But Stephen Ambrose being Stephen Ambrose, and me being a stubborn reader who doesn't like to give up on books, I read. And read. And kept on reading.
Ambrose, in 252 pages, takes the reader from the U.S. Civil War to today's world, accurately predicting pilotless aircraft and conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and shedding light on the events and figures in America's wars from the mid-1800s into the future.
I enjoyed his profiles of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton as a World War II buff.
But his essays on the homefront and later on the My Lai massacre were the best parts of the book.
Ambrose, in only a few dozen pages, took me beyond the rah-rah of a nation united into a nation I vaguely remember reading about in some of the history books we had a home: Fighting a racist war against Japan while maintaining a segregated army and putting Japanese-Americans into prisons for the duration. He took us from Franklin Delano Roosevelt hoping to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible to advocating for firebombing cities in the hopes it would end the war sooner.
Mistakes sown there led to similar mistakes in Vietnam, where racism continued to bubble and mixed signals really fuddled the mission of the US in that nation.
Ambrose, of course, has the advantage of looking back at history to see the rights and wrongs, but also reminds us that we have no control over the past and that the only control we have on the future is remaining aware of what's going on now. He mentioned this quote from humorist James Thurber, and it's really stuck with me:
That's something I'm going to try to remember muyself.
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