Book Recommendations

[Clyde from Carolina]

Just finished Last Chapter by Ernie Pyle. A lady at work lent me a copy that had belonged to her father, who was on B-25s in the Pacific in WWII. I really enjoyed reading it but it was a bittersweet experience knowing how it ends...

For those who don't know about Pyle, he was a Pulitzer-Prize winning war correspondent who covered the war in Europe from 1942-44. He was noted for his "everyman" approach to covering the war that concentrated on the lowly GIs and their dirty war, rather than the high-level political and grand strategy side of war. He was immensely popular with the GIs and their families back home who read his columns. He always tried to mention the GIs that he talked to by name in his columns, and where they were from back home.

Last Chapter covers his brief, final sojurn in the war. He lived on a light carrier as it raided Japan, (unnamed for security reasons except by her nickname, "The Iron Lady" --which we now know was the USS Cabot).

He'd gone to the Pacific after things had started winding down in Europe. After the fast carrier's raid, he landed with the 1st Marine Division at Okinawa on April 1, 1945. He chronicled his time with the cocky-but-nice Marines and deemed them just as good company to share a dugout and a smoke with as his beloved GIs in Europe. His last lines were about the fighting on Okinawa and how the easy time the Marines were having on the northern half of the island was atypical for the Marines and NOT what they were used to encountering on "blitzes" in the Pacific.

He went to the little island of Ie Shima where the Army 77th Division was fighting, to cover that action, and was killed by a single bullet through the temple from a Japanese machine gunner on April 18, 1945.

[Tooln]

Guess I'll offer up a few too.
R. A. Heinlein, just about anything he's written. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Friday are favorites of mine. Coventry was one of his shorts, and a damn good one at that.

Spider Robinson. Any and all of the Callahan's Series. And most notably Variable Star. It was a Heinlein novel left unfinished at the time of his death, Spider finished it in grand style.
Spider is in a class of his own.

Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy. Its long and sometimes seem to drag along but a good read none the less

W. T. Grant, Wings of the Eagle
Larry Chambers, RECONDO

Edit: Seems I've been a forgetful fool today.
Orson Scott Card's, Enders Game.

[HCM]

In the series finale of Justified, Rayland tosses Tim a worn paperback copy of George V. HIggins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle . Set in the 70's, its an old school page turner.

The 1970s movie version with Robert Mitchum is pretty awesome as well.

[Drang]

To my utter astonishment, some of Sven Hassel's books are available in Kindle format.

(And I thought the effect on my "Recommendations" of accidentally clicking that link to the "Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu" page was going to be bad!)

Sure, the same highjinks ensue in multiple books on multiple fronts (Tiny seemed to run downhill to get away from the tire of the exploded truck multiple times), but one of them -- The Commissar? -- was also the source of one of my all time favorite quotes:

It is at times like these that one regrets having taken that Unexploded Ordnance course...

(Alas, Willi Heinrich's Cross of Iron is NOT available for ebook...)

[Odin Bravo One]

I have it from a reliable source that many of the events in this work did not happen the way it is told/represented, essentially classifying it as "fact based fiction" to a degree. Lots of taking credit for other people's work.

Bummer, seemed like a stand up guy when he was editor of kitup and now sofrep.

It is a bummer. Sorry to be the bearer of the news.

http://hamptonroads.com/2015/05/form...r-fire-critics

[MRW]

They're not in Kindle but I would recommend anything by James Crumley. "Last Good Kiss", "The Wrong Case", and "Dancing Bear" are standouts. Really influential private-eye crime fiction.

Fro non-fiction, I would recommend "Public Enemies" by Bryan Burrough. It's a good history of the robbery crime wave of the 1930's, law enforcement's response, and the rise if the FBI with all the stumbling that came with it.

I also recommend "To Hell on a Fast Horse" by Mark Lee Gardner. It advertises itself as an untold history of Pat Garret and Bill the Kid but most of the information can be found other places. It is a well written and fast paced dual biography of The Kid and Garrett. The book is a good intro to the history of the Lincoln County War it's aftermath.

[Kyle Reese]

Winning Paktika: The Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is a well done and compelling read. If you're a student of COIN, it's a must buy. A lot of what the author's experiences and opinions regarding the province and its people resonated with me, even though I was there 7 years later.

[Drang]

They're not in Kindle but I would recommend anything by James Crumley. ...

One To Count Cadence is a classic amongst SIGINT geeks.*
If anyone else cares.


*(He was ASA. He got around the fact that at the time you weren't even supposed to admit that ASA existed by inventing a COMSEC mission. Which did exist, sort of.)

[ACP230]

I have One To Count Cadence somewhere in my stack of paperbacks.
Hadn't thought of it in years but I liked it when I bought it.

Vandenberg by Oliver Lange was bought about the same time and is in the stack
too. Also a good read although pretty dated by now. (One of the best appearances in fiction
by an M2 Carbine is in Vandenberg.)

[Drang]

I have One To Count Cadence somewhere in my stack of paperbacks.
Hadn't thought of it in years but I liked it when I bought it.

Some don't care for it because they feel it's so full of '60s angst as to be unreadable. I didn't see it.

Having spent a third of my Army career in Korea, and all of it in units dedicated to "The Asian mission", I found Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles a fascinating look at the background. The movie was good, the novel (as usual) better.

Richard McKenna was a retired US Navy Chief Machinist Mate, and another author I've been hitting "I want to read this on Kindle" on Amazon.
His other works are out of print:
Left-Handed Monkey Wrench: Stories and Essays, which is mostly stories and essays based on his Naval career.
The Sons Of Martha and Other Stories is a bunch of essays which were to be the basis of a novel which McKenna was having little progress writing, at the time of his death. It was to be another novel of Naval life between the World Wars.
It turns out that there is a Kindle edition of his collection of science fiction, AmazonSmile: Casey Agonistes. One review (of two) says that some material is missing. Haven't read it in a long time, so I can't say.