Great Summer Memoirs to Read

[daft]

I've run across the most interesting accounts in early Texas history that you would not expect at all given the usual top-down narrative. Here are some examples, and it pays to search for a most suitable version from your library or online source (bookseller or sometimes avail in audio or free with expired copyright).

1500's Cabeza de Vaca memoirs of being longterm shipwrecked in Texas. I read the book, but this example may be an equivalent free audiobook: https://archive.org/details/journey_of_cabeza_de_vaca_sa_librivox
This is a quite sympathetic Spaniard who wants more positive relations with Indians than his bosses. He makes first encounters from Florida to Mexico, but sees the dark side when stuck with a near starving tribe hemmed in by enemy tribes around Galveston. He accidently appears to bring "dead" (comatose) indians back to life, so as a medicine man is given permission to cross the honeycomb of tribal war boundaries back to freedom.

1800ish The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson, by Andro Linklater. A right hand man of George Washington and sort of for Pres. Jefferson, but he was a Spanish spy! He was made governor of the Louisiana territory that comprises much of the present US midwest, yet he sabotaged possible expansions south near or towards Texas which may have been welcomed by those residents. Spain bolstered their feeble presence in Texas as a result but failed to quash the (leaked) Lewis and Clark expedition which could have halted US moves to the west.

1830ish With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution by de la Pena. The first half is spellbinding with him admiring how the "enemy immigrants" have transformed desolate Texas into modern productive farms and ranches. The second half is suspected to be a fake (the wormholes don't extend from vol 1 to 2) with a weird spin on the Alamo battle, etc.

P.S even a Sam Houston bio can put the Texas war for independence in a surprising light. Ordered troops to relocate from the Alamo which looked so clearly indefensible... but nobody obeyed. His final victory appeared a defeat that put his head in hands... until Santa Anna was taken by chance as a hostage. He didn't want slavery, while most original Spanish residents wanted to emulate rich Natchez slaveholders. BTW Santa Anna later tricks the US into letting him out of exile to help defuse (actually expand) the Mexi war as noted below.

1840ish The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Davis in the Mexican War, 1846-1848 by Dugard. Or you can go into free onlne memoirs of Grant and Sherman where Hispanic parts are more interesting than their civil war parts. They were peaceniks, unhappy with any more than defensive border skirmishes! They had many serendipitous encounters, sometimes being treated as liberators of towns where the Mexican army couldn't defend them from overwhelming Indian raids. They hated the Texas Rangers who made revenge raids on civvies, yet couldn't punish them due to a loophole in Army regulations.

 

[unionrdr]

I wouldn't mind also reading " Gone To Texas" that spurred "The Outlaw Josey Wales". A lot of truths from that time of the end of the civil war in it, moreso than the movie as I understand.

 

[daft]

I should have given this thread a more general title, such as "Great summer memoirs to read". Anyway I am giving up on two WW2 memoirs of c-47 planeloads of army nurses and then secretaries crashing in either the boonies or behind enemy lines, then making their way back. Poorly written and the crashes were dumb and avoidable in the first place.

So on scraping the bottom of the barrel, what were favorite WW2 memoirs from AXIS side? Almost any pilot memoir is exciting, and there is even a good Japanese sub commander memoir. A good land war one is "Five Years, Four Fronts: A German Officer's World War II Combat Memoir". So aggressive... he repeatedly uses his pistol against his own side to demand more fuel for instance. He reopens churches that Stalin closed in Russia. He respects British soldiers, but is quite ruthless against others.

An unusual memoir is "Berlin Diaries 1940-1945" by Marie Vassiltchikov, a young Russian ex-princess escaping Stalin. She has to work for the German gov't she hates, but in spare time lives an adventurous and glamorous life in wartime Berlin. Germany had austere rationing even before the war, but the VIP crowd lived on captured French lobster and champagne. Round the clock bombing was a small threat due to excellent bomb shelters, although it could be creepy for her to duck into an unfriendly one in a party dress. She and her friends hated being eventually relocated to a mountain ski resort to escape bombing, and they found every excuse to revisit Berlin. Not just a flippant life, she rejoiced at the deaths of powerful generals and politicos there.

"Spandau; The Secret Diaries" by Speer is mostly a gloomy read of being imprisoned for being a henchman of Hitler. His other famous wartime memoirs of being a mislead nice guy is less respected now, but this book has hidden gems. He remembers anecdotes that were otherwise lost to history, but show the true mental workings of key wartime characters like Hitler. Hitler had unusual eccentric abilities to get as far as he did. Fellow VIP prisoners are mostly creeps, and it raises a smile when doctors come to give some minor operation and the US army lays a coffin alongside the operating table to emphasize how expendable they are considered. The only interesting other prisoner is Hitler's deputy R. Hess who became mildly insane even early in the war. Sympathetic to the point where US guards would sneak in booze and chocolates for him, which he refused for decades. Speer pointed out the prison was more lethal to US guards than to prisoners, because they became alcoholics, diabetic, or dead from boredom and cheap commissary luxuries.

 

[Tin4]

I changed the title.

 

[daft]

every excuse to revisit Berlin. Not just a flippant life,

Before I add one book I forgot, I wanted to underline that princess Marie's memoirs did have substance. She was distantly connected to the kill-Hitler plot, and her ex-boss was executed for this. She was frustrated that he focused more on a replacement gov't than ensuring the assassination went OK. Another boss was constantly yelled at by his wife and his boss (Goebbels) so when Marie refuses to comfort him by becoming his private secretary, he repeatedly leans out the window where she chants to herself "jump; you want to, so go ahead and jump!".

Several of these books have an appealing Dilbert quality of a bright employee under a klutzy boss. Cabeza de Vaca predicted the disasters that followed his captain's various bad decisions. De la Pena was a shrewd observer of the doomed Santa Anna. The German Army officer repeatedly defies orders he considers stupid, but then has to win the battle to get away with it.

I meant to add the story of a Jew living in wartime Dresden: "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary 1941-1945" by Victor Klemperer. The best of 3 volumes, he survives because his wife is a non-Jew and the infamous firebombing of Dresden kind of sets them free to flee towards southern Germany and it's approaching US troops. Before this Dresden was oddly free of bombing, so you get a window on how city life there was sabotaged by it's gov't alone against it's citizens (esp Jews). There are a lot of counterintuitive themes, like how (mild) forced labor and stress seemed at times to improve the mental and physical health of this aging scholarly couple as they stepped up to it.