Discs from the past month or so.

Here are my finds for the past few weeks. I’m going to stop commenting on every single book since my preferences and interests in each one should be fairly obvious by now.

Brad Thor: Use of Force • Finally! Out of the twenty books Thor has written, I have read fifteen or so of them, and was missing the newer ones… and this is the last of those new ones that I needed! (Only $2.50!) It’s taken forever to find it at a thrift, being a newer book (2017). Now I can finally begin reading the series again, and when I’m done re-reading the first fifteen, I’ll just continue through into the newer ones such as this book. What’s also great is that my Vince Flynn series is in the exact same situation, as far as how many I’ve read before and new ones that I’ll be reading for the first time. These series are great to read and re-read.

Great Photographs of World War II • I have a separate post about how I came across this book…

Picked up a stack of these magazines at the ARC Thrift Store in Arvada; I’ve found other military/history magazines here before, although it isn’t often. This post contains my recent find as well as my previous magazines. I have a subscription to this, which is an expensive choice but one never knows when, or if, that subscriptions’ editions will ever be found at a thrift in the future, and how many years would that take to find, if ever? It is very nice to have one show up in the mail. Back in the day, I would look forward to Newsweek and National Geographic, car and video game magazines; now it’s history magazines which is far more interesting. Most car magazines are super-thin, don’t contain much news and have more and more cars and issues I don’t care about (electric, save-the-world green cars and such). However, when they have cool cars, the photography is amazing and almost worth the subscription price.

Time changes things, and car magazines don’t deliver much car news anymore aside from reviews and comparisons, so much has moved online that the print versions are lacking.

I do believe, and I think it is Road & Track that either moved, or added a big, four-times-a-year publication that is really neat. That’s probably the way print needs to go.

Newsweek has been and became unbelievably more partisan, so much so that it hasn’t been in print form in years. Not sure if it’s even online. It’s eye-opening to read an old one and observe how often they would predict or promote something that didn’t happen or turned out badly. This is an age-old epidemic in media.

National Geographic, while it still has excellent photos and some great articles, is clearly nothing more than a vehicle for social politics today. It is also much thinner than it used to be. They’ve had entire issues dedicated to topics that they wouldn’t have touched not so long ago; so much that I have actually tossed a few issues into the trash, something unthinkable for me to do. It’s not scientific anymore, very one-sided and always pushing agendas as opposed to just delivering on the Society’s mission statement. So even at only thirteen dollars a year with access to the entire archive that covers more than 100 years, I let this go. Their History magazine, however, is pretty good and I still subscribe to that.

Video game magazines, I haven’t had a subscription since the late 1990’s. At one point I let almost all of my copies go as I had no room and didn’t play games anymore, but they were fun reading for years.

In any case, finding a stack of old history magazines is good fun!