What I have been reading lately #51

In December of 1944, the German army launched an offensive on the western front in a last-ditch effort to win the war. This offensive is commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge. At that time, Bill Davidson was a U.S. army soldier/journalist covering the war for Yank magazine. During the battle, he found himself trapped behind German lines with two Jewish German children to take care of. This book, written decades after the war was over, retells Davidson's efforts to get back through the lines to the Allied side and the various soldiers, resistance fighters, deserters, black marketeers, famous authors, and possible Nazi spies that he encountered along the way.

Left: Ernest Hemingway


Below: U.S. soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge

After the war, Davidson went on to write several biographies of Hollywood celebrities including Spencer Tracy, Sid Caesar, and Gary Coleman.  For more information, click here.

What I have been reading lately #43

Journey to Topaz - Yoshiko Uchida

Journey to Topaz is a novel about a Japanese-American girl named Yuki who is interned along with her family during World War II. I read this book out loud to my class of fifth graders.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

This was Arthur Conan Doyle's first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. Notice that the title does not have the word "the" in it.

I'm Not Scared - Niccolo Ammaniti

This novel is about a boy and his friends growing up in a remote part of Italy during the late 1970s. It is a thriller, and, despite the title, I found it to be very scary.

Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China - Guy Delisle

From the author of Pyongyang and Burma Chronicles, this book is about when Guy Delisle spent some time in China working for an animation studio. It is the last of Delisle's books like this.

The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle

This is probably my favorite of the Sherlock Holmes novels (as opposed to the story collections). Notice that it only has one "the" in the title.

What I have been watching lately #3

I just finished watching the movie Kelly's Heroes for the first time since I was a little kid. It features many of the most important twentieth-century American actors, including Telly Savalas, Stuart Margolin, Don Rickles, Gavin MacLeod, and Donald Sutherland. I do have the following questions, however:

• If they needed the combat engineers to build a bridge across the river, how did Kelly and his men get across the river before the engineers built the bridge?
• Why was the town completely deserted before and during the battle, but then afterwards all the people came out as if from nowhere?
• When the American soldier was ringing the church bell over and over again, why didn't any of the Germans go investigate?
• Has there ever been a movie that had so many tanks and other vehicles crashing through walls so many times?
• How did Kelly and his men get the stolen gold back to Allied lines, especially since they were driving in captured German vehicles?

Below-- the main soundtrack theme as performed by the Mike Curb Congregation.

Abandoned Books and/or Movies #3

Sometimes when you are reading a book, you realize that you want to stop. Sometimes that happens with movies, too. Here are some recent examples:

Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass. Famous German author admits that he voluntarily signed up for the Waffen-SS as a youth during World War II.

The Black Arrow by Robert Lewis Stevenson. Adventure story set in England during the War of the Roses. I read it once as a kid. I have tried (and failed) twice as an adult.

Rebels Without Borders by Marc Vachon. True story of a Canadian hoodlum who becomes a logistics expert for an international medical relief organization. Not as interesting as it might sound.

Becoming Manny: Inside the Life of Baseball's Most Enigmatic Slugger by Jean Rhodes and Shawn Boburg. Discussed elsewhere.

The Italian Job. Boring movie from 1969 that was remade into another boring movie in 2003. I actually have watched the 2003 version twice but could not quite make it through the 1969 one.

Escape from New York. Way back when, movie director John Carpenter needed to find a place that looked like Manhattan would look if they turned it into an island prison colony run by the prisoners and then the prisoners went wild. He chose downtown St. Louis, which is the only reason I would ever watch this movie. I fell asleep on the couch about halfway through.

Below- downtown St. Louis

The Sixth Man: A Season Inside the NBA Playground by Chris Palmer. Do you know those little, tiny square candy bars that are about two centimeters across? This book has the same relationship to a real basketball book that a little, tiny square candy bar has to a real, full-size candy bar. (The "season" in question is 2004-2005.)

What I have been reading lately #24

I have recently finished reading Robert Sullivan's excellent book, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City.  From reading this book, I learned about the many interesting items that can be found or previously could be found in this wilderness/wasteland just a few miles west of New York City.  The list includes (in no particular order):

• many of the AM radio transmitters for New York City radio stations;
• abandoned copper mines:
• abandoned clay pits previously used for digging up clay to make bricks;
• salt hay farms;
• failed land development schemes;
• the cities of Newark and Secaucus (to name only two);
• garbage dumps (both in use and no longer in use) containing such items as rubble from the London Blitz, leachate (the liquid that trash makes after it has sat for a while), and fires (both above and underground);
• toxic waste, including, but not limited to, mercury, chromium, naphthalene, methylene chloride, toluene, and ethylbenzene;
• hunters, fishers, and swimmers;
• sports facilities for professional sports teams;
• highways and railways;
• lunatic asylums;
• organized crime murder victims (including, possibly, Jimmy Hoffa - pictured below);
• hotels;
• factories;
• pig farms;
• chemical and oil refineries;
• piles of coal;
• hills made from garbage;
• the Kearny, NJ Library, which boasts of having the world's largest collection of foriegn-language translations of Gone With The Wind;
• soccer stars, including John Harkes, Tab Ramos, and Tony Meola;
• cedar forests;
• mosquitoes;
• buried pirate treasure; and
• the ruins of the original Penn Station from New York City.

Above, the Meadowlands; below, Jimmy Hoffa.

What I have been reading lately #16

I am currently reading Richard Overy and Andrew Wheatcroft's The Road to War: The Origins of World War II.  The book serves as an accompaniment to a BBC television series of the same name from the late 1980s.  Each chapter covers one of the major powers and explains how they came to take part in the war.

Of all the figures in the book, the one that I learned the most about was Neville Chamberlain.  The authors portray the British Prime Minister not as a mealy-mouthed appeaser desperate to avoid antagonizing Hitler, but as a pretty crafty leader who managed to manoeuvre Hitler into war at a time when the Germans did not consider themselves to be fully ready.

I also learned that at least one Japanese family celebrated their country's alliance with the German people by making a snowman of the German leader, Hitler.