11. The Whistling Season

By:  Ivan Doig
Rated:  4 Stars
Audio Book

I guess I need to remind myself more often that I don't like Westerns because I really enjoyed this book.  It's a coming of age/Little House on the Prairie/My Antonia kind of book with a little twist at the end.  It's also a peek into rural life in Montana 100 years ago and a nostalgic look back at the one room school houses of the time.

My one mild complaint is that while Doig does an excellent job of describing time and place his attempt at adding a couple rascals into the story came off as far fetched.  Still it is a book of fiction after all and while I rolled my eyes a little I still enjoyed the book.

Publisher's Summary

When a widowed rancher hires a housekeeper to help with his three young sons, he finds her to be cheerful and competent. Yet she is concealing a colorful and infamous past. Filled with humor and hardship, this novel sings with what the author calls "a poetry of the vernacular".

3. A Higher Call

An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II

By:  Adam Makos & Adam Alexander

Rated: 5 Stars

Who knew that the first book I read in 2013 was going to be my top book for the year.  I say that because it's hard to imagine how I could like any book more than I liked this one.

I have read many books about WW2 but this is the first one that tells what the war in the air was like from a German point of view. Beautifully written, it simply tells the reader exactly how it was.  This is an important book for anyone interested in the history of this era.

Book Description:

Publication Date: December 12, 2012

Four days before Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly, a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bomber’s tail—a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber in the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy imagination and later be called the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.

This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that day—the American—2nd Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17—and the German—2nd Lieutenant Franz Stigler, a former airline pilot from Bavaria who sought to avoid fighting in World War II.

A Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franz’s harrowing missions. Charlie would face takeoffs in English fog over the flaming wreckage of his buddies’ planes, flak bursts so close they would light his cockpit, and packs of enemy fighters that would circle his plane like sharks. Franz would face sandstorms in the desert, a crash alone at sea, and the spectacle of 1,000 bombers each with eleven guns, waiting for his attack.

Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen skies at one another. What happened between them, the American 8th Air Force would later classify as “top secret.” It was an act that Franz could never mention or else face a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search for one another, a last mission that could change their lives forever.

22. Singled Out

How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After The First World War

By:  Virginia Nicholson
Rated:  In Progress
Format:  Paperback


I am still reading this book and it's going to take me a while as I have other books and a quilting project going on.  But from what I've read so far it's going to be a very interesting read.

Book Description:

Publication Date: October 29, 2008
Almost three-quarters of a million British soldiers lost their lives during the First World War, and many more were incapacitated by their wounds, leaving behind a generation of women who, raised to see marriage as "the crown and joy of woman's life," suddenly discovered that they were left without an escort to life's great feast.
Drawing upon a wealth of moving memoirs, Singled Out tells the inspiring stories of these women: the student weeping for a lost world as the Armistice bells pealed, the socialite who dedicated her life to resurrecting the ancient past after her soldier love was killed, the Bradford mill girl whose campaign to better the lot of the "War spinsters" was to make her a public figure--and many others who, deprived of their traditional roles, reinvented themselves into something better. Tracing their fates, Nicholson shows that these women did indeed harbor secret sadness, and many of them yearned for the comforts forever denied them--physical intimacy, the closeness of a loving relationship, and children. Some just endured, but others challenged the conventions, fought the system, and found fulfillment outside of marriage. From the mill-girl turned activist to the debutante turned archeologist, from the first woman stockbroker to the "business girls" and the Miss Jean Brodies, this book memorializes a generation of young women who were forced, by four of the bloodiest years in human history, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity, and their future happiness. Indeed, Singled Out pays homage to this remarkable generation of women who, changed by war, in turn would change society.

21. No End Save Victory

Perspectives on World War II

By:  Stpehen E. Ambrose, Caleb Carr, John Keegam, William Manchester
Rated:  In Progress
Format:  Paperback
From:  My Friend Connie

I am still slowly reading this book.  It's wonderful

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2002

Robert Cowley and the editors of Military History Quarterly present a fascinating anthology of World War II essays from some of the world's most eminent historians. 

35. The Big Burn

By:  Timothy Egan
Rated:
From:  Library
Format:  Hard Cover Book


Publisher's Summary:

In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men -- college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps -- to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, through the eyes of the people who lived it. Equally dramatic, though, is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. The robber barons fought him and the rangers charged with protecting the reserves, but even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by those same rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.

THE BIG BURN tells an epic story, paints a moving portrait of the people who lived it, and offers a critical cautionary tale for our time.

31. The Groovy Greeks

By Terry Deary
Illustrated by Martin Brown
Rated 4.5 Stars
Format:  Small Paperback book, 136 pages

I discovered these books in a National Trust bookstore somewhere in England back when I used to travel over there every couple of years or so.  I loved the snarky way they were written and such an easy way to learn about history in a short, succinct, and interesting way.  If you're into snark that is. :)

Product Description

"The Groovy Greeks" is full of fab facts about the hip and happening Greeks - who hung out all over 2000 years ago. This book tells you who had the world's first flushing toilet and why dedicated doctors tasted their patients' ear wax.

32, The Savage Stone Age

By Terry Deary

Illustrated by Martin Brown

Rated 5 Stars

Format:  Small Paperback book,

Publisher's Summary:

Information on nasty Neanderthals, awesome archaeologists and curious cave paintings. Find out about the truth of Stonehenge and what suffering scientists do with Stone Age poo.