The 3 Books to Read in March

Spring is here! As a new Oklahoman, I am unfortunately learning that spring springing means it is tornado season. When we were buying our house, the realtor made a point to tell us how excited we should be that each house we looked at had a tornado shelter. Coming from Indiana, I can remember maybe 2 or 3 tornados ever truly threatening any sort of property damage in our area. In 2020 alone, Oklahoma had 39! 149 in 2019! I have yet to take a peek into our storm shelter, mostly due to fear of what is possibly living down there at the moment, but it sounds like taking the shop vac and going to battle down there needs to be priority number 1. Between cleaning up the storm shelter and getting the yard ready for summer, the joys of homeownership are already very apparent.

England seems to have a mixed relationship with Winston Churchill. Most people seem to revere him for the hero he is, but some people say that the country’s relationship with him isn’t as simple as America thinks it is. Before reading this book, I can’t say I knew much about Churchill or his actions during WWII. After reading it, I can’t see why people would think he isn’t one of the greatest wartime leaders of all time. Britain stood little to no chance against the German military, but Churchill refused to give in to Hitler, during a time when a good chunk of Parliament waned to. Who knows where England, or the world for that matter, would be if Churchill hadn’t stood his ground against Hitler. This book takes you through Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the early years of WWII. Erik Larson paints Churchill as someone who is very true to his nickname of Bulldog. It is very entertaining to read the inner workings of the British government in its battle against the Germans in his first year. Most of Churchill’s first year was spent worrying about German invasion on UK soil, and reassuring the public that they would be fine, despite the aerial onslaught that Hitler’s Luftwaffe was imposing across the UK. While many citizens thought Churchill was leading them towards being invaded, and a swift defeat, his strong, stubborn, and imposing will were what lead them to victory. All that and the United State’s intervention certainly improved their odds as well. This is an acclaimed book for a reason, it is a very good read, and a must-read if you’re interested in WWII history.

The exploits of Easy Company and the 101st Airborne are well known by pretty much every American at this point, thanks to the HBO series based on this book. There isn’t much to say about this book other than you really need to read it. To read what these guys went through to win the war is just insane. American heroes is putting it lightly. They, along with many other soldiers, really helped save an entire world with their actions in Europe. The series is fantastic, and I hate to be this person, but the book is even better than the TV series. The amount of research that Stephen Ambrose put into this book is astounding. The hours upon hours of interviewing these heroes is something I am very envious of. Getting to talk to these guys firsthand had to have been an awesome experience. Hearing their stories of true badassery really makes you feel like a wimp while reading. One of my favorite parts of reading this book was hearing about their time in places I have been blessed to visit in Europe. I have been to Eindhoven, through Bastogne, Normandy, etc., and it made visualizing what they went through so much more vivid having been to those places before. Even if you have watched the series on HBO, I highly recommend giving this book a read.

With St. Patrick’s Day just barely in our rearview mirror, I thought it would be a good time to suggest reading a fascinating book about the battle between the United Kingdom and the people of Ireland. Say Nothing chronicles the IRA’s (Irish Republican Army) battle against the British crown to gain independence for the entire island. Honestly, I had no idea that Ireland and Northern Ireland were two separate countries, with two very different sets of rules, until we went to Dublin and took a tour up through Northern Ireland and around Belfast. Not only did I not realize that they were two different countries, but I also had no idea how long, or how brutal, the conflict between them had been. This book does a great job chronically the power struggle between the citizens of Northern Ireland and the British government. Most of the struggle takes place in Belfast, and the author does a great job of painting the picture of Belfast as basically a battlefield. Between members of the IRA, loyalists, and British soldiers stationed in and around Belfast, it seemed like Belfast was basically as dangerous as Baghdad during the ’70s-’90s. A lot of the major conflicts occurred before I was born, so a lot of people probably have a better idea of how bad things were, but reading this book was really eye-opening for me. Keefe gets the insider scoop on the inner workings of the IRA during the major conflict years and tells first-hand accounts of some of the bigger events in the history of the conflict. You know those books that you say “just one more chapter” before you go to bed, and then 5 chapters later it’s midnight and you don’t know where the time went? This is one of those books that does that. Again, this may have been because I knew next to nothing about the conflict before I visited Belfast, but I still think it is one of the better books I have read lately.