Book Reviews? I’ll Start: “19 Minutes To Live”
 

My daughter and I go to a lot of book sales, building inventory for her planned cafe-bookstore. My unofficial role is to pick up the “dad books”. I select a lot of nonfiction, some scifi, some classics.

At this weekend’s sale I picked up a book titled “19 Minutes To Live: Helicopter Combat in Vietnam”. It is by a guy named Lew Jennings, who was a Cobra pilot with the 101st, and recounts in great detail his year flying and fighting in, I think, mostly the A Shau Valley area, including the battle of Hamburger Hill and other combat. I learned a lot about how Loaches, Cobras, and Hueys worked together and with firebase artillery, FACs, jets, and even B52s and naval guns. It is a self-published book, pretty obscure I’ll guess, but really engrossing. He served twenty years, then flew airliners, retired, came back to fly helicopter ISR missions in Iraq at age 62, and finally retired for good to his boat cruising the Pacific and Mexico. Quite a life.

The book reminded me of a lawyer I worked with, back when I was a lawyer, who had been a forward air controller in Vietnam. My firm had quite a few Vietnam veterans-turned-lawyers, Marines and Army; they all had big respect for that quiet small man.

Book sales are really quite interesting. Sometimes you’ll see “scanners”, who scan each book’s bar code, looking for titles that sell well online. We don’t scan. My daughter knows a lot about what authors are popular but is more building a curated inventory of quality books with certain emphases. She finds good stuff. We stopped in a little town in the Russian River at a library sale that included the personal collection of an author who most have never heard of, but is pretty well known in a certain niche genre. She had quite an amazing collection, lots of books gifted and signed to her by other authors. I saw a scanner there, complaining “there’s nothing good here”. He never even bothered to check out that collection; we took hundreds of books from it. You pay about $0.50 to $1.00 for a used book that will sell for $5-10 - *when* it sells, inventory turn is the problem here. And sometimes you find a first edition or, as at that sale, a signed book by a desirable author or better yet a book signed by one author to another, that will sell for $50-200 - when a collector comes along who is looking for it. I think my daughter will have to put some of her inventory online to get maximum value. We think she needs about 6,000 books to open, and she has about 4,000 so far. Physical books are having something of a rennaissance, kind of like vinyl and film. Portland is a good book town and since each small bookstore has its particular focus, there’s room for all of them. We don’t know exactly how the cafe and bookstore combo will work and if the books will be more than just decor and ambiance, but I’ve seen some similar combinations and they seem to do okay.

It is also interesting to read a good book and compare to the mountains of AI drivel that are flooding the internet now.

P.S. Jennings’ book is available on Amazon and Thriftbooks.

Right now, I'm about halfway through 'Meet the Kellys: The True Story of Machine Gun Kelly' by Chris Enss. Beyond the subject itself, it's an interesting look into life in the USA in the early 1930s.

I just finished 'Devil at his Elbow' by Valerie Bauerlein. The story of the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina. A really good read.

Currently reading “Frostbite” by Nicola Twilly. It’s a book about the history of refrigeration. It is an incredibly deeply researched book, including such tidbits as the fact that big US abattoirs electrocute animal carcasses before they begin to chill them in order to make the meat more tender, and in the 1920s conspiracy theories claimed refrigeration poisoned food and refrigeration was a plot to kill Americans.

"Jet Pack Dreams"

The author discusses the history of the Jet Pack (or Rocket Belt as it was originally known) and crosses the country to try and discover how close 'we' are to having personal jet packs.

Ignition by John Clark for the science geeks.

Jelly Bryce is an entertaining biography. Nothing like getting arrested the morning of your first day as a law man.

First couple that come to mind.

Small selection at first, if promising then can devote more space.

She may do something like special of the day is a recipe from a cookbook which will be on offer to buy.

Pretty interesting sports genre book:
https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-Side-Wall-Greatest-Baseball/dp/1592284396

How close are we?

I remember >20 years ago there was a turbofan version of the "jetpack" that looked pretty cool. We even talked about it here. I was living in Berkeley and working in SF, and thought "cool, I'll commute by jetpack soon".

'Bout as close as we were in 1960 when Wendall Moore invented the first one.

People cant handle 2D driving. Imagine 3d?

Thanks, I'm always looking for non-fiction Audible books to download since it's my go to driving listening medium.

19 Minutes is on Audible so I just downloaded to listen when I finish Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (45 hours long so it's gonna be awhile to finish it first)