Will o'the Glen on Books

The author of The Boston Massacre: A Family History presents an interesting thesis, that the amount of social interaction between the occupying British troops and American colonists turned the so-called “Boston Massacre” and the later Revolutionary War into “family conflicts”. According to the descriptive blurb, “… the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political. […] When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution. Serena Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.” In my view, this book fails to live up to its billing, as it never effectively identifies a causal relationship between the personal, social interactions which she describes in great detail, and the actual event – let alone the greater events that followed, and which eventually led to American independence. Ms Zabi...

The Yalta conference, in February 1945, comprised what is probably the most important eight-day period in modern history. The leaders of the three principal nations of the Allied alliance opposing the Axis powers – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin – met in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta to confer on subjects ranging from the conduct of the final campaigns against Nazi Germany to the configuration of Poland post-World War II; they also wrangled over the settlement of many other issues which would arise in the aftermath of the war, effectively shaping the world of the second half of the 20th century, and beyond, in the process. Diana Preston’s account of the conference, and its aftermath, is thoroughly researched and extremely well-written. The book includes vivid descriptions of the environs – the war-ravaged Black Sea resort of Yalta – and the personalities: FDR, ravaged by a multitude of physical ailments and increasingly unwell; Churchill, voluble, ...

Henry Hemming’s Agents of Influence was a real revelation to me, recounting as it does a British effort to bring the United States into World War II that went far beyond anything that I was aware of before reading this book. In addition to documenting the activities of British diplomats and the British intelligence service, MI6; not to mention the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill – to sway the U.S. government and U.S. public opinion in favor of entering the conflict in support of Great Britain, Hemming details the efforts of both the Nazi regime and the American isolationist movement, spearheaded by the “America First” organization and their spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, to keep the United States out of the war. Some might characterize the activities of the U.S.-based office of MI6, led by Canadian William Stephenson, as underhanded, and even duplicitous, but they were fighting a desperate battle to combat misinformation (while spreading a bit themselves, in a good cause) and turn ...

It is a rare and beautiful thing to find a non-fiction book that reels you in by appealing to multiple subjects of interest, and In The Waves , by Rachel Lance, was just such a book for me. The subtitle – My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine – and the back cover blurb, “How a determined scientist cracked the case of the first successful—and disastrous—submarine attack” were clues to how well this book would line up with subjects that intrigue me. As a mechanical engineer by training and profession, anything to do with scientific and engineering investigations is of interest to me. With a career in the U. S. defense industry, and specifically submarines, that started in the Reagan era, coupled with a general interest in military history, the story of the Confederate submarine HL Hunley which lies at the heart of this book certainly piqued my interest. The Hunley , which famously sank the U.S. Navy blockade ship Housatonic with a black powder “torpedo” in February ...

“The King’s Justice” is the ninth novel from author Susan Elia MacNeal to feature the flame-haired, British-born, America-raised protagonist Maggie Hope. I read this book without having read any of the previous eight in the series, and while I am always wary of jumping in on a long-running series late in the game, MacNeal keeps newcomers like myself in the picture with a judicious amount of back story, but not so much as to bore continuing readers with details that they already know. It’s March 1943, and London has survived the aerial Battle of Britain and the bombing campaign of the Blitz. “The King’s Justice” finds Maggie working with a bomb-disposal unit in London after earlier adventures with the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and time spent supporting the Metropolitan Police in apprehending a notorious sequential murderer (or serial killer, as we call them in the USA) known as the “Blackout Beast”. While the “Beast” sits in jail, a new killer has begun to stalk t...