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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
eglazier has commented on (18) products
What It Is Like to Go to War
by
Marlantes, Karl
eglazier
, January 19, 2012
This is must reading for all those who think war is heroic. It is especially valuable for those hawks who want us to intrude everywhere without thinking of the consequences. Those who want to send young men into battle and who never have to go themselves ought to see what they are unleashing on the men and on their own world. The writer is a decorated Marine officer who was in armed combat in Vietnam and what happened after coming home over many years to allow him to finally understand what combat does to those who live it and survive.
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Guard of Honor: A Pulitzer Prize Winner
by
James Gould Cozzens
eglazier
, January 15, 2012
This is the epitome of character description while telling an interesting story. It takes place on an Army Air Corps training base in Florida in he early days of WW II, but the most telling part of the story is the interplay between very real people. One knows these characters existed before the story begins, and they will go on with their lives after the end of the book. They are real.
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The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by
Sagan, Carl and Druyan, Ann
eglazier
, October 09, 2011
i read this book when it was first published and have seen our country become more educated and less knowledgeable over the years. for most people science is a mystery, but for those who have gotten college degrees it is to them an open book, which unfortunately they do not know how to read. in the last decade we have witnessed more hysteria and less thought about the real problems that beset us. a case in point is the mass rejection of childhood disease vaccines that have resulted in the almost epidemic rise of some of them in clusters of the well-to-do and supposedly well-educated populations. the number of children's deaths are rising. it must be rather disheartening for parents to see their child die when they know they are responsible for this. we have a whole political party that rejects even the notion of science and they are campaigning on this idea. imagine in a world they inhabit where science is ever present and the fruits of science are keeping them alive, they reject it all.
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Murder Of Promise
by
Robert Andrews
eglazier
, September 04, 2011
if one likes well-written police detective novels and one wants an admixture of politics, then Robert Andrews has the right mix about a detective and a crime taking place in D.C.. This one also mixes in some cutting edge computer technical wizardry as a bonus.
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Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion
by
Christophe Browning
eglazier
, September 03, 2011
I have a somewhat personal view of this description of what ordinary German men could be persuaded to do under circumstances that were not at all threatening nor critical to their safety and security. When I read of some of the murders of Jews that took place and looked at photographs taken by the German police in this battalion, I realized that some of my family members were possibly among those bodies lying in the streets of the small Polish towns that were being made Juden frei. The whole story is laid out from the meticulous records kept by the Germans of all their actions; even to the record of the state railroads who charged the one-way excursion fare to the German government to pack the Jews into box cars and take them to the camps to their death. This is not a pretty story, but one showing how easily ordinary people can be caught up in a political movement and willingly do that which their ethics and religion tells them is wrong. We should not believe that it cannot happen here because it already has in some small way.
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Distant Mirror The Calamitous 14th Century
by
Barbara W Tuchman
eglazier
, September 02, 2011
The 14th century in Europe might seem to be a subject of little interest to us today, but this telling of all that occurred from 1300 to about 1450, centering on one noble family and the terrible results of the Black Death of 1348 to 1350 during which about 1/3rd of the population of the civilized world at that time died makes a real story read in some ways like fiction. This month of September is the 10th anniversary of a great disaster that occurred in the United States, but that was nothing to what happened all during this earlier century to the known civilized world. We can learn how well humanity survives under circumstances of great stress and of almost no technical advances.
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Klondike Fever The Life & Death of the Last Great Gold Rush
by
Pierre Berton
eglazier
, September 02, 2011
The story of the Klondike gold rush of 1896, the last great gold rush of our time. It is not the gold that is interesting but the actions made by those who left home and searched for it and what they did aftre they found it. It is the story of people so caught up in the craze for the riches that the whole range of humanity is displayed for us. We read of bravery, the overcoming of great hardship, the ignorance of what the seekers would find so far north, and the enormous difficulties of getting there. All of the human attributes, including all the base ones, are pictured for us to see. Best of all it is a story with endings that we look forward to as the story unfolds.
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On Killing The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War & Society
by
Dave Grossman
eglazier
, August 28, 2010
i am sure the book is a good study but for one mistake. the canard that most riflemen did not fire their weapons during WWII was generally attributed to gen. s.l.a. marshall and he was wrong. the reviewer that thought this was a good idea would seem to be full of wishful thinking. in combat not using your weapon means not supporting your buddies and would seem to be a death sentence for those depending on your support. war is hell, but those in the middle of it deserve better from their comrades. it is also a way to stay alive.
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This Is How It Starts
by
Grant Ginder
eglazier
, April 13, 2010
if one likes reading about immature people who are constant drunks, this novel is for you. none of the characters here has any redeeming feature. we are treated to a bunch of wealthy, powerful post-teenagers whose power is given them by their brain-dead followers. i am reminded of my being at grad school and watching a whole class of new students striving for their ph.d. who decided to follow an immature ex-frat guy because he was charasmatic. he convinced them during the first year to form a study group he led to study for their qualifying exams. they followed and in september of the second year, they took the exams and all failed, an unheard of event in any graduate class. this novel reminds me of that grouping; a bunch of naive followers following a ner'e do well drunk to defeat and obscurity. best advice, find something much better to read. it cost me $14. at barnes and nobel to learn this.
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Fountainhead
by
Ayn Rand
eglazier
, January 09, 2010
i first read this novel when it was published in 1943 and it captured me completely, but then i was only 14 and i thought as a child. for all its vaunted fame, it probably is one of the most badly written novels i have had the misfortune to wade through. even if one ignores its childish philosophy that cannot stand up to the scrutiny of the mind of the average adult, the novel itself is full of wooden characters doing stupid things and , because of the mind of the author, getting away with them. there is nothing in this novel that could be called realistic, as anyone who has lived and worked even for a decade in the real world of people would know. i guess that the worst thing about the novel is that to any thinking person, it is one big bore.
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Coldest Winter America & the Korean War
by
David Halberstam
eglazier
, January 01, 2010
the true story of the korean war and a detailed description of the personalities of the leaders of both sides, personalities that caused the war to be what it was rather than what heretofore it was thought to be.
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Third Reich at War
by
Richard J Evans
eglazier
, August 15, 2009
This is one of those works that attempts to answer, and does, how a lawful,civilized society with generally deep religious faith could have been turned into a natioal killing machine. the work also describes in some detail who did the killing, how much they did, and how they did it. the lessions are to be well taken, for now, during this political fight over healthcare in the u.s., one can easily see how, by the use of the big lie repeated over and over again, a normally civilized and mostly genteel society can be panicked into doing and saying things that are at best outlandish and working against their own interest and at worst the chance for our society to go down a path from which there would be no return. though the pundits repeat constantly that it could never happen here, one need only listen to the violent hatred spewed by many; plain citizens, radio and tv talking heads, and some of our elected politicians, to understand that it can. we have seen this happen before in our history, with a close example during the 1930s when we had father coughlin spewing hatred, the famous like charles lindbergh and joe kenedy praising the rise of the nazis in germany because they were doing something to rid their country of 'undesireables'. mussolini was praiseworthy because he made the trains run on time, all the while he was clamping down on freedom in italy. our country in some ways is easily led to disaster. i do not believe it will happen now, but it is easy to see the beginnings of such a pathway.
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Coldest Winter America & the Korean War
by
Halberstam, David
eglazier
, July 20, 2008
The only other reviewer complained that this book did not detail the whole of the Korean war. There are plenty of those extant, so many that one can almost have a daily log of what transpired in the war itself. The real value of this book is its detailing of the people involved in the start and conduct of the war; the political scene and that of the high military command. This was a war dominated by a fool at the military leadership who brought a few other incompetents with him such that they caused the needless deaths of thousands of the UN fighting force. Truly the first rule of war is that young men die, but if we accept that at times there is no choice we at least should be spared those lost because the top commander was an egotisitic fool who , though he thought he did because of his long service in Asia never really understood the Chinese. MacArthur never could imagine that the Chinese and Koreans were like all men, able to fight valiantly and ferociously for something in which they believed, whether it be a man, an idea, or a country. His chief commander in the field, Gen. Almond was an out and out racist and so he could only think of the Chinese as 'laundrymen'. Fortunately we had serving underneath these two fools many fine commanders, as Marine General O.P.Smith whose tactics saved the Marines at the Chosin reservoir and Col. Paul Freeman who followed his instincts and saved his 23rd Infantry regiment from having to run and be slaughtered going through the Gauntlet, the Chinese Army ambush of the 8th Army. Halberstam also details the political leaders of both sides, Mao, Kim Il Sung, President Truman, terribly underrated in his time, and all the other players in the U.S.; politicians, columnists, publishers, and members of congress both good and bad. Korea was also my war, though in only a peripheral way. I was a serving USAF officer in a little known army camp , Camp Detrick in Maryland, serving with Army, Navy , Air Force personnel and civilians. My lab contained about 5 civilians, two army enlisted men, an army Lt. and me; all of us doing the same type of work. One of the army enlisted used to complain to me that everyone got paid so much more and we all worked the same type of job. I had to remind him that being here was better than being in Korea.( we met again about 15 years later when we worked together in a company in California) This book, and many others, tells any reader why Korea was bad; even as wars go it was bad. For all those for whom history is just 20 or 30 years ago, this book is a look at some of our history that has been forgotten by most. The majority of people in the U.S. know there was WW II, though they may know little about what it was all about, but very few know of Korea and the honor of the UN in actually fighting for its principles. The U.S. was part of that.
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Bloody Season
by
Loren Estleman
eglazier
, June 28, 2008
Forget all you knew about the Earps and their status as western heros. This is the story about the fight at the O.K. Corral and its aftermath, part fiction, part real. There is an afterword of the eventual fate of the people who took part, one of whom, Wyatt's common-law wife Sadie Marcus died in 1944 and Alvira, Virgil Earp's common-law wife, in 1947. Wyatt lived until 1929. First of course is that the fight did not take place at the O.K. corral, but about 30 yards west at an empty lot next to Fry's boarding house. Though the Earps and Doc Holliday were on one side, they were really not the law nor dogooders, but a rival gang to the Clantons and they went to one skirmish in a gang war. Far from being the stalwart western heros the Earps were just gamblers, business men who owned saloons and one of whom, James the oldest brother, ran whorehouses. They were investors in mines and other income producing properties, all of which they wanted to keep. For this reason they went into the law business so they could work things their own way. It is true the Earps were big men in a day when men over six feet were not common. But they were not big men when it came to ethics. When one reads the story, one recognizes they were ordinary people just like the ones we work with, know, and read about every day, except they lived in a time and a place when death was common by gunfire. Most men were armed, the law was frequently nonexistent, and because life at best was hard, tempers were often short. This was along with that trait that the good people did not often come to these little western towns though the rascals and the psychotic did. Money from the silver mines was being shipped around frequently, stage robbing was common, and in the Tombstone area, Mexico and its cattle were close and easy to rustle. Feuds were common and shooting from ambush or really for no good reason at all did happen. The law when presnt was frequently bought and paid for, as were the Earps. Reading this account is worthwhile for it is not only well done and an interesting story but will remind us, lovers of the written and filmed western, that the fictions are far from reality and that the people who made the west were no different from many of us.
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9 11 The Big Lie
by
Thierry Meyssan
eglazier
, February 02, 2008
books like this always get a big sale because people like to believe there are great conspiracies in this world, though no one ever seems to be able to prove them. the author is a kook writing this book to make money. were any of it correct, there would have been a great hue and cry, but of course it is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. by all means people should read this to understand how far someone is willing to twist unproven things to make a living. we have whole corps of people, especially now in the run up to a national election. they are called spin meisters. truth is not a concern, perception is all.
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War An Intimate History 1941 1945
by
Geoffrey C Ward, Ken Burns
eglazier
, November 08, 2007
dr falconberg's comments were well spoken, but if she wants that story told, tell it herself. the war was far larger than this one subject, as bad as it was, to dr falconberg and all the other unfortunates that were victimized. ken burns' subjects were the american men who fought that war. whatever they may have done, as detailed by her, is also a result of the war, and combat. it turns men bad. it has the same effect on women in combat, as witnessed by the vietnamese who fought. it does wonders for children as witnessed by the child soldiers all over the world. dr falconberg war is bad. forget the bad results to your victims. first get rid of war.
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The Face of Battle
by
John Keegan
eglazier
, June 09, 2007
for those for whom battle is all heroics and bravada, here are three famous ones described as what battle over the past 6 centuries really is. it is what we send our young out to fight and die in, and die they do in large numbers and in unpleasant ways. we do this for many reasons, and for the u.s. in particular, we have done it in the past for the sake of generally worthwhile ideas and ideals. we ask them to sacrifice for the rest of us and for the future. this book is a clear and an insightful description of what battle is really like. though the times change, and the weapons, it is in many ways what our youngster face on the battle field and it is something most all of us forget, never knew, or ignore.
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Boys Crusade The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe 1944 1945
by
Paul Fussell
eglazier
, June 09, 2007
we read about the 3500 soldiers killed in iraq but with little comment about who they might be. this book by one of them who was there in WW II refreshes our memory and notes indirectly that this new war is about a group of soldiers most of whom who are children who have learned how to kill other children and who are dying themselves. this is not an impersonal thing. there are in iraq a large number of boys, and now girls, whose life stopped before they were old enough to even get just the beginning of what life is.
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