The Final Chapter - U.S. Army vs Japan

McManus, John C.  To the End of the Earth: The U.S. Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945.  

         New York: Caliber, 2023.  ISBN: 9780593186886

 

In January 1945, no one knew what would happen.  There was no notion that the war would finally be over.  Instead there was a resolve to continue the grind of the war until victory could be obtained.  In To the End of the Earth, John McManus finishes the tale of the U.S. Army in the Pacific that he started in Fire and Fortitude.  

 

McManus opens with General McArthur's invasion  Luzon in the Philippines and the march across the island to liberate Manila and the POWs on the island while keeping Japanese forces pinned in the mountains.  Next up is changes in China with General Wedemeyer replacing General Stilwell and the completion of the Burma Road that provided a narrow land route for supplies to reach China from India.  The third major front was Okinawa where the U.S. Army and Marines faced a determined enemy who had a plan to bleed American forces as much as they possibly could.  The final act has McManus taking a last look at American POWs located in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere as Truman takes over and decides to use weapons rather than blood to end the war.  McManus closes the book by following some of the well-known names into their lives after the end of the war. 

In To the End of the Earth, John McManus brings his trilogy to a fitting close.  Throughout these three books, McManus provides the broad scope of the battles while using individual stories to highlight often overlooked details.  All too often, the U.S. Marines get the glory when talking about World War II in the Pacific.  But the Marines could never have succeeded without the help of the U.S. Army.  In this trilogy, the U.S. Army gets its due!

Chance and Your Doctor

Jena, Anupam B., and Christopher Worsham.  Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That

        Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health.  New York: Doubleday, 2023.

        ISBN: 978-0-385-54881-6

 

How much does chance, luck, or other random factors influence your medical care?  Does it matter what doctor you get when you visit the ER or your Family Medicine provider?  Does having a marathon in town put you at risk?  These and many other questions are what Dr. Jena and Dr. Worsham seek to discover in Random Acts of Medicine.

 

Jena and Worsham start a discussion on chance and random events in relation to our lives.  This discussion segues into them defining a concept of natural experiments which they will use in the later chapters.  The first natural experiment they discuss involves birthdays, and flu shots (and, yes, it does matter when your kid is born)   The next experiment involves Tom Brady, birth months, sports, and  ADHD diagnosis - actually several experiments regarding relative age effect.  Next, the duo asked the question, "Are marathons hazardous to your health?"  And the answer is maybe, but not necessarily why you might think they are.  Semi-related to the marathon study, is the examination of what role medical conferences may have on your health - specifically when many doctors are out of town.  You might actually get better care, or live longer!  Another study looked at all the data being gathered and whether this information actually helps or hinders your medical care. They also studied the role of left-digit bias in regard to medical situations (a patient's age being one of possible bias).  In the next to last chapter, they worked on how to define what a "good" doctor was.  The final chapter looked at politics at the bedside, i.e. does the political persuasion of your doctor influence the advice and care he or she gives to their patients?  

 

In Random Acts of Medicine, Jena and Worsham use naturally occurring experiments to delve into the multiple ways that chance and luck play in healthcare.  If you have an interest in these topics, or are fans of Freakencomics podcasts/books, you will want to read this title! 
 

The Land of Secret Societies!

Dickey, Colin.  Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American 

         Democracy.  New York: Viking, 2023.  ISBN: 9780593299456 

Secret societies - the Illuminati, the Masons, the Lizard People, "slaveocracy," and the John Birch Society are all part of the American Historical landscape.  But so are the Ku Klux Klan, witches, slave revolts, the Molly Maguires, Haymarket anarchists, the Satanic ritual scare, and the recovered memory movement.  Each of these and others were involved in "moral panics" that swept across America.  In Under the Eye of Power, Colin Dickey walks the reader through the conspiratorial-laden underbelly of America.  

Colin Dicky begins his meanderings with the Freemasons and its offshoot - the Illuminati in the section As Above, So Below.  He spends four chapters dealing with how the Freemasons developed, came to America, how its symbols are everywhere, yet its rituals are secret, so secret that some Masons have murdered a former member to halt their publication.  Next stop - Deep-Laid Schemes - has six chapters filled with slave revolts, slave conspiracies, Underground railroads, ant-Catholicism, witchcraft trials in Salem and elsewhere, and in Texas, Abolitionist arsonists!  In National Indigestion, Dickey has five chapters with anti-immigrationists, anarchists, bankers, Wall Street, antisemitism, and the (In)Visible Empire.  In Wonders of the Invisible World, Dickey, in four chapters, explores subliminal messaging, the CIA and "truth drugs" plus LSD, ant-fluoridation societies (which includes anti-Communist groups such as the John Birch Society), and the FBI COINTELPRO on anti-war and leftist groups.  Finally, Dickey, with six chapters in Behind the Hieroglyphic Streets, ventures into cultural wars, modern conspiracy theories, Satanic rituals, recovered memories, Q-Anon, the Lizard People, ritual sacrifices, and Citizen Commissions.

 

Under the Eye of Power is wonderful for readers interested in American history with all the warts and stains included or for the reader who longs for a primer on all the ways secret societies and conspiracies have played a role in U.S. history.  

Possible Histories?

Johnson, Hal.  Impossible Histories: The Soviet Republic of Alaska, the United States of Hudsonia, 

        President Charlemagne, and Other Pivotal Moments of History That Never Happened.  New

       York: Odd  Dot, 2023.  ISBN: 97812250809674

Alternate histories (AH) are interesting.  The premise of all AH is that something or some moment happened differently than we know happened.  From that premise has grown a whole genre of SFF tales postulating what would have happened if Caesar had not been assassinated or if Columbus had not gotten his ships or if the black plague had not wiped out Europe.  Related to that genre is scholars and historians speculating what might have happened if such and such even was changed based on the choices available at that time.  In Impossible Histories, Hal Johnson takes the reader on a series of What Ifs through a number of eras in history.

Hal Johnson opens with a philosophical prelude (What does it mean for something not to have happened?) and follows that with 20 What Ifs and ends with s philosophical postlude (How do you make things that did not happen happen?).  In each of those 20 What Ifs, Johnson lays out what actually happened  and they brings out the change and how that change would have reshaped the world.  For example #2 Vikings in North America: What if Leif Erikson had Tarried in Vinland - Johnson discusses why Erikson ends up in Greenland and then Vinland and provides a brief history of what happened in our world.  Then he postulates what the outcome would be if the Vikings had stayed longer, brought horses and their diseases with them?  Would the Spanish faced armored horseman when they came later?  The What Ifs Johnson looks into cover war (World War I, World War II, World War III, Vietnam War), ancient history (Socrates dies, Julian the Apostate, 1st and 3rd Crusade, Rome and the dangers of bathing!, and Ethiopia vs Yemen), individuals (William Morgan and Freemasonry; Sigmund Freud reading Sophocles; Vice President Henry Wallace; Samuel Taylor Coleridge in America; Harriet Beecher Stowe vs Aaron Burr; and Seward assassinated), and odds & ends (British Navy and fresh fruit).   

Hal Johnson provides very readable Wat If scenarios that the reader can easily follow with sources that back up his historical renderings.  Some of the What Ifs are more plausible than others, but all make for interesting reading. 

North versus South in England!

Rose, Alexander.  The Lion and the Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a 

        Confederate Navy.  New York: Mariner Books, 2022.  ISBN: 9780358393252

 

The American Civil War is filled with stories.  There are battles, there are personalities, and then there are the less well-known tales.  These tales tend to be small stories, but not always and Alexander Rose is providing one of those tales in The Lion and the Fox.  Thomas Dudley, a Union  consul, was trying to catch and/or thwart James Bulloch, a Confederate agent, in Liverpool England.  Their struggle in England helped shape the conflict in America. 
 

Captain James Bulloch left the service of the New York and Alabama Steam Ship Company in April 1861 to become an agent of the Confederate States of America.  His job - hire and/or have built blockade runners, commerce raiders and warships in Liverpool using smuggled funds, subterfuge and the promise of cotton.  He enlisted several shipbuilders in Liverpool in his endeavors and skirted the British neutrality act by arming the ships after they left English waters.  

Thomas Dudley arrived in Liverpool as American consul on 19 November 1861 with his family after turning down the job as ambassador to Japan.  When he accepted the job, he did not realize the massive job ahead in trying to curb Confederate influence peddling and shipbuilding activity.  It took him time to realize how the Confederate side has enlisted folks in blockade running as a lucrative business that then financed the building of commerce raiders.  But once he realized the scope of the job, Dudley was relentless in getting agents to spy on shipbuilding, bring lawsuits, and ultimately thwart Bulloch's scheme to build ironclad dreadnoughts that would break the Union blockade once and for all.

Alexander Rose in The Lion and the Fox has written an exciting tale of intrigue, lawsuits, espionage, and diplomacy that shaped the war in America involving lesser known figures of American history.  Then he adds an interesting twist at the end the shows how entwined Americans are with Civil War history.  Read The Lion and the Fox to be entertained and enlightened!

The Women Who Built the CIA

Holt, Nathalia.  Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage.   

       New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2022.  ISBN: 9780593328484  

How much do you know about the early years of the Central Inelegance Agency?  How much have you read about its predecessors - the  Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG)?   If the answer to either question is not much, Wise Gals will help fill in gaps in your knowledge.

 

Nathalia Holt in Wise Gals opens with a coterie of women - Addy Hawkins, Liz Sudmeier, Mary Hutchison, Jane Burrell, and Eloise Page -  working with others on the Petticoat Commission in November 1953.  This commission was compiling facts and data regarding the inequities in job titles and especially pay between women and men at the CIA.  After this opening, Wise Gals digs into a changing cast of women who were initially part of the OSS during World War II and stayed on to deal with the new reality of the developing Cold War.  There were double agents who they need to bring in, new contacts to develop, and leads to follow.  Holt divided the book into five sections subdivided into chapters.  Each chapter is titled with an operation name, date, and then the name of the "wise gal" who is the main focus of the chapter.    Operations ranged from 1940's Ukrainian dissidents to Iraq Revolution in 1950's to Sputnik to the specs for MIG-19 to U-2/Gary Powers fiasco to the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1960's.  

 

The women Holt writes about in Wise Gals have all died so their stories can be told while those "wise gals" still surviving will get their time to shine when they are gone.  It is amazing who is known from the CIA versus who actually did the work of making the CIA as functional as it is.  Read Wise Gals and celebrate their triumphs and mourn their losses!

 

Bond does Science?

Harkup, Kathryn.  Superspy Science: Science, Death, and Tech in the World of James Bond.  

         London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2022.  ISBN: 978147298226

How many James Bond movies have you watched?  How many have you obsessed over, digging into the nuts and bolts of the action and the villains?  More than you want to admit?  Well join Kathryn Harkup on a wander through the 25 James Bond movies produced by Eon Productions as she looks at what is actually real in the world of James Bond.

In the Prologue, Harkup sets the stage for how the James Bond movie franchise differs from other spy/thriller series.  Over the next 25 chapters graced with the titles of the Bond movies in chronological order, Harkup delves into various aspects of the Bond universe.  Topics covered range from the opening gun barrel sequence, Rosa Klebb's shoe, lasers as weapons, the  care and feeding of volcano lairs and henchmen, how the crocodile run was set up, space stations, parachuting from the edge of space, electrocution via various devices, drugs, poisons, exotic weapons, nanobots, exploding vehicles, and Bond's backstory.  Of course there is a bibliography to back up the claims made in the book and provide more sources for the Bond enthusiast to explore.

So if you are a lover of Bond movies, you are likely to enjoy perusing the pages of this tome.  Just remember, as Harkup repeats several times in regard to various situations, "Please, do not try this at home!"  Rather, enjoy it on the screen!