Influences

• John Keegan, James M. McPherson, Bruce Catton, Stephen Ambrose, Martin Middlebrook, Shelby Foote, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Barbara Tuchman.

  Also, Walt Whitman, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Shaara.

Favorite Books

• The Lord of the Rings, Goodbye Darkness, The Mask of Command, Six Armies in Normandy, At Dawn We Slept, The First and the Last, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, All Quiet on the Western Front, Utmost Savagery: The Three Days of Tarawa, We Were Soldiers Once -- and Young, The Great Gatsby, A Helmet for My Pillow, A Rumor of War, Into Thin Air, Shadow Divers.

Favorite Authors

• Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton, John Keegan, William Manchester, Martin Middlebrook, Richard B. Frank, Joseph H. Alexander, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Shaara, Jon Krakauer, Robert Kurson, Brad Matsen, Robert Sherrod, Robert Dallek.

What I'm Reading

• Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage by Noah Andre Trudeau

  FDR by Jean Edward Smith

  Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands

  Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America by Adam Cohen

  No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black

  FDR and Lucy: Lovers and Friends by Resa Willis