Recent Reading

[chickenfeet]

Richard Holmes; Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket.

This is similar in content to his other books Sahib and Tommy It's an interesting read if you are into the sociology of military organisations.  I didn't learn a lot that i didn't already know.  One exception would be that apparently recent research suggests that the army in the late 18th and early 19th centuries contained a significant proportion of officers promoted from the ranks.  Traditionally this is assumed to have been a very small proportion whereas it turns out that it may have been as high as 20-25%.  For someone with a less than encyclopaedic knowledge of the peculiarities of the British army in general and the period in particular, and who needed to know details of who did what and how, what they ate, how they dressed and the like,  I think this book would be most valuable.

Jessica Gregson; The Angel Makers

This is not the sort of novel I normally read (not that I read many novels) but I enjoyed it a lot.  It's about life in a Hungarian village during and after WW1, with the men away and then back, and the effect of this on the lives of the women of the village.  The central character is very much an outsider (which probably helped me identify).  I don't want to be spoilerish because this is very much a story type novel.  It's strongly plotted with well developed characters and enough tension to keep one turning the pages.  It's told in a series of episodes with long gaps between them which is effective without being artificial and it deliberately (and effectively) leaves a number of issues unreso

Comments

[gramarye1971]

The book on the redcoats sounds interesting -- my knowledge of the army of that time period is more shallow than I'd like it to be, and it sounds like a book that might provide a little more depth without getting bogged down in the writing problems that often plague military history.