Purple and Mad Men

I've been taking it easy while entertaining myself of late.

Awhile back I found Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers and was taken by his profound storytelling ability.  Recently, I picked out one of Sides' later works at the library.

Blood and Thunder isn't nearly as good as Ghost Soldiers but is nonetheless a good read.

Ghost Soldiers (2001) is a gripping story about a special Rangers unit during WWII selected to free US prisoners at Cabanatuan in the Philippines.  The risks in this operation were nearly suicidal, yet the Rangers pulled off the seemingly impossible mission of rescuing over 500 US soldiers from the heavily guarded Japanese prison camp.

Blood and Thunder (2006) is the story of Kit Carson's mid-nineteenth century adventures in the American West.  While Sides strives to negate the romanticism in Carson's story, he isn't always successful.

A fundamental flaw in the second book points to a constant problem in any effort to write history for the masses.  In telling a story about the distant past, conjecture and imagined plausibility tend to dominate the narrative to such extremes that the author is nearly always certain to colorize his canvass in deep purple.

While Ghost Soldiers has relative immediacy and the advantage of a younger narrative, including information gleaned from the lingering survivors of the rescue, Blood and Thunder relies too heavily (and perhaps unavoidably) on secondary sources to tell Carson's story.

Sides makes shit up to fill in the gaps in the Carson story.  Another popular historian, Stephen Ambrose, did the same thing in Crazy Horse and Custer.

But what the heck...

Besides my reading I've been streaming some good television of late.  Weeks ago a friend turned me on to a French police procedural series that started in 2005, I believe.  Netflix has it now, and it is titled Spiral. First-rate television, with excellent elements--writing, acting, directing.

Finally, I've challenged myself to watch Mad Men, which I first missed in 2007 because I didn't have cable.  I still don't have cable, but you can stream the first four years of this excellent series at Netflix as well.

It's funny.  Many mad television consumers rale against Netflix because it is supposedly slow to bring things online.  Doesn't matter to me because I'm too far behind popular culture to worry about it.

Five years after I first heard Terry Gross talking about Mad Men on NPR I'm finally digging it.


TS