Charles Williams Books

There were four Regular Army regiments recruited after the Civil War from the veterans of the US Colored Troops raised for war service. Two were infantry, the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth, and two Cavalry, the Ninth and Tenth. The Tenth Cavalry was mostly stationed in the west to keep order among the Native Americans who called them Buffalo Soldiers. There has been a continuing great interest in the deeds and motivations of these men in the face of rampant prejudice and social seperation. The Tenth's service has been perpetuated in the present order of battle of the US Army and there still is an active 10th Cavalry though it is now integrated.
This 1899 book was long out of print and the original is now a collectible. This facsimile reprint edition, with a new introduction added, should interest all those who study the War with Spain. In addition to a few introductory chapters on Negro's service from the Revolution to the Civil War, and a chapter each on the other three Black regiments, the book gives most coverage to the Tenth in Cuba. The 9th and 10th flanked the famous 1st Volunteer Cavalry, the "Rough Riders" at San Juan.
The original also has a commendatory introduction by the Cavalry Division commanding officer "Fighting Joe" Wheeler, who had been a Confederate officer in the Civil War. Most of the book is a collection of personal narratives interspersed with interviews with other commanders.
As an aside, Lt. John J. Pershing, later commander of the Punitive Expedition in 1916 and then the AEF in France, got his nickname "Black Jack" from his service with the Tenth.

This is a long-hidden collection of letters written by Baron Corvo to a potential customer of some Venetian boys in their early teens a century ago. The letters were known about but did not appear until a trio of slim books by Corvo were finally published many years after his death. The letters may be part fantasy, but they are our only glimpse into the world of young male prostitution in Venice prior to the First World War. They also provide a valuable look at the life and personality of one of the great eccentrics. And I might add that this would be a good book to read in conjunction with Mann's Death in Venice.

Everything you need to install, use, and extend VTK. Detailed examples, installation procedures, developers guide, file format descriptions, how to write imaging and graphics filters, plus data object API details for VTK version 3.1. Includes source code, updated HTML documentation, release notes, data, and PC binaries. User's Guide is 356 pages and comes with the VTK CD.

The VTK Users's Guide is a companion text to The Visualization Toolkit text. While The Visualization Toolkit stresses algorithmic and data structure details, the VTK User's Guide stresses how to use the software. The VTK User's Guide includes a CD-ROM of VTK 3.1.

Finally, thank heaven, there is a practical management book that was written by people who clearly have real life, in-the-trenches, experiences at all levels of the corporate ladder. Absent from this book are the feel good, pie in the sky, out of touch recommendations so prevalent in contemporary management writings. Any recommendations to changing a business culture comes with clear instructions to orchestrating the change. Checklists are used effectively throughout the book facilitating execution and ensuring significant bottom-line benefits.

The diet metaphor is wonderfully used. The similarities between achieving sustainable results on a persoanl diet and achieving sustainable results in a business organization become so striking when you read this book that you'll never forget them.

Supply chain management concepts are masterfully reviewed. When, how, and to what degree outsourcing is appropriate is meticulously covered.

If everyone enrolled in an MBA program were to have a course dedicated to the concepts used in this book, productivity would improve world-wide. A GREAT BOOK!!

British historian Charles Oman spend thirty years writing "The History of the Peninsular War." Although now somewhat dated, Oman's seven volume study may still be the best English language narrative history of the Peninsular War. Oman chose to include a significant collection of supporting materials on the British Army in a companion volume: "Wellington's Army 1809-1814."

In "Wellington's Army," Oman sketches the leadership, organization, tactics, and details about the life of the long-serving British field army in the Iberian Peninsula. His topics include Wellington's use of his infantry and cavalry, his conduct of supply and of sieges, and the means by which he disciplined his force.

Oman's long immersion in the correspondence and memoirs of the Peninsular Army leads to many worthwhile insights, including why Wellington was respected but not loved by his troops and why his army was so successful for so long against superior numbers of French forces. One example is Wellington's insistance on campaigning from an established supply chain, which allowed his army to remain concentrated in the field far longer than his French adversaries. The French Army of the time depended on forage and pillage for supply, and when concentrated into a large mass, quickly exhausted the available local supplies and was forced to disperse.

Oman provides useful insight into the manning of Wellington's army through the rotation of first and second battalions under the regimental system. An appendix documents why Britain strained to field Wellington's relatively small army in the Peninsula, given the competing demands of the world wide British Empire.

Oman does not spare Wellington's Army its faults. The conduct of siege warfare was never its strong suite. Wellington's force lacked engineers and sometimes the artillery and the time to conduct proper sieges. It was successful at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz thanks to the bravery of its soldiers, not its technique, and failed at Burgos for want of serious preparation.

This book is highly recommended to students of the Peninsular War and of Wellington as a commander. The casual reader with some background in the British Army will also find this a worthwhile book. Oman's writing style is clear and readable. This Greenhill reprint is wonderfully priced and contains a small number of prints and all the excellent appendices of the original.

This is a timely, must-have book for anyone who cares about reducing the level of poverty in our country. In an ambitious undertaking, History Professor Frank Stricker examines fifty years of attempts to solve problems of poverty. His analysis covers the historical settings as well as the political decisions, public attitudes, and public policies enacted from the 1950s to the present time.

Stricker examines the War on Poverty in the 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson and evaluates its scope and effectiveness. He shows how job training and other antipoverty programs didn't lower poverty levels as expected because an equal effort wasn't made to create good jobs. In one enlightening chapter he describes the causes that led to a shift from a war on poverty to a war on the poor. At a time when the focus should have been on the effects of global changes, deindustrialization, and recessions, blame was shifted to individual habits and accusations of laziness of the poor. It seems that it has been much easier to blame the poor for their poverty than to deal with the complex conditions that cause poverty.

The author provides eye-opening evidence that demonstrates how the poor fare in other countries. As he points out "American capitalism does not initially produce more poverty, but American governments offer fewer income supports to help the poor than every one of fourteen other rich nations." To see the effects of this lack of support, one need only to read today's headlines expressing concern about the uncertainty of our economy and the worry it is causing. Many middle class Americans are now facing a likely fall into poverty. In other industrial countries income supports help people get through the bad times of the markets.

In the last section of his book Stricker argues for a much-needed debate on ways to win the war on poverty and offers seventeen suggestions of his own. Foremost among them is the need for government to stimulate job creation and to create good government jobs, real jobs that provide real benefits. One that comes to mind would be hiring more inspectors to check on the safety of our food, drugs, toys and other goods. Stricker acknowledges that many of his suggestions will be politically difficult to achieve because of ideological differences among political parties and differences of opinion among citizens. But he points out that if we care about eliminating poverty we must try. Whether more low-income Americans can be moved to vote and more politicians can be unchained from increasing corporate influence will only happen if the attempt is made.

Stricker's book is a thoroughly researched history written in a clear, down-to-earth style. It is a good read from beginning to end, and also a valuable reference book for citizen activists interested in learning how specific programs to eradicate poverty have worked. "Why America Lost the War on Poverty-And How to Win It" answers the questions it asks and gets my enthusiastic recommendation!

The other books in this volume are Four Hundred Million Customers by Carl Crow, The Return to Religion by Henry C. Link, North to the Orient by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and An American Doctor's Odyssey by Victor George Heiser.

As Mary's brother I may be a bit biased, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book which was full of interesting information, written with the humor and a 'down to earth' approach we expect from Mary.

This is one of the most original books of criticism ever to focus on William Faulkner. Baker interprets Faulkner's work in a completely fresh and untraditional way by paralleling the author's intentions and accomplishments with such other "traditional" post-colonial writers as Chinua Achebe, Sean O'Casey, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Salman Rushdie. While this work will prove useful for those academics looking to "read" and "teach" Faulkner from a new perspective, it will also prove useful to those readers located outside of academe since Baker provides a cogent overview of the dominant issues and themes of post-colonial theory.

Fourteen writers who knew and loved the incredible William Maxwell have written beautifully about him in this fine collection of "memories and appreciations." In addition to the editors, Charles Baxter, Michael Collier and Edward Hirsch, other writers included are John Updike, Donna Tartt, Alice Munro, Shirley Hazzard, Anthony Hecht, Richard Bausch, Paula Fox, Alec Wilkinson, Benjamin Cheever, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Annabel Davis-Goff. There is also a previously unpublished speech of Mr. Maxwell's. It is almost as if these writers read each other's notes since they express practically the same sentiments with only minor differences as they each see him through the prisms of their own experiences. They describe him as loving, generous, kind, gentle, modest, dignified, thoughtful, tremendously interested in the lives of other people, never glib. The superlatives go on and on. Born in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1908, Mr. Maxwell apparently had an idyllic childhood until he lost his mother to influenza during the horrible epidemic of 1918. That single event, which he wrote about again and again in both his fiction and other writings, shaped the rest of his life. According to Mr. Wilkinson, when Mr. Maxwell's mother died, he "gave up any belief in a god who protected human happiness. No sensible person can fail to be astonished by creation, he thought, but the idea of an old man watching over individual lives, a being who judged, kept track, and intervened, who favored one person over another, a figure from a story-- such a version had no meaning for him." Ms. Davis-Goff says he believed in love, not in God, and that he wrote about the redeeming nature of love. Edward Hirsch in one of the most moving essays in the collection-- that made my eyes burn-- reminds us that Mr. Maxwell's religion was literature. He was happily married to his wife Emily for many years and died at the age of 92 only 8 days after her death. As an editor for THE NEW YORKER for forty years, Mr. Maxwell published many fine writers including Eudora Welty, John Cheever, John Hersey, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov et al.

These for the most part are beautiful essays-- John Updike's contribution is a poem-- written about a most beautiful man. Many of them should cause those of us who already adore William Maxwell to reread him or introduce him to a new generation of lovers of literature. One is reminded again of the difference between fine literature and popular fiction and why Updike and Tom Wolfe should never be discussed in the same paragraph.

There are many wondrous sayings of Mr. Maxwell included here: that all he asked of life is the privilege of being able to read, that the the only part he would miss about dying was that he couldn't read Tolstoy, that either you retire from life or you advance to meet it, that when he first read Yeats' early poetry he "felt as if fairy dust had been sprinkled on him." And you have to love someone who says that "every writer has a lifetime ration of three exclamation points." In addition to the Maxwell quotations, many of the writers discuss at considerable length his works, particularly his novels. The most successful of the essayists, rather than analyze them, let Mr. Maxwell's works speak for themselves. Shirley Hazzard describes the last year of Mr. Maxwell's life, with his wife slowly dying of cancer, when he reread Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE. "He said, 'It is so comforting.' We rejoiced together over certain scenes, not 'discussing' or dissecting them but paying, simply, the tribute of our delight." That's the best way to enjoy this extraordinary book. Just pay tribute with your delight.