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Post by SUVFan on May 30, 2019 15:50:30 GMT -5
I started to be more specific and make it a topic about war related books (supposedly true stories, obviously), but realized that with so little traffic, it might as well start out very general and if traffic ever picks up, more specific topics can be linked.
So this is a place to post about non fiction books -- good, bad, indifferent.
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Post by SUVFan on May 30, 2019 16:14:49 GMT -5
I just finished an amazing book about Vietnam: Surviving Hell -- A POW's Journey. Written by USAF Col. Leo Thorsness, it's absolutely chilling. The Colonel was 6 missions away from getting his ticket out of Vietnam. For his 94th mission, after his release from captivity 6 years later, Col. Thorsness was awarded the coveted Medal of Honor for his valor in saving the bacon of other fighter pilots. The standard to meet to earn a MOH is to go above and beyond the call of duty. Col. Thorsness describes how he could have flown safely back to base but instead went back to the fight and saved American crews from an ambush style attack. After all that he could have refueled in mid air but yielded to another aircraft that he recognized would have no chance making it back. His plane ran out of fuel on approach to the base and managed to coast in.
He should have been done for the day, but as luck would have it, a crew he was backing up couldn't go, so he was back in the fight and ended up being shot down. His chute deployed but took fire floating down, so the landing was rough and damaged his knees. He was fortunate that the Cong didn't kill him because of his injuries, but he ended up in Hell -- one of the nicknames that the American residents of the Hanoi Hilton came up with for their quarters. He endured 18 straight days of torture before breaking -- giving up more than name, rank, number and DOB. No description is given for what he told them but it couldn't have been detrimental to our side more than two weeks after his capture.
He tells how the prisoners were pressured to make videos praising their conditions and generally favorable to their captors and anti-US. He describes how one pair of captives used false names for their videos -- for example, one said he was "Clark Kent". Upon hearing the names, US representatives were able to discredit the videos. When that happened, Col. Thorsness describes the torture those guys received as punishment.
It's a fairly short read at 127 pages, but it's packed with details of Col. Thorsness' final two missions, his capture, captivity, release and welcome back home in 1973.
The book gives you a sense of what it might have been like to have been there, while at the same time you have to realize you truly have no clue. Suffice it to say that nothing any of us encounter in our lives can represent even a small fraction of what those guys faced every day.
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Post by SUVFan on Aug 5, 2019 15:18:12 GMT -5
I've started reading Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich. Two chapters in, I'm really liking it. Very well written, reads like a fast paced novel. Mezrich also wrote The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal and this is kind of a sequel to that. The movie, The Social Network was based on Mezrich's effort. So far, the new book casts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a horrible light. I'm getting the sense that none of privacy invasions we read about are anything but intentional.
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Post by sandipaws on Sept 4, 2019 14:27:15 GMT -5
Last month read "Sixty Miles of Border" Found it very interesting.
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Post by SUVFan on Jan 19, 2020 15:05:56 GMT -5
I finished I Hear You Paint Houses ("Housepainter") the other day. I liked it a lot.
The book was published back in 2004. The NetFlix movie, The Irishman, which is based on Housepainter, brought the book to my attention. The primary focus of the movie was on the admission in Housepainter by Frank Sheeran, who had connections to the NY Mob as well as the Teamsters, that he killed former Teamsters' president Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. I found Sheeran's admission to be very credible but others have questioned it. Hoffa's body has never been found and Housepainter offers a plausible explanation for that.
As is normally the case, there's so much more in the book than in the movie. Sheeran's revelations regarding both his personal involvement as well as the mob's in both the Bay of Pigs Cuba invasion as well as the assassination of JFK are stunning and chilling. I plan to add additional posts about other aspects of Housepainter.
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Post by SUVFan on Jul 30, 2020 16:57:12 GMT -5
I finished Code Name Madeleine by Arthur J. Magida today.
I'm interested in reading about WWII from other perspectives. This one had very little American involvement, just the occasional reference to FDR or D-Day and some background provided early in the book about the principal character's father's tour of the US.
Previously, I had no awareness of the spy network the Brits set up in France. They had some success but it's quite possible they did more harm than good.
So it was with the principal character, Noor, who was exceptionally brave and sacrificed herself for the cause. Her efforts were said to have facilitated the interruption of German troops that would have been deployed to Normandy and, possibly might have altered the outcome on the beach that day. There's no way to know.
What is known is that Noor disregarded orders and kept copies of all of her transmissions over 4 months in France. There was little doubt that she'd be captured eventually and when she was, those documents were helpful to the Germans in keeping Noor's persona active as far as the Brits knew. That resulted in the capture of many operatives and the interception by the Germans of a considerable amount of money and armaments that had been arranged using her radio. To be sure, the Brits ignored safeguards, too.
Noor is described throughout as a "Mystic" and near the end, the book shares an observation that she believed in the unbelievable. Her portrayal in the book was consistent with that description. So her refusal to follow the protocol of getting rid of all transmissions as soon as possible is explained by her unreasonable but confident belief that she wouldn't be captured.
Otherwise, the descriptions of Paris in WWII were very interesting and the stories from the various prisons, including German concentration camps such as Dachau where Noor was murdered with 3 other British spies, were chilling. The brutality is still unimaginable no matter how much I read about it.
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Post by SUVFan on Sept 17, 2023 7:46:07 GMT -5
Walter Isaacson, author of a biography of Steve Jobs, wrote a biography of Elon Musk that was released last week. I'm not reading it and probably won't but the following quote, which was attributed to the start of the Musk bio, appeared in an email newsletter I get every Sunday and I wanted to record it here.
“I re-invented electric cars and am sending people to mars…did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
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Post by SUVFan on Dec 6, 2023 10:45:24 GMT -5
Most of this year, on and off, I've been reading The Grand Slam:
It's an outstanding look at a man who still holds the title of greatest golfer of all time. I've reached the point in the book where Jones is seeking to win the 1930 US Open, the 3rd leg of what was then considered the 3rd of 4 major championships that Jones, an amateur, could win. He had already won the British Amateur and The Open championships that year.
It's a book I should have read some time ago but glad I'm getting to it now.
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Post by SUVFan on Dec 18, 2023 20:09:02 GMT -5
Thiller Novelist Mark Greaney, author of the Grey Man series, made the following recommendation in his monthly newsletter: I just put a hold on a copy at a local library and look forward to reading it.
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Post by SUVFan on Jan 10, 2024 9:53:25 GMT -5
An email subscription included the following list of recommended self help type books that I plan to check out:
Poor Charlie's Almanack - Refine your filters and say NO to almost everything - to develop true life mastery.
Winning - Ignore surface stuff that matters little, like branding, and instead become so good you can't be ignored.
Letting Go - Let go of everything you can't control, and operate at a higher conscious level (helping me as I attempt to raise 4 teenagers! - 3 we've adopted and 1 we're in process of adopting).
The Law of Attraction - Mentally and emotionally accept and live your highest dreams, and peaceably allow others to live as they want to. \ Here's a quote included with the recommendation about the first book's approach:
I've got to point out the paradox of this recommendation: Would Charlie's approach even allow for reading the book? And all the others??
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Post by SUVFan on Mar 13, 2024 6:59:07 GMT -5
I found a reference to this book looking for a post for the letter Z in the Military Alphabet thread:Looks like an interesting read.
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