Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell was an American scholar best known for his writing about World Wars I and II.  He was a veteran of the latter conflict as a 20 years infantry officer who served in Western Europe after D-Day. He was wounded, after which he received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.   After the …

Samuel Eliot Morison

I believe it was when I was in Junior High that friend of our family gave me a copy of Samuel Eliot Morison's book Admiral of the Ocean Sea:  a Life of  Christopher Columbus.   That was my introduction to the writings of Dr. Morison, who, unbeknownst to me when I was a teenage boy, was …

CALL 999!

It's no secret I like to read mysteries!  I used to work with someone who introduced me to that genre of fiction about forty years ago.  I am one of those readers who have three or four, or maybe more books going at a time.  I read non-fiction for the most part in my living room, …

Murder Mysteries Set on Trains

Before the advent of automobile and air travel, railroads were the way travel long distances.  As early as the mid-1860s, both coasts in the United States were joined by rail.  By the 1930s, railway travel brought cities closer together both in America and Europe and had a certain romance to it.  At the same time …

Sir John Keegan

British historian John Keegan and I were almost contemporaries.  Although he was four years older than me, both of us were boys living in a Britain troubled by war in the early 1940s; he in England, I in Scotland.  Keegan told interviewer Brian Lamb a few years ago he chose military history  to study because he …

CHURCHILL II, 1939-1965

When Winston Churchill became the First Lord of the Admiralty for the second time in 1939, he ended his decade exile from government.   Then Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister on May 10, 1940 and Winston Churchill assumed that office.   Soon afterwards he addressed the British people and later the House of Commons.  He …

Churchill I, 1874-1939

Fifty years ago last January, Great Britain lost one its greatest leaders.  Winston Spencer Churchill had been Prime Minister twice, once during World War II in the reign of George VI and then under George VI again, until king’s death in 1952 ;  then  under Queen  Elizabeth II, as she started her long reign.  In …

Gallipoli Campaign

The Gallipoli campaign was a side bar in 1915, the second year of the First World War .  Gallipoli is a peninsula in northwest Turkey on the west side of a waterway leading from the Black Sea past Istanbul (it was called Constantinople in 1915) to the Adriatic Sea.   Because Russia was fighting on the side the …

JCOC: The Jim Casada Outdoor Collection

Most of the adult book collection at the Marianna Black Library in Bryson City is housed in the main reading room, but if you step to the right, go through the opening framed by the flags into the room that houses the reference collection, you will find the Jim Casada Outdoor Collection (JCOC).   Casada …

LARSON’S BESTSELLERS

Erik  Larson is one my favorite non-fiction writers, probably because he has written on a variety of subjects.  Larson's books first appeared  in the early nineties, but the first to become a bestseller was Isaac's Storm: a Man,  a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999).  Larson followed that book with best sellers in 2003,  2006, …