The past 12 months or so have been fruitful for people I know publishing books (see here and here). My friend and former colleague Peter Fey makes it a hat trick with his first book, Bloody Sixteen: The USS Oriskany and Air Wing 16 during the Vietnam War, which came out early last summer. The book chronicles Oriskany’s three deployments to Vietnam with Carrier Air Wing 16 (CVW-16) in the late 1960s. The three cruises were during Operation Rolling Thunder, the ultimately unsuc

Written with the skill of a historian, the heart of a baseball fan, and the soul of a Wisconsinite, Home of the Braves chronicles the saga of the Milwaukee Braves. Covering their move from Boston and their eventual move to Atlanta, the book is the story of a city and team falling in love with each other... and the subsequent heartbreak of a romance gone wrong. It's important to know what you're getting with this book. It is not, primarily, a story of the team's on-the-fie

As a teenager, Davin Douma was tried as an adult and convicted of murdering someone who – we would find out much later – had abused him. He would spend over a quarter century in prison before finally being paroled. This is his story. This is his family’s story. Told primarily from the perspective of his mother, Bonnie Jane Hall, and interspersed with letters between the two of them (and between Davin and his brother James and sister Deborah) and a few of Davin’s several e

After a 24-year career flying KC-135 tankers, retired Lieutenant Colonel Mark Hasara has made a unique contribution to the field of military memoirs and aviation history. It's not too hard to stroll down the right aisle in a book store and find books by fighter and attack pilots, but you'd have a more difficult time finding one from the prospective a tanker pilot. That's a shame, because aerial refueling is critical to everything military aviation does, from combat operations

Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton came to me via a Goodreads Giveaway, and was grateful for the chance to read this intricate account of British covert operations in World War II. The title may be a little verbose, and maybe even a little misleading (it wasn't ACTUALLY a ministry in the conventional sense), but it accurately reflects the amount of attention Milton pays to the evolution of the various parts of this unconventional enterprise and its

I thought I'd periodically share books or articles I've found particularly interesting (probably not everything I happen to read - as anyone who's seen my Goodreads feed can tell you, that would probably get to be a bit much). I'll start off with Peter Bowerman's The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less. Catchy sub-title, even if I'm not in the position to actually need self-sufficiency in six months since my day job wil