It is time for a "book round-up"! Part 1

Even though it has been a busy summer, I always have a book "going" along with whatever else I do. Isn't it that way with you?

With a couple of exceptions, I have a whole stack of "nothing too special" on my left as I compose this entry:

From my parents' old bookcase, I found P. D. James' first crime novel, "Cover Her Face"; it was like a Barbara Pym novel with a "warm, milky drinks murder"--well written, no doubt--but the world has changed from 1960 when people happily read these well composed, scripted crime novels.

Since one of our sets of kids will re-locate from LA to Princeton, NJ soon, I finally read a little old hard cover book,"The Fish-Shape Paumonok - Nature and Man on Long Island" by Robert Cushman Murphy. This is one of the exceptions to the disclaimers above. The book is the text, with photos and drawings, from the author's Penrose Memorial Lecture (1962) for the American Philosophical Society.  Murphy was a very old man in 1962 and remembered Long Island well, growing up there before the turn of the 20th Century. He was distressed at the changes due to over-building and over- population; the lecture/book was crafted toward the very dawn of the environmental movement, before it was heavily politicized.     Somehow, my copy is autographed by the author; I will give the book to my son.

"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien. The subject of the Vietnam War is one I have, sort of, avoided since I was a teenager. Until much later, I did not really know anybody who served there.
My nearest touch to the war, in those days: perhaps 1967, during a holiday home from college, my Father was taken to the emergency room at Great Lakes Naval Base hospital (suspected heart problem). During our time waiting, there was a virtual parade of wheeled stretchers along an extended hallway from an entrance bay to a bank of elevators far away; each stretcher with a wounded man--some blood visible--brought back from Vietnam for treatment at the military hospital.  That was a shock.  The book? Well written. Could any operation so ill-conceived and badly run as that war result in anything good? You can't enjoy a reading experience like this; like a holocaust book; but as part of an effort to understand the War? Yes.