The First All-Star Game

The First All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, FDR and America at the Crossroads by Randall Sullivan

Dark Summit

Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season by Nick Heil

This is the chronicle of the 2006 season on Everest. Another year with a lot of fatalities. Also included is some history of Himalayan climbing, back to Mallory. This will be familiar ground to those who have read about other tragedies about climbing, which sometimes seems like the only kind.

The author does provide a nice summary list of the books published about the 1996 season “Before long a small library of firsthand accounts emerged, most notably Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb, Beck Weathers’s Left for Dead, Kenneth Kamler’s Doctor on Everest, and Matt Dickinson’s The Other Side of Everest.”

The Will to Climb and K2

The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna--the World's Deadliest Peak by Ed Viesturs, David Roberts, and K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs, David Roberts

These two books are the story of Eds climbing these two mountains, which was covered in his No Shortcuts to the Top book, but here he goes into more detail. These are also histories of climbing on these two mountains, which is rather involved since they are extremely difficult to climb mountains. The early history of attempts to climb are interesting because to get to the base of these mountains originally involved weeks of hiking and employing a lot of porters to carry gear. As opposed to presently people just flying into the base of the mountains.

No Way Down

No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 by Graham Bowley

A history of expeditions to attempt to climb and to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world. K2 is located in Pakistan so that alone makes it difficult. K2 is considered the most dangerous high mountain to climb in the world as the death rate and success rate are rather staggering.

The Aviator and the Showman

The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon by Laurie Gwen Shapiro.

This is a very detailed biography of Amelia and George and provides lots of details on their life and work. They both had very unconventional lives, which at times were tumultuous and hectic. It really comes out in this book how unprepared Amelia was for her around the world flight, and so much of what was known at the time was hype from George that was loosely based on the facts and used to raise funds. She genuinely was in many ways an aviation pioneer but was pulled in so many directions that she was not able to practice many technical aspects of flight that she really needed.

After Amelia's death George was left scrambling to make ends meet, since his success was so closely tied to Amelia. Oddly enough he ended up in life owning the Stovepipe Wells hotel in Death Valley.

Mickey & Billy

Mickey & Billy: The Glory and Tragedy of a Yankee Friendship by Tony Castro

Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin both played for the Yankees in the 1950s, Mickey's first year was 1951. This book is mostly about Mickey, but also their friendship and the trouble they would get into. All night binges and bar fights, missing flights and trains and generally making the management mad. However, one of them was Mickey Mantle so lots of it was overlooked. Billy was ultimately traded, as he was a 'bad influence', it was thought, but since that did not end Mickey's behaviour that turned out to not be the case. A great narrative of an important time in baseball and the impact the stars made on the game.

Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham

The story of the US intelligence agencies, as they started in WW2. At the beginning of the war the US had no military intelligence people. What little had been in place after WW1 was dismantled in the 1920s, so FDR was starting from scratch. Interestingly, the people who put together the 1940 intelligence system chose to focus on people from the humanities. This first version was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which after the war became the CIA. The strategy for recruiting academics and librarians to form the first intelligence service was that they wanted people who were used to and familiar with spending hours doing research in libraries and archives. These were not James Bond type spies, these were people spend hours going over newspapers, phone books, railroad time tables and scientific journals, gleaning information that was useful and that was in plain site. Also, being academics helped provide a cover, they were setup as book buyers in Istanbul and Stockholm, which gave them access to people and material that they could use to compile their reports. Also, since they were secretly working for the government, they had a pretty limitless budget to purchase books and other materials.

A fascinating story of the evolution of the intelligence world.