Frivolous Friday, 08.20.2010: Recommended Reading

I'll probably write more on this from a more serious angle of angle after I polish them off, but in the meantime, I heartily recommend the memoirs of General/President Ulysses S. Grant for reasons that have little to do with software development:

• At West Point, Grant excelled at few things, but mathematics was one of them. (Booyah for America's second Nerd-in-Chief!)
• His writing, thanks to his own talents (with presumably a bit of polishing from a contemporary whose name might seem familiar because it's Mark Twain) is cogent, clear-eyed, modest, respectful of history where record and recollection diverge, and actually laugh-out-loud funny at times.
• The recollections and opinions are pretty much guaranteed to creep you the heck out with either their prescience. Ditto the head-banging frustration of realizing how closely history can repeat itself (e.g. the way the first-hand description of San Francisco during the Gold Rush years presages the dot-com boom and collapse.)
  
• The work, originally published in the 1880s, is out of copyright and should be available for a price ranging from free to chump-change.
• It should whet your appetite for more. Seriously--the Civil War isn't quite so done-to-death as World War II, but its paths are well-worn enough that I tend to shy away from it, given the choice. After this, I actually might break down and hitch a ride on the Team of Rivals bandwagon.
• (This was endearing to me, anyway: Grant more or less concedes that, when it came to finer details, he pretty much needed a keeper. Just like I sometimes do.)
  

Granted, this isn't exactly pulp fiction we're talking about here--meaning the kind of brain-twinkie you snarf down during re-run season. And it's not unbiased: Despite a certain gentility, Grant makes no bones about his views. Plus, he also tends to gloss over certain...shall we say..."complicating" details, such as his wife coming from a slave-owning family, not to mention his skirmishes against the bottle. For all that, you simply can't go wrong with this peek through History's keyhole.