The Best and the Brightest

I bought three books yesterday, The Best and the Brightest, The Kingdom and the Power and The Guns of August.

I may hold off on the The Guns of August, having read it before. I also may want to create an online course using it. Possibly integrating it with a geographic tool.

I think I'll start the Halberstam book, seeing if it gives any insight into what is currently going on in Iraq. I enjoy his books, and will try to get a couple of more in the coming weeks. When I get The Powers that Be I'll probably read it as a companion to The Kingdom and the Power.

The Guns of August

Wiki Link

Barbara Tuchman

New York, Macmillan, 1962.

This was my father's favorite book. I read it for fun twenty years ago and then used it as the basis for my senior thesis in college. My copy is now in tatters.

I bought it again today and will reread it. It is difficult to comment on books that I enjoyed, but have now forgotten. It is difficult to even get the pulse of the books correct.

I recently reread The Sun Also Rises. This was probably my favorite work of fiction from my college years. While rereading it, I realized that I was experiencing something totally different from my first reading. I still enjoyed it, but missed the romanticism of youth. It is my youth that has past, not the books. I did not realize how much I had changed in the intervening years. Not completely, but enough. I'll expand on this later.