Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is, “Books We Wish We’d Found Sooner”. I tend to think I find books when I’m meant to. I have mentioned on numerous occasions, for instance, that Death and Life of Great American Cities was a life-changing book for me. I was only a quarter of the way through it and knew I would never view politics the same way again. It would not have had that effect, though, if I’d read it 2-3 years earlier. Rather, other books had started shifting my thinking in unintended ways, and then when I read Death and Life it acted on those small alterations to create a paradigm shift. I doubt that’s always the case, but I think our reading lives are journeys, in a way, knit together — not just a random string of book titles.

And now. WWW Wednesday!

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews and The Thirty-First of March, a memoir of the LBJ administration.

1WHAT are you reading now? I’m trudging through Vendetta, about the RFK/Hoffa legal contest. I’m a couple of chapters into Crusade in Europe by Dwight Eisenhower, but that will be a peck-at-it-for-weeks project, I think. It’s an extremely detailed military history of World War 2 that has already proven interesting. Here’s a couple of quotes:

The million men who had come into the Army through the National Guard and Selective Service could not be required to serve anywhere outside the Western Hemisphere or for more than twelve months at home. In the summer of 1941, consequently, with the Germans racing across Russia and their Japanese ally unmistakably preparing for the conquest of the far Pacific, the Army could only feebly reinforce overseas garrisons.

History testifies to the ineptitude of coalitions in waging war. Allied failures have been so numerous and their inexcusable blunders so common that professional soldiers had long discounted the possibility of effective allied action unless available resources were so great as to assure victory by inundation. Even Napoleon’s reputation as a brilliant military leader suffered when students in staff colleges came to realize that he always fought against coalitions—and therefore against divided counsels and diverse political, economic, and military interests.

WHAT are you reading next? I just received a preorder, Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown; and I’m looking into The Age of Eisenhower.