5 comments about Dustoff: The Memoir of an Army Aviator.

1. An outstanding account of what happened in the war zone. A must read!



2. Dustoff is rare look at a rare breed of man. Mike Novosel is a true American hero and his account of his military life make a great read. I wish our country had a few more men like Mike Novosel.



3. Mr. Novosel isn't a professional writer. Therefore, his book doesn't read like some Hollywood glamour novel. However, his book is one of the best accounts of a real soldier doing his job. After meeting Mr. Novosel, I realized that his book reads almost as if he is there recalling the experiences to you personally. I was captivated from the first page, finding it difficult to find a stopping point (okay, I'll read just one more chapter). For anyone interested in military related books, medevac crews or a great memoir, this is a must-read. Well worth a hard cover for your collection.



4. This book is about a true American Hero. Starting before World War 2, this book covers the life and career of one of the bravest men I have ever read about. This is a man who not only risked his life time and time again to selflessly save the wounded in Vietnam, but did not expect any special gratitude or treatment for it. This is a well written and engrossing tale about a man who served more than any man would be expected to, but signed up for two tours of Vietnam as a emergency evacuation pilot. Although I know it doesn't count for much, I hope Mr. Novosel reads this review to realize how much respect I have for him, and the men who served with him.



5. I picked this book up on a sale rack while waiting for a flight. After sitting down with it, I put it down for a total of maybe 5 minutes from cover to cover, and that was out of sheer necessity.

   For having led such an amazing life, the author has such an easy, flowing writing style that you get the impression he were relaying the entire account over a few beers at some smoky enlisted club. Even more striking is the level of modesty with which Novosel recalls his time, a rarity in the military as anyone who's been in knows! Thankfully missing is melodrama and hollywood, which leaves the real excitement to stand for itself.

   All in all a fantastic read. You don't meet people like this guy every day (if ever!). I can't recommend this book enough.

No comments about George Washington's Diaries: An Abridgment (Papers of George Washington).

5 comments about John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father.

1. John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father
   
   by Francis J. Bremer
   
   Oxford University Press, published 2003
   
   Millerstown University Professor Francis Bremmer's John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father is the first major work on the Massachusetts's governor in over fifty years. It is an engaging and comprehensive volume serving as the author's attempt to provide a more balanced view of Winthrop than has been seen in other works. Bremer writes, "The Winthrop of modern histories has been constructed to suit particular agendas. It is time for biography that is interested primarily in John Winthrop himself." (pg. xvi) Bremer is well qualified to take on this task, as he is the editor of John Winthrop's papers for the Massachusetts' Historical Society.
   
   The narrative traces all of Winthrop's known ancestors in England. Almost a century before John was born, his grandfather, Adam, was a successful London cloth merchant. Adam profited handsomely from Henry VIII's reformation of the church. He purchased monastery lands from the government and established the family's seat in Suffolk. It was to this estate that Adam retired during the Catholic restoration of Mary I. The Winthrops were staunch Protestants and the move was designed to prevent retribution from the Marian government. The estate was to be the family's headquarters until John's departure for the new world in 1630.
   
   The family estate was located in the Stour Valley, which was a hotbed of reformed Protestantism. Bremer deliberately avoids using the term Puritan because he feels that it carries to strong a connotation to the modern reader. "Godly" was the description used most often by the Winthrop family and their circle. Like many others in Suffolk, the Winthrop's were non-conformists to the Anglican model and hoped for continued reforms of the church.
   
   John Winthrop was born in 1588. He attended college at Cambridge for two years and left without taking a degree. While he considered entering the ministry, his early marriage and family obligation precluded that career path. In 1605, he married for the first time. From 1605 through 1630, John Winthrop lived the life of the minor gentry. He was involved in running his estate, raising his family and practicing law. In 1615, his first wife died in childbirth and Winthrop soon remarried. His new wife died a year later in childbirth; John married again in 1617 to his third wife, Margaret Tyndal.
   
   Winthrop became involved with the civil government when he was appointed to the Court of Wards and Liveries. It was at this time he grew increasingly displeased with the corrupt state of the civil government. After considering emigration to Ireland, he and Margaret decided instead to join with members of the Massachusetts Bay Company and move to the new world. The venture was seen as a way to serve God and to make a profit. The founders of the company decided on John Winthrop as Governor for the colony. This is a reflection of the modest nature of the project in the eyes of the founders because, "if Massachusetts had been a larger, more important venture, he would not have been entrusted with the responsibility." (pg. 170)
   
   As Governor, Winthrop was responsible for seeing the colonists through the bitter early years and for establishing order among the colonists. It was at the start of the emigrating that his famous "Christian Charity" sermon was given. He compared the colonists endeavors to a "city on a hill" that all could see. This biblical reference is Winthrop's most enduring literary legacy and is often quoted by politicians to this day.
   
   Winthrop strove to live a good Christian life and to ensure the others the opportunity to so as well. He sought unity amongst the settlers but was willing to compromise and attempt to reach consensus. He was unwavering, however, in his principles and showed no reluctance to expel Roger Williams or Anne Hutchinson from the colony when their unorthodox theologies threatened the stability of the society.
   
   Winthrop served as governor for 12 of the 19 years he lived in Massachusetts. He was untiring in his efforts to promote the growth of the colony. In the winter of 1649, he became ill and died. Bremer sums up the man and his accomplishments, "Zealous but not a zealot ... he helped to prevent his colony from being blown off course by the winds of extremism and from being wrecked on the rocks of fanaticism." (pg. 385)
   
   Accessible to all levels of interested readers, John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father is a valuable portrait of an important figure in American History. Sources are extensive and meticulously documented. They primarily come from the records of the Courts of Assistants in Massachusetts Bay, Official Records of the Governor and Winthrop's own papers and journals. In addition, a host of sources from both sides of the Atlantic is employed in the work. The in-depth coverage of the Winthrop family background can be tedious to readers only interested in American events, but they provide needed insights into the English Reformation and the events that lead to colonization of New England. Bremer's work takes its place as the definitive biography of John Winthrop for the next fifty years.



2. Bremer has brought us a sensitive and balanced portrayal of Winthrop, one that is at the same time truly gripping. One of the significant contributions of the book is Bremer's attention to Winthrop's forty or so years in England prior to coming to New England, which helps create the sense of organic development and shows points of continuity between English Puritanism and that of the New England colonies. The relationship between Bremer's presentation and other scholarly opinions is covered in many of the endnotes, which makes it useful to the scholar but not burdensome for the average reader. Scholars, history buffs, and even those just interested in the human experience of life, will find this book rewarding. Highly recommended.



3. This is a wonderful book. The author demonstrates a rich, nuanced command of the period and the players. I especially appreciate how he works to portray the characters from their own perspective instead of juding people who lived four centuries ago by todays ideas. I appreciate that he goes to great length to provide historical context. Indeed, he provides so much context, beginning with the subject's grandfather, that the book starts out a little slowly. But once the book reaches the point of Winthrop's departure for America, it remains compelling up to the end. A wonderful book for a more complete picture of the settlement of our country and a valuable addition to a balanced view of the puritans.



4. This is a well-written and fresh look at John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Bremer derives his view of Winthrop from the "Model of Christian Charity" sermon, which Winthrop delivered sometime around his emigration to North America. Rather than the stern, unbending, and judgemental character that is the common perception, Bremer shows Winthrop as a pragmatic leader who often worked behind the scenes to reconcile diverging points of view. As portrayed in this book, Winthrop was a man of humility who strove to include anyone with a "spark of godliness" into the community.

   At 385 pages of text, the book moved along quickly. I was sorry to get to the end.




5. Thanks to an absent minded John Winthrop falling into a foul smelling peat bog and surviving (which he took as a sign that he should emigrate to the colonies) the settlers of the Massachusets Bay Company were blessed with a practical and efficient administrator. Elected Governor many times over, John Winthrop is portrayed as an honest and god fearing a man as any patriotic American would want.
   Although a good third of the book describes Winthrop's life in England, it is justified and necessary to see the religious and social preparations for his career in America. Once he came to America, his life was devoted to the preservation of his religion, his family and his colony.
   Those readers familiar with Boston and surroundings will enjoy the detail in this biography; the streets he lived on, the configuarion of the city, its growth during Winthrop's lifetime.
   And how easy it is to forget how little in the way of goods and services was available to the settlers in the 17th century. John Winthrop was not in the first wave of New Englanders in Plymouth, but even 10 years later he had to bring with him wheat, barley, oats, beans and peas for cultivation, potatoes, hop roots, hemp seed, tame turkeys and rabbits, linen and woolen cloth, bottles, ladles, spoons and kettles, among a long list of other essentials.
   In spite of harsh conditions and personal tragedies, Winthrop prevails and the reader will learn much about this "forgotten" Founding Father in this compelling and interesting biography.

4 comments about John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Southern Biography Series).

1. Newmyer does a masterful work with his book `John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court'. This is more that just a standard history of John Marshall. Newmyer focuses on the legal nuances of Marshall's opinions and also the complexity of his mature jurisprudence during the development of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was then and is still today overshadowed more by Marshall than any other Justice. Marshall was the conservative nationalist who envisioned a theory of "Cooperative Federalism" between the States and the Federal Courts. He felt that the Constitution was not a code of laws but a written document that declared itself to be the supreme law of the land. He sought to keep constitutional questions, of a legal nature, the exclusive right of the Supreme Court and not left up to the States and the political parties of the day. This placed him at odds with Jefferson and would result in a decade long battle to make constitutional interpretation the business of lawyers and judges not politicians. Marshall feared localized states representative's potential abuse of power. He considered the Union to be in danger from states interpreting the Constitution with all their associated cultural localisms. Newmyer unfolds Marshall belief that "the states constitute parts of the Union; they are members of one great empire, sometimes sovereign, sometimes subordinate". His vision was to make the court a legal institution guided by legal interpretation and avoid politics. Combining this with fair-minded judges aided by time-tested rules of interpretation, to ascertain the meaning of constitutional language, would resolve every major national or states issue. Marshall's Supreme Court constitutional interpretation monopoly was not to be. Times and doctrines were to change or even evaporate away removing the Court from the center of government and placing it, not ahead, but competing along side the other government branches. Jefferson/Jacksonian democracy would prevail over Marshall's conservatism. However Marshall's stamp on American law would be forever made as well as his help in laying the foundation for the sound establishment of the Constitution.
   
   There is a lot to digest and consider in the book. Newmyer expects readers to start this book with a good base knowledge of the Constitution and other documents like the Judicial Act of 1789 etc. This was one area where I felt the footnotes could have helped and covered better. Newmyer does a great job in weaving Marshall's common sense straight-forward personality into this study. From judicial review down through contracts law, a picture of Marshall emerges. Here is the Federalist Statesman, Common-law Lawyer, Revolutionary Soldier, Lawyer-legislator, Ratifier of the Constitution and Virginia's son. Well worth reading and adding to the history shelf.



2. Maybe I'm getting spoiled with the recent output of historical profiles that have the narrative quality of great fiction, like Caro's LBJ series, Chernow on Hamilton, and McCullough's books on our founding. Given that high bar, Newmyer's history of Marshall is a very difficult read.
   
   This book plods along. When discussing a principle the court dealt with Newmyer often makes it impossible to keep track of what year or even decade he's referring to, making it difficult to put the principles discussed into the proper context, especially political context. I also felt the book was very biased, glorifying his conservative nationalism without really defining why his brand of nationalism should be considered conservative rather than liberal or even non-ideological.
   
   This book would prove helpful in a Constitutional Law class discussing certain principles and their historical development, especially the rise of Corporations, but only with the guidance of a Professor who knows the era and Marshall's court well and only in small doses. I'm a sucker for books about our founding ideals and the history of our framers, but this was torture and with no obligation to finish this book, I finally gave up about ¾ of the way through, which I rarely do.



3. John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court written by R. Kent Newmyer is a biography about the fourth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Marshall. This is not just an ordinary biography, but a biography with feeling, deep understanding andcomprehensive knowledge of Marshall.

   This book is, by far, the most extraordinary biography, and paints a portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, the man, with perception and details , at the same time the author does an exhaustive biography of the jurisprudence of the Marshall Court.

   John Marshall, (1801-1835) was appointed to the Supreme Court by John Adams as he was leaving office. A last minute appointment and second cousin to Thomas Jefferson, Marshall served in some of the most formative years that the has ever seen. Marshall wanted to bring the court into the central picture of the government and reigned in the court from the fringes of government, Consolidating the authority of the court making the Supreme Court the final arbitor when it came to constitutional.

   John Marshall was a man equal to Jefferson when it came to the challenges of office and was equally skilled at the crafting law that supported the emerging American market economy. It was Jefferson and Marshall, however who symbolized and personalized the competing constitutional persuasions of the age and brought them into explosive focus. Each had taken a stand on the great foreign and domestic issues of the 1790's; each had conflated those issues into a dispute over the meaning of the Constitution. When fate and ambition made Jefferson president and Marshall chief justice, the institutional stage was set for what is one of the most creative confrontations in American constitutional history. At stake was not just the position of the Supreme Court in American government but the place of law in republican culture.

   Can you imagine being there when Marshall was giving the oath of office to Jefferson... when the new chief justice administered the oath of office to the new president on March 4, 1801. With his hand on the Bible held by Marshall, Jefferson swore to uphold the Constitution, Marshall was sure sure he was about to destroy.

   This book has an engaging narrative and you seem to read the information quickly and with ease, the author's prose is extremely well-written. As for the historical information it is spot-on even the court cases are found on a listing in the back of the book. Marshall was more than a chief justice, he was priciple in the forming a United States. Marshall's institutional accomplishments are found in this impressive study. For a one volume book... this is the most comprehensive... Marshall was the most representative figure in American law. This book is well worth the money ans should be in the library of all who study American History.




4. John Marshall, our nation's fourth Chief Justice, served from 1801 until 1835. He was appointed by President John Adams in one of the last and most significant acts of his administration.

   Professor Kent Newmyer has written a comprehensive account of the great Chief Justice's career. The account is admirably researched and documented, drawing extensively on a new edition of Marshall's papers. It includes careful analyses of Marshall's leading opinions. Most importantly, Professor Newmyer gives a thoughtful discussion of Justice Marshall's place on the Court and on the importance of his vision of the United States for our history.

   The book includes a good discussion of Marshall's role in the Revolutionary War, as a successful lawyer in Virginia, and as a landowner and extensive land speculator. But most of the book consists of a discussion of Marshall's career on the Court, his opinions, and the manner in which he shaped the Court as an institution.

   While Newmyer admires his subject greatly, I found this a very balanced account. He allows that Justice Marshall did not always meet his own stated goals of separating law from politics and notes how Marshall's activities as a land speculator seemed to play a critical role in several of his leading opinions.

   The discussion begins with Marbury v Madison and its role in the doctrine of judicial review. It continues with a thorough discussion of Marshall's role in the treason trial of Aaron Burr, through a discussion of the great opinions construing the Commerce Clause and Contracts Clause of the Constitution, through the Cherokee Nation opinions that Marshall wrote near the end of his tenure which established the foundation of American Indian Law. (Professor Newmyer considers these decisions Justice Marshall's proudest moment.)

   The book considers Marshall's attitudes towards and opinions dealing with slavery. There is also a discussion of a series of polemical articles Justice Marshall exchanged with critics following the decision in McCollough v Maryland. Marshall's critics feared that he was giving too expansive a power to the National Government as opposed to the States. In fact, at the end of his career, Justice Marshall feared his life work had been overtaken by events with the rise of the democracy, a strong state rights movement, and the Presidency of Andrew Jackson.

   Professor Newmyer sees Justice Marshall as a Burkean conservative in a new world. Marshall interpreted the Constitution broadly, yet flexibility to allow the development of individual, and national commerce and enterprise. Yet he was devoted to institutions and strongly inclined to accept the world as he found it rather than make it over in accordance with abstract principles (as he accused the supporters of the French Revolution of doing.) Newmyer writes:

   Marshall spoke as a Burkean conservative, or as much of one as American circumstances allowed. He was repelled by reductionist abstractions as well as abstract idealims, even when it was couched, as was much of southern constitutionalism in terms of a mythical past. He worked from the 'given', accepted the world as it was, relished 'the disorder of experience" to borrow a phrase from Charles Rosen." (p.351)

   Justice Marshall was not an original thinker, but he took the text of the Constitution, together with the Federalist, and molded it and the Court's interpretive role in a way that is with us today. He remains America's great Chief Justice. There is much for the interested reader to learn and to think through in Professor Newmyer's fine study of Justice Marshall.

No comments about Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series: The 17th President, 1865-1869 (The American Presidents).

5 comments about Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War.

1. This is a fascinating book. It is by turns sad, gross, uplifting, and a constant reminder of what can go wrong. While some may find the details a bit overwhelming, they are part of the whole, and for me, could not be left aside. The author crafted a memorial to this era, and to this war.



2. This was an excellent book , well researched and beautifully written. I felt I knew each of the soldiers , Paul, Alec and George and I grieved at their deaths and the waste of their young lives as though they were my own sons and not just men who died over ninety years ago.
   I was fascinated by the History surronding the burial of the unknown soldier , the building of the Cenotaph and indeed the story of the first Rememberance Day.
   I highly recommend this book to any who want to learn more about this period in history.



3. `The Unknown Soldiers' revealed how a brilliant and simple idea gave the families of those killed in WWI, but not located or identified, an opportunity to center their grief at a tangible location and get a measure of closure. Thousands of families suffered even the loss of the fallen bodies of their loved ones; then after the War, someone's mother had the idea of an unknown grave to symbolize ALL the missing. Though it was a little slow to catch on with the hierarchy, once it did, there was a ground swell of support and ceremony that was unprecedented in England, and the idea spread as well to their allies. The outpouring of the general population of the warring countries toward their `unknowns' was amazing and very moving. It was apparently an idea just waiting to happen. It reminded me of our experience of visiting the Vietnam War Memorial a couple of years ago on Memorial Day; it felt like being in church as families left notes and some cried at the wall, even though the Vietnam War had been over for more than 30 years!
   
   The book follows three very brave and articulate soldiers through the War until their deaths. An American, a Brit, and a German corresponded with their love ones about the hell that they were in, and gave some detail of what they were going through. It frankly made me angry when I read of the commanders well behind the lines feeding thousands of men in some cases to almost sure death for territory that could be measured in yards. Sometimes, the territory that thousands died for switched hands several times during the War so that their deaths were for naught. At some point for each of the three soldiers, the letters stopped, and the families knew that the worst had happened. It was heart-breaking to read about. It is hard to imagine what the vets went through, and for so long; and the vets were often very young, late teens or early 20's.
   
   This was a good, sobering book about a noble idea that came out of a terrible time in our modern history.
   
   
   



4. This book was recommended to me by my best friend, and he is rarely off the mark, I bought the paperback edition, and I'm very glad I did. We are both very much interested in "bottom up" history with an emphasis on line soldier accounts, esp. when it is in their own words, and in this respect, Hanson does a terrific job.
   
   The stories of the three soldiers are sensitively told. The reaction of their families is also well done, and he expresses well the heart break that must have been theirs to learn that they would never know the final resting place of their sons.
   
   The back story of the evolution of monuments to Unknown Soldiers in Great Britain, France, and the U.s. is also very interesting. It was also very enlightening to see how many of Europe's leading statesmen and artists - writers, etc. - lost sons and brothers in WWI. It at least gives the impression that it was not a "rich man's war, poor man's fight."
   
   My only (minor) criticism is Hanson's habit of stringing quotes from disparate sources together in the same paragraph, without a hint as to who said them, without looking back in the endnotes.
   
   I highly recommend this book to all.



5. When I agreed to review Neil Hanson's book, I expected something far, far different. Something perhaps more along the lines of an epistolary format or the utilization of a more conventional fictional format. What I got was a meticulously researched, well-written, captivating horrifying, narrative history that took me to the Somme in 1916. Hanson focused on three soldiers: A Briton, a German, and an American. "Their tracks, faint as smoke in the wind, intersect time and again, but they are united only in death, for each was killed on the Somme, within gunshot sound of each other."
   
   Hanson uses more than the diaries and letters to explain the cost of war from the soldier's point of view. He researched the heck out of this battle, topic, and time as evident by the 96 pages of footnotes.
   
   In an essence, Hanson is giving faces to the three million unaccounted-for soldiers from WWI. He also explains how the world remembers those unknown soldiers ever since. "The grieving families of such men were deprived even of the consolation of a funeral and a grave site, and for them, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier became the grave and the gravestone of their lost loved ones. In almost every combatant nation, an unknown solider was also buried at some national shrine and, just as in America, at once became the focus of a pilgrimage that continues to this day
   
   I admit that, as a predominately fiction reader, the quote marks around quoted passages versus dialogue sometimes tripped me, as did the switch in point of view with a sentence. I had to often re-read paragraphs, sometimes, chapters, to be sure of what was happening. But the structure works--well, very well. I came away from this book with a new respect for fighting men and women everywhere. I also came away with an intimate new knowledge of trench warfare that on one level I'm not sure that I wanted to know but on another level compelled me to keeping reading.
   
   I thought I kind of knew what WWI was like, but I had no idea. This book should be compulsory reading in every high school or college worldwide.
   
   Armchair Interviews says: An eye-opening story of the soldiers of World War I. Check his web site to see what else he has written.

No comments about George Stoneman: A Biography of the Union General.

No comments about The Boys of '76: A History of the Battles of the Revolution.

No comments about Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: An African American Woman's Civil War Memoir.

2 comments about Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan.

1. I had searched through a lot of website information for Morgan's Raiders and was looking for a "beginning to end" book on this story. This book surpassed my expectations in getting the historical information along with the overall mood of the time. General Morgan was a very dashing figure and this helps to sort out the truth of many tales of the time. I would recommend this book highly to anyone who wants the whole story.



2. John Hunt Morgan....This name stirred up the passion of both Northerners and Southerners, and in his biography of the General, James Ramage does an excellent job in telling us why. The Morgan in Ramage's biography comes across to us the readers, as not very religious...deeply rooted in the Southern lifestyle of the times, and as a careful soldier. I found two Morgan's in the book...The Morgan who was at his most successful after the period of his first wife's death, and

   the Morgan who seems to lose interest in the war after his second marriage, when failure would always seem to bear its ugly head whenever the General attempted to do anything. Ramage has done a good deal of research, rooting out letters to and from the General, with special emphasis on Morgan's relationship with his second wife. This research helps us to understand the transformation of Morgan as the war went on, and helps the reader to ultimately understand this diverse per! sonality of our great internal conflict. The chapter on the death of Morgan is probably the best in the book, as Ramage tries to put down the various stories and myths that have cropped up over the years. All in all, I found Ramage's work a good read, and I recommend it to all Civil War enthusiasts.