Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
Welcome to 2019. I know, we’re all still a bit hung over from last night, but welcome to the New Year. Admittedly it doesn’t yet feel a lot different than 2018, but I really expect that 2019 will mark an epochal change in our history. Since I wrote about that yesterday I won’t go back for more.
That being said there is one resolution that I think that all people, the great and the small, should do, and that is not to cry boo who, but read like our lives depended on it, which in a sense they do. By reading, I don’t mean just the news, commentary, or opinion sections of print or online news services, but get real books, especially works of history, biography, philosophy, and the classics.
Barbara Tuchman wrote:
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
Likewise, the French philosopher Voltaire hit the nail on the head when he said:
“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.”
That my friends is fact. If you want to be able to better distinguish fact from fake, read.
Last year I committed to read more, even as I stayed current on the news, analysis of it, and commentary, even as I continued to write. My office at work is crammed with books, as is much of our home. I think that we follow well the advice of Dr. Seuss who wrote:
“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”
So I read, and I read, until my eyes they turned red. I read with those eyes that had turned red, in bed and even in the head.
I read as I eat, and eat as I read, because somewhere in my soul I have this great need, which I ever did cede I would be a great deal poorer indeed.
The pages they turned and as my eyes burned I knew I could never be through so long as my fingers don’t turn blue. I read and read with voices sounding through my head I, but I will not stress even though I digress…
But really, I read a lot last year and will continue to do so in the coming year. I cannot remember who said it, but someone that oI respect recently said that we should all read at least thirty books a year. That comes out to a bit over half a book a week.
I write about reading rainbow quite frequently, so today after a little extra inspiration last night I decided to look back at what I actually read this year. Here is the list which includes printed books and those that I read on my Amazon Kindle reader in no particular order:
The War that Ended Peace by Margaret McMillan
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert Massie
Das Reich: The March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division through France, June 1944 by Max Hastings
The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940 by William Shirer.
Silent Night: The Story Of the World War One Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub
The Guns Of August by Barbara Tuchman
The Proud Tower: A Portrait Of Europe Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara Tuchman
1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies
The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution by Christopher Browning
The Nazis: A Warning from History by Laurence Rees
The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah Lipstadt
Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor
The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor
Hitler by Joachim Fest
Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich by David Clay Large
The Trial Of the Germans by Eugene Davidson
Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN by Andrew Wiest
The Anatomy Of the Nuremberg Trials by Telford Taylor
Incredible Victory by Walter Lord
Telling Lies about Hitler: History, the Holocaust, and the Trial Of David Irving by Richard Evans
The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt
A Bright and Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan
Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Vietnam by Bernard Fall
After Tet: the Bloodiest Year in Vietnam by Ronald Spector
Waterloo: The Story Of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles by Bernard Cornwell
Grant by Ron Chernow
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
Landscape Turned Red by Stephen W. Sears
Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning
Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power by Henry Ashby Turner
The Night of the Long Knives by Max Gallo
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Goering, Dr. Douglas M. Kelly, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII by Jack El- Hai
Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg by Valerie Hebert
Buchenwald : ostracism and violence 1937 to 1945 : guide to the permanent exhibition at the Buchenwald Memorial edited by Volkhard Knigge in collaboration with Michael Löffelsender, Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau and Harry Stein on behalf of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation ; translation: Judith Rosenthal
The Participants: The Men Of the Wannsee Conference by Hans-Christian Jasch
The Good Years: 1900 to the First World War by Walter Lord
Munich Playground by Ernest Pope
The Fall of the Dynasties: 1905-1922 by Edmond Taylor
Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941 by Stanley Weintraub
Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life Of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangeth
Enemy of the People: The Untold Story Of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler by Terrance Petty
Hunting Eichmann: How a Band Of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Tracked Down the Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb
The Eichmann Kommandos by Justice Michael Musmanno
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder
Perpetrators: The World Of the Holocaust Killers by Gunther Lewy
Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder
The Butcher Of Poland: Hitler’s Lawyer, Hans Frank by Garry O’Connor
Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard Evans
The First Salute: a View Of the American Revolution by Barbara Tuchman
Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward
Dereliction Of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster
Dispatches by Michael Herr
The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan
Everything Trump Touches Dies by Rick Wilson
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstadt
The Final Hours: The Luftwaffe Plot Against Goering by Johannes Steinhoff
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew
The Somme by Peter Hart
July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin
Hitler Ascent: 1889-1939 by Volker Ulrich
What Have We Done: the Moral Injuries of Americas Longest Wars by David Wood
QB VII by Leon Uris
Russian Roulette by Michael Isikopf and Davis Corn, Operation Eichmann: The Inside Story Of History’s Most Notorious Manhunt Told by its Chief Investigator by Zivi Aharoni and Wilhelm Dietl
The Road not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot
Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden
Why Don’t We Learn From History by B. H. Liddell-Hart
Lincoln’s Lieutenants: The High Command Of the Army Potomac by Stephen Sears
The Collapse of the Third Republic: an Inquiry Into the Fall of France 1940 by William Shirer
The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality by Wolfram Wette
War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 by Geoffrey Megargee
Sherman’s March by Burke Davis
Antietam by Bruce Catton
The Culture Of Defeat: on National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery by Wolfgang Shivelsbusch
The Nanking Massacre: History Of China, Japan, and the Events Surrounding the Nanking Massacre by Mukuro Mori
The Miracle Of Dunkirk by Walter Lord
Note that very few books that I read this year deal with current events. I have always been that way. For the most part books on current events tend not to have stood the test of time.
I also read quite a few of the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trial, and still have many more to go. It kind of do those in between, and since each volume is the size of a book, they should count as books, but I don’t count them as books, although maybe I should.
Not counting the Nuremberg transcripts I read about 78 books this year, that’s about a book and a half a week, and I am not a speed reader. Yet it is not only about quantity, it is about content. Likewise, if one is to read one must understand and learn the lessons of the the past and the men and women have already learned and passed down. As Will Rogers notes:
“There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by readin’. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
Reading is the key to not falling for what the vulgar hoard is both eager and content to devour. That includes the average 15 lies, falsifications, and distortions of truth that the American President tweets or speaks every day. So I close with the words of Dr. Seuss:
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Until tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 
As a dedicated reader myself, I am more than impressed with your list of books that you’ve read last year many of which I have also read – the main omissions being that they have not been published in the UK. I share everything you say about the criticality of reading and the importance of thinking for yourself from what you have read but I hope you won’t be offended if I remark that there isn’t much light relief in the list. The odd murder mystery from say Agatha Christie might not come amiss.
I think there was a scene in a Star Trek TNG where someone asked Picard what book he was taking on holiday after he said he was going to do some light reading. He responded with some very serious title, I can’t remember what and they turned to someone else and said “light reading?”
Anyway, I didn’t mention the Father Blackie Ryan mystery novels by Andrew Greeley, or various books on baseball, Stephen Clarke’s “A Year in the Merde”
Blessings
Steve