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.
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