Charles Ashbacher Reviews

  Review of Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case , by Chris Rowe, ISBN 0803728042 Five out of five stars The murder of a young black that changed things   Over the years of segregation in the southern states, there were many brutal murders of black people at the hands of whites. The goal of course was that of terror. By maintaining a state of fear in blacks and any whites that showed sympathy for their plight, the forces of segregation were able to maintain their oppressive system. While the murder of Emmett Till was no more brutal than many other killings of blacks, it had a positive effect for change.   Till was raised in Chicago and was fourteen years old when he traveled to Mississippi to stay with relatives in the summer of 1955. Till was unfamiliar with the extremely repressive culture of no contact between black men and white women in the south, where even a glance at a white woman by a black man was considered an insult punish...

  Review of How To Lose WWII: Bad Mistakes of the Good War , edited by Bill Fawcett, ISBN 9780061807312 Four out of five stars Failures of leadership in a populist tone   Although World War II was of course global, the stories in this collection are restricted to the European theater. They are written in a populist tone and describe specific failures of the leadership of both sides. Sometimes the people of failure are the political leaders and other times it is the military that blundered. While the failures of Adolph Hitler are the background of many popular and academic histories of WWII, it was pleasing to see some of the blunders of Winston Churchill included as well. The stories are by multiple authors.   The story I am referring to is “Sacrificing Africa and Greece,” by Douglas Niles. In it, he makes a convincing case that if British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had not insisted on defending Greece, the British forces that were on the verge of defeatin...

  Review of Riders on the Storm, A Sam McCain Mystery , by Ed Gorman, ISBN 9781605986258 Five out of five stars Very context appropriate murder mystery   While the book was written in 2014, the historical context is 1971 in Black River Falls, a small town in Iowa. The Vietnam war is still very active and several men from the town have been killed in the war and several others came back missing body parts and part of their mental stability. The main character is Sam McCain, who was drafted, but a severe auto accident in boot camp kept him from participating in combat. He now works as a lawyer and part-time private investigator and tries to keep his life in order.   Some of his boyhood friends are among those disabled from the war and the main character in that group is a man named Will Cullen that is still haunted by his memory of gunning down an innocent Vietnamese girl. When Cullen joins a veteran’s group against the war, one of the veterans that is very pro-wa...

  Review of James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles , by Abigail Foerstner, ISBN 9780877459996 Five out of five stars Humble and great are both understatements.   For approximately a year in the early 1990’s, I worked as a programmer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa. During that time, I had a few brief encounters with Dr. Van Allen and he was as nice and humble as he is depicted in this book. Even though he had no idea who I was, he would smile at me when I said, “Hello Dr. Van Allen” and give a polite hello in response.   That aside, as is stated in this book, his scientific achievements are off the charts.   Some of the most endearing aspects are how the early scientific packages were literally built from ad hoc parts. The local hardware stores were familiar with grad students from the physics department popping in looking for off-the-shelf hardware that they needed immediately as they constructed machines that w...

  Review of Jupiter , by Ben Bova, ISBN 0312872178 Five out of five stars Plausible human exploration of Jupiter There are many extreme planetary environments in the solar system, it is difficult to imagine humans entering and surviving in them. That is not the case for Ben Bova. Using the latest scientific data about a planet, he manages to develop a plausible mechanism whereby humans can survive for at least short periods of time in the harshest of environments.   In the planetary part of the solar system, there is no harsher environment than the atmosphere of Jupiter. There are wild variations of temperature, extremely violent storms and extreme atmospheric pressures found nowhere else. Using a plausible liquid that humans could breath, feeding tubes attached to veins of the neck and electronic interfaces from humans to the ship, an expedition into the Jovian atmosphere is developed. Bova has done his homework, using the latest data regarding the environment of Ju...

  Review of Donner Dinner Party , by Nathan Hale, ISBN 9781419708565 Four out of five stars Horrible title, good historical rendition   Given that the Donner Party was trapped in the snow on their journey to the west coast and resorted to cannibalism to survive, the title of the book is appalling. Yet, the story is rendered in a historically accurate manner. The original members of the group left Springfield, Illinois with a destination of the area of California near San Francisco. They started on their journey in April of 1846 with high expectations, a large team of oxen and what they thought were more than enough provisions for the journey.   Like many of the people that executed their dreams to go to the west coast, the people of the Donner party underestimated the difficulty of the journey. Unfamiliar with deserts and mountainous terrain, they did not appreciate how hard it was to traverse areas of what was still largely wilderness.   Their fatal mist...

  Review of The Battle of Koniggratz , by Gordon Craig Five out of five stars History changing battle is an understatement. July 3, 1866 was a day when the course of European history changed. On that day, Prussian forces attacked the Austrians at the city of Konnigratz in what is now the Czech Republic. It was a titanic battle, involving nearly a half million troops. At the end of the day, the Austrians were defeated and with that defeat it became certain that Germany would be unified under the leadership of Prussia. A great deal of historical analysis has been created as a consequence of the unification under the House of Hohenzollern.   Craig does an excellent job in setting the background for the battle as well as how it was carried out. He includes several diagrams of the movement of the various forces and describes the action down to the unit level, including the commanders. It is clear from the explanation that while the end result was a complete defeat of the ...

  Review of The Blockade-Runners: True Tales of Running the Yankee Blockade of the Confederate Coast, by Dave Horner Four out of five stars Interesting, but not all about the war   In retrospect, it is amazing that the Confederacy held out against the Union forces for slightly over four years. The Confederate forces were generally outnumbered two-to-one in overall numbers, although there were times when they were able to achieve local superiority. The Confederacy was also way behind the Union in manufacturing capability as well as having a significant rail network. The Confederacy had almost no capability of making weapons of war as well as the manufacturing of the necessary support materials.   One of the primary reasons why the Confederacy was able to survive as long as it did was due to the skill and daring of the blockade runners. These ships took loads of cotton from the Confederate ports to “neutral” ports in the Caribbean or even to England where they wo...