What Are You Reading (May, 2008)?

We just took a trip to the Southeast, and I grabbed Confederates in the Attic to go with me. Not only did the Civil War information in it enhance the trip immeasurably, but the book by itself is great fun. There have been parts that made me laugh until I cried.

I just finished a The Battle for New York last night. Working on a non-history for Early Reviewing.

Just finished Jeffrey J. Noonan's first book The Guitar in America: Victorian Era to Jazz Age (American Made Music). It's the first scholarly work of which I am aware addressing the cultural history of the guitar --including players, teaching, and techniques.

It's the kind of work P.G. Wodehouse would have Jeeves call "an improving book." :) I feel like I know more about the guitar and its role in American culture than I did before I read Noonan's book.

Finishing Alexander Hamilton and am LOVING it. Certainly my new favorite Founder.

Moving on to What Hath God Wrought next.

Besides knocking off The Book Nobody Read, I'm now working on McClellan's War.

I'm about done with my non-history early-reviewer book, and will be starting The Life of Thomas More today.

Just picked up Steven Craig Harper's Promised Land: Penn's Holy Experiment, the Walking Purchase, and the Dispossession of the Delawares, 1600-1763.

Need to read Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. :)

Halfway through a superb biography. Sitting Bull by Bill Yenne.

Damn touchstones.

Now starting on The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 by Mike Cox. Volume one of a two volume history of the legendary semi military force/Law Enforcement agency.

I'm really enjoying What Hath God Wrought but am afraid I won't finish it by June when I'm starting a history course for which I will be reading The Dictators.

Just started David Levering Lewis' God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215.

Just starting Ghost Map about London's 1854 cholera epidemic.

Finished Promised Land: Penn's Holy Experiment, the Walking Purchase, And the Dispossession of Delawares, 1600-1763 by Steven Craig Harper (hopefully the touchstones are working now).

Harper's work is excellent. He resurrects the Walking Purchase (1737) as a major reason behind the hostility of Delaware and Shawnee Indians in Pennsylvania in 1754 and 1755 at the beginning of the French and Indian War. His work implies also that concepts of ethnicity and civilization in America owe their origins to this event. Peter Silver goes on to expand on the same general idea in Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. I haven't finished Silver's book yet, but I will before too long.

Moving on to C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796-1873 (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series) by Philip Gura for little brain candy before finishing Silver's book.

nbmars, I'm also reading The Ghost Map. What an interesting book. I particularly enjoy the discussion of how the efforts to prevent disease in the 1840s actually contributed to the cholera epidemic in the 1850s.

It makes me think of our current obsession with antibiotics for every illness and even in soap and hand lotion. We may be inadvertently creating a super-resistant bug, much as the flushing of raw sewage into the Thames to clean up the slums created a breeding ground for cholera. Frightening thought.

Just started Boone: A Biography by Robert Morgan. Been sitting in my TBR pile for some time.