A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Book Review: Sword Beach: D-Day Baptism by Fire by Max Hastings (2025). Hastings is a well-known British journalist and military historian. This book details the experience of the British forces at one of the five beaches on which Allied forces on D-Day. Most of us are familiar with the two beaches assigned to the US Army which were code named Omaha and Utah. The British landed on Sword and Gold; the Canadians on Juno. (Hastings shares that British planners named these three beaches for fish, as in Swordfish and Goldfish. Juno was initially called Jelly as in jellyfish, until Winston Churchill decreed the name too wimpy and changed it to Juno.) I’ve read much about the US experience on D-Day but was mostly oblivious to what happened in the British sector. This account includes the 6th Airborne Division which dropped inland from the British beaches as the US 101st and 82nd Airborne did in the American sector. Notably, British glider-borne troops proved decisive in the opening minutes of the attack. There were two bridges inland that were critical for linking the invasion force with the airborne troops further inland, so these bridges had to be seized before the Germans could demolish them. Several gliders filled with troops landed immediately adjacent to the bridge. Unlike troops delivered by parachute who are widely scattered when they hit the ground and take time to assemble, a successful and accurate glider landing – which these were – delivers a mass of troops right on the objective. In the big picture, Hastings acknowledges that the British plan to rush inland and seize the major city of Caen on the first day was unrealistic, but that the sole focus on making it onto the beach kept troops from training for what to do once they were ashore. This training gap made a mission with only a slight chance of success unfeasible. However, Hastings says that whatever the shortcomings of the British, the German’s failure to get nearby tank units moving promptly towards the beachhead was the critical mistake on June 6. While the allies were not able to immediately break out of their beachhead, they were able to expand and reinforce it enough to withstand whatever else the Germans threw at them afterwards.

Art Exhibition: America in the Making at the Addison Gallery of Art, Phillips Andover. The Addison is a superb museum located 20 minutes from Lowell. Admission is free and new exhibits seem always to be on view. The current show is “America in the Making” which draws on the Addison’s collection to chart America’s journey from the Declaration of Independence to the present as reflected in the art of the time. The exhibit fills the entire museum and is hung chronologically with portraits of colonial era merchants, the elite in the new democratic society, giving way to immense landscape paintings that reflected westward migration and the Manifest Destiny doctrine. Then as the nation modernized, artists addressed the complexity of life by turning from realism to abstraction. How artists respond to current times in the US remains to be seen, however, the Addison does not take federal funding so is not subject to the same government censorship that curtails what can be displayed at the Smithsonian and in our National Park Museums.

Obituary: Harry Lew (1884-1963), New York Times, October 21, 2026. As a historian, the obituary section of the New York Times is one of my favorite parts of the newspaper. Most listed have died recently, but the paper also reaches back in history to highlight people who died long ago and were underappreciated or unacknowledged at the time of their passing. Recently, the Times afforded such coverage to Harry “Bucky” Lew of Lowell, Massachusetts, who is credited with being the first Black professional basketball player in the United States. Many of us are aware of this history, especially after local author Chris Boucher (whose mentioned in the Times article) published his Harry “Bucky” Lew: A Biography of Basketball’s First Black Professional earlier this year. Now, thanks to the wide reach of the Times, more people, especially basketball fans and players, will know of this accomplishment.

Podcast: James Marriott on the End of Reading – I watched this on a YouTube channel called “Persuasion” but it’s also a podcast called “The Good Fight.” The presenter is Yascha Mounk, a German-American political scientist teaching at Johns Hopkins University. This episode was an interview of James Marriott, who is a columnist with the London Times newspaper, but the focus was his new book, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society. Marriott argues that a “reading revolution” in the late 18th century propelled Europe and what became the United States into the Enlightenment and mass democracy. He explained that the maturation of the printing press meant more books were available; that the increasingly complex modern state and economies required literate bureaucrats and merchants; and that the rise of Protestantism, a religion the emphasized the written word, were all factors in this revolution. Marriott further argues that the decline in reading today is a factor in the erosion of democracy in the US and Europe. The host pushed back on this thesis, suggesting that literacy had arose because of economic advances rather than the other way around. I tend to fall on the Marriott side of this argument mostly because of my own experience. I enjoy reading but often find it easier to sit in front of a video screen and consume whatever comes up rather than expend the effort needed to read something complicated. There’s a place for both, but one shouldn’t crowd out the other.