Books read February through December 1960
| Author | Treece, Henry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | February 1960 |
After the last Roman legionaries leave Britain, Arthur, "Artos" in the story, pulls the sword Excaliber from a tree stump, battles his adversaries, and makes himself King of England.
I still have a few hazy memories of this book. If I remember them correctly, the story opens with the last Roman soldiers embarking for the continent. Arthur is not an important man, but he is a strong one who pulls the sword out of the tree stump (that detail came from a book review on Amazon - Treece departed from the sword in the stone version to make it more plausible.) He leads armies on one campaign after another, finally uniting all of the tribes into a single kingdom.
I was thirteen years old when my father gave me a small, pocket size spiral notebook with graph paper pages. I began writing down the author and title of each book I read, in printed (not script) lettering, one letter per small square in the page. This book was the first one. At some time, probably in the 1970s when I was taught in library school to keep index card records of each book I read, I put this little notebook in the card file box and preserved it down to today. I also counted the entries in the notebook and wrote down the count, 226 books, at the top of the first page.
I began reading history and historical fiction sometime around age eight years. I read for the adventure of history and there were many books written around that time for young people like me. I'm pretty sure that this one, and all or almost all of the books read starting at that age came from the adult section of the local libraries, though many might be classified as "young adult" by the time I became a librarian in 1974.
The date_read element of this and all subsequent books up to 1974 is purely a guess made by dividing the number of years between this book and the beginning of my book card file, divided by the number of books in the little notebook.
| Author | Slaughter, Frank |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Biographical fiction |
| When Read | February 1960 |
From Amazon reviews combined with Wikipedia I see that this novel is a highly fictionalized story of Andrea Bianco, a real Venetian mapmaker who produce a map of the world in 1436. In the novel he is betrayed by his brother and his fiancee, sold into slavery, and fights for his freedom and to learn the truth. There is apparently a fair amount of material about navigation and mapmaking as well.
My 13 year old self would have loved the action and adventure, the seafaring, and also the technical information about sextants, clocks, and trigonometry. I was deeply interested in the age of sail at that time.
Slaughter was a medical doctor (with an unfortunate name for a doctor I should think) and a very successful popular writer. I read others of his books.
| Author | Sanderson, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Henry Holt, 1958 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 277 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Hungarian Revolution |
| When Read | March 1960 |
A fifteen year old boy is fired by the revolution against the Russian domination of Hungary via a Hungarian communist party that never had the support of more than a minority of the people. He joins the student revolutionaries that begin actions that escalate on both sides until a full scale invasion by the Soviet Red Army. They fight the soldiers with small arms and Molotov cocktails but are defeated within a few weeks. If I remember correctly, the story ends with the boy uselessly firing a submachine from the streets or rooftops of Budapest at MiG-15 jets flying over the city.
This book made an impression on me that, 58 years later, still fires some brain cells in my memory. Like most Americans I was a staunch anti-communist at that time and remained so until about seven or eight years later when the Vietnam War caused me to start thinking differently about the meaning of politics, freedom, and democracy.
I later read The Bridge at Andau on the same topic.
| Author | Tracy, Don |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dial Press, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 369 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | April 1960 |
As I remember it, the story concerns a Confederate blockade runner that ran trade goods and weapons into Wilmington, North Carolina, and cotton back out again. The other end of the voyage was to British controlled Bermuda. I seem to recall that they ran though the blockade on a steam engine at the highest possible speed of 17 knots, which was very fast for a ship at that time. There were night operations in rain and fog with the danger of hitting sandbars or other obstacles in the darkness. There may have been a main character who was a teenage boy - a fitting character for an audience of young teens like me.
At that age, and for some years before and after, I was greatly interested in American military and naval history. I read books about the revolution, the War of 1812, and especially the Civil War.
| Author | Cooper, James Fenimore |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1841 |
| Number of Pages | 418 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American frontier |
| When Read | May 1960 |
22 year old frontiersman Nathanial "Natty" Bumppo finds adventure and danger with his Indian friend Chingachgook in the lake country of New York in the 1740's. This was the last written of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales but the first one in the character's chronology, what we might call a prequel today.
I read all five of the novels in the Leatherstocking series, starting with this one, which was the first chronologically concerning Bumppo and the other characters. This was the first that I read and it stimulated me to read all of the others, in chronological story (not publication) order.
The single scene that is fixed in my memory from this book was the one in which Natty is lying alone in a birchbark canoe. He can't go where he wants to go so he decides to go to sleep and wake up later when the lake is dark. Unfortunately for him, the wind changes while he is sleeping and his canoe drifts downwind where he and it are captured by hostile Indians. I remember thinking "No, Natty. Don't go to sleep in the boat. It isn't safe." I also thought that an awful lot of the story depended on this one rash act and it was all strange and not what I was expecting in an adventure story that a rash act consisted of going to sleep. It also seemed much out of character for such a person, who grew up in the woods on the frontier and was experienced in Indian lore, to sleep on the lake instead of hidden on the shore. But I did like the book and read more Cooper. It was different from the books I was reading that were written in the 1950's
| Author | Kirst, Hans Helmut |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Kee, Robert |
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 1960 |
Gunner Asch fights the Russians in World War II while also fighting against self-important officers and non-coms and idiotic rules and regulations in the Wehrmacht. Although I read all of the books in the series I have no specific recollections of this one.
Kirst joined the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht in 1933. He would have been 18 years old at the time. He fought through the whole war and only afterward came to a more informed and mature view of Nazism.
This was the first of the Gunner Asch novels that I read. I don't think I realized that it was the second of a series. I would have just turned 14 when I read it. It was not a book written for teenagers and I'm not sure I understood it as fully as I might have even four or five years later, but I think I understood enough to realize that it was a serious and interesting book. I read others later.
| Author | Stevenson, Robert Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1888 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | War of the Roses |
| When Read | June 1960 |
Young Richard "Dick" Shelton grows up in the household of his guardian but, as he gets older, comes to suspect that his guardian murdered his, Dick's, father. In fear of his life, he joins an outlaw band whose leader is famous for his trademark black arrow. The story then concerns his struggle with his guardian and the larger War of the Roses (Red and White) representing the houses of York and Lancaster who are contending for the throne of England in the 1450's.
The book was originally written for young readers and serialized in 1883, then published as a free standing book in 1888.
I recollect reading the "Great Illustrated Classics" edition of the book, though I don't see it in the catalog of the publisher that calls itself by that name today. The illustrator was probably Andrew Wyeth.
I read multiple books in the illustrated classics series. I don't think this was the first. I can convince myself that I remember some of the illustrations but, if I do, it is only with the vaguest of memories. The abstract above is cobbled from Amazon and Wikipedia info but reading that material seems to stimulate corresponding memories dredged from deep in my hippocampus, or wherever I keep very old memories.
| Author | Mason, F. Van Wyck |
|---|---|
| Publication | J.B. Lippincott |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 572 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Revolution; Naval |
| When Read | June 1960 |
In 1778 young American revolutionary naval officer Andrew Warren goes to Jamaica, posing as a Tory and a real Tory girl with him. There is action, sailing, love, intrigue, etc.
I know I read a fair number of Mason's books. They had everything I wanted in the way of fighting and sailing adventure. At age 14, even the love stories would have been interesting to me, though the ones written in 1942 for young audiences wouldn't have had any sex.
My recollection is that the length of the books was no deterrent to me. Long books of this type just produced longer reading fun.
| Author | Pratt, Fletcher |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Hanover House |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Military |
| When Read | July 1960 |
Pratt discusses sixteen battles that he believed changed history, starting with Greeks and Persians and continuing through to the battle of Midway in the Second World War.
It's hard for me to be sure that I remember anything from this book, in part because I read Edward Creasy's The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World from Marathon to Waterloo 44 years later and may be remembering parts of that book when I think I'm remembering this one. But I do have a memory of reading about the battle of Midway in my youth and it might well have been from this book. I also remember a chapter in a book on "The Red King at Beneventum" and I strongly suspect it was from this book. The king was Pyrrhus, from whose name we derive "Pyrrhic victory". It was a big battle between a Macedonian/Hellenic style army, replete with elephants, and an army of the Roman legions. The Greek phalanx faced the Roman checkerboard formation and each side experienced a significant learning curve. If I remember correctly, Pratt had a good explanation of Roman tactics and it may have been from this book that I learned something of the ancient sciences of warfare and why the civilized states were able to defeat large hordes of barbarians even when the barbarians had been brought up from childhood with weapons in their hands.
My interest in military and naval history probably began with the war stories of my father and uncles and their friends, and the TV movies I watched with them about World War II. I know that by the age of eight I was already very interested and was reading military history.
As an eight year old I had been introduced to Landmark Books. It was a series of history books written for young people, but longer than books written for eight year old. I specifically remember reading a book on Napoleon. It opened with the words "Plop, plop" talking about French soldiers marching in rain and mud. I showed the book to an eight year old friend of mine who pointed out that the words sounded like the words for poop falling into a toilet. It stuck with me. Another Landmark book I read was about the Battle of Britain - a subject that still interests me today.
| Author | Seeger, Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Longman's Green |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | x + 433 |
| Extras | "decorations", maps, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Russia; Soviet Union |
| When Read | August 1960 |
This is a popular history of Russia and the USSR from beginnings to the end of the Great Patriotic War (WWII).
Looking up this book at LC I found a reference to a Google scan of the book, freely available from the University of Michigan and the University of California and readable online. There are some missing parts of some pages but it's mostly there and is even searchable in a clumsy but usable way.
Reading some pages, it looks to me like it would have been perfectly understandable to my 14 year old self. It's written simply and with much sympathy for Russians. I would think that publishing it as it was, at the beginning of the McCarthy era was a brave action by both author and publisher, but I didn't read enough to find out if there were many protective caveats thrown in. In any case, I don't know how much I knew about McCarthyism at that time.
My interest in history was well established by this time and it was already fairly universal - not restricted to particular times and places. If I remember correctly, I was particularly interested in certain subjects (ancient history, American history, Napoleonic era, and more), but I was more likely to choose a book by reading a few pages at the library to see how interesting it seemed than by restricting it to certain subjects and ignoring others. I read books, for example, about the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, about the Taiping rebellion in China, and other subjects that had nothing to do with what I was learning in school and were not popular subjects in trade publishing.
Today I read online reviews before I commit to reading a book, but in the old days reviews were orders of magnitude harder to find and, besides, my whole life was before me. It was not until I was well into middle age that I began to feel any nagging urgency to read particularly valuable books before it was too late.
| Author | Michener, James A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 270 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Hungarian Revolution, 1956 |
| When Read | August 1960 |
The village of Andau on the border between Hungary and Austria had a bridge that could be used to cross from one country to the other. Michener went there and interviewed Hungarian refugees fleeing from the Russian invasion in 1956. He then wrote this book about it.
The story followed various characters, but mostly an 18 year old youth who fought on the side of the rebels and escaped over the bridge at the end.
This book is described by Amazon and by the Wikipedia as non-fiction although the main character is also said to be a composite and some description is given of his interior life. At the age when I read it, I don't think I made the strong distinction that I would later between fiction and non-fiction.
It made a strong impression on me. I can still recall scenes of Josef Toth (the name is recalled for me by currently available reviews) throwing Molotov cocktails and shooting at Russians with his submachine gun taken from the enemy. I seem to recall a scene of Russian tanks in front of the Hungarian parliament and a crowd of students demanding freedom. I seem to recall Josef on the roof of a building in Budapest futilely firing his submachine gun at MiG-15's streaking overhead. It was a heroic struggle for freedom.
I see that I wrote about the boy with the submachine gun and the MiG-15 in Boy With a Gun, read earlier in 1960. I'm sure the scene came from one of these books, not both. It was probably the earlier book. I wouldn't be surprised if both books are available in the Internet Archive, but I'll leave the confusion in place and not worry about it for now.
| Author | Khoklov, Nikolai |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Kingsbery, Emily |
| Publication | New York: D. McKay Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 365 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | September 1960 |
Khoklov was an NKVD agent and then a partisan fighter in World War II. In 1954 he was ordered to assassinate an anticommunist Russian in Yugoslavia but he warned the man instead and fled to the West. In 1957 he was himself the target of an assassination attempt. Poisoned with a radioactive chemical he survived and went to the U.S. where he later obtained a PhD and became a professor.
The notes above are based on what I read about Khoklov today, mainly in the Wikipedia. Stimulated by them, I seem to recall reading about K's survival of the assassination attempt and also of the treatment of his father, a commissar forced into a punishment battalion, and dying there, because of a comment he made about Stalin during the battle for Moscow.
As this and the previous books show, my interest in history came to include Russia and the USSR. My understanding of the politics and history were at the level of an interested kid of my age. It was, of course, only later that I read Marxist as well as liberal democratic views of those times and places.
| Author | Overstreet, Harry and Bonaro |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Norton, 1958 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 348 |
| Extras | bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Communism |
| When Read | September 1960 |
A book about communism by a husband and wife team. Harry Overstreet was chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at City College of New York and also taught at the New School for Social Research.
Continuing my attempt to understand history and politics, I picked up this book. I can't say that I remember anything about it but I found (today in 2018) a copy of "Chapter 11 - Tactics and Stratagems: The United Front", and also a 1995 critique of same by one Robert Jaffe, at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/home.html.
I read the chapter. It's a strongly anti-communist analysis from the point of view of what we might call a pair of progressive liberal democrats. It is about how the Communist Party of the USA forms "united fronts" with other organizations seeking progressive goals, not so much for the purpose of achieving those goals, but for the purpose of achieving the goals of the Soviet Union.
The book is a product of the Cold War, a time when liberalism was under assault from both left and right and it was important for people espousing liberal democratic and even socialist goals to make clear that they were not communists, did not endorse violent revolution, and did not support the Soviet Union. I'm sure that it made a deep impression on me at the time. In the 1970's after being radicalized by the Vietnam War, my acceptance of the Overstreets' position would have wavered. Today I'd be, not so much in the Overstreets' camp, as in the difficult position of seeing arguments for both sides.
I find the critique by Robert Jaffe to be tendentious and useless.
| Author | Wyeth, John A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper, 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1899 |
| Number of Pages | 614 |
| Extras | illustrations, maps |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | October 1960 |
This is a military biography of General Nathan Bedford Forest, CSA, covering his exploits in the Civil War with single chapters each on his life before and after the war. It is extensive and detailed by a CSA cavalry veteran (though not a member of Forrest's brigade), and is based on much correspondence with other veterans as well as other sources.
Google Books has placed an out of copyright searchable image PDF of the book on the Internet. The abstract above is based on my reading the Table of Contents and a bit of the Preface in the Google Books.
I was particularly interested in the Civil War in my teenage years and read many books about it. I would have read without a strong political viewpoint. It was common when I was in school in Baltimore to teach that the Civil War was about tariffs and states' rights. It was only later that I came to understand that the war was really about racism and slavery. In the meantime, a man like Forrest, whom I would later see as a former slave dealer and an enemy of the United States, seemed brilliant and courageous. I guess he was both of those things. So perhaps were Erwin Rommel and Isoroku Yamamoto. Learning to hope for more from our heroes than just bravery and skill was part of growing up and developing a deeper understanding of history. Its an ongoing process for me.
| Author | Uris, Leon M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 626 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust; Israel |
| When Read | October 1960 |
This was the famous novel about Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, fighting the Nazis in Europe and then fighting Arab armies for the independence of the State of Israel. It also became a famous movie.
This was a compelling novel that I read during the day and continued to read at night, with a flashlight, under the covers so that my parents wouldn't see that I wasn't sleeping. It was not the only book I read that way but it was an important one. I was very moved by it. Having been raised in a Jewish family, living in a Jewish community with almost all Jewish friends, going to Sunday school, and still believing in God, were probably all factors in my attraction to the book.
| Author | Kirst, Hans Helmut |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Kee, Robert |
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1955 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 311 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Comedy |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 1960 |
This was the first of the Asch trilogy. Asch was a sane fellow in the irrationally bureaucratic and authoritarian German Army before the beginning of World War II.
Book 2 of the series very much appealed to me and when I realized that there were two more, I got and read this first one. World War II was already important to me. I grew up with the stories of my father and all but one of my uncles, and all of their friends. I watched all of the WWII Late Show movies with my father on Channel 13, and the "Combat" TV show, etc. I was into this stuff.
Asch was appealing in a different way. He was not a Nazi. He performed no heroic acts. He was, like the people I knew, a humanitarian fellow. I liked him and liked that he put a human face on the German people. I was brought up to believe that all people have the potential for good, even our enemies in the great war that absorbed everyone in my parents' generation. Kirst and his creation confirmed that for me.
| Author | Roberts, Kenneth |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1929 |
| Number of Pages | 632 |
| Extras | maps |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Revolution |
| When Read | November 1960 |
This novel has been published a number of times since 1929, often with varying subtitles. It's about an expedition from Maine into Quebec in 1775-6, led by then Colonel Benedict Arnold, in an attempt to take Quebec City and Canada from the British. If I remember correctly, the city was only partly occupied and the Americans were eventually driven out. The Americans suffered terribly throughout the expedition from hunger, cold, disease and from the fighting. Many fewer made it back to Maine than those who left.
As we might expect in young adult (i.e. 13-18 year olds in public library parlance) novels like this, there was a youth and a love story as well as what was apparently quite well researched history.
This book was a favorite of mine and I went on to read quite a few of Roberts' books. See my notes under The Lively Lady, book ID 1989-02.04.
| Author | Roberts, Kenneth |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1930 |
| Number of Pages | 870 |
| Extras | maps |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Revolution |
| When Read | December 1960 |
A continuation of the Arundel story. The center of the story is the Battle of Saratoga in 1778 where American forces defeated the British Army under Burgoyne that was attempting to drive from Canada down to New York City, with the aim of splitting New England from the rest of the colonies/states.
My reading of Arundel set me to reading more books both by Roberts and by other authors writing about the same time and place - especially James Fenimore Cooper. I liked this as much as the others.
| Author | Kipling, Rudyard |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1901 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | India |
| When Read | December 1960 |
The famous Indian-English-Irish spiritual adventure story.
Whatever memories I have of this book were overtaken by the Errol Flynn Hollywood film version. The movie appeared from time to time on the Late Show and I would stay up and watch it. I don't know whether I read the book and was stimulated by it to see the movie or vice versa.