A couple of weeks ago I said that I was Monitoring Mohler (so to speak), reading through his entire suggested summer reading list. At that point I had read The Unforgiving Minute, With Wings Like Eagles, Hunting Eichmann and World War One. Since then I’ve read several of the other titles on this list and thought I’d check in.

Number five on the list was Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton. Mohler says, “Horse Soldiers is a story that demands to be told and Stanton tells it well. No one reading this account will believe that the establishment of a lasting peace in Afghanistan will be anything but unspeakably difficult—and unquestionably important.” This book tells the story of a tiny handful of US soldiers who were among the first American servicemen to deploy to Afghanistan after 9/11. What they did there was pretty incredible and Doug Stanton tells the story very well. Anyone with an interest in military history or modern warfare will want to read this one to see how twenty-first century warfare came face-to-face with the nineteenth century in the mountains of Afghanistan. And, as Mohler says, this book shows the great and perhaps impossible challenge Afghanistan faces as it tries to build a lasting peace. Having said that, it’s hard to believe that what the Americans did there has had any lasting value as it seems that the violence continues to escalate and that the nation is a long, long way away from any kind of peace. Time will tell, I suppose. Do note that there is some swearing in this book since these are, after all, soldiers we are talking about here.

Up sixth was Sultana by Alan Huffman, a book about the worst maritime disaster in American history. Through gross greed and negligence, the Sultana, hugely overloaded with Union soldiers recently liberated from Confederate prison camps, exploded and sank in the Mississippi. Around 1700 of the 2400 passengers aboard the ship died. Mohler says, “Sultana is a book that makes for compelling reading that reaches the heart.” The book does more than recount the disaster. It follows several of the men involved through their service in the Union army, through their imprisonment and it is only in the final few chapters that we come to the Sultana. Ironically, I found the earlier chapters more interesting and more compelling than the tale of the disaster itself. I appreciated that the author saw fit to widen the scope of the book by making it about the whole war and not just about a single tragedy. Any Civil War enthusiast will appreciate this book, I’m sure.