Fighting Patton: George S. Patton Jr. Through the Eyes of His Enemies by Harry Yeide

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Jeff Grim

I have read several books on George Patton and most of them treat him like the icon that he is in American history.  Most of us have learned about how he was a great general who had a few flaws – mostly his propensity to slap combat fatigued soldiers.  As one can tell from the title, Fighting Patton: George S. Patton Jr. Through the Eyes of His Enemies, Harry Yeide takes a different approach in writing about Patton.

The book is not a pure biography of Patton.  The first few chapters do chronicle Patton’s career before World War II – with particular attention on Patton’s limited experience in World War I.  However, the majority of the book focuses on Patton’s World War II German opponents – those who fought against him in Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany.

Yeide calls upon a wealth of information from his research in the National Archives.  For instance, during the D-Day preparations by the Allies, Yeide explains that despite Eisenhower’s and others’ claims that the Germans tied down many of their forces in order to counter Patton’s fictitious First United States Army Group, the Germans, according to Yeide, did not mention Patton at all in their intelligence analysis.

Although many Americans believe Patton to be a master strategist who charged across France against German resistance, Yeide concludes that the Germans did not think of Patton as a major strategist, but more of a good tactical armor leader.  Yeide goes as far to say that if Patton was in the Wehrmacht, he would be one of the least experienced armor generals.

The book is 422 pages (including a glossary) divided into 14 chapters.  Yeide includes 34 maps and 52 black and white photographs.

This book brings a fresh perspective to one of America’s most studied and admired generals.

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The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Kevin Holtsberry

As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of reworked or retold myths and legends and so was excited to dig into The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.  To understand why, here is the publisher’s setup:

The legend begins…

Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia to be raised in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. “The best of all the Greeks”—strong, beautiful, and the child of a goddess—Achilles is everything the shamed Patroclus is not. Yet despite their differences, the boys become steadfast companions. Their bond deepens as they grow into young men and become skilled in the arts of war and medicine—much to the displeasure and the fury of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, a cruel sea goddess with a hatred of mortals.

When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece, bound by blood and oath, must lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

As it turned out this was really a romance – between Patroclus and Achilles – with the classical story mostly as background. It was well done in many ways, and the writing is often excellent, but the classics as romance was not what I was looking for.

More below.

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Q&A with Nick Arvin, author of The Reconstructionist

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Kevin Holtsberry

As I noted in my review of his latest novel, The Reconstructionist, Nick Arvin really captured my attention with Articles of War.  He was gracious enough to participate in a Q&A for that novel so I was excited about getting his perspective this time around.  Luckily for me, he agreed to take some time to answer some questions.

First, a brief bio:

Nick Arvin, American Author

Nick Arvin, American Author (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nick Arvin is an American engineer and writer. Born in North Carolina, he was raised in Michigan, and graduated from the University of Michigan and Stanford University with degrees in mechanical engineering, and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked in forensic engineering and accident reconstruction.

Now, on to the questions.

1) They say that all writing is autobiographical. What made you decide to tackle forensic engineering or accident reconstruction – something you have direct experience with – in your second novel?

I did work in accident reconstruction; I sort of stumbled into it. I had worked as an engineer for Ford, but I quit that to do an MFA in creative writing, and then ended up living in Denver on some grant money for a year after the MFA. When the grant ran out, I started looking around for a job in engineering. I’d worked in the automotive industry, but there isn’t much of an automotive industry in Denver. Then I realized that there were a couple of forensic engineering companies that did automotive accident reconstruction. So I sent them my resume, and one of the resumes happened to land on the desk of a guy who’s a reader and was impressed that I had published a book of short stories. Soon I had a job.

I knew from the first day that I wanted to write a novel about the work — the work itself was basically a process of creating little mini-stories about the accidents we were working on, and these accidents were dramatic and tragic, and the process of creating these mini-stories was really interesting, but also discomforting in the way that it required applying cold, analytical techniques to examining terribly human situations. So, the work had all these interesting layers of narrative and emotional disconnect, and I knew I couldn’t cover all of it in a short story. So I collected material from the job in a notebook for a couple of years, and then began to try to figure out how to structure it into a novel. Writing the novel took about seven years altogether.

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Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Kevin Holtsberry

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and I are joined by Andrew Kelly, to discuss Sticks and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools.  In the podcast we discuss the federal role in education and ways to move past traditional, and often stale, debating points regarding the federal government’s responsibilities in education policy (what works versus what doesn’t, the constitutionality of federal involvement, etc.).

Listen to the podcast.

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The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Kevin Holtsberry

Back in February I wrote the following:

Everything about The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey makes me want to read it. The cover art, the website, the video, the plot, the connection to a Russian fairy tale, the author’s name – everything. Thus begins the rearrangement of my TBR pile …

As the above makes clear, it just seemed like a book that had so many of the elements I look for in a book.  For those of you out of the loop, here is the publisher’s synopsis:

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Well, in April I finally got the chance to read it.  With all the hype surrounding this book – my own above, and many others - there was ample room for disappointment. But despite the fact the book was different than I had expected, there was no let down for me.

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