First off, sorry, but this guy needs to be fired like yesterday. At least everyone and their third cousin is screaming about him. (The irony that he issued his apology the week of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not lost on me.)

An excellent piece in the Telegraph on Christian Appy's oral history on Vietnam. (Recently published in the UK, but out in the US for a couple of years.) Some things to think about:

The undeclared war lasted 19 years, from 1956 to 1975. By its end, the tally was 58,000 US dead, more than a million Vietnamese, and $200 billion spent – to what end? When US General Kinnard posed this question to 173 army generals who served in Vietnam, "70 per cent said they really didn't understand the war's objectives".

As Christian Appy puts it in his superb oral history, even after 30 years, and countless novels, histories and films, the questions of "why it happened, why it was so vehemently opposed, what it did to the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, what it actually did to us, and who was responsible" have not been satisfactorily answered. "We have simply avoided a full public reckoning."

One of my favorite writers, Tim O'Brien, is interviewed in the book and as usual, sees the world through what he learned in Vietnam: The parallel is on every page, but only with Tim O'Brien's words does the pressure of this book's relevance leak through. "The events subsequent to September 11 remind me of the early stages of the Vietnam war… You can't talk with people you demonise."

Another attempt to track the history of the Blues is reviewed at the Observer. These books fascinate me - it's like trying to pin down smoke or vapors. We can know when the music was first recorded and first publicly played or sang but when it began - where it came from - who birthed it? It's an exercise in futility I think - a wonderful fascinating exercise, but still vapor and faery dust. (I might be reading too much Neil Gaiman these days and thus everything looks mysterious to me, but I can't help it. "The Problem With Susan" by the way is nothing less than pure delight. It's worth the price of the book alone.)

I've been thinking about The Mathematics of Love since I read the first blurb about it and this review in the Post just makes me determined to get a copy. It doesn't hurt that there's a comparison to Lucy (and thus Susan) in the opening paragraphs:

Two very different characters, separated by more than 150 years, hold our attention here. The first is Anna Ware, a rueful teenager who's already experienced enough disappointment to make her precociously cynical about matters of the heart. Her errant mother has packed her off to spend the summer of 1976 in the English countryside with an uncle at a shuttered boarding school. Of course, any young person sent to an old mansion in the English countryside is bound to discover a wardrobe with a false back, and, in this case, Anna's portal to a different world is a stash of old letters written by an early owner of the estate. These documents are faded and difficult to read, but with little else to do, Anna is gradually drawn into the life of Stephen Fairhurst, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

I love history, I could read it all day long.