15 War Books for Inspiration

Sunday, October 23, 2011

1. Doughboy War: the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, James A. Hallas ed. : This book is a set of excerpts from numerous and moving first-hand accounts. There are some descriptions of combat and its aftermath that leave one wondering how much a human can take and still function. The prevailing mood of the stories is somewhat dark/pitiful but something like this should be done for every war that America participated in as a memorial to that generation's unique brand of sacrifice.

Even though the United States did not enter the war until April 1917 and didn't engage in battle until the fall of that year, war's end saw over 80,000 killed in action. The poignancy of having friends buried in shallow graves on the battle fields, or seeing them mangled or "blown to atoms" by shellfire is recounted. As if the horrors of the warfare were not enough, the influenza epidemic killed thousands in 1918. The doughboy's war is vividly portrayed by these carefully edited anecdotes and should serve as a reminder of all those men who went to France "to make the world safe for democracy."

2. The First World War by John Keegan: This book illuminates the war to end all wars and captures the sweep of the first global conflict. Keegan details the primary causes and the primary instigators of the conflict. You really come to understand how about 15 individuals and a lot of national pride led to the deaths of millions. While not a truly "modern" war, many of the instruments of death were well hoaned (e.g. the rifle, the machine gun and artillery). This book describes the horror of trench warfare, details the attacks and defenses, the general's attempts to break the stalemate, the mathematics of attrition, the political motivations, and most importantly, the effect on nations that established the groundwork for the second world war.

3. Articles of War: A Collection of Poetry about World War II, Leon Stokesbury ed.: Soldiers, local civilians, and victims write about their struggles and fears, as all hope for the future seems lost. War-time experiences shake the poets to the very core of their beings, and the brutal realities of war and battles--both at home and far afield--change the writers forever. "Articles of War" features works by writers who saw the war and those who heard the stories from loved ones. With writers like Auden, Cummings, Jarrell, Hugo, and Shapiro, this book features 120 poems.

4. Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose: Band of Brothers tells us everything about a group of men and how they fought. We get to laugh with them, we get to see the horrors that they have seen. We also get to see the incompetence that sometimes becomes prevalent in wartime. Ambrose doesn't pull any punches, and neither do the men of Easy to whom he spoke. They are very outspoken about the people they didn't like. Not just people, but also nationalities. One thing to keep in mind when reading this book is that the only impression of nationalities that these men had were when they were going through territory, wondering whether or not they would be running into enemy fire at any time.

5. Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose: If you are a student of military history at all, or for that matter just interested in World War II, this book is an outstanding addition to your library. Ambrose is a master of oral history presentation and has a demonstrably keen grasp of the larger issues of WWII and, more importantly, of the ultimately quite human aspects of modern warfare.


To read the stories of men, from all walks of life, all parts of the country was riveting. These men, bring back a time when they were young and brave and scared. Their innermost fears revealed. Anyone who cherishes freedom and liberty should read this book, for the men who fought so long ago, will not be with us much longer to share their stories

6. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailler

7. Poets of World War II, Harvey Shapiro ed.

8. The World War II Memorial, Douglas Brinkley ed.

9. The Coldest War by James Brady

10. No Bugles, No Drums by Rudy Tomedi

11. A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam by James R. Ebert

12. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

13. We Were Soldiers Once…And Young by Harold G. Moore

14. Road to Baghdad by Martin Stanton

15. Jarhead by Anthony Swofford

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8 Books to curl up with on a Winter Night

Saturday, October 22, 2011

There are few things more enjoyable than curling up on a cold winter night with a good book. Here are Eight titles to get you through the cold winter nights.

1. Still Life by Louise Penny - Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec solves a crime of passion in a quiet village with his keen powers of observation. Louise Penny has written a wonderful "cozy murder mystery." The mystery is intriguing and well laid out. It is the characters, though, that you will fall in love with. They make the story! In this book that is the first in a series, Penny does a great job "hooking" the reader so that you want to read more about Three Pines.

Not an over the top slasher gory zombie-geddan affair. No vampires, werewolves or other monster of the moment.  Rather this is a a smart witty likable who-done-it. This is a perfect book to plop down on the couch with a cup of tea, under a light blanket, while the dog snoozes by the fireplace.

2. Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason - a popular author from Iceland pens an unusual whodunit featuring Inspector Erlendur Sveinnson, a veteran detective with the Reykjavik police.

Jar City follows a not-always-linear storyline that starts with a murder in a poor neighborhood of Reykjavik and moves backward and forward to bring in rape, genetics, and murder. The principal investigator, detective inspector Erlendur (almost always referred to by his given name), doggedly pursues the case as a good crime novel detective should. What makes this novel stand out is it's exotic (to American readers) setting in Iceland. In a manner that is both fortunate and unfortunate, Indridason makes the city fairly mundane. This is fortunate because he's writing first for a domestic audience, but also because it allows the general reader to move the city somewhat into the background.

The writing is awesome!! Beautiful use of the English language. Interesting plot and characters; no handsome guys with curvy gorgeous women; no manufactured sex to hook the reader. Just a fantastic story of people it's easy to relate to.

3. Mad Mouse by Chris Grabenstein - second in the series featuring the likeable New Jersey policeman and Army Veteran John Ceepak who lives by the code "I will not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do.”

If you like a good, quick paced, murder mystery peppered with humor, "Mad Mouse" is the mystery for you. Set in a normally quiet seaside town on the Jersey Shore, policemen Ceepak and Boyle track a sniper taking pot shots at people right before the big Labor Day weekend. Grabenstein uses descriptions sparingly, giving just enough backstory to allow the reader the opportunity of filling in some character details and ambience on their own... much the way horror writer Stephen King provides just enough detail for you to scare yourself silly. Even with two murders in one summer, I want to live in Sea Haven. Great story line and surprise ending.

4. Too Darn Hot by Sandra Scoppettone—1943 Manhattan is recreated in full color from the food they ate, and the clothes they wore, to the way they spoke in this fast-paced mystery starring toughtalking, loveable private eye Faye Quick.

The audience will feel as if they are transported back to 1943 NYC due to the realistic tidbits that are cleverly woven into the fine historical mystery to include idioms and slang, and references and items (artifacts?) from the WWII era. The protagonist is a tough independent Jersey girl crossing the Hudson to prove she is also a quick thinker as she connects the dots to try and does solve cases. TOO DARN HOT is a gripping private detective tale with a pulp fiction feel to its 1940s ambience. 

5. The Hard Way by Carol Lea Benjamin —this time private investigator Rachel Alexander goes undercover as a homeless woman along with her pit bull Dashiell in hopes of finding a ruthless killer. This is a soft mystery book, not a lot of action, but the pace does move along from clue to clue. The books are just long enough to while away a Sunday night with a cup of cocoa. Any avid mystery reader can pick out the ending way before the last chapter; it just takes Rachel a little longer. There are moral issues involved and lots of commentary on the way of the world, so maybe this is Benjamin's soapbox.  

6. The Old Wine Shades by Martha Grimes— Scotland Yard detective Richard Jury hears a compelling story from a stranger in a pub and sets out to solve the mystery. The book opens with a rather fantastic tale. Does one believe it or not? Then a woman is found murdered. Is the tale told to cover up the murder? Or, is the murder part of the tale? Parts of the tale are true. Parts are not. When we think we're finally certain of what happened & who is the criminal & we think he's finally been caught red-handed, he isn't.
It's an inconclusive, unsatisfying ending.

It's a tricky story - not one you'll see in any other mystery novel. It's well worth the price of a good glass of Cabernet - maybe a glass from The Old Wine Shades! 

7. The Highly Effective Detective by Richard Yancey— Meet Theodore “Teddy” Ruzak, the most unlikely private investigator in Tennessee as he somehow manages to solve his first case! The protagonist is a security guard who always dreamed of becoming a private eye. An inheritance makes it possible for him to go into business as one ... except that he has not the slightest idea of how to run a business or how to detect anything. He manages to get a client ... a guy who wants him to find the person who heartlessly ran over some goslings ... and that leads Teddy into some real detective work involving a murder. He manages to solve the case in spite of himself, with a lot of bumbling along the way. Teddy, who is remarkably knowledgeable about a wide range of subjects, is given to long, rambling digressions that make for very funny and often insightful paragraphs. Teddy's free-association style of thinking is, truth be told, probably pretty close to the way we actually process and synthesize information.

8. Out Cold by William G. Tapply— the trail leads to New Hampshire for Boston attorney Brady Coyne when he finds the body of a pregnant teenager in the snow-covered yard of his Beacon Hill home.  Attorney Brady Coyne's virtual spouse, Evie, is out of town so Brady and dog, Henry, are on their own. It's a snowy day when Henry brings Brady's attention to a person buried under the snow in their backyard. The young woman, discovered to have miscarried, dies and no one can identify her. Brady feels responsible and is determined to find out who she is and what happened. Others die and someone wants Brady to be one of the dead.

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The Things They Carried book review

Friday, September 12, 2008

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a powerful combination of fact and fiction linked to leave the reader with a lasting impression of fear, love, and gratitude for the novel’s components. Through description and haze, O’Brien leaves his reader feeling burdened with the hardships of the soldiers yet doubtful of their existence.

O’Brien opens the novel by introducing the men not through personality, but through “the things they carried.” Tangible objects are listed - such as Kiowa’s Bible - while intangible objects are described through story - such as the encumbering romance of Lieutenant Cross. When describing the tangibles, O’Brien incorporates weight and number to force the pressures of the soldiers onto the reader, for example: “every third or fourth person carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine – 3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades – 14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade – 24 ounces.” (Page 7). In combination, O’Brien uses repetition throughout the book to remind the reader of what’s happening, as if he’s talking to a child, trying to show them the severity of what they can’t bring themselves to understand. In the first chapter alone, “carried” is easily repeated more than 50 times. As O’Brien took the reader through the various deaths of his companions, he constantly repeated descriptions, such as on page 129, when he tells us of “the man he killed”: “now one eye was a star.” Prior to this, O’Brien had described the shape of the dead man’s eye five times – and that was only within the first four pages of the chapter. Through his weighted-down descriptions, O’Brien pulls the reader into the story, shaking her shoulders and repeating, repeating, repeating, amplifying, amplifying, amplifying until finally he thinks she may have an idea of what he’s trying to relay to her.

As O’Brien moves through the war, telling various stories of love, death and friendships combining to a narrative, he incorporates interruptions of himself talking to us – like the reader is watching a movie and he keeps pressing pause to explain a scene that we might not have fully grasped. However, instead of making his story clearer to us through his style, O’Brien makes it a confusing blend of fact and fiction. While we’re watching O’Brien at the battlefield, the story is told through soldier Tim, where every pain is real beyond reality. Alternately, O’Brien tells the story as his present self, author Tim O’Brien, merely telling us a story, not an experience. He questions the definition of a “true war story,” and truth and reason in any story. For example, on page 230, author Tim makes the reader doubt the validity of his war story by telling us that stories are merely dreams: “the thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.” After statements like this one, the reader dives back into soldier Tim’s story as if looking down onto it through a thin straw – anything we don’t see could be true, for according to author Tim, soldier Tim’s story is only being dreamed, so therefore, everything outside the straw we see him through could very well be true…or could it be? Author Tim in turn leaves the reader in question regarding soldier Tim’s story, wondering if what’s being told is at all true or all a hazy, dreamed explanation of author Tim’s past.

To counterbalance the doubt of fact, O’Brien incorporates truth to nourish the doubt of fiction, feeding wood to the reader’s ever burning fire of uncertainty. On page 41, for example, O’Brien writes with confident statements within an account of soldier Tim, causing the reader to accept them – and possibly the entire story of soldier Tim - as fact: “You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”

In the chapter of the book entitled Notes, instead of stepping outside of soldier Tim’s world to tell us that the last 50 pages we read were in fact not necessarily real, O’Brien incorporated biographical information of his outside life, which research reveals as true. By breaking away from his past life story as a soldier to his present and true life story of an author, the reader is once again swayed to accepting the war story as non-fiction, despite the fiction label on the book’s cover.

 Another of O’Brien’s works, Going after Cacciato, incorporates the same element of doubt as The Things They Carried. Another war novel, this time the story of a young soldier and his encounters of horror and hallucination in the strangest of wars, Going after Cacciato is another blend of reality and fantasy. Could that be all this book is, purely O’Brien’s fantasy of what his encounter with the war had really been? As he told the reader before leaving us alone with our uncertainty: “…when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” – and that, ultimately, is what this novel is. It isn’t a biography, or a factual war account, it’s a story – still, a powerful and thought provoking work. Nonetheless, though O’Brien can play with the reader’s mind throughout the book, twisting it into confusion and haze, he can’t erase the fine print on the back cover of the book: “TIM O’BRIEN received the 1979 National Award in Fiction.” And so, despite O’Brien’s efforts to convince and confuse us, in the end, the reader is left with the fact that The Things They Carried was 246 pages of inspiring, capturing, powerful, beautiful, extremely believable fiction.

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When You Are Engulfed in Flames Book Review

Friday, June 6, 2008

Is anyone in your house pooping on your towels? Do you have a sudden hankering to spend time at a nudist colony? Have you ever felt like you betrayed your apartment because you moved to a new one?

These are just a few of the experiences New York Times best-selling author and NPR commentator David Sedaris shares with you in his series of personal essay collections, the latest one, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. In this assortment of witty, often painfully revealing essays, Sedaris describes his journey to give up smoking, a loved habit he’s had for most of his life. His adventure takes him to Tokyo, where he discovers hard truths about himself, his country, and his grammar.

It is not just the entertaining quality of his stories that grab his audience. It’s

that somewhere in all of us, he touches a cord. It may be the fly in the corner of your window that you name and talk to first thing in the morning. Are you a man that shops in the the women’s department for pants that fit only to realize the problem when you are at the urinal with pants that zip up the back? Perhaps your lover has better childhood stories than you do, so you claim them as your own at parties. Whatever the secret story is in your life, Sedaris will trump it - and you will feel certain that his story is much more embarrassing than your own.

All of Sedaris’s books are offered on audiobooks at your local bookstore or library, and because Sedaris reads them himself in his deadpan delivery and subtle timing, it’s well-worth it to listen to them in addition to reading them. While enjoying his books in order is not necessary, it does add to the reading enjoyment as the Sedaris family begins to feel like your own crazy set of relatives.

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The Art of Follow Up book review

Sunday, January 6, 2008

The Art of Follow Up by Jaime Lee Mann offers many helpful techniques Virtual Assistants can use when contacting potential clients, no matter which method (e-mail, snail mail, phone) is most comfortable to you.

If you choose to contact clients via e-mail, the author offers several templates that you can customize for you own use. Is a previously gung-ho client now unresponsive to your correspondence? Having experienced this situation herself, the author has a few suggestions on how to approach these prospects tactfully and professionally. The issue of SPAM, and how to avoid it, is covered briefly as well.

If snail mail is your cup of tea, you'll find plenty of great tips in this e-Book. The author talks about essential content that must make its way into your sales letters, including the best closing statements to elicit a response from prospects. She also shares a few sample letters, including one that can be used for initial contact and another that can be used to follow up with those you've contacted previously.

Prefer to chat with potential clients via phone but aren't quite sure what to say? You can use one of the prepared phone scripts in this e-Book verbatim or as a starting point to give you ideas for your own script. The various scripts include possible responses to client questions and show you how to land a consultation to increase your chances of signing that client. The author also tells you what to say when prospects tell you that they aren't interested in your services or that your hourly rate is too high.

The price of this e-Book is a little steep, in my opinion, but if you need some help getting new clients for your business, this is a great resource worth checking out.

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