We’ve had Adam Makos on the podcast several times to talk about his amazing World War II books, and his newest is another great one. What I love about Makos’ work is that he finds these incredible movie-like stories from WWII you’ve never even heard of. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of Tidal Wave: In August 1943, American B-24s flew a treetop-level raid on the oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania, the place that kept Hitler’s war machine fueled.
One of those bombers got shot down and crash-landed on the estate of Princess Catherine Caradja. The princess took the crew in as “her boys,” kept them out of German hands, and pulled them into a circle of unlikely allies that included Romania’s 21-year-old king and the country’s top fighter ace. The narrative is action-packed, full of intrigue, and just a really fun read.
It comes out November 3; order it today, and you can crack it open the day it releases. In this essay, classicist Catharine Edwards looks at how Cicero thought about manliness during the collapse of the Roman Republic. For Romans, virtus (from vir, man) started out meaning courage in battle.
Cicero wasn’t a general, so he argued that a man could also prove his manhood with his voice — in the Forum and the Senate. Then he lost that arena when Caesar took power. That, combined with the death of his daughter, left Cicero feeling unmanned.
So he turned to philosophy and recast virtus as moral excellence: self-control and the courage to face pain and death. It’s a good reminder that men have been grappling with what it means to be a man for a long time (and often defining it in a way that best fits their own qualities). If so, a good place to figure they’d be hiding is in the remote regions of Appalachia, and there are people in Eastern Kentucky who swear they’ve seen them there.
After a major flood in the region, sightings of “goblins” — leather-apron-wearing creatures that look kind of like Dobby, from Harry Potter — emerged, and people started theorizing that they got washed out of the deep, abandoned mines where they lived. This episode of the Spooked podcast dives into these reports. It’s a totally wild story — you keep waiting for the War of the Worlds, “just kidding, this isn’t real” disclaimer — but it’s based on firsthand accounts, and it’ll have you wondering if goblins might exist.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
