Read the heck out of any book this summer

I still read books, which, apparently, makes me old. I don’t listen to them being read to me in my car or read them on a Kindle. I buy a book, hold it in my hands and read the heck out of it.

I’ve always taken my reading seriously. A long time ago, I found myself seated next to the legendary USC football coach John McKay at a sports banquet. While waiting for the festivities to get underway, he was reading a book about the Civil War Battle of Chancellorsville. (Most people were reading “The Godfather” or “Slaughterhouse Five” at the time.) I asked why he was reading that. He looked up and said, “Stuff that really happened is more interesting than anything somebody can make up.”

That one sentence would shape my reading habits for the rest of my life. I recently interviewed a high-school kid who told me that her favorite subject was history. I told her that story and she shrieked, “That’s 1000% true!” So I finally passed it on.

One other thing: I went to the library and checked out that book about Chancellorsville. Reading it that weekend, I learned that:

 The bumbling Northern general, Joseph Hooker, whose name is often associated with the legion of prostitutes that accompanied his corps of officers, somehow managed to lose the battle despite having a five-to-one advantage in manpower.

 His second-in-command, Ambrose Burnside, had outrageous facial hair. For a time, that facial-hair style was known as burnsides. It eventually became sideburns.

 Despite being severely outmanned, Robert E. Lee split his forces and sent Stonewall Jackson to lead a flanking maneuver. Union General Hooker was actually told what was about to happen by spotters who were in a hot-air balloon above the battlefield, but he chose to ignore the intelligence, believing that there was no way that Lee would be crazy enough to split his forces. 

The North was routed and had to retreat. Emboldened, Lee invaded the North. Up to that point, all of the battles in the war had been fought in the South. 

 On the way back to his lines, Stonewall Jackson was mistakenly shot in the arm by one of his own troops. His arm had to be amputated. He appeared to be recovering, but then died suddenly a week later. Jackson was buried in Lexington, Virginia, but his arm was buried at Chancellorsville, more than 100 miles away.

 Finally, pushing into the North, hoping that a decisive victory would prompt Northern citizens to give up the fight, Lee attacked at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Fighting for the first time without Jackson, Lee was soundly defeated. He would never win another battle. That same weekend (the Fourth of July), troops under Ulysses S. Grant took control of the Mississippi River by winning the battle of Vicksburg. It was the beginning of the end for the South.

Now, what novelist could make that up?!

In a lot of places, summer reading is “Eat, Pray, Love” kind of crap. But here in Tucson, the summer is hard and the reading has to match. Along those lines, I have a couple books to recommend to you. 

First we have “American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt For America’s Jack The Ripper.” Summer reading, indeed. 

After he had successfully taken down Al Capone, the most notorious gangster of all time, Eliot Ness looked for new worlds to conquer. Somehow he ended up in Cleveland, matching wits with a monster known as the Torso Killer. This murderer killed men and women, removed genitals, sawed bodies in half, and left stray body parts all over town. (The killer even left a mutilated body in a spot where Ness could see it from his office.)

This thing features one of the sickest real-life villains of all time, a national hero who turns out to be something less, and a messy ending that should make you angry. What more could you ask?

I just finished reading “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann. It’s as grim as the title. The British man ‘o war ship has to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific and can either go all the way south of Cape Horn, getting dangerously close to Antarctica or try to navigate the treacherous Strait of Magellan. I did learn that right near the entrance to the Strait is a place called The Cape of 11,000 Virgins.

It reminded me of Richard Pryor’s response to learning that China had a billion people. Who counted ‘em?

“The Wager” is a good book, but I recommend an even better book by Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It tells the story of the Osage Indians in Oklahoma who, in the early part of the 20th century, found themselves sitting on a fortune in oil. Every member of the tribe was a millionaire, but then they started dying under mysterious circumstances. No big spoiler alert: The white man wanted the oil and was willing to kill to get it.

The book has been made into a movie that will come out in October. The three-hour, 20-minute film by Martin Scorsese is being hailed as a masterpiece. We should all see it when it comes out.

But in the meantime, read the book. Heck, read any book.

This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2023.