I’ve had a bunch of obscure books in my Amazon list for years, and over the break I decided to see if I could track them down to read without spending $45 for an out-of-print copy.

The first was an accident, a book I stumbled on at the thrift store, and the thing that kicked this off: Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, a history of the conflict in French Indochina up to the American ramp-up in the early 1960’s. This was a seminal text recommended to all of the officers headed into that expanding war, and something none of the idiots in charge ever bothered to read or digest. I’d read about it for years and meant to find a copy, so I was pleased to pick this up for $1.

The second is a book called Missile Inbound, by Levinson & Edwards, which recounts the missile attack on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf in 1987. It’s an exhaustively researched book, and not quite what I was expecting—the first half is a minute-by-minute account of the attack, and the second is about the investigation afterwards. It’s a short book but a good read. There’s a related book called No Higher Honor about the USS Samuel B Roberts, which hit a mine a year later, and was saved through heroic action by its crew; that’s next to track down on my list.

The third is called A Corporate Tragedy: The Agony of the International Harvester Company, by Barbara Marsh. This traces the rise and fall of the company, from one of the largest agricultural manufacturers in the world to its collapse in the mid 1980’s. I found this one available on the Internet Archive—it’s long out of print.

I wish the publishing business would find an equitable way to make e-books more affordable.