Tagged

John Moser from No Left Turns tagged me. My reply:

Getting Tagged

John Moser at No Left Turns has “tagged” me with some hard-hitting questions. I have been out of town (still out of town—I am writing this in a coffee shop in Athens, OH) so I haven’t been able to respond. Due to the wonders of the internet I have been able to get most of the needed information by looking at my purchase history at Amazon.com.

Here goes:

1. How many books do I own?

Hard to know. I have a couple thousand books that never made the move to Ohio or Colorado and reside in boxes at my dad’s house. I probably have about 500 at home at around 700 in my office.

2. What’s the last book I bought?

According to Amazon.com I went on a book-buying binge on March 28 and purchased:

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Issacson and Evan Thomas

Kennedy Versus Lodge: The 1952 Massachusetts Senate Race by Thomas J. Whalen

Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents by Donald A. Ritchie

Watergate: The Presidential Scandal That Shook America by Keith W. Olson

The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon Era Strategy (Modern War Studies) by Jeffrey Kimball

Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy by Dean Kotlowski

3. What’s the last book I read?

--Press Gallery by Donald Ritchie. I had been waiting for that book to come out and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Ritchie didn’t disappoint me either.

4. What are the five books that mean the most to me?

This is the toughest question. Some of the books are obvious.

Alonzo Hamby’s Man of the People is the book that made me want to move to Ohio and study under the man. I got a Ph.D., met my wife and changed the course of my life because of Hamby. He remains the single most important intellectual influence in my life. I could easily add Chester Pach’s and Charles Alexander’s Eisenhower books for the same reason. I met my wife in Pach’s class and Alexander is one of the greatest men I have ever known. He used to overpay me to clean the rain gutters at his house and his wife is and was wonderful to my wife and me. But this is supposed to be about books.

This next one might not be too hip a choice in certain circles but Stephen Ambrose’s two-volume biography of Eisenhower is the book that got me thinking about the subjects I still work on. I would be lying if I denied its influence on me.

Isaiah Berlin’s The Proper Study of Mankind is probably the book that most influenced my ideas about relativism, truth, totalitarianism—you name it.

Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom is just about the most perfect history book ever written.

I read Victor Davis Hanson’s The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece in his class and have admired him and his work since then.