Krusty Books Blog

Available here:
1942: The Crux of War, by Jonathan Parshall

According to bookshop dot org, the release date is 6/18/26. I had pre-ordered,
and my copy showed up almost 4 weeks earlier than the release date. And so,
a preview...

I'd pre-ordered because I have a lot of respect for Parshall's work, notably Shattered
Sword (2007, available here: Shattered Sword.

So what am I looking at? 1200+ pages, with a month by month break down of the
war from December 1941 through December 1942. Parshall argues effectively
that the events of this period determined the results of the war.
Knowing I was going to post about this before I could reasonably read it, I picked
a chapter - November 1942. I did this because of my familiarity with certain of
the events of the period - Operation Torch, and the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
The point of Parshall's approach is that also we learn that in this same narrow
period Rommel & Afrika Korps are retreating from their defeat at El Alamein
(late October) at the same time that the Allies are landing on the other side of
North Africa, and that Hitler's obsession with Stalingrad is colliding with a massive
Soviet effort that will break the German Sixth Army completely.
MacArthur's forces are engaged in a hard battle to take Japanese strongholds in New Guinea; the First Marine Division is fully engaged with Japanese forces on Guadalcanal,
and then the US Navy managed to sink two Japanese battleships in a period of 3 days
in brutal night fights in Ironbottom Sound.

Each chapter provides framing material on various important topics; the November
chapter provides a discussion of shipbuilding efforts by both the Axis and the Allies,
important because of the rate at which ships were being sunk at sea, and also
discusses the state of the Battle of the Atlantic in that month, important simply
because that is where most of the merchant ships were being sunk.
Lots of maps, but I'm particularly struck by the monthly timelines, which show in
considerable detail what was going on in each theater on any particular day. I've
never seen that laid out in such detail before.

Looking forward to carving the time out to read this all the way through.

[this book has been out for a while, but I see it's still in print, so I'm dredging up my quick-and-dirty review from years ago. You can get the book here: The Battleship Book]

I have been reading the blog Lawyers, Guss and Money for quite a number of years now. One of their founding writers, Robert Farley, teaches at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University and Kentucky. He also is obsessed by Battleships.
One product of this obsession was a long running series, Sunday Battleship Blogging. This series wound down a while ago, but the material was engaging and it morphed into this book (in somewhat different form).
Farley examines 62 different ships, ranging from the pre-dreadnought HMS Victoria (1885) to the RFS Pyotr Velikiy (1986). He places in their time and discusses their relationship to other battleships, and frames the discussion with chapters on subjects such as the Battle of Jutland and the Naval Treaties of 1921 and 1930 that radically change the nature of the naval arms race that had produced the dreadnoughts of WWI.
The book is extensively illustrated. Unfortunately, the reproduction is erratic and some of the pictures and plans are a bit muddy, as is the cover art. The text, however, is excellent and there is a lot to be learned here.

This book does not appear to be in print, but probably can be found somewhere.

George Brinton McClellan is one of the more challenging figures of the American Civil War. There is much that is murky about his actions and intent, and the situation is not helped by the fact that conventional accounts of his tenure are hampered with much conventional wisdom, quite a bit of which, on close examination, proves to be poorly supported.
Styple's concern is political intrigue relating to McClellan during his time in command of the Army of the Potomac, and in particular the role of McClellan's aide, Colonel Thomas M. Key.
Key was a politically active lawyer in Ohio. He and McClellan met and became friends when McClellan took the position of President of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad and moved to Cincinnati Ohio in 1860. When the war came and McClellan resumed service in the US Army, Key came along as an aide. But Key's interests were primarily political and he exerted heavy influence on McClellan.
Both men were War Democrats. They favored a war to reunite the states, but were opposed to emancipation of slaves. Like many War Democrats serving at high ranks in the army, they had an uneasy relationship with the goals of the Lincoln Administration.
Much of what is written about McClellan and 1862 is problematic, as many authors have engaged in the repetition of conventional wisdom rather than genuine scholarship. This applies both McClellan's generalship, and to his political activities while he commanded the Army of the Potomac.

John Scalzi is a current writer in the SF & Fantasy category, a favorite of many (including myself).
From where I stand he seems to have two different modes. He does a lot of stuff that is often described as Heinlein-esque, which is to say it resembles a lot of the beloved work of Heinlein, with a significant action/adventure characteristic. Examples are books in the Old Man's War continuity and the Collapsing Empire series.
His other mode is comic, with plots that frequently escalate into utter insanity. Notably, Redshirts A Novel with Three Codas won a Hugo Award and I also have a strong attachment to The Android's Dream, an earlier novel.

Scalzi is active online. His blog is Whatever, and he also posts on Bluesky

Some books:

Old Man's War
The Collapsing Empire
Red Shirts
The Android's Dream

Krusty doesn't do business in used books. I love used books, but it's a complicated business that requires some capital.
The shops and vendors are around and I am going to point out one that is not as well known, HGG Books, which happens to be run by one of my partners in the startup I'm at. Check Greg's bookshop out.

Available for pre-order here: Meade and Lee at Bristoe Station

Histories of the American Civil War often pay little attention to one period - 1863 in the east in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg. This is largely due to the fact that there were no major battles between the entirety of the armies of Lee and Meade in this period - but that does not mean that nothing happened.

Most of the time, Lee outmanuvered his opponents, so that he could fight them
from an advantageous position. He failed to do this at Gettysburg, and so was
defeated by the new commander of the Army of the Potomac. George Gordon
Meade was by no means Lee's equal, but he was no idiot and a competent
commander. He and Lee would spend the rest of 1863 in the east trying to
close in on each other, but not quite having the next major battle.

This book is the second in Hunt's trilogy covering the war in the east after
Gettysburg, before Grant was brought east to become General in Chief of
the Federal army. This is a story of manuvering armies, of distrust between
Meade and his superiors (Halleck was General in Chief and of little help at
all), and of frustration all around. Meade wanted firmer instruction, and Halleck
and Lincoln wanted Meade to take more risks on his own initiative. Meade's
apparent distrust of his own instincts and the intelligence he was receiving
led him to show too much caution for Halleck & Lincoln's tastes.

in the first book, Meade and Lee After Gettysburg, we got the story of Meade's
pursuit of Lee through northern Virginia, which lasted until Lee slipped away. This
only lasted until the end of July (Gettysburg having been fought at the beginning
of the month.) At this point, both Lee and Meade detached forces to send west
to support their respective sides in the Chickamauga Campaign.

What followed was a series of cavalry skirmishes, sharp but smaller battles,
Lee would try to bring the Army of the Potomac to battle, but Meade avoided
the traps. The largest battles were between corps (each of the Armies were
devided into several corps.) Despite the lack of another great battle, a great
deal of fighting occurred.

[This is a book which you will find almost impossible to find. I can't provide a link for it. But it's quite an interesting read. I wrote this a number of years ago after attending a Rotary International convention in Hamburg, Germany.]

When you attend a Rotary International Convention, one of the things that is a must do is spending some time in the House of Friendship, a huge hall with booths of all kinds, some devoted to Rotary Service project, some devoted to Rotary Merchandise, some devoted to local exhibitors, and various other things. In the case of the Hamburg Convention of a couple of weeks ago, there was one booth that attracted my attention, which was devoted to a German project to document what happened with the Rotary Clubs of Germany during the Nazi regime.

Rotarians tend to be interested in the history of Rotary, but often that knowledge is a little bit glib and superficial. As a case in point, I had only the barest knowledge of the subject of this book, and what knowledge I had was misleading. One issue is that we tend to view the history of Rotary through the lens of what Rotary is today, and lose sight of the fact that Rotary has not always been precisely what we know and love. In the case of German Rotary Clubs and Nazis, it is good to remember that although Rotary has tended to promote good ethics, the Four Way test did not become a Rotary standard until the 1940s, well after the German Clubs were shut down by the Nazis. It was not a factor in the thinking of German Rotarians struggling to cope with the situation they found themselves.

It's important to be aware of the timelines. Rotary was founded in 1905 in Chicago, and Rotary Clubs would appear in the UK and Ireland in 1911. Rotary would not come to Central Europe until 1925 though and it would be 1927 before the first German Club was chartered. When the Nazis came to power in 1932, Rotary was only 5 years old in Germany.

It would be easy to pretend that Rotarians reacted with horror to the excesses and crimes of the Nazi regime - and while some did, many did not. Rotary Club membership in Germany divided, as many Rotarians bought into the "new Germany". The Nazis were to permit about 5 years of Rotary Club operation before they shut the clubs down altogether, and in those 5 years many members were expelled, in particular any Jewish members. Other "undesireables" were expelled as well. IN 1933, Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann, author of the great German novel _The Magic Mountain_, would be expelled from the Munich Rotary Club of which he was a founding member.

From 1937 on, there were no formal meetings of Rotary Clubs in Germany. Clubs in Austria would shut down in 1938. There were some informal meetings of some groups of former Rotarians under the name 'Circle of Friends'.

With the end of the war there was interest in reviving Rotary Clubs, but RI was very hesitant to charter any clubs while the military occupation was underway and de-Nazification was in progress. When the Federal Republic of Germany was created in 1949, RI finally looked at rechartering clubs in West Germany, and they started to appear in 1950. The Soviets were hostile to Rotary and there were no Rotary Clubs in Soviet controlled Europe. Clubs would reappear after the iron curtain fell.

For many decades, the records to support this research were unavailable. The Nazis collected all the Rotary Club records and stored them in Berlin. The Russians would take the records back to Moscow, and then eventually give them to the governement of the DDR (East Germany). They would not become available to scholars until German reunification. A group of Rotarians and historians have been working through the records to develop and accounting of what happened.

This is an excellent monograph, and I plan to develop a 25 minute presentation suitable for a Rotary Club Meeting based around it. [I did develop that presentation and have given it a few times.]

Available here: McClellan and Union High Command

This is a relatively slim monograph (less than 200 pages) discussing a subject that deserves some real attention.

One of the common problems in Civil War History is the endless repetition of conventional wisdom, assuming that some older sources are correct withouth proper examination. Related to this is the frequent decision by writers to heap abuse on the convenient, cheap and easy targets that had been singled out by writers before them. George McClellan is a general who has certainly been victimized being an easy target. It's not that McClellan is guiltless (he had some very serious issues indeed), but rather that other contributors are allowed to skate because of the convenience of blaming everything on McClellan.

Between the Revolution and 1860, there was ongoing tension about the correct construction of the military for the young republic. As a result, the regular army of the US was kept small, and militia was heavily used. The operating belief was that the militia with their citizenship spirit could over come their lack of formal training. If for some reason a conflict arose requiring a major expansion of the army, the regular army could be spread out to provide the core of a much larger army.

Available here: Death Traps (on backorder as I enter this.)

This is an older book, but still in print in paperback. It's a fairly unique memoir, which addresses something rarely seen in military memoirs - the perspective of the folks who were engaged in recovering and repairing tanks which were damaged or broke down in battle.

I'm going to start out by recommending it. I do this because in the review I'm going to point out some issues and limitations with the book, but i won't be doing that to discourage folks from reading it, but rather to provide a frame of reference for understanding Cooper's views and the limitations associated with those views. The book is a memoir and makes for a good example of how to interpret memoirs, especially those written decades after the events in question.

I need to write this story down somewhere.
First of all, it has nothing to do with The Simpsons or Krusty the Clown.
Back in the mid 90s, I rented space in a steel building owned by the Golden Krust Bakery in Cohoes, NY to work on cars. A big part of this was building a race car for Sports Car Club of America road racing. I named the business "Krusty Motorsports" after the bakery mascot, Krusty the Baker.
So many years later, when I had to name this online bookstore, it was pretty easy to go with Krusty.

If you're waiting for me to review something current, that may be a while. I have a substantial stack of books to read, just like any book lover.
A resource that I find invaluable is Locus Magazine. They publish reviews extensively and their reviewers are very good. I add books to my SF/Fantasy and Literature categories on Krusty Books Bookstore based on their reviews. They also provide their own bookshop.org links, as they too are in the affiliate program. I can't really complain if you buy through them instead of me. In any case, they have some really good reviewers.

Available here: Reading The Man

Robert E. Lee is a difficult figure to come to grips with today. The "real" Lee is hidden behind a mythological figure, the famous "Marble Man", a figure deeply connected to the larger mythology of the Lost Cause.

Douglas Southall Freeman's famous Lee biography from the 1930s is frequently referenced as an impressive piece of research. Many historians and biographers since have held it up as the gold standard. But Freeman was a firm believer in the Lost Cause mythology and as a result, while his research impresses, his conclusions are frequently problematic. Alan Nolan (Lee Considered, 1991) points out a number of cases where Freeman ignores statements in Lee's own writings that are not consistent with Lost Cause interpretations.

In the immediate aftermath of the surrenders of Confederate forces in 1865, a number of Confederate officers and politicians set out to reframe the history of the war, in a way that was much more favorable to the South. When I say immediate, I mean immediate. The most famous of this group, Jubal Early (who had served as a Corp Commander under Lee), went to work on this only weeks after the war ended. Their goal was to portray the South as a victim.

Available here: The Infantry's Armor

The U.S. Armored Divisions of WWII are fairly famous and well documented. But more than half of the tanks in U.S. service were not in armored divisions, and none of the tanks in the Pacific were. These tanks were instead in the independent Armored Battalions, and attached to Infantry units.

There is a standard narrative offered up in many histories about the challenges of infantry-armor coordination early in the war. This narrative goes on to state that by the end of the war, all the problems were gone and and combined arms operations were a finely tuned machine.

The reality is much more complex, and this book gets into all the details. It starts with the light tanks (M2 and M3 models) that were deployed in the Phillippines at the time of Pearl Harbor, These tanks are almost forgotten, but they were the first US tank units to fight in WWII. As was true in most cases during the war, there had been no training for the armor or the infantry on how to cooperate, there was no doctrine, and so they had to try to figure out what they were doing in the worst of all possible circumstances. That they accomplished anything at all is remarkable.

Available here: The Woman Who Smashed Codes

I have a long standing interest in the history of codes and code breaking. One of the notable figures of the first half of the 20th century is William Friedman, a founder of the field of Cryptanalysis. Friedman is particularly noted for the signal accomplishment of the US Army Signals Intelligence Service - in the 1930s, his band of cryptoanalysts succeeded in reverse engineering the Japanese "Purple" machine, which was used for all their diplomatic traffic. And so the US read these message through the entirety of WWII. Less well known but rather important is that the crypto machine that Friedman developed for the army, SIGABA, was never broken (unlike the Enigma, which the Germans were sure was never broken - but it was.)

Friedman's career has come to overshadow a different career, that of his wife, Elisebeth. After WWII, Elisebeth could focus on preserving William's legacy while not spending so much time on her own. Her papers are preserved, but rarely looked at. Fagone is the first biographer to spend the time, and the result is well worth it.

Available here: The Player of Games

I am a comparative latecomer to the novels of Iain M. Banks. I'm now reading them in order of release, and have just finished his third novel, Use of Weapons. Banks fans regard this as possibly the finest work in his series of novels about The Culture, an advanced human civilization which has achieved a sort of Utopia, where the vast majority of the residents have no needs, wants, or work. The civilization is run by powerful AIs referred to as minds.

Utopia is actually a pretty boring subject when you're trying to write a series of novels. Banks addresses this by focusing on the margins - the margins where the Culture interacts with other civilizations in space. These are very dark margins, and the Culture is absolutely ruthless in dealing with otthers in defense of its own interests.

Use of Weapons focuses on a Special Circumstances operative and his controller. Special Circumstances is the hidden hand of the Culture where they want complete deniability when meddling with other nearby civilizations. Think of it as covert ops on steroids. The story is presented as parallel threads from different times in the operatives life - from his youth in a privileged family on a world outside of the Culture's sphere of influence, through a number of operations during his career, up until his apparent death. The line between hero and anti-hero is quite blurred; we are never quite sure if we should like him or be terrified by him. Things in this book are rarely what they seem at first glance.

I don't know if this is Bank's best Culture novel or not; I'm only three books in. But it is excellent.