have often thought that I should read it again, and so I found it on the net.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Sat Aug 04, 2018 11:34 am
by The Creeping Spleen
"The End Game" by Raymond Khoury.

Fifth novel in the "Sean Reilly and Tess Chaykin" series of Knights Templar conspiracy thrillers.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Sat Aug 04, 2018 4:56 pm
by Guacho
The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens, a history of the North American Indian wars. Balanced account of a genocide :cry:

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Tue Aug 28, 2018 11:09 am
by Strelets_410
Right now, everything I read are articles like this because I've been asked to study the real estate market in the UK... But as you can see, I'm reaching peak levels of productivity by posting here.
I swear I'm doing it for work ::):

Apart from that, I've recently read a French magazine about tanks that was laying around in my house. So much for work today.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Fri Aug 31, 2018 7:14 pm
by northmaven
Albert Goldman's biography of Elvis. I've dipped into his more scurrilous ones on Marilyn and Lennon, leafing through for the goss, but this is in a different league. He kicks off with Fat Elvis in Graceland preparing to heave his bulk off the bed to do a Vegas gig, and riffs at length on the analogy of the king and his court. Then it's back to Tupelo for his birth. He takes pains to discern how the history diverges from The Myth, and manages to communicate the strangeness of Elvis, what a weirdo he looked like to his teen peers, dressed as he was like a pimp or Italian lover. It's got that gonzo journalist vibe too, where he includes himself in the story, in his attempts to dig past the official story of Col Tom Parker etc. Much better written than I was expecting.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2018 7:49 pm
by The Creeping Spleen
"The Burial Hour" by Jeffrey Deaver.

Thirteenth novel in the Lincoln Rhyme series.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 11:25 am
by RDR
Goodbye to All That: Robert Graves
Reading it again, just because I've just read a biography of W.H.R Rivers by Richard Slobodin and he's mentioned in that.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 10:35 pm
by Vinegar Tom
One of the best of those officer class first world war memoirs, but I think it is pipped by Edmund Blunden's Undertones of war. Both great reads though.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:06 pm
by RDR
Vinegar Tom wrote:One of the best of those officer class first world war memoirs, but I think it is pipped by Edmund Blunden's Undertones of war. Both great reads though.


I've not read Blunden's book, though I have heard of it, must try and get a hold of a copy.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Thu Oct 04, 2018 7:09 pm
by viceroy
RDR wrote:
Vinegar Tom wrote:One of the best of those officer class first world war memoirs, but I think it is pipped by Edmund Blunden's Undertones of war. Both great reads though.


I've not read Blunden's book, though I have heard of it, must try and get a hold of a copy.


I have read both books and they are excellent. Of course both writers were well educated and middle class and served as officers. Not that I would want to disparage them in any way for this, but as a counterpoint from the Other Ranks I can recommend: With A Machine Gun To Cambrai by a man called George Coppard. He lied about his age and enlisted as a private in 1914, serving in the Machine Gun Corps all through the war, eventually becoming an NCO. I read this book years ago and it is almost certainly out of print, although you could probably find a secondhand paperback copy on Amazon if you were interested. More recently I read Storm Of Steel by Ernst Junger, a no holds barred account of life in the trenches on the German side. This is actually a very famous book, but also a controversial one as he comes pretty close to glorifying the whole business.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Fri Oct 05, 2018 1:40 pm
by RDR
viceroy wrote:
RDR wrote:
Vinegar Tom wrote:One of the best of those officer class first world war memoirs, but I think it is pipped by Edmund Blunden's Undertones of war. Both great reads though.


I've not read Blunden's book, though I have heard of it, must try and get a hold of a copy.


I have read both books and they are excellent. Of course both writers were well educated and middle class and served as officers. Not that I would want to disparage them in any way for this, but as a counterpoint from the Other Ranks I can recommend: With A Machine Gun To Cambrai by a man called George Coppard. He lied about his age and enlisted as a private in 1914, serving in the Machine Gun Corps all through the war, eventually becoming an NCO. I read this book years ago and it is almost certainly out of print, although you could probably find a secondhand paperback copy on Amazon if you were interested. More recently I read Storm Of Steel by Ernst Junger, a no holds barred account of life in the trenches on the German side. This is actually a very famous book, but also a controversial one as he comes pretty close to glorifying the whole business.


I've read the Junger book and didn't particularly enjoy it.
Will look up the Coppard book as it sounds interesting. Thanks very much for suggesting it.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Sun Oct 07, 2018 7:43 pm
by The Creeping Spleen
"The Foundling" by Paul Joseph Fronczak and Alex Tresniowski.

Subtitled "The True Story of a Kidnapping, a Family Secret, and My Search for the Real Me".

In 1964, a woman pretending to be a nurse kidnapped an infant boy named Paul Fronczak from a Chicago hospital.

Two years later, police found a boy abandoned outside a variety store in New Jersey. The FBI tracked down Dora Fronczak, the kidnapped infant’s mother, and she identified the abandoned boy as her son. The family spent the next fifty years believing they were whole again—but Paul was always unsure about his true identity.

Then, in 2012—spurred on by the birth of his first child, Emma Faith—Paul took a DNA test. The test revealed that he was definitely not Paul Fronczak. From that moment on, Paul has been on a tireless mission to find the man whose life he’s been living—and to discover who abandoned him, and why.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2018 10:16 am
by RDR
The Chief: Douglas Haig and The British Army - Gary Sheffield.

The authors attempt to rehabilitate Haig's reputation in his conduct of WW1.

Re: What Are You Currently Reading

PostPosted: Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:17 pm
by banjo
utopia for realists and how we can get there....rutger bregman.