Engaging. Good account of the Battle of Antietam.
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I get that way at times but just push through it. Generally, I read half a dozen books at a time, from light to heavy. When I'm not so much into it I read the light ones. That right now is Davies's Europe. The heavy is Gauchet's Disenchantment--heavy because of French rhetorical style. Midway is Bell's Marxian Socialism in the United States.
It is. Nearly 1400 pages in toto! But easy reading.
Just ordered Fritz Kern's 1914 Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages. Mentioned in Nisbet's Quest and Hoppe's From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy: A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay as the definite work on that time period.
There was a French Medievalist whose work I want to read. His name was Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (died 1889). What the 19th Century Medievalists did was use a wealth of primary source material to demolish the distorted perspective on the Middle Ages inherited from the Enlightenment. Sadly, the popular imagination remains steeped in that distorted perspective.
Regine Pernaud was also a great Medievalist. She only died relatively recently. I have two of her books.
Andersonville ... John McElroy.
He was in the first group of prisoners placed there. He doesn't have the greatest writing style but he was a witness. I've learned a few things I didn't know.
Recently finished: a collection of short pieces by sci-fi/fantasy master Michael Moorc*ck called 'Tales From the Texas Woods'.
Now reading: 'Bottom of the 33rd' by Dan Barry, an account of the longest game ever played in organized baseball - a 33-inning marathon between the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox that was finally suspended in the wee hours of Easter Sunday, 1981. More than just a dry recounting of the game itself, this is a fascinating study of the individuals involved - from the bat boy who refused to go home with his mother till the game was over, to the umpire whose family spent the night and early morning calling police stations and hospitals in search of their missing relative, to the rookies and veterans on both teams, freezing, exhausted and hungry but determined to follow the rules and traditions of The Game and play on; some who would never attain the Major Leagues and a few who someday would - like Boston's Wade Boggs, and a 20-year-old Third Baseman named Cal Ripken, Jr.