Friday Reads: The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

Happy Friday! Today, Adam Pellman tells us about his new read, Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945.

Adam Pellman is reading The Guns at Last Light: 

The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 by Rick Atkinson

This book is the third volume in journalist and historian Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy," a sweeping account of the Allied effort to liberate Europe during World War II. The first book in the trilogy chronicled the war in North Africa, and the second detailed the invasions of Sicily and Italy. This third volume begins with the Normandy invasion in June of 1944, and I timed my reading so that I would start the book around the anniversary of the invasion.

Atkinson does an incredible job of bringing the events and personalities of the war to life, drawing heavily from firsthand accounts, diaries, and personal correspondence, along with a wealth of other primary source materials. The amount of research that went into this trilogy is staggering (this volume alone includes 200 pages of bibliographical references), and the details Atkinson includes make for a very engaging and eye-opening read. For example, by the time of the invasion, there were over 1.5 million American GIs in Britain, a figure that was higher than the population of many U.S. states at the time. So many GIs impregnated British women that road signs cautioned, "To all GIs: please drive carefully, that child may be yours." It's colorful details like these that really make history come alive.

Friday Reads: The Winds of Khalakovo

Some people are getting a lot of reading done in quarantine; others, not so much. Public Services Librarian Kelly Clever is slowly chipping away at The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley Beaulieu.

Kelly Clever is reading The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley Beaulieu

Years ago, when I got my first Nook e-reader, I snatched up free ebooks every time I saw one that sounded sort of interesting. The Winds of Khalakovo was one of the first ones that I gleefully added to my virtual library. About ten years later, I'm finally getting around to reading it.

I remember being intrigued by the vague description of the book as the beginning of an epic-scale fantasy. That's about all I knew about it until a few weeks ago. Now I know that the names are sort-of Russian; that the protagonist seems to be a prince named Nikandr who has some mysterious "wasting disease," which he is keeping a secret from the woman he is about to marry for political reasons; and travel and commerce seems to take place via some sort of "windships," which I'm still struggling to visualize. All is not well in the land of Khalakovo-- there are racial, socio-economic, and political tensions, and an ongoing famine is threatening to get even worse. Nikandr seems to have his work cut out for him if he wants to fix this mess. In the tradition of most of the Russian literature I've read, however, so far he seems resigned to dying a grim death and hopes only to accomplish something not-totally-futile between now and then. We'll see.

Getting oriented to a new fantasy world always takes some time, and I am enjoying the overall tone and atmosphere of the book, so I intend to keep at it.