William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War. I like Manchester and have read a lot of his books. He writes history in a very interesting, precise way and has this great, surgically precise vocabulary. He can throw a word into a paragraph, a totally obscure word to most people, without seeming pretentious at all. And that one word is often so right, that it saves him writing another paragraph. It doesn’t do this very often, but when it does, you want to have dictionary access and it is always a pleasant surprise. It’s like a little extra treat you get when reading Manchester. His biographies are excellent as well.
He is most famous for his 1967 book, The Death of a President that also includes his intimate interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy soon after the assassination of her husband. The book traces the movements of both Oswald and Kennedy in detail in the weeks previous to the assassination and then he covers the post-assassination Washington machinations and the reactions of the Kennedy family and the nation. A pristine, first edition signed copy of that book sells for around $500 dollars today. Manchester is always well researched and his books are indexed. He was a prize winning historian and biographer.
For the past few nights I’ve been reading the Encyclopedia of Film Noir, by Meyer and McDonnell in order to get to sleep during bouts of insomnia. It doesn’t help much because the book is so interesting. The first 85 pages discuss what Film Noir is in detail, how it came to be, the look of a noir, etc. 496 pages, very thorough on American noir, but not much on foreign noir. You can pick up a film noir encyclopedia through Amazon for 35 bucks, or you can go here and get one like mine for free in pdf format. LOL. I love the net.