Suddenly, everything is different. Coronavirus, the virus that causes COVID-19, has turned our lives upside down. No large gatherings allowed; please stay inside; food available most often in restaurants via take-out service; and retail businesses — like bookstores — curtailing hours and days open.
How can we cope?
Those of us who like to read, and touch real hardback or paperback copies of new titles may find it onerous to visit local bookstores or libraries, which often are closed. There are ways to overcome! You can purchase books on the internet and have them shipped directly to your home or buy electronic copies for your laptop, Kindle or Nook.
Washington Post writer Angela Haupt has offered a few other suggestions such as clicking on websites like Project Gutenberg that provide free books. The Library of Congress and Cambridge University Press also have free books available to download.
It also may be time to dust off an old favorite from that bookshelf and reread it. If you’re like me, and the books are 10 years old or more, the details and often the plot are lost in your memory. They’ll read like new ones!
Honestly, one of my favorite old collections is a murder mystery series, by Elliott Roosevelt, second son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which his mother, Eleanor, is the detective. There were 20 books in the sequence that began in 1984. Elliott died in 1990 but the series continued for another decade written by a ghostwriter, presumably William Harrington.
Publisher St. Martin’s Press simply said Roosevelt had left behind many manuscripts to be enjoyed later.
These Eleanor Roosevelt mysteries included, “Murder and the First Lady,” and murders in the Oval Office, Rose Garden, Blue Room, Red Room, East Room, Map Room, Lincoln Bedroom, and even the West Wing and White House Pantry. Some of the last ones published also are available as e-books.
Francis Gary Powers and the Cold War
Francis Gary Powers. For those of us 65 years and older or true history buffs may remember the U-2 incident involving a high altitude reconnaissance aircraft that was shot down by the Russians in 1960 leading to a major incident in the Cold War.
For historical accurateness, Powers was born in Kentucky because that’s where the closest hospital was located. He was bred and reared in Southwest Virginia near the town of Pound in Wise County and became an Air Force pilot instead of the doctor his father wanted him to be. His son, Francis Gary Powers Jr. and co-author Keith Dunnavant have created an intriguing account of the Cold War times—late 1950s and early 1960s—in “Spy Pilot: Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident, and a Controversial Cold War Legacy” (Prometheus, 314 pgs., $25).
Powers was shot down, captured by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, subjected to a show trial witnessed by his parents and wife, and imprisoned. He was released after 18 months in an exchange for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Ivanovish Abel.
As he grew up, Powers Jr. faced the fact that many Americans, maybe even the majority, felt his father was a traitor. They believed Powers Sr. should have destroyed his plane, rather than allow it to be seized, killed himself with a suicide pill he carried and not admitted that he knew he was flying over the Soviet Union.
After his father’s death in 1977, young Powers spent years securing evidence and talking to witnesses in an effort to not only clear his father’s name, but also legitimately proclaim him a hero. Using heretofore unpublished personal papers, government documents and old audiotapes, Powers Jr. and Dunnavant created a marvelous endnote to the Francis Gary Powers saga, set the record straight and exonerated him.
The U. S. government was unwilling to defend Powers Sr. after the incident and for years after Powers Sr. had come home. The government contended he was a civilian operative. Government files obtained later showed he was an Air Force officer working for the CIA.
With the help of some of his father’s old military buddies, Powers Jr. even secured a number of military medals posthumously for Frank Powers, as the spy pilot was called by his family and friends. Using that information, Powers Jr. secured for his father in 2011 the famed Silver Star “for gallantry in action,” from May 1, 1960, to February 1962, the dates of his imprisonment.
This is a riveting narrative that simply transforms history.
Virginia’s 12th Infantry — The Petersburg Regiment
Lawyer and local Illinois office holder John Horn of Oak Forest became interested in Civil War history when visiting his wife’s Richmond area homeland. Action around Petersburg intreated him and he visited battlefields and conducted related archival research. The result is “The Petersburg Regiment in the Civil War: A History of the 12th Virginia Infantry from John Brown’s Hanging to Appomattox, 1859-1865” (Savas Beatie, 445 pgs., $39.95).
Earlier in 2015 he wrote “The Siege of Petersburg” for his current publisher Savas Beatie, a California-based company, that specializes in military history and calls itself “independent, scholarly and a bit old fashioned.”
Horn has shaped a splendid account of one of the most memorable Virginia Civil War Regiments. For those of us in Tidewater, the regiment’s activities in the 1862 Peninsula Campaign is most interesting for its detailed soldiers’ account of the battles. Those personal glimpses are what makes this volume particularly important!
Have a comment or suggestion for Kale? Contact him at Kaleonbooks@gmail.com.
