Writer happy to suggest valuable readings in history

To The Eagle:

I feel like Mike Swift just shouted in my face without really saying much beyond a few tired platitudes [Letters To The Editor, May 25, 2017 edition]. He might consider expressing an original idea once in a while. No sense in my denying the aging hippy comment. Got me dead to rights.

I also feel like Swift left his audience hanging on to nothing with his final comment that we "read more history." I do actually read quite a bit of it and have some publications to recommend.

If you're an insomniac and like multi-volume series, try Winston Churchill's " History of the

English Speaking Peoples." Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" is a fascinating study of 11th century Europe and its emerging nation states.

Brendan Phibbs wrote an exciting and poignant account of his experiences as a medic in a tank batallion during WW II in "Our War for the World." Not to be missed is Stanley Karnov's definitive history of "Vietnam" and that war.

Speaking of which, kudos to all the other aging hippies of my generation for the anti-war movement that finally got this country out of that quagmire. That lesson doesn't seem to have kept us out of Afghanistan or Iraq, but where governments are concerned, one just has to "follow the money". . . and read more history.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island