The summer fly by, and my to be read pile has shifted. I’ve got through all of my Summer 2019 To Be Read Pile and have only one book left from the TBR Pile Update in June. So, it’stime for another look at my to be read pile. This fall tilts heavily toward history with an Urban Fantasy to start off the season.
Just Finished
Fallen
Book 10 of the Alex Verus series publishes at the end of this month! Benedict Jacka writes one of my favorite Urban Fantasy series, and this book takes the series to a new level. This is a novel of big changes for Verus and friends. I’m working on my review, and this might be my favorite book in the series yet. Fallen publishes September 24th from Ace.
For Mage Alex Verus, everything is on the line in the tenth urban fantasy novel from the national bestselling author of Marked.
Once Alex Verus was a diviner trying to live quietly under the radar. Now he’s a member of the Light Council who’s found success, friends…and love. But it’s come with a price—the Council is investigating him, and if they find out the truth, he’ll lose everything.
Meanwhile, Alex’s old master, Richard Drakh, is waging a war against the Council, and he’s preparing a move that will bring Alex and the life mage, Anne, under his control. Caught between Richard and the Council, Alex’s time is running out. To protect those he cares for, Alex will have to become something different. Something darker…
Currently Reading
Sailing True North
by Admiral James Stavridis, USN retired
I didn’t know who James Stavridis was before I saw this book; while researching him, I read one of his Time essays. Its style is one that I identify as military writing: smart, respecting and respectful of the ideals the uniform stands for, and always in service to the nation. Because of that essay, I found myself wanting a historical account of the people who lead navies with insights from a man who’s been in their position. Luckily, this book was there waiting for me. Sailing True North will be published on October 15th, 2019 from Penguin Press.
From one of the most distinguished admirals of our time and a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, a meditation on leadership and character refracted through the lives of ten of the most illustrious naval commanders in history
In his acclaimed book Sea Power, James Stavridis reckoned with the history and geopolitics of the world’s great bodies of water. Now in Sailing True North, he offers a much more intimate, human accounting: the lessons of leadership and character contained in the lives and careers of history’s most significant naval commanders. Admiral Stavridis brings a lifetime of reflection to bear on the subjects of his study–on naval history, on the vocation of the admiral with its special tests and challenges, and on the sweep of global geopolitics. Above all, this is a book that will help you navigate your own life’s voyage: the voyage of leadership of course, but more important, the voyage of character. Sadly, evil men can be effective leaders sailing toward bad ends; ultimately, leadership without character is like a ship underway without a rudder. Sailing True North helps us find the right course to chart.
Simply as epic lives, the tales of these ten admirals offer up a collection of the greatest imaginable sea stories. Moreover, spanning 2,500 years from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century, Sailing True North is a book that offers a history of the world through the prism of our greatest naval leaders. None of the admirals in this volume were perfect, and some were deeply flawed. But from Themistocles, Drake, and Nelson to Nimitz, Rickover, and Hopper, important themes emerge, not least that there is an art to knowing when to listen to your shipmates and when to turn a blind eye; that serving your reputation is a poor substitute for serving your character; and that taking time to read and reflect is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
By putting us on personal terms with historic leaders in the maritime sphere he knows so well, James Stavridis has in Sailing True North offered a compass that can help us navigate the story of our own lives, wherever that voyage takes us.
To Be Read
The American Story
David Rubenstein hosts The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations and has established himself as an excellent interviewer. In The American Story, Mr. Rubenstein engages with prominent historians about the subjects they’ve dedicated their lives to. This book features a number of historians that I admire, and it piqued my curiosity. In these turbulent times, when my country seems so lost, history serves as a grounding point that we will survive the current turmoil. When I saw the list of historians, I knew this book was for me. The American Story publishes on October 29th from Simon and Schuster.
Co-founder of The Carlyle Group and patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein takes readers on a sweeping journey across the grand arc of the American story through revealing conversations with our greatest historians.
In these lively dialogues, the biggest names in American history explore the subjects they’ve come to so intimately know and understand.
— David McCullough on John Adams
— Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson
— Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton
— Walter Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin
— Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln
— A. Scott Berg on Charles Lindbergh
— Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King
— Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson
— Bob Woodward on Richard Nixon
—And many others, including a special conversation with Chief Justice John Roberts
Through his popular program The David Rubenstein Show, David Rubenstein has established himself as one of our most thoughtful interviewers. Now, in The American Story, David captures the brilliance of our most esteemed historians, as well as the souls of their subjects. The book features introductions by Rubenstein as well a foreword by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to lead our national library. Richly illustrated with archival images from the Library of Congress, the book is destined to become a classic for serious readers of American history.
Through these captivating exchanges, these bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning authors offer fresh insight on pivotal moments from the Founding Era to the late 20th century.
Checkpoint Charlie
When perusing upcoming releases, I happened across Checkpoint Charlie. It fits in with my current Cold War/European history obsession. Is there a more iconic European site for the Cold War than Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous of the Berlin Wall’s crossing points. The history of this unique border point is an integral part of the history of the Cold War from the perspective of the everyday German who lost their freedom of movement under Soviet occupation. Checkpoint Charlie is available on November 5th from Simon and Schuster.
A powerful, fascinating, and groundbreaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States confronted the USSR during the Cold War.
East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next twenty-eight years, at least five thousand people attempted to smash through it, swim across it, tunnel under it, or fly over it.
In November 1989, the East German leadership buckled in the face of a civil revolt that culminated in half a million East Berliners demanding an end to the ban on free movement. The world’s media flocked to capture the moment which, perhaps more than any other, signaled the end of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie had been the epicenter of global conflict for nearly three decades.
As the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall approaches in 2019, Iain MacGregor captures the essence of the mistrust, oppression, paranoia, and fear that gripped the world throughout this period. Checkpoint Charlie is about the nerve-wracking confrontation between the West and USSR, highlighting such important global figures as Eisenhower, Stalin, JFK, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedung, Nixon, Reagan, and other politicians of the period. He also includes never-before-heard interviews with the men who built and dismantled the Wall; children who crossed it; relatives and friends who lost loved ones trying to escape over it; military policemen and soldiers who guarded the checkpoints; CIA, MI6, and Stasi operatives who oversaw operations across its borders; politicians whose ambitions shaped it; journalists who recorded its story; and many more whose living memories contributed to the full story of Checkpoint Charlie.
Retreat from Moscow
by David_Stahel
Retreat from Moscow is another book to scratch my European history itch; though, this book takes place earlier than my Cold War obsession. David Stahel takes an in-depth look at the German winter campaign of 1941-1942. In the little education I have about the Eastern Front of World War II, I learned that Russia drove the Germans back out of Russia, that the Germans were defeated. Mr. Stahel argues the opposite in Retreat from Moscow. While I remain skeptical, I’m interested in Mr. Stahel’s arguments and how he backs them up. Retreat from Moscow publishes on November 19th from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
A gripping and authoritative revisionist account of the German Winter Campaign of 1941–1942
Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 has commonly been seen as its “first defeat.” In Retreat from Moscow, a bold and gripping account of one of the most seminal moments of the Second World War, David Stahel argues that, in fact, it was its first strategic success in the east. Far from a self-evident triumph, the Soviet counteroffensive was a Pyrrhic victory. Though the Red Army managed to push the Wehrmacht back from Moscow, the Germans lost far fewer men (1:6), frustrated their enemy’s strategic plan, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.
Hitler’s new strategic plan called for holding important Russian industrial cities, which the German army would do. And the Soviet plan as of January 1942 aimed for nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Centre, but in fact, not a single German army, corps, or division was ever successfully destroyed. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army mounted an offensive that attempted to break German lines in countless head-on assaults, which led to far more tactical defeats than victories.
Through journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us into the Wolf’s Lair and reveals a German command at war with itself, as generals on the ground battle to maintain order and save their troops while Hitler’s capricious directives become all the more irrational. And through soldiers’ diaries and letters home, he paints a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer fight against frostbite as much as they do Soviet artillery. Continuing his path breaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel’s Retreat from Moscow is military history of the highest order.