Summer Reading

At the moment I'm reading a book by Thomas E. Ricks called Fiasco that's been getting a lot of attention in the press. Deservedly so: the book is a devastating indictment of the way the War in Iraq has been both planned and carried out by the idiots currently in power in the White House and the Department of Defense.

I'm about halfway through it at the moment so I don't want to discuss the book as a whole quite yet, although on the basis of what I've read so far (I'm up to page 207 as I write this) I would say that it's one of the three books published this year that everyone should read who wants to understand, as Trollope would put it, The Way We Live Now (the other two, if you're interested, are Cobra II and American Theocracy).

But right now I want to talk about one teensy problematic part of it.

On page 35, Ricks discusses "Rep. Ike Skelton, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee ... He is so deeply read in military affairs that he once released [in 2003] a national security book list, a compilation of fifty volumes he considered key to understanding the armed forces. It is a thorough offering, heavy on American and British campaigns, but ranging from biographies of Alexander the Great and Hannibal to Grant's memoirs and strategic thinker Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command."

Sounds pretty good, right? Ricks certainly sounds impressed. You can read Rep. Skelton's list here:

http://www.house.gov/skelton/natsec_booklist.html

Now I don't know if you know this about me, but I am rather a connoisseur of book lists. It doesn't matter what kind of list -- I look at them all and find the flaws in all of them. If you were to present me with a list of The Greatest Novels Ever Written by Latvian Writers Who Wrote Left-Handed, I would probably read it with interest -- and then proceed to tell you what's wrong with it. At excruciating length.

So it's not entirely a surprise that I read Rep. Skelton's list and found it, well, a tad inadequate. Actually, "inadequate" is not exactly the right word to use in this context.

It kind of sucks.

Now, lists like this all tend to share one big inadequacy. They're all bottom-heavy, relying heavily on books the compiler has read and been impressed with in the past few years. That explains the overabundance of titles on Rep. Skelton's list that were published after 1990. It also explains why he would choose Roy Jenkins's biography of Churchill over the one by Martin Gilbert. Rep. Skelton's list, like most lists of this kind, was thrown together relatively quickly, without a lot of rumination and second-guessing -- and it shows.

So I thought, as a corrective to Rep. Skelton's list, I would put together a list of my own to indicate the kind of books that the Congressman has left off his list. Ordinarily I would just send it to the congressman privately, but the fact is that you can't e-mail the congressman unless you live in his district.

Here's my list of books that Congressman Skelton forget to include on his list:

Books Not on Congressman Skelton’s National Security Book List

Homer
The Iliad
The Odyssey

Arrian
Campaigns of Alexander

Thucydides
The History of the Peloponnesian War

Xenophon
Anabasis

Anonymous
The Bhagavad-Gita

Julius Caesar
The Gallic War
The Civil War

Tacitus
The Histories
The Annals

Jean Froissart
Chronicles

Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Thomas Macaulay
The History of England

David G. Chandler
The Campaigns of Napoleon

Shelby Foote
The Civil War

William T. Sherman
Memoirs

Edmund Wilson
Patriotic Gore

Alfred Thayer Mahan
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History

Thomas Pakenham
The Boer War

Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August

Robert Graves
Goodbye to All That

Winston Churchill
The World Crisis
The Second World War

Martin Gilbert
Churchill

Paul Fussell
The Great War and Modern Memory
Wartime

William L. Shirer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Herman Wouk
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance

Ted W. Lawson
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

E.B. Sledge
With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa

David Halberstam
The Best and the Brightest

Michael Herr
Dispatches

Keep in mind that not one of these titles is on Rep. Skelton's list.

Now you have some reading to do before Labor Day!

Tom Moran