Books of 2001

 

 

It has been an outstanding year of reading for me, and it is now time for me to report to you all of the amazing, pleasurable, educational and entertaining things that I have read this year. It is really one of the best selection years that I have had in my life. On June 24th of this year I sent you a list of books that I had read in the first half of the year so I have just reproduced that and added the last half to it. For technical reasons beyond your understanding I desire to have all of the books read in 2001 on one list rather than two. So you can skip the first 36 entries below unless you just want to re-savor them as I do.

Then again if you don’t care what I read this year just delete now.

1. A Texan In England by J. Frank Dobie. A real goodie. I think that it is Dobie's best book ever. He exhibits none of the arrogance and rudeness that I think typified some of his earlier works. It concerns his year at Oxford as visiting professor. Dobie is a keen observer and he had some great things to say about the English people.

2. The Sense Of Smell by Roy Bedichek. Roy Bedichek could write about the most mundane of subjects and hold my riveted attention. I think he is great. Here he writes about the significance of smell as a sense in men and in animals, the nose and how it is viewed in various cultures and the importance to man of his sense of smell. Bedi had the idea that smell was more closely linked to our emotions than any of the other senses. Excellent book.

3. Three Friends by William Owens. A book about the relationship and interchange between three very close friends at the University of Texas: Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb. It was a re-read for me. I read it first several years ago but enjoyed it this time as though it were new.

4. Sharpe's Battle by Bernard Cornwell. An adventure in reading for me, as are all of the Sharpe's novels of the Peninsular War. I think I have read each of them about four times and watched the videos several times.

5. Sharpe's Gold by Bernard Cornwell. See comments above

6. Sharpe's Enemy by Bernard Cornwell See comments above.

7. Queen Victoria's Little Wars by Byron Farwell. Also a re-read for me. I had read it first back in my bookstore days. A well written narrative history of the colonial wars and "hot-spot management" of the last half of Queen Victoria's reign. I was struck while reading this that the U.S. is doing very much the same thing in the world today that the British used to do. Pax Britainica has become Pax Americana.

8. Adam's Task by Vicki Hearne. It was Adam's task if you will remember your Genesis to name all of the animals that had been created. This is a good book on communication between dogs, horses and cats and their human owners. It is Vicki who is assured that she is properly training an animal (her job) when the animal starts to train her back using her methods. Interesting book.

9. The Hermit of Eyton Forest by Ellis Peters. A Brother Cadfael mystery - to which I am addicted. This is a third or fourth re-read.

10. Eothen by Alexandre Kinglake. Eothen is a word in some language, probably Greek, which means "out of the east". This book is about a hippie Englishman wandering around with a camel in Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. I was not greatly impressed by it. Wilfred Thesinger can write the same sort of thing (as in one of my favorite books, "Arabian Sands") and do a much better job of it.

11. The Confession of Brother Haluin by Ellis Peters. See comments re 9 above.

12. Fate is the Hunter by Ernest Gann. Strangely I read this book in my late thirties and didn't care for it but just ate it up when I reread it in my seventies. The book has not changed, so it must be me. This is a book for pilots of aircraft - either real pilots or at least wish-they-were pilots. It is all about flying. I really enjoyed the book this time and can't understand why I didn't like it the first time I read it.

13. Rough Notes of Seven Campaigns by Spencer Cooper. Another Peninsular War memoir by a soldier in the ranks. I have read bunches of these and feel that I am an expert on them. This one is only fair.

14. Wellington In The Peninsula by Jac Weller. Super book. Weller has a style of writing that is very much adapted to military history. Just the right amount of detail, just the right amount of speculation, just the right amount of data. And he is a good word-master.

15. Nop's Hope by Donald Mc Caig. A very sentimental, tear jerker about a woman who loses her husband and daughter in a drowning accident and over a period of two years is brought out of her misery and woe - at least a little - by her great dog Nop's Hope. Get a box of Kleenex handy if you read it. I did and knew what I was getting into.

16. Genome by Matt Ridley. Wonderful book. I was devastated when I found I had reached the last page. A very technical and scientific book written by a journalist (actually he had a degree in economics) in a way that would make you think he was a PhD in molecular biology. Possibly the best book I've read this year. It unravels more mysteries of our sub-cellular makeup than anything I ever read and tells what effect it has on our lives. You should get it and deal with the scientific concepts and read it. It is worth it.

17. Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto. To unwind my mind after reading 16 above. I like Japanese detective stories and had never read one by this author. Very good. One of the better of this genre.

18. The Outer Limits Of Life by John Medina. Covers the same material as Genome but does a very poor job of it. Not recommended.

19. Native Tongues by Charles Berlitz. An interesting, but not very gripping comparison of the different languages spoken on this planet. I barely finished it.

20. A House in Sicily by Daphne Phelps. Very enjoyable and relaxing read. Woman inherits huge mansion on Sicily but has no means (read money) to keep it up. So she turns it into a palatial B & B. Had guests like Tennessee Williams and several other authors and painters who made her and the mansion quite famous.

21. On Familiar Terms by Donald Keene. If we had a war right now with Japan I would advise the FBI to keep a close watch on this guy. He was, at the time he wrote this book, the head of the Department of Oriental Languages at Columbia University but he wrote about his time in WWII when he was a translator for the Navy in the Pacific theatre. He learned his Japanese at US Navy Language School. He is the one who liked the Japanese POWs better than the GIs and who saw Pearl Harbor as just a "brilliant strategic move". It is an interesting book. He adopted much more than the Japanese language. He adopted their viewpoint also.

22. Children of Allah by Agnes Newton Keith. The author is a very unusual person and a very unusual writer. Every time I read one of her books I more or less fall in love with the author. Maybe that is putting it a little strong. Let us say that I come to a great appreciation of her personality and character. This book is about her seven years stay in Libya in the post war but pre-Khadafi days of that country. Her husband (Harry) was a forestry expert sent by the UN to Libya to see if he could do anything about their lack of forests - of course it makes sense. In this book Agnes is a mature woman with a son in the Marine Corps, but she is still the same irrepressible, slightly naive person that wrote the other three books. I really enjoyed reading this.

23. Travels On My Elephant by Mark Shand. Shand for no good reason at all decides to buy an elephant in far southern India and ride it seven hundred miles north to an elephant market and sell it. It gets to be quite an expedition of five or six people. The star of the book is Tara, the female elephant that he bought. And when he got her to the elephant market he found he was so attached to her that he couldn't sell her. Shand is himself half Indian and half English but educated through Cambridge in England. He has written another book entitled Queen Of The Elephants which I, of course, have on order. You will love Tara.

24. The Other Side Of The Dale by Gervase Phinn. Phinn is a school inspector in Yorkshire and is really back in the backwoods of Yorkshire. His book is amusing, low key and well written. How those people talk up there...but he translates. It is a quiet and peaceful read, except you get upset at Phinn that he doesn't recognize that all the teachers are coming on to him (actually he does recognize it but doesn't want you to think he does).

25. The White Rabbit by Bruce Marshall. This is about as far away as you can get from the dales of Yorkshire and their peace and tranquility. "The White Rabbit" is the code name of a man - an English RAF wing Commander - who parachuted into France right after the Dunkirk evacuation and effectively set up and organized the French Underground. He was captured by the Gestapo and tortured but never admitted and they never found out that he was the top man in the French Underground Forces. This is a "gritty" book - not a "nice peaceful read " at all. But it is well written, and if you want to chew your fingernails for a couple of days try reading this one. I failed to mention that even though he was a British citizen he had spent much of his life living in France and spoke French like a native.

26. Lieutenant Ramsey's War by Ramsey and Rivelle. This is another "gritty" book that will keep you on the edge of your chair for a while. Setting is the Philippines in 1942 through 1945. Lieutenant Ramsey is cut off from his unit on Bataan Peninsula and cannot rejoin them for the surrender so he sets off for the hills and organizes an army of Filipinos for underground warfare. Unlike The White Rabbit he never got caught even though the Japanese had a huge price on his head. Good book.

27. Wellington in India by Jac Weller. The same carefully researched, well written type of book that I have come to expect from Weller. Wellington's exploits in India were more obscure than on the peninsula but no less expert and well managed. I am glad that I have this.

28. Silent Thunder by Katy Payne. Katy is a scientist; an acoustic biologist with years of experience studying whale noises. I really thought this book might be like the Shand book, but woefully not so. There are some brief passages that approach good writing but in the main the book fails to have the heart of a Shand book. But if you want to know that elephants communicate over long distances by "infra-sound" - low frequency sound in the 16 to 30 Hz region below the hearing range of humans - then this is your book. They make these sounds with a diaphragm in their foreheads.

29. Wild Orchids And Trotsky - A collection of 13 essays on modern American social customs and culture. I thought this was going to be the most - but it was the least - interesting book I read all year so far.

30. Recollections of Rifleman Harris - Recollections of what? Why the Peninsular War of course. Sort of a tongue-in-cheek diary of a rifleman in Sharpe's old outfit, The 95th Rifles. This memoir is only fair in comparison to some others extant.

31. Island Cross-Talk by Tomas O'Crohan. A mildly amusing collection of stories and conversations of the Blasket Islanders. The Blasket Islands are off the coast of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula. O'Crohans time there was 1912 to 1920. In 1953 the islanders were forced to leave the island, which has been deserted ever since. Pleasant reading.

32. Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose. Ambrose is an accomplished writer and this book is composed of detailed conversations he had with U.S., British and German veterans concerning that period of time between D-Day and the collapse of Germany. His coverage of the "hedgerow" battles in Normandy is the best I have ever read. The only drawback in reading this book is that it once again makes me furious at Field Marshall Montgomery. The British had some good generals but he wasn't one of them.

33. Dogs Never Lie About Love by Masson. This book is written by a psychiatrist disillusioned by his discovery that everything Freud said was a hoax. His wife is a pediatrician so money is not an issue. So he sets out to become an animal psychiatrist and author. He should have staid with the people on the couch. In my opinion - and my opinion is important - he is a poor animal psychiatrist and poor writer. He wrote several books, and he always has good titles like the title of this one and "When Elephants Weep", which I have already bought. He should be a book titler and tell his wife to keep her day job.

34. Elephants by Jeheskel Shoshani. This is what we used to call in the book store trade a "coffee table book". It has some super elephant photographs in it and some data about elephants.

35. Three Came Home by Agnes Newton Keith. Here she is again, my ideal American girl. This book is written about the 3 1/2 years that she and her son George, and her husband Harry spent in Japanese captivity during WWII. It was as she said "the worst years of my life". She was not actually tortured by the Japanese (nor was Harry) but her health was nearly ruined and she worried constantly about her two year old baby. And the conditions under which she lived were very degrading. Still she maintained her view of life and people that I have come so much to admire. She could even forgive the Japanese - I don't think that I could have. This is by far the saddest of her books but every one ought to read it. Incidentally Agnes has kept her American citizenship for the fifty years she was married to Harry, who retained his English citizenship. Their son, George, has dual citizenship. That was very confusing to the Japanese.

36. In Love With Norma Loquendi by William Safire. A very interesting and informative book about language and linguistics at which I was surprised to learn that Mr. Safire was expert. But that is why I read - to be surprised. It is worth reading. Actually, I think the best linguistic writer we have these days is Richard Lederer, and he is a high school teacher, but good. But Safire comes close and does an excellent job of presentation. Maybe that is why he is a writer for the New York Times.

Well that is the crop for the first half of 2001 and I look back on it as a very entertaining and instructive bunch of books. Come December and we will see what the last half of the year brought---maybe.

 

So here is what I read in the last half of the year:

37. The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould wrote lots of books about Nature and its oddities and the relationship of animals and plants of today to their evolutionary predecessors and the little oddities that pop up in evolution and what effect they have on the animals which bear them. Excellent writer if you are not in a hurry and have a lot of time to kill over minor details, which I do.

38. Lucy's Child by Donald Johnson. Not nearly as interesting as Lucy by the same author. This book is more an exposition of the bile and rancor that exists between the two great camps in primate paleo-archaeology than it is about the discovery of the humanoid skeleton that Johnson calls "Lucy's child". My botanist friend knows Richard and Mary Leakey who head one camp and he is on Johnson's side, who I am convinced wrote this book just to snipe at the Leakeys. Not recommended.

39. Elephants Have The Right Of Way by Father William McCown. I bought this book thinking it had to do with elephants when I was on an elephant-reading binge. It has nothing to do with elephants. It is just the story of a Roman Catholic missionary to Kenya and his four years in that country. It is a pleasant little pointless book but of no great import.

40. Ordeal by Beatrice Saubin. Weird book. Written by a druggie French nineteen year old who goes to Burma and falls in love there with a Chinese dope smuggler who sets her up by planting a few kilos of raw heroine in her suitcase when she is going back to Europe for a short visit. She gets a life sentence in Burmese prison but after serving seven years she is finally pardoned by a benevolent Burmese head of state. Uh-uh! This is supposed to be non-fiction.

41. Queen of the Elephants by Mark Shand. This is s sequel to "Travels With My Elephant" by the same author, which is a marvelous book. Like most sequels it falls way short of the original. This book is really about a mahout (female) that Shands calls "the Queen of the Elephants". Shands should stick to elephants. He writes much better about elephants than about women.

42. Daughter of the River by Hong Ying. Excellent book. It probably better shows life in China for the poor village people than any other book I know of. It is the autobiography of a girl raised in a family of five whose "father" is killed in an accident on the river. Turns out the great family secret is that he was not her father but a merchant in the village is and she finds all of this out a few days after he dies.

43. A Dorset Soldier by Sergeant William Lawrence. Story of the adventures of a soldier conscripted for service in the Peninsula at his own request to get away from a tyrannical master to whom he was apprenticed. I don't see how this guy ever made Sergeant - it wasn't for brains. Not recommended.

44. Point Last Seen by Hannah Nyala. Hannah Nyala was a battered wife who took up dog training to get her mind off her marital difficulties and who became probably the premier lost person tracker in the United States. She tells in this book the ways she uses to assist the dog in tracking a lost person and some of her search adventures. Incidentally she finally freed herself from the battering husband and married a park ranger. Good book.

45. The Gist of H.L. Mencken ed. by Mayo du Basky. A massive collection of Mencken quotes and short writings. You learn a lot about Mencken by reading this book. It is well organized and presented.

46. The Candlemass Road by George MacDonald Fraser. One of the best books I read all year. It is a novel of the time of the "reivers" or robber bands in the Scottish/English borderlands. I am highly prejudiced in favor of Fraser. I like the way he writes.

47. My Dog Tulip by J. L. Ackerley. Truly a dog story about a most pampered and snooty dog by a most correct and polished Englishman. Ackerley in real life was for several years a confidential secretary to His Highness, the Maharajah Sahib of Chhokrapur (don't try to do anything funny with that last word and both "h's" belong there). The book is interesting and entertaining if possibly a bit stuffy here and there. I get the strong impression that Ackerley is gay.

48. The General Danced At Dawn by George MacDonald Fraser. This is a genre of writing (fictional biography), which I have previously decried as unworthy of print and demanded that it be labeled one or the other. However, George MacDonald Fraser does it with such verve and flair and side-splitting comedy that I cannot here say a word against it. It is the story of his life in the British Army as a lieutenant in the Highlanders. He wrote three books about it. The other two are named immediately below. When bound together they form a volume called McAuslan Entire. By all means don't miss any of the three if you get a chance at them. Good book.

49. McAuslan In The Rough by George MacDonald Fraser. See above. McAuslan was "the dirtiest, most inept, most accident prone soldier in the British Army.

50. The Sheikh And The Dustbin by George MacDonald Fraser--see above

51. Manhunter by J. Pasgucci. Supposedly a true story about a Federal Marshall this is pure bull manure, and Pasgucci is a liar, a cheat and a thief in my view. I shouldn't make that so clear, he tells you throughout the book what a dangerous and courageous man he is. This book pulls my "BS trigger" on every page. I picked that expression up from Pasgucci.

52. Walking On Borrowed Ground by William Owens. Without a doubt I consider this book to have the highest literary merit of any book I read in 2001 and it will go down in my list of ten top books of the year for me. It is a story of race relations done in a way I would never have believed a white man could write it. It is a subject that I avoid thinking, talking, or writing about. I was raised in the time this book portrays and I am aware that no person who grew up then in rural or small town Texas can ever fully rid themselves of racial prejudice completely, but Owens appears to have done so. It is the story of a schoolteacher who was a Negro teacher in a Negro school in a tiny town in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Read it , if you can. This makes the fourth book that I have read by W. A Owens and I think he has failed to receive the acclaim as a writer that he deserves. This book is his best.

52. Six Silent Men by G. Linderer. This is the story of the operations of a LRRP (Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol) of the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. I was startled to learn after I read this book that there are two more books by the same title but different authors concerning the same patrol unit. Anyway it was a well-written saga of six very tough and competent soldiers. I enjoy reading books like this but the story line does not stay with me.

53. Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay by Richard Lederer. Lederer has always been a favorite of mine when he writes about the English language. This book explores some of the oddities about English grammar and why it is that way. He is worth reading.

54. Who Gave Pinta To The Santa Maria by R. Desowitz. This is a funny book by an epidemiologist about the spread of syphilis around the world. Conventional wisdom has always laid the blame on Columbus and his sailors for bringing the disease to Europe from the new World. Desowitz says he doesn't think that they are guilty and that the disease already existed in Europe before Columbus made his trip. I liked the book well enough that I bought another book Desowitz wrote, but I have not read it yet.

55. Modoc by Ralph Helfer. A real tear-jerker true story of a female elephant named Modoc who was raised in Germany as part of a circus. Her constant companion was the son of the elephant trainers for the circus and they formed a very strong bond. All sorts of emotional problems arise when the circus goes broke and Modoc gets sold and the son stows away on the ship with the elephant and so on and so on. I could hardly read the book for the tears that flowed. One of my favorite books of the year. It is supposed to be a true story, but I don't know...

56. All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot. I love to read Herriot. It is sort of veterinarian soap opera but it gives you a wonderful feeling to read it. This was a reread for me. I read all of Herriot some years ago but recently bought all of his books again for a second round.

57. Mondo Canine by Jon Winokur. A collection of short dog stories that is worth reading if you are a dog fancier, and if you are not a dog fancier there is something wrong with you anyway.

58. How To Tell When You Are Tired by Reg Theriault. My book find of the year! Comparable to last year's "Travels With Lizbeth" by Lars Eigner. Reg Theriault is a most unusual man. Totally uneducated. He has been a common laborer all of his life. He was a stevedore on the San Francisco docks for over seven years which he describes as being as near to a beast of burden as a man can get. Theriault developed a philosophy about work, worker's dignity, bosses, jobs, and lays all of this out very well in this book. I think he is a genius and I greatly admire him and his writing. All of his political philosophies are different from mine.

59. Hatred Pursued Beyond The Grave by Jane Cox. In a dusty English basement Jane found a box or boxes containing the court records of the Bishop of London. In the time of King Charles I the less serious and civil suits were brought in the ecclesiastical courts and only the more serious crimes of murder, treason and the like were tried by the King's Court. The Bishop's courts tried all cases of slander, libel, petty theft, defamation and the like. She describes many of these cases and their outcomes. Weird book. One interesting statistic. She says eighty per cent of the cases in Bishop's Court were brought by women.

60. Robert van Gulik, His Life And Times by Janwillem van de Wettering. A very well written biography of the noted Dutch author, musician, pornography expert and ambassador for the Dutch to China for most of his active life. You have heard about Robert van Gulik from me before with his writings about the real Judge Dee of 637 AD Imperial China. I enjoyed it.

61. The Chinese Nail Murders by Robert van Gulik. Naturally reading a biography of Robert van Gulik got me back to reading Judge Dee mysteries. There is nothing like them. This is real escapism literature for me.

62. The Portable Curmudgeon ed. by Jon Winokur. Quotes against the establishment and prevailing social order by just about everybody. Such as, "Under certain circumstances profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer". Mark Twain said that. A worthy book.

63. A Vanished World by Anne Gertrude Sneller. A very good book simply about Ms. Sneller's upbringing in an upper New York state farm family and the personalities and influences of all her uncles, aunts and grandparents. It is a very pastoral book. If you are looking for excitement and suspense this is not the book for you. It is true that Ms. Sneller's world has vanished.

64. Hunting Badger by Tony Hillerman. One of the mysteries solved by Sergeant Jim Chee and Lieutenant Leaphorn of the Navaho Tribal Police. The crime this time is a robbery and murder of the manager of a Ute tribe Casino where it was obvious that the perp had fled onto the Navaho Reservation and our intrepid duo track him down.

65. Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman. A mad doctor is killing people with injections of bacteria but no one knows that until both Sgt. Jim Chee and Lieutenant Leaphorn flush the rascal out.

66. The First Eagle by Tony Hillerman. In this novel I was reminded how much like Arthur Conan Doyle Hillerman's writing is in that he gives the reader the chance to solve the crime too. Another good Chee/Leaphorn mystery.

67. Steel Bonnets by George MacDonald Fraser. This is, I believe, Fraser's only venture into pure history rather than historical fiction. It is the history of the strife along the English/Scottish border in the time of Elizabeth and James I. It is the time of the "rievers" or robber barons. It is good and well written, but I prefer Fraser as a writer of light fiction at which he excels.

68. What Cops Know by Connie Fletcher. This book was written by the wife of a cop and is a distillation of hundreds of interviews with "on the street" cops. It tells special tricks and bits of knowledge that cops gather to help them stay alive and do their job. I found it very interesting.

69. The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman. See above about Hillerman mysteries.

70. Rowan Cottage by Evelyn Hood. I bought this book thinking it was a travel story about a woman who retired in Scotland. What a downer! It is a very soap opera-ish romance novel and I was well into it before I realized it. Yuk! I went ahead and finished it, but regretted it.

71. Wellington At Waterloo by Jac Weller. This was my antidote for item 70 above. Weller is my favorite writer on Wellington other than Lady Longford who is a distant niece of Wellington's. Weller adopts a novel viewpoint in his battle descriptions. He believes a general should be judged only on what he knew at the time of the battle. So Weller does not tell the reader what is over the hill or where Gouchy is after he disappeared with 30,000 of Napoleon's soldiers. He just lets the reader know what Wellington knew. Very good book.

72. Guests Of The Sheikh by Elizabeth Fernea. This book is actually comparable to "Children of Allah" by Agnes Newton Kieth but Mrs Fernea is not as endearing a person as Agnes. Her husband has brought her to very rural Iraq to study the familial organization of Iraqi tribesmen. Since no Iraqi woman would possibly talk to him, a man, he asks his wife to become friends with the women and gather data relating to family organization. She does this, but not as gracefully as Agnes would have done it. Dr Fernea incidentally was a life long Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin. The book was written in the 1930s so I am sure he is now dead. Very entertaining book.

73. The Last Of The Bedu by Michael Asher. Asher thinks he is another Wilfred Thesiger, but he misses the mark by a lot. This book is the story of his search over the Arabian Peninsula for those few primitive tribesmen who still live the nomadic life of the true bedu. He has the same subject as Thessiger but he does not handle it nearly as well. Also he goes roaring around the desert in his pickup truck and Thessiger pulled of his shoes and put on Arab clothing and rode a camel across the Empty Quarter with the bedu to get to know them.

74. In The Peninsula With A French Hussar by Albert Jean Michel de Rocca. It is hard to feel close to a French cavalryman after all the books I've read about the English soldier in the Peninsular War. Rocca spent almost all of his time fighting against Spanish guerrillas. I like the books about the English better.

75. The Diary Of A Cavalry Officer 1809-1815 by Lt. Col. William Thomkinson. Now this is a much more likable protagonist. He is my kind of a man. During most of the book he is a Captain in the English Light Dragoons attached to the 16th Division under General Stapleton Cotton. One of my favorite books of the year.

76. Hougomont by Julian Paget. A pivotal part of Wellington's defense at Waterloo was the holding of the Chateau de Hougomont. The fiercest fighting of the battle raged around this old stone farmhouse and the British there were the Scots Guards under Colonel MacDonald. Long after the battle someone said to Wellington that Napoleon had no doubt that he could take Hougomont. Wellington replied "But he did not know MacDonald”.

The word "Hougomont" is derived from "Gomme Mont" which means "Gum Mountain". It was built on a little hill with pine trees around it used to collect pine gum to make turpentine - and I would not have known that if I had not read this book.

77. Alexander Hamilton by Richard Brookhiser. A good, concise well-written biography of Alexander Hamilton that told me much about the man and much about his times. Hamilton was not the easiest man to like and he had a hard time in his life. He was a very capable aide de camp to George Washington during the Revolutionary War and served as Secretary of the Treasury in Washington's presidential cabinet. Hamilton was a financial thinker and very conservative but he was a strong organizer and tireless worker. I think he was a far better man than the Aaron Burr, who killed him.

78. Anathemas And Admirations by E. M. Cioran. This is a real downer. Not recommended! Cioran's anaethema's are easy to find in the book and encompass just about everything but his admirations I have yet to find. The man writes well but he leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I read it all but I wonder why.

79. Rorke's Drift by Michael Glover. A super good little book supplying the detailed history of the battle at the trading post and church of Rorke's drift between 4000 Zulu attackers and 87 British soldiers and about 20 Natal Native Police. The 107 soldiers held out against charge after charge of the Zulus and finally were saluted by the natives who withdrew. Something like 14 Victoria Crosses were awarded to the little garrison. The movie "Zulu" starring Michael Caine is remarkably accurate historically.

80. La Grande Armee by Georges Blond. A masterful description of Napoleons Grand Armee which fought in the Peninsular War. A good detailed history that took me a month to read.

81. Marvels Of Animal Behavior by National Geographic. I believe this is the best National Geographic book I ever read. Usually they have great pictures and sorry writing. This was different. The writing was good too. excellent section on elephants and on gorillas.

82. The Private Journal Of Judge-Advocate Larpent by Francis Seymour Larpent. This book is 580 pages long and is composed entirely of letters written by Larpent to his stepmother during the two years he was Judge Advocate General of Wellington's lawyer. As such he was boss of all courts martial under Wellington and reviewed all judicial cases tried. He held the substantive rank and pay of a Lt. Colonel but was uniformed and accorded the privileges of a Major General since he reported directly to Wellington and no one else. He wrote to his stepmother almost daily during 1812,and 1813 and was very detailed in his reporting of what went on. His letters she carefully saved and they became a historian's treasure trove. Wellington was always very cordial, though Larpent frequently disagreed with him on how a case in court martial should be resolved. Larpent would never yield, but Wellington did to his superior legal knowledge. Very good book.

83. Slitherin' Through Texas by Jim Dunlap. A most unscientific but mildly funny treatise on every kind of snake that inhabits the Lone Star state. It devotes a page or two to every snake and makes some comments about them. All snakes are called by their common names or one that Dunlap makes up on the spot. It is a fun read but not a book you would want to spend weeks with.

84. Talking God by Tony Hillerman

85. Ghost Way by Tony Hillerman

86 Dance Hall Of The Dead by Tony Hillerman. These are three more of the Joe Leaphorn and/or Jim Chee mysteries about the Navajo reservation. I really like the way Hillerman writes. These read very quickly.

87. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. A very well written book outlining 48 things that you must do to get ahead in organizational America (Corporate, academic, political). This guy lays it on the table and says things about the ruthless power mad world of America's organizations. There are only a couple of his laws that I disagree with to any great extent. Remember if you read this that the laws are not how to be a great or good person but how to be a successful person climbing the corporate management ladder. Incidentally this book is for junior and middle managers. Another set of rules entirely, some of them contradictory to these, apply to Presidents and CEOs and Entrepreneurs. Good book, but it is not a fast read. There is a lot of meat in it.

And Now For The Top Ten. My I Have The Envelope Please?

1. Walking On Borrowed Ground

2. Genome

3. How To Tell When You're Tired

4. Children of Allah

5. Candelmass Road

6. The Private Journal of Judge-Advocate Larpent

7. Modoc

8. A Texan In England

9. Guests of the Sheikh

10. The General Danced at Dawn

So there you have it. My literary year 2001. It was a good year.