Charles Ashbacher Reviews

  Review of Lincoln: The Untold Stories , DVD version Five out of five stars Distilled from massive accumulation of memories   It is not widely known that there is a massive amount of data about the life of Abraham Lincoln. After he was assassinated, William Herndon spent over 30 years interviewing over 250 of the people that knew the most about Lincoln. The interviewees range from his closest family members to neighbors to people that interacted with him professionally.   This video is a distillation of that massive compilation, and what emerges is the story of a man that had to overcome great odds. His father considered him to be little more than labor for their farm and they were always only a short step above poverty. His emotionally distant father would rent Abraham to labor for neighbors, and he was forced to turn all earnings over to his father. It is stated that this was the germ of his opposition to slavery, where people worked hard and received nothing...

  Review of The Warren Commission Report: A Graphic Investigation Into the Kennedy Assassination, by Dan Mishkin et. al. ISBN 9781419712302 Five out of five stars The evidence remains unclear   When Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, he robbed the country of what it needed, a trial of Oswald where the evidence was put forward and examined in a court of law. As is clear in this book, while there is strong evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did in fact kill President Kennedy, there is real doubt that it would have been definitive.   Conspiracy theories still abound concerning the assassination of President Kennedy and from this book it is easy to see why. Eyewitness testimony is all over the place concerning the immediate events, with one witness contradicting what another stated over the same scene. Even though some of the facts seem to contradict each other, there remains a debate as to how many bullets were fired at Kennedy. There are also questions as t...

  Review of National Geographic: The Search for Kennedy’s PT 109 , DVD version Five out of five stars Based on an event that made a president   Given his chronic back problems, John F. Kennedy could have avoided combat in World War II. However, he pleaded with his very influential father to find a doctor willing to certify him healthy enough to serve in a combat role. After his basic officer training, Kennedy was given command of a patrol-torpedo (PT) boat with the designation PT109.   Their assignment was to patrol the area that was known as the “Tokyo Express,” where fast convoys of Japanese ships traveled down to the Solomon Islands at night to reinforce and resupply the Japanese garrison there. One night, a Japanese destroyer collided with PT 109, cutting it into pieces, killing some of the crew and sinking it.   Left for dead, the crew of the PT 109 had to fend for themselves. Swimming to an island, they managed to survive until they encountered some...

  Review of The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War, by Fred Anderson ISBN 0143038044 Five out of five stars A war that paved the way for war   The war that is referred to as the French and Indian War in the United States was fundamentally a classic great power battle between Britain and France. With British allies on the European continent, battles taking place in North America, the Caribbean and Asia, it was a global conflict. Outside of the United States, it is commonly referred to as the Seven Years War. Action on the North American continent was only a part of the struggle yet is generally considered by Americans to be distinct from the other action.   As the American name implies, there were three fundamental belligerents in the war in North America. The British crown forces of the British military and their American auxiliaries, the Native American tribes and the French forces and their American auxiliaries. The Native Ame...

  Review of Images of Rail: The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Maryland , by David Shackelford, ISBN 9781467121422 Five out of five stars Pictorial history of one of the first U. S. railroads   The Baltimore & Ohio railroad, commonly abbreviated B & O, was the first railroad to offer passenger service. It was formed when a group of businesspeople in Baltimore decided that a railroad starting in Baltimore and going all the way to Ohio would be an economic boom to the Baltimore area. They started small when rail service started in 1830 there were only 13 miles of track. Even that was challenging, for there were many geographical challenges in going west from Baltimore.   Like most other major infrastructure projects, as the railroad moved westward, it ignited an economic boom along the entire length of its passage. The B & O eventually directly employed thousands of people with many thousands of others being employed in the businesses that grew up ar...

  Review of Pan-Judah Volume Two , edited by Thomas Dalton, ISBN 9781737446163 Three out of five stars One star for content, three for history In Germany in the 1920s until 1945, the German newspaper called “Der Sturmer” was a National Socialist bastion with emphasis on vile propaganda against Jews. The prime cartoonist was a man named Philipp “Fips” Rupprect and he was obviously a very talented artist. Unfortunately, the primary topic of those cartoons was extremely harsh depictions of Jews. They are held responsible for all the ills of the world. This book is a collection of Rupprecht’s work.   The text that accompanies the images is very laudatory of the National Socialist position, hailing the party as the savior of Germany. This continued right up to the point where Germany surrendered to the Allies and was in ruins.   While the content is disgusting, it is important to read this book for the historical perspective. In this book, the long existing and oft...

  Review of Yankees 1936-39, Baseball’s Greatest Dynasty: Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and the Birth of a New Era , by Stanley Cohen, ISBN 9781510720633 Five out of five stars The most powerful dynasty in baseball history   Arguments as to which major league baseball team was the greatest of all time continue. Yankee teams are always in the conversation, the general consensus is that the 1927 Yankees was the best team of all time. The Big Red Machine of the mid-seventies is also often mentioned. However, when the conversation goes to the greatest multi-year dynasty of all time, it is almost impossible to end up anywhere but the Yankees of 1936-39. They won four straight American League pennants by an average of nearly 15 games over the second place team and their record in the games of the World Series over that span was 16-3. In other words, they lost an average of less than one game per series. This book is a year-by-year chronicle of those four years.   In 1936, ...

  Review of The Rape of Nanking , by Iris Chang, ISBN 0140277447 Five out of five stars History that must not be ignored   Although no one doubted that the Holocaust in Europe took place after the end of World War II due to the extensive documentation, recently there has been a small, but determined effort to deny that it took place. So far, that effort has been minor with little real altering of how it appears in history.   There was another event that could be described by the term Holocaust, and it took place in China. In December of 1937, the Japanese army entered the Chinese capital city of Nanking. For approximately six weeks, the Japanese engaged in a brutal exercise where Chinese soldiers that had been captured were systematically executed, women were gang raped, sometimes to death and civilians were killed in some of the most brutal ways. Japanese soldiers held contests to see who could kill 100 Chinese in the shortest period of time. Estimates of the n...

  Review of 50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know , by Joanne Baker, ISBN 9781847241481 Five out of five stars Good distillation of complex topics   Some of the main ideas of modern physics are extremely counterintuitive. Regarding quantum mechanics, the Nobel Laurette physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “You don’t really understand it, you just get used to it.” The primary reason that Albert Einstein did not receive a Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity is that not enough people understood it at the time.   The physics topics covered in this book are generally the more advanced ones that have wide applicability. All of the truly revolutionary ideas such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Pauli’s exclusion principle, Olbers’ paradox, Fermi paradox, Rutherford’s atom, string theory and Schrodinger’s cat are all given a four-page description.   Even though the topics are often extremely difficult to understand, the author does an excellent ...

  Review of Ding’s Half Century , by J. N. Darling Five out of five stars Great social and political commentary   The best political cartoonists can wield great power in propping up and taking down mighty people. In a single drawing with only a few words of commentary, they can expose malfeasance, make sharp social and political satire and move the masses. They can elicit feelings from anger to relief to laughter.   J. N. Darling, who signed his work as “Ding,” was one of the best over the fifty years his daily cartoons were published in Iowa papers and also syndicated around the United States. This book is an edited collection of some of his best cartoons and the subject matter covers everything from the current international political scene to politics in the United States to basic farm prices. Darling was also an ardent conservationist, he was sometimes called, “the best friend a duck ever had.”   The cartoons in this collection are but a sampling of h...

  Review of Faster , by James Gleick ISBN 0679408371 Five out of five stars Proof that things are accelerating   Nearly everyone talks about how things in life are moving faster and in this book, Gleick gives many examples that it is not an illusion. One of the best examples is when an air traffic controller instructs a pilot to perform a maneuver in a minute. When it is not done quickly, he raises his voice and says, “I meant a New York minute, not a hillbilly minute!”   One of the main things that have been sped up is the amount of information that is packed into videos. The film industry is constantly pushing the envelope to determine the high-speed limits of our perception. Although I am a lifelong fan of comic books, I find it very difficult to watch the latest superhero movies as I become overwhelmed with the imagery content.   I generally watch the network news in the evening, and I have noticed how the remote correspondents talk much faster than t...

  Review of Perry Mason Solves the Case of the Baited Hook , by Erle Stanley Gardner Four out of five stars No courtroom climax in this one   Given that the Perry Mason novels authored by Erle Stanley Gardner follow a basic formula, any evaluation of a specific book must be done within that context. Based on that premise, this book follows it well, yet deviates in significant and effective ways. In this book, Mason never makes an appearance in a courtroom, the climactic event takes place in his office where he faces Sergeant Holcomb. Determined to destroy Mason, Holcomb must be forced to admit the truth regarding the murderer(s).   The opening is rather unique. A rich and powerful man enters the law offices of Perry Mason with a woman that is wearing an effective disguise. After some preliminary banter, a large denomination bill is torn into two pieces with Mason given one. The deal is that Mason will know his client based on the presentation of the other sectio...