11. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British

By:  Sarah Lyall
Rated 4.5
Audio Book


Publisher's Description


Sarah Lyall, a reporter for the New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s and soon became known for her amusing and incisive dispatches on her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life. The roller-coaster decade of Tony Blair's New Labor government was an increasingly materialistic time when old-world symbols of aristocratic privilege and stiff-upper-lip sensibility collided with modern consumerism, overwrought emotion, and a new (but still unsuccessful) effort to make the trains run on time. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford's classic Noblesse Oblige, Lyall's book is a brilliantly witty account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic.

12. Omar Nelson Bradley, General at War

By:  Jim DeFelice
Rated 5 Stars
Kindle Book


I was drawn to read this because he was from Moberly, Missouri a small midwestern town where my Grandparents lived in the years before my Grandmother died and where a lot of my relatives still live.  He was a principled man who reflected the values I was raised to believe instead of the "family values" that currently are in vogue.  Kind of comforting.

Book Description

Publication Date: September 12, 2011

In the years since World War II, military historians have focused on two larger-than-life personalities: George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower. But what of Omar Bradley, the American hero who led the forces at D-Day and was the head of the largest body of U.S. soldiers to serve under one field command? Picked by Patton to be his deputy during World War II, Bradley rose to become Patton’s commander. He was known as the “soldier’s general” for his compassion toward his troops, and he eventually became the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as an advisor to several presidents. Yet despite these achievements, Bradley has been largely overlooked by biographers. In his intriguing new book, Omar Bradley, award-winning author Jim DeFelice brings an American hero to life with a comprehensive and compelling biography about one of the most important—and overlooked—generals of World War II.