Charles Ashbacher Reviews

  Review of Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters , by Fia Winters Jordan, ISBN 9781588384836 Four out of five stars Memories, not memoirs   The word “memories” rather than memoirs in the title is accurate. The book is centered around the experiences of Louise Lomax, who served in the U. S. Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. However, it is not based on any conversations between Lomax and the author, her daughter. Lomax never spoke about her war experiences, and it was only when Lomax went to a nursing facility that the author discovered her mother’s Tuskegee Army Flying School scrapbook and was able to learn the events depicted in this book. Despite their wearing the uniform of the United States Army and being well trained in their fields, the black nurses were discriminated against like the airmen were. Their base was in the heart of Alabama and to the discriminatory white people, only the color of their skin mattered.   Being wr...

  Review of MacArthur in Korea: The Naked Emperor , by Robert Smith, ISBN 0671240625 Five out of five stars El Supremo is truly laid bare   This book truly lays out Douglas MacArthur as the arrogant, dramatic incompetent that he was. No less a soldier/politician than Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “I studied dramatics under Douglas MacArthur for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.” Eisenhower served under MacArthur both times.   Even though it was clear well before Pearl Harbor that the Japanese had their sights on the Philippines, MacArthur did little to nothing to prepare for the invasion. In September 1940, the Japanese took control of French Indochina, they already had massive forces in China and control of the island of Formosa. A simple look at a map would make it clear that the American controlled Philippines would pose a clear danger to these holdings. In fact, there was a consensus in the American military that the most likely ...

  Review of Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, by Gerard Jones, ISBN 0465036562 Five out of five stars Fascinating history of the comic book   To many, the comic book was born in June 1938 with the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1. In some sense it is true, for it was the first appearance of a genuine superhero, although comics were published before 1938. In any case, it is the most valuable comic in the world, in 2014 a copy was sold for over three million dollars.   The people that created the modern comic book in the 1930s were in many ways just trying to find a way to earn a living during the Depression. Young men in particular whose only real skills were drawing were recruited to work at was even then starvation wages. The history of the early years is amazing, some of the major players in building up the circulation were part of organized crime groups, therefore the use of the term “gangsters” in the title ...

  Review of The Anglo-Boer War: Why Was It Fought? Who Was Responsible?, edited by Theodore Caldwell Four out of five stars A colonial war fought between Europeans   The bulk of the original Europeans that settled in what became South Africa were of Dutch and French Huguenot extraction. They did very well, working the land and expanding their influence. When the Netherlands came under the control of revolutionary France, the British invaded and took control of the original Dutch colony in 1795. During the next several decades, there was continued unrest and occasional conflict between the Dutch and British.   Starting in 1835, groups of the people of Dutch extraction, called Trekboers, moved northward into the African interior in order to avoid British control. Differences in everything from their views of religion, slavery and social structure led to constant friction between the Boers and the British. These problems reached a point of no return when it became...

  Review of The U-boat Century: German Submarine Warfare 1906-2006 , by Jak Mallmann Showell, ISBN 9781861762412 Five out of five stars Reading generates a lot of what-ifs?   It has been reported many times that the German weapon most feared by Winston Churchill was the U-boat or submarine. Yet, it was a weapon that was surprisingly unappreciated by the Nazi leadership. Despite the success of the German U-boat fleet in its’ fight against the British navy in World War I, there was a surprisingly low number of operational U-boats in the German fleet when World War II started in Europe.   In September 1939, when the war started, Germany had only 46 operational U-boats, yet they contributed an enormous amount to the German war effort. This is contrasted with the enormous amount of resources that went into building the battleship “Bismark.” It is not unreasonable to argue that had all of those resources been channeled into the production of U-boats at that time, Germ...

  Review of The Swazi: A South African Kingdom , by Hilda Kuper, ISBN 0030426154 Four out of five stars Good primer on a small independent state   Swaziland or the land of the Swazi tribal group is a small independent state within the larger and more prosperous South Africa. This book was published in 1963, when the racial segregation known as apartheid was the law in South Africa. This created an unusual combination of tension with necessity for the Swazi people in their dealings with South Africa. They were opposed to the apartheid system yet were forced to economically engage with South Africa.   The history of the Swazi people predates the European colonization of southern Africa, so their history includes the encroachment of the European civilization upon the Swazi culture. Like all other locations in the world where the Europeans colonized the land, there were strains that were the seemingly inevitable conflicts between European cultural and economic mores...

  Review of Winters’ Tales: Stories and Observations for the Unusual , by Jonathan Winters, ISBN 0394564243 Four out of five stars Comic genius in short stories   Like the best comics, Jonathan Winters moves to a different and unusual beat. He can take a routine fact or action of life and turn it into comedy material. This book is a collection of short vignettes, most are less than two pages, with a humorous conclusion. In most cases, the story takes an unusual turn at the end.   For example, the story “The Wedding” is for all appearances a fancy wedding where the bride and her maidens in attendance are beautiful. Yet, at the end it turns out that it is simply being acted out as a scene from a movie. The story “The Blue Hill Massacre” opens as if it is the aftermath of a titanic battle between American and German armies. However, at the end the battle was carried out between two sets of toy army men.   There was no story that had me laughing. They are all...

  Review of Digger Phelps’ Tales From the Notre Dame Hardwood , by Digger Phelps and Tim Bourret ISBN 1582618275 Five out of five stars Disjointed history of Phelps at Notre Dame   Notre Dame was long known as an NCAA football powerhouse and an also-ran in basketball, that began to change in 1971. That was when Richard “Digger” Phelps was named the head basketball coach. What followed was twenty years of being a force in college basketball, including some dramatic wins over the mighty UCLA Bruins under coach John Wooden. This book is a temporally scattered recollection of the main games, people and events of those twenty years.     The book is constructed of a series of short, largely independent segments with a title followed by an average of a page and a half of text. There are broad-based chapters where the segments within the chapter are related. For example, the first chapter is, “Coming to Notre Dame,” and it of course deals with the background of how...

  Review of Notre Dame’s Greatest Coaches: Rockne, Leahy, Parseghian, Holtz , by Moose Krause and Stephen Singular, ISBN 0671867016 Five out of five stars As much about Krause as the coaches   There is no question that the football tradition at Notre Dame is unrivaled. The four football coaches listed in the title are legends and have some of the best winning percentages in the history of the sport. During the times these coaches were at Notre Dame, Edward “Moose” Krause was as well. Krause was a three -time All-American while playing under Rockne and is Notre Dame’s only two-sport Hall of Famer. He also coached under Leahy, hired Parseghian and was a close advisor to Holtz. Krause served as the Notre Dame Athletic Director for thirty-two years. He became known as “Mr. Notre Dame.”   This book is a sequence of Krause’s recollections of the years these four coaches were active at Notre Dame. There were some other coaches in this time frame, but they were largely ...