wildbill's reading for 2013

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wildbill's reading for 2013

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1wildbill
Bewerkt: dec 26, 2013, 9:44 pm

I moved over here this year from the 50 Book Challenge. This year I want to concentrate on working on my tbr pile and reading books that I already own. My goal is 50%. I went through my library and made a long list of good books to read so that I have plenty of material. I am posting the books I have had for a while on ROOT- 2013 Read Our Own Tomes and double posting them here. I decided I want a complete journal of everything I read so I am going to put it here.

1. Tarzan of the Apes
2. Select Epigrams of Martial
3. The Search for Modern China
4. Thirty-three Teeth
5. Seven Days: The Emergence of Robert E. Lee and the Dawn of a Legend
6. The Island at the Center of the World
7. Lee and His Men at Gettysburg
8. The Prince
9. Anarchy and Old Dogs
10. The Origins of the War of 1914, volume 2
11.Much Ado About Nothing
12.The Greek Way
13. Landscape Turned Red:The Battle of Antietam
14. Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century
15. A Coney Island of the Mind
16. Disco for the Departed.
17. Seven Guitars
18. The Curse of the Pogo Stick
19. Book of Blues
20. Six by Suess
21. A Confederacy of Dunces
22. Causes of the Civil War
23.Cop Hater
24.Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
25.The Analects of Confucius
26. Two Years Before the Mast
27. Gulliver's Travels
28.The Thin Man
29. Shiloh,1862
30.The Merry Misogynist
31. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
32. The Grand Design:Strategy and the U. S. Civil War
33. Winesburg, Ohio
34. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist
35. The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
36. The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution
37. Tao Te Ching
38. Grant Moves South
39. Looking for Rachel Wallace
40. Slash and Burn

2stretch
dec 30, 2012, 8:22 pm

Welcome to the Club Bill! Glad to see you here this year.

3wildbill
Bewerkt: jan 15, 2013, 9:10 pm

Glad to be here. I look forward to an interesting year of reading and getting to know some new people. I'm posting books that I have had on the shelf for a long time on the Root-2013 group. I'm also going to post them here because I want one thread that has everything I read for the year.

4wildbill
Bewerkt: jan 15, 2013, 9:04 pm

Tarzan of the Apes
This is a fast paced action adventure story set in the constant dangers of the jungles of Africa. An orphaned infant is raised as a wild animal by a gorilla and given the name Tarzan. As he grows up he finds the home of his parents and teaches himself to read from the books there. As he matures he becomes the King of the Jungle ruling the otherworldy fantasy world of Numa the Lion and Sabor the leopard.
Then civilization comes to Tarzan's jungle. First there are native Africans. They were driven off by Europeans after revolting against their cruelty. Then they set up a village and engage in cannibalism. Tarzan extends his rule over them through guile and his rope which pulls tribe members up into the night sky.
My favorite character is D'Arnton. He is a Frenchman who is first captured and tortured by the natives. He is rescued by Tarzan and nursed back to health. He then becomes a true friend to Tarzan. He is the only European who shows genuine respect and affection for Tarzan.
Tarzan has more depth than I expected as a character. He is the descendant of English lords raised as a wild animal. His superhuman strength and acute senses create a larger than life persona than is one rung below Superman.
Burroughs empasizes the conflict between the uncorrupted primitive a la Rousseau and the evils of civilization as personified in Robert Canler an evil man who tries to use money to obtain the hand of Jane Porter the love interest of three men in the story. The ending was not my favorite part of the story but it did not greatly detract from a book I enjoyed much more than I thought I would.

5wildbill
Bewerkt: jan 15, 2013, 9:11 pm

Select Epigrams of Martial
This is a book I found in a used book store years ago. It tickled my curiosity and has been sitting on my shelves gathering dust. There were a lot of giggles in this book and a few groans. The giggles are for Martial's wit, the groans are for his over the top obscenity. The editor of this book made a point of putting in a lot of poetry of Martial that had not been printed before for that very reason. Martial was the master of the epigram; concise, precise and insightful. It just so happens that as Freud proved sex is a big part of human behavior and Martial didn't leave anything out. In his own words;

Not all my poems are meant
for cocktail parties-----
a few are fit for morning tea.

Still he does have a way of getting right to the point in a few words and his style of epigrams set the tone for many writers. The editor mentions quite a few poets that followed Martial's style and has a quote from Byron who paying his respects to the Roman poet.

And then what proper person can be partial
to all those nauseous epigrams of Martial

Don Juan Canto I
stanza xliii, 11. 343-44

Considering that he was writing in 100 c.e. Martial's comments seem very timely. The editor put it nicely in saying," When we look at the nature of man, strip man down to his bare self, today's man versus yesterday's, we find that progress amounts to little more than toilet paper, tin cans and atom bombs." Except for the Latin name the following could easily have been written by Dorothy Parker.

Saenia swore that she
was robbed of her virtue.
So how can a girl be robbed
of what she hasn't got?

There don't seem to be a lot of copies around but I am glad I have this book on my shelf for those moments when I want a laugh or a reason not to take life so seriously.

6baswood
jan 16, 2013, 4:23 am

enjoyed your post on the select epigrams of Martial

7Jargoneer
jan 16, 2013, 6:01 am

>4 wildbill: - I read John Carter of Mars last year and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Burroughs writing may be rough and ready but it seems that, at least some of, his work is standing up quite well.

8wildbill
jan 16, 2013, 8:08 pm

I read A Princess of Mars last year. It was wall to wall non-stop action. I thought that Tarzan of the Apes had more depth. I remember reading the comic books when I was a kid. I enjoyed the fantasy world where Tarzan rode a triceratops.

9dchaikin
jan 17, 2013, 4:04 pm

#5 - great quotes...hadn't heard of Martial before.

10wildbill
jan 17, 2013, 6:56 pm

#9- Nice of you to say so. That book is one of the reasons I shop at used book stores. I hadn't heard of it until I saw it.

11wildbill
jan 19, 2013, 4:48 pm

The Search for Modern China
I first read about this topic in a college textbook and have found it fascinating ever since. I have always felt that because the history of China is so different from the U.S. it had a lot to tell me. Now that I have got around to reading this book it is one of my favorites on this subject. The book covers the history of China from about 1600-1989. During that time China changed from an Imperial state to a totalitarian bureaucracy. The book begins with the conquest of China by the Manchus and ends just after TiananMen Square, which I consider to be the end of the Chinese Revolution and the beginning of modern China. Along the way China underwent great changes brought on by it's conflict with the Western powers in the 19th century and internal changes which ended with the fall of the Imperial system. The 20th century saw the Chinese Civil War and the growth of China into a modern nation shaped by the Chinese Revolution. After 1949 Mao Zedong oversaw the modernization of China with a series of destructive movements that ended with his death. Deng Xioaping fashioned a series of economic reforms which created the economic powerhouse which is modern day China. This is a series of generalizations about an era of history which Jonathan D. Spence has set forth in detail in his wonderful book.
I must begin with what I most like about the book and one item I really dislike. The book is filled with pictures and maps that provided a big plus to my understanding of what was happening. There is a great variety of illustrations from the Imperial age to Tiananmen Square that greatly enrich the story. Almost 50 maps made sure that I always knew where the events described in the text were happening. Maps are very important to me in reading history and this book definitely met my needs. All of the maps and pictures made the book a good cross between a seminar text and a coffee table book. I didn't like or understand the fact that all the way through to the end of the book the author referred to the capital of China as Peking. In my mind the city became Beijing in 1949 and I don't know why the author refused to change. It bothered me a little every time I read it.
Jonathan Spence is one of my favorite Chinese history authors and in this book he tells the complete story of the rise of modern China. He uses 750 pages to write a thorough and detailed story of the changes which took place in China during this time. He concentrates on the events more than the personalities of the people making the book read a lot like a textbook. My interest in the numerous events and the great changes that took place during this time and kept the reading from being dull and dry.
A few items that made an impact on me. I have never felt the same about the British since reading about their actions in the Opium Wars. Purely for the love of money they made drug addicts out of a vast segment of the Chinese and killed people for the right to do so. The Manchus who ruled China during this time were the conquerors of China and Westerners always seemed to think of them as the Chinese. I don't believe that Mao Zedong cared for any body in the world except for himself. From the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution he ruined the lives of the Chinese people to stay in power and because he wanted to and he could. Tiananmen proved to me that the attitude of the Chinese leadership is the same it has been since 216 b.c.e. when the First Emperor burned all the books so that no one could have any ideas contrary to his. I thank Jonathan Spence for reawakening my interest in this subject. I look forward to digging out some of my other books on the subject that have been gathering dust since college.

12rebeccanyc
jan 19, 2013, 7:01 pm

I've had this book on the TBR forever (like, since it came out). Your review may inspire me to read it!

13dchaikin
jan 19, 2013, 11:01 pm

My copy has only been sitting on the shelf for two years. I really do want Spence's details.

14petermc
jan 20, 2013, 8:28 am

#5 - On Martial, you must visit this site (http://www.marshall.edu/classical-studies/translations.htm) for some literal and then modern takes on the same poems - the modern versions are often hysterical...

Example...

Invitas nullum nisi cum quo, Cotta, lavaris
et dant convivam balnea sola tibi
Mirabar quare numquam me, Cotta, vocasses:
iam scio me nudum displicuisse tibi.

You invite no one except (someone) with whom you are bathed, Cotta
And only baths provide guest(s) for you.
I was wondering why you had never called me, Cotta:
Now I know that nude me was displeasing to you.

Rub-a-dub-dub
Invite the ones you scrub
Guests come from the tub
But I’m not in your club
Too dirty to pass?
No, it’s my ugly ass!

15wildbill
Bewerkt: jan 20, 2013, 1:59 pm

> 12 and 13, The book does take some time to read but as you can tell it is really good. That subject is so entertaining I know I will be reading more about it this year.

>14 petermc: Thank you for the information. I will be sure to check out that site. The editor had nothing but praise for Martial's poetry. It's good to know about another source for his work. I love the different translations of the poems on the site.

16wildbill
jan 26, 2013, 4:14 pm

Thirty-Three Teeth
This book was fun. It is part of the Dr. Siri Paiboun series. He is the only coroner in the Socialist Republic of Laos. He also carries the sprirt of Yeh Ming a shaman who is one thousand years old. As the coroner he gets involved in a lot of murder mysteries and sometimes he uses the powers from Yeh Ming to help solve them. In this book he discovers that he has thirty-three teeth just as The Buddha had.
The setting provides a lot of the fun in the book. Laos is a very old country and the people have learned not to take life too seriously. The common greeting when people meet in this story is "It's hot, Damned hot." It hasn't rained in a long time. People don't gripe about global warming. They just fan themselves and say," It's hot." There is plenty of tropical scenery and old French colonial buildings. The only people who aren't fun are the cadres who take themselves too seriously.
There are several mysteries in the book. The most serious involves people who are found murdered by a wild animal. Dtui, the nurse at the morgue, finds out that a Malay brown bear has escaped from a cage. She tells the police that the bear is probably the killer. Then she finds out the bear couldn't have been the killer and feels very bad that she may be the cause of the bear's death. She goes on a hunt to find the killer in order to save the bear. The problem is that she finds the killer and gets herself in a real bad situation. Dr. Siri goes to save her. I won't be a spoiler but the story goes from fun to suspense and danger.
There is an interesting story in the book that begins with a murder and ends with the discovery of the royal puppets. All through the book a mixture of murders and the light side of life.
This is the second Dr. Siri book I have read. They have an interesting mixture of murder and the occult. The more I get to know the characters the more I enjoy spending time with them. Nice people, mostly, good entertainment with a nice mixture of mystery and suspense.

17stretch
jan 26, 2013, 4:38 pm

I might have to read Dr. Siri. I like the idea that a murder mystery might not take so seriously.

18LisaMorr
feb 2, 2013, 3:49 pm

17> Me too! I'll also put The Search for Modern China on my list.

19mkboylan
feb 2, 2013, 7:51 pm

Hello wildbill. I'm new to club read this year so checking in. I'm also a fan of Dr. Siri. Enjoyed your review.

Merrikay

20wildbill
feb 3, 2013, 2:01 pm

Hello all. I am crawling the used book stores for some more Dr. Siri. They are a quick read and very entertaining.

21wildbill
feb 15, 2013, 9:05 pm

Seven Days: The Emergence of Robert E. Lee and the Dawn of a Legend
This is the first book by this author that I have read and I was pleasantly surprised. I liked the book very much for a number of reasons. It was well written and full of interesting details. The author's writing had a journalistic style, similar to Bruce Catton. Dowdey wrote a book of military history strictly from the Southern point of view. The actions of the Northern armies were described only as they made an impact on the armies of the South. The only political history discussed was that part that had an impact on the Southern army. The topic of slavery was largely absent, it just wasn't what the author was writing about. Given those restrictions the book was very informative and entertaining. When I say entertaining I mean that listening to the book was truly enjoyable.
At the beginning of the Seven Days battles the troops of McClellan could see the spires of the churches in Richmond. At the end the Union forces had been pushed back to the James River. The author states that this campaign lengthened the war by at least a year and a half. He argues this premise in several places in the book and is very convincing.
I listened to an audio edition of this book and I was glad to find there is a e-book edition at a decent price. Several times I wanted to look back at a portion of the book and I couldn't. The author made excellent use of descriptive language in describing the battles and the people involved. His approach was very direct. One good example is his description of Jackson's behavior during the campaign. He spent a lot of time not doing very much. Many times the call was heard "Where is Jackson?" and he was taking a nap. Dowdey counts the hours Jackson was marching or in the saddle prior to arriving at his assigned position and states that he was suffering from stress fatigue. This book was published almost fifty years ago so this is not some trendy new age diagnosis. Many other authors describe Jackson's strange behavior but this is one of the first I remember using this straightforward common sense description of the problem.
The author's style of writing helped me to follow the action in the battles across the terrain. His description of the position of troops in one battle, three concave rows of rifle pits backed up by artillery, created a mental picture I could easily understand. This almost made up for the lack of maps in the audiobook.
Dowdey did very good biographical sketches of many of the participants. He included thorough biographies of men such as Benjamin Huger and Theophilus Holmes, generals who are often slighted. He followed many of the men to the end of their career. A lot of the interaction between the different generals is included. In one incident James Longstreet made Benjamin Huger's troops wait while Longstreet's troops marched by, even though it was Huger who was supposed to lead the attack. Lee was constantly frustrated by the failure of his generals to carry out his orders.
I am sure I will listen to this book again. I have already found another book by this author and am reading it. I recommend it for all and especially Civil War buffs.

22wildbill
Bewerkt: feb 16, 2013, 10:47 pm

The Island at the Center of the World
I have owned this book about five years so it is definitely a TOME. I bought it because I knew nothing about the topic and it piqued my curiosity.
There has been significant new research which helped the author tell his story in great detail. Since the 1970's the records of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam have been being translated and published. They figure prominently in the copious bibliography. The ample footnotes also attest to the amount of research that went into this book.
This was the beginning of the colonial era in the Americas. The Dutch had recently won their freedom from Spain and were getting wealthy from the spice trade. The colony was run by the West India Company and Peter Stuyvesant worked in Curacao before he took over New Amsterdam in 1647. There is a very striking portrait of him in the illustrations. He has dark eyes and a steely stare. His portrait is right above that of Adriaen van der Donck who led the opposition against Stuyvesant in a battle for self government by the colonists. That struggle is a large part of the story of the colony. In addition to self government the colonists fought for freedom of speech and dissent. The personalities of Stuyvesant and van der Donck and the political struggle dominated the narration. There was a foreshadowing of the American Revolution in the political struggle of the colonists.
I did not think that the writing gave justice to the story. At times the author seemed to just plod along filling in the narrative. It did seem to move better towards the end but I learned more from the book more than I enjoyed reading it. The one item that kept up my interest was the variety of items that this country inherited from the Dutch. Many of the boroughs of New York of course but odd items like the office of District Attorney which did not exist in English law. I did feel that I learned a lot. The Dutch were definitely a factor in American colonial life. They occupied all of New York and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. To the extent the book satisfied my curiosity it was a worthwhile read. I don't think I would want to read it again.

23rebeccanyc
feb 17, 2013, 7:31 am

I really liked The Island at the Center of the World, probably more than you because I live here and I love reading about NYC history. I read it quite a few years ago, so I don't remember the details, but I do remember the idea that the multinational and generally tolerant character of NYC was here from the very beginning of European colonization because it was the Dutch who were the first colonists here, not the English. There are Dutch names throughout the Hudson Valley too.

24mkboylan
feb 17, 2013, 10:40 am

I especially enjoyed your review of Seven Days - sounds like fascinating reading. Glad you included the comment about stress fatigue. It has always been around by SOME name. I always think it's the soldiers who come home WITHOUT PTSD we need to worry about. By definition, PTSD is a normal response to an overwhelming experience. Those who go to war and kill and experience all the horror of war and are uneffected by it are the ones I worry about.

25avidmom
feb 17, 2013, 8:01 pm

Both of those last two books sound very interesting. I have had Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury and Terrible Swift Sword on my bookshelves (used library book find, believe I paid a whopping $1 for both of 'em) for years now. I'll have to put Seven Days: The Emergence of Robert E. Lee on the wishlist ... and read those Catton books!

26wildbill
feb 17, 2013, 9:34 pm

> 23 The Dutch were definitely more tolerant than the Puritans. The Dutch colony went as far north as Albany.

>24 mkboylan:, 25 I'm glad you enjoyed the Seven Days blurb. I just finished Dowdey's book on Gettysburg and liked it more than Seven Days. I will get it posted soon.

avidmom- Catton is probably one of my favorite authors, history or otherwise. I am sure you will enjoy his books.

27wildbill
feb 19, 2013, 8:53 pm

Lee and His Men at Gettysburg
This book went right to the top of my list after I read Seven Days.
I learned a lot reading this book and had a good time doing it. The author puts a lot of emphasis on the personalities of the central figures which makes his narration an enjoyable story. This was the first major battle fought after the death of Stonewall Jackson and Lee had to work with a revamped command structure. The author shows that this led to some poor decision making and even worse performance. Richard Ewell was afraid to make a decision when just maybe he could have taken Cemetery Hill on the first day. Longstreet was upset because Lee would not take his advice. He showed he was angry by going through the motions at slow speed. Stuart went chasing glory and deprived Lee of his cavalry.
The author reminded me that there was the battle and then there was what was written about the battle. Longstreet became a Republican which made him a good scapegoat for the loss of the battle. Jubal Early is named as one man who spread that idea. This author doesn't believe the oft repeated yarn that Longstreet said "no 15,000 men could succeed" at Pickett's Charge.
Probably my least favorite part of reading about this battle is Pickett's Charge. I just feel for those guys. They tried so hard and according to this author came pretty close. Better use of the artillery and a few more men supporting the charge and it could have been a close contest. At least that is what Dowdey has to say about it. He has a lot of opinions and he often disagrees with many well known authors. What makes his books interesting is that he is able to put facts in support of his ideas. Above all else the book is very well written. The author's use of descriptive language bring to life the scenes that make up his story. He uses a variety of details from the warmth of the breeze to the sounds of combat. These were both very good books and now I feel I need to move on to something different.

28wildbill
Bewerkt: feb 24, 2013, 7:57 pm

deleted

29dchaikin
Bewerkt: feb 19, 2013, 10:22 pm

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
Good stuff on Dowdy.

30wildbill
feb 24, 2013, 3:56 pm

The Prince
This is a book that has been sitting on the shelf of my set of Great Books of the Western World since before I started college. That and the fact that it was written in the 1500's surely qualify it as a TOME. It is a very short book which made great changes in the thinking about political statecraft. His book is a frank discussion of the use of immoral means to achieve the goals of The Prince.
For Machiavelli the sole goal of the Prince was to obtain power and hold it. Using historical models he sets out the most effective means to attain this end. The nobles and the people are the two forces that hold political power in the State as he sees it. Machiavelli goes into detail about how to deal with each of these. The nobles have their own bases of power and act in their pursuit of their own interests. For this reason it is important for the Prince that they fear him rather than love him.
In his discussion on fortresses he makes the statement that the best fortress is the love of the people. A state that is prosperous and ruled fairly is the best way to achieve the love of the people. The Prince must also cultivate the love of the people through great achievements building a charisma that draws them to him.
The art of war is a very important part of Machiavelli's discussion. Mercenaries are the most dangerous troops to use. They fight for their own reasons and are only loyal to the Prince as long as he is able to pay them. Auxiliary troops drawn from the people are more likely to remain loyal as long as their love for the Prince is constant.
Machiavelli's ideas inaugurated modern politics and statecraft. His was original and unencumbered by the ideas of the past. He established new rules for the practice of statecraft. He was excoriated for his immorality but his ideas quickly gained precedence. Last year I read The Thirty Years War. Many of the principles set forth by Machiavelli appeared in the actions of the rulers in that war. They used mercenaries to a great extent and were often ruined by them. Morality was absent in their dealings with each other. They practiced the code of attaining power that Machiavelli established.
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31wildbill
feb 24, 2013, 7:51 pm

Anarchy and Old Dogs
This is another Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery. I wasn't able to find any used books in that series but there are several Kindle editions that are very reasonable.
The story begins with a blind dentist being run over by a truck on the streets of Vientiane. Dr. Siri discovers that the dentist was carrying a coded message written in invisible ink. The message leads him onto the trail of a plot to overthrow the Laotian government. Dr. Siri and his old friend Civilai travel to southern Laos to investigate. Nurse Dtui and Phosy, a local policeman, pose as a married couple and infiltrate a Laotian refugee camp in Thailand as part of the investigation. The solution of the mystery leads to a sad conclusion and a surprise for Nurse Dtui.
There is a very poignant story about the drowning death of a ten year old boy. Dr. Siri's plays Sherlock Holmes and using a few clues and his powers of deduction solves the mystery of the boy's last days. Dr. Siri's efforts give him the ample reward of a job well done.
In the beginning of the story Dr. Siri becomes acquainted with a transvestite fortune teller. Their encounters provide some humorous interludes and in the end the joke is on Dr. Siri.
Dr. Siri has more encounters with alcohol than the supernatural in this story. On one occasion Siri and Civilai get royally drunk on the real Johnny Walker Red. Dr. Siri has some interesting comments on the power of good Scottish whiskey. There is more than one happy ending to the story which makes the book very enjoyable. The more I read these stories the more I loke them. There is plenty of suspense and danger to keep the books interesting and the relationships between the characters are charming in a way that is not often duplicated. The countryside and the long struggle of the Laotian revolution provide a background that is truly unique. The author does an excellent job of mixing these ingredients to produce a book that is true to life and very entertaining.

32baswood
feb 25, 2013, 7:47 pm

Nice summary of The Prince. I read it last year and thought it was well worth a read.

33wildbill
Bewerkt: mrt 2, 2013, 4:39 pm

>32 baswood: Thanks for the compliment.

I thought it was interesting the way it made me think of the Thirty Years war. It is like it took that long for the ideas to filter down.

34wildbill
mrt 4, 2013, 9:27 pm

The Origins of the War of 1914 volume two
Finishing this book gave me a sense of accomplishment. 688 pages of some very dense history that tells about one of the most important events of the 20th century. WWI truly changed the face of Europe and initiated a century of violence the like of which the world had never seen.
The author of the book was a fascinating man. Luigi Albertini, the perfect Italian name. He had been active as a politician and owned one-half of an influential newspaper. After Mussolini came into power he had to retire from politics and sell his interest in the newspaper. He worked for years writing the authoritative history of the beginning of WWI.
I would estimate that 50% of the text of the book is excerpts from documents, telegrams, notes of meetings, diplomatic correspondence and every other primary source you can imagine. The author includes material from interviews of many of the principle men involved in the action. The book is very informative and detailed as the author covers country by country in a narrative format the actions of the Great Powers as they stumble towards disaster.
It is hard to explain but I could definitely tell that I was reading a book written by a European and not an American. I have read Guns of August several times and this author's slant on events was much different. The focus of the book was the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that started the war. Germany, Russia and England are next in importance then France and Italy. The events that led up to the war, the diplomatic history, is the author's area of concentration.
The author shows great command of his sources as he evaluates the actions of the different parties. He highlights the duplicity of the Austria-Hungarians and the simplicity of the Russians. The Tsar signs orders that he doesn't really understand and then says "God's will be done". The author also uses documents to show how in their official histories many of the nations involved distorted events and lied about what was said at the time.
I truly enjoyed the three page narration of the Archduke's drive through Sarajevo up to the point of his assassination. Another precious item was the narration by someone who was there of Bismarck's statement of how "one day the great European, war would grow out of some foolish thing in the Balkans."
My major problem with the book was trying to keep track of who was who and remembering their names. I just did the best I could to keep track of what was going on.
Good book and not for everybody. The pleasure was in the information I learned and not the entertainment value of the book.

35stretch
mrt 5, 2013, 10:13 am

I'm curious if you found the Princeto be even a little satirical? I never read it, but I saw a documentary on the Medici that hypothesized that Machiavelli wrote as jab towards the people who destroyed his career in politics. they never explored this in great detail of course and provided very little in the way of evidence.

Interesting review of the Origins of the War of 1914, never been interested in the war itself but the political tangle that was Europe might be interesting.

36wildbill
mrt 6, 2013, 9:16 am

>35 stretch: Machiavelli's writing seemed very serious and straight forward without any attempt at satire. In reading about the book there is speculation that he was trying to get back into favor and he does discuss that briefly in the book.

37NanaCC
mrt 6, 2013, 9:32 am

You might find a few of the articles that mental floss has posted for the WW1 centennial interesting.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/section/ww1

38baswood
mrt 6, 2013, 6:56 pm

Excellent review of The Origins of the War of 1914 and congratulations for getting through it.

I agree with you wildbill about Machiavelli and his reasons for writing the Prince. His main motive was to get back into favour with the Medici's and any hint of satire would have been foolhardy on his part. However when you read The Prince without knowing the context and with a modern viewpoint I can see how it might appear satirical.

39dchaikin
mrt 7, 2013, 1:25 pm

Enjoyed your review of Albertini's The Origins of the War of 1914, V2.

40wildbill
mrt 16, 2013, 8:27 pm

Much Ado About Nothing
I enjoyed reading this play very much. I have only read about six of Shakespeare's plays and I plan to make reading them more of a priority. I once read words to the effect of "as much as people say Shakespeare was a great writer, he really was a great writer". He really was a great writer and a pleasure to read. His ability to mix verse and prose adds to the sheer beauty of his writing. This edition had a good number of footnotes on each page indexed by line that helped me a lot with the language. It made the play more accessible and added to my enjoyment.
This is an Italian comedy based on the story of two sets of lovers.
An enemy of Claudio has another women pose as Hero, Claudio's betrothed, the night before their wedding making Claudio think he is being betrayed. The next morning he breaks up their wedding with a powerful dramatic speech. Hero then fakes her death with the help of her father.
The other couple is Beatrice and Benedick. They trade caustic barbs like the couple in The Taming of the Shrew until their friends trick through gossip and rumor, referred to as noting, into confessing their love for each other. It sounds crazy but Benedick ends up challenging Claudio to a duel at the demand of Beatrice. This is just the beginning of the plot which runs the full gamut of human emotion. Comedy means a happy ending and Shakespeare delivers a full dose of comic happiness at the end.
This book was very good and I think I would enjoy it more the second time. Perhaps the more I read Shakespeare it will get easier and I do plan to read more.

41Mr.Durick
mrt 18, 2013, 6:30 pm

Now you'll want to see a performance of it. I believe I saw the Kenneth Branagh version and was happy with it.

Robert

42wildbill
mrt 18, 2013, 6:37 pm

That is a good idea. I just started a NetFlix 30 day trial. I remember seeing Branagh in Henry V and enjoying it very much.

43wildbill
Bewerkt: dec 27, 2013, 5:27 pm

1781
This was a well written narrative of the year that America won the Revolutionary War. The author concentrates on the military and diplomatic history with a good dose of the politics on both sides of the water thrown in. I always enjoy reading about the English arguing with each other about just about everything. Clinton and Cornwallis never got along and if they had put as much energy into fighting the Americans as they spent on their intramural spats as they might have won the war. The English were not solidly united politically either but neither were the Americans.
Most of 1781 was spent fighting the English Southern campaign and on the American side that was a war between neighbors. I remember when I was very young watching Leslie Nielsen play the part of the "Swamp Fox", Francis Marion. Two of my favorite Revolutionary War battles, Cowpens and King's Mountain, were fought in 1781. The author does a good job on the description of these and the other battles during that year. King's Mountain was fought strictly between the Americans and I have always been intrigued by the way the Patriots got themselves together and won very convincingly. Cowpens was a good example of General Daniel Morgan's talent in his use of the militia troops. He just asked them to stand and get off two good volleys and then they could leave the field. He got good use out of the troops and didn't ask too much from them.
The author gave Washington and Lafayette places of prominence in the action. Lafayette enjoyed being the young protege of Washington and a leader of the Revolution. The more I learn about Washington the more admiration and respect I have for him. His leadership of the Americans and his ability to work well with the French Were but a small part of his overall leadership. I enjoyed the book very much. It is a relatively short audio book and I listened to it twice back to back.
This type of book is my idea of a good time. A well written narrative history of an interesting topic. The author won a Silver Star for his exploits in the Vietnam War. After 27 years of service in the army he retired with the rank of colonel. Unfortunately that opens up something I find very upsetting. I deeply respect those who served their country in the Vietnam War. My problem is how did America, one of the first countries that was created by a political revolution, allow itself to become the most powerful country fighting to maintain colonial power. It is just a rhetorical question but the whole thing makes me feel ashamed.

44baswood
mrt 18, 2013, 9:38 pm

I second Robert's recommendation for the Branagh film it is tremendous fun

Enjoyed your review of 1781 and your rhetorical question at the end will take some answering. It seems to be the way of most nations.

45dchaikin
mrt 20, 2013, 7:49 am

Great review of 1781.

46wildbill
mrt 24, 2013, 1:56 pm

The Greek Way
I have always been fascinated by the beginning of Western Culture in the flowering of Athens. Somehow over the space of roughly a century or two there occurred a magnificent growth of culture and ideas in that city that has made the mind and spirit of the world today forever changed. This book is a description of the men and ideas that contributed to the changes that occurred and how they molded the Western Culture that grew out of that remarkable time.
Edith Hamilton was sixty-three when she wrote this book and she synthesized a lifetime of knowledge to bring to the reader the world of Athens during this time. Her chapter on Socrates and the growth of philosophy is a delight. Casual conversations become discussions on the nature of virtue. Socrates always asking questions, seeking after truth.
Her comparisons of Herodotus and Thucydides illustrate the different approaches that gave rise to Western history. Herodotus wrote down everything that came his way while Thucydides sought to provide a guide to the future through the story of the past.
The comedy of Aristophanes described by the author as the speaking picture of the follies and foibles of his day illustrates the impulse to make fun of all aspects of life. The concept of tragedy grew out of the ability to look calmly at the pain in life without fear. This grew through the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides developing ideas I cannot say I truly understand. She then moves forward to the works of Shakespeare to show how those beginnings grew.
Underlying this fantastic growth of ideas was the concept of freedom. The gift of the Greeks was that they felt free to think about anything that came to mind. Their thoughts were not constrained by religion or fear of the unknown. That was their great gift to Western Civilization. The ability to use their reason to think allowed them to question freely the world around them. It was their attempts to answer those questions that gave rise to the world we live in.
I feel this was a feeble attempt to bring to the reader some small glimpse of this classic book. I could read it time and again to gain a real understanding of the ideas the author has set forth. I do know that I now have a greater knowledge of who we are and the world we live in.

47baswood
mrt 24, 2013, 7:13 pm

The Greek Way sounds like a useful introduction to Greek thought and literature

48wildbill
mrt 24, 2013, 7:43 pm

Edith Hamilton wrote another book The Echo of Greece which adds additional material on the development of Greece. The Greek Way is also a useful introduction to the influence of Greek thought on later Western Culture.

I read through your Club Read thread this afternoon. I enjoyed the variety of the books you reviewed. I have it starred so that I can visit regularly.

49deebee1
mrt 25, 2013, 3:22 pm

Interesting about The Greek Way, wildbill. I've been trying to look for an introduction to Greek thought and Western culture, and this seems to be a good place to start. I'm adding it to my wishlist.

50Mr.Durick
mrt 25, 2013, 6:57 pm

Has nothing changed in ancient Greece since she wrote the book? I may still have that in my back bedroom from high school days. I don't know whether I have read it.

Robert

51wildbill
Bewerkt: mrt 27, 2013, 5:12 pm

The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth Century Philosophers
I worked very hard but I just could not get through this book. What I read were some selections from John Locke, David Hume and George Berkeley edited by Isaiah Berlin. I read over 100 pages and I didn't enjoy it and didn't feel like I was learning anything. I have read other books written by Isaiah Berlin that were enjoyable learning experiences.
For whatever reason I would read the same passage three times and not have any understanding of what the author was trying to say. Perhaps someone who enjoys philosophy can give me some tips on what it takes to get into the subject. For now this book goes back on the shelf and I will try to find another way to learn some philosophy.

52mkboylan
mrt 27, 2013, 5:14 pm

#43 - Heartbreaking rhetorical question

53wildbill
mrt 27, 2013, 5:52 pm

The Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
This is a very good description of one of the most important battles of the Civil War. I enjoyed it much more than The Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam The battle was significant for a number of reasons. It was the victory that Lincoln was waiting for so that he could issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation changing the whole character of the war and the bloodiest single day battle in American history.
I have read several other books by Stephen W. Sears and I thought that this was one of his best. The book starts with some comments on the Battle of the Seven Days and a short description of The Second Battle of Bull Run.
The drama of the battle began when Federal soldiers found a copy of Lee's detailed battle plans, Order 191, wrapped around three cigars. This gave George McClellan a terrific opportunity to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia. McClellan followed his pattern of delaying and not using all of his troops and blew his chance to end the war.
I thought that Sears made excellent use of primary sources throughout the book that made the action come alive. He writes a detailed narration of the day's fighting with insightful commentary on the mistakes made by the Northern generals. Time and time again Lee's army is pushed to the brink of destruction but McClellan fails to make the final push necessary for complete victory.
There is a very good appendix detailing exactly how Lee's orders were lost and then found. Sears points out that there is a disagreement among the sources for this part of the story and we may never know exactly what happened.
This is an excellent book for a student of the Civil War. While it is well written and dramatic tale it may not be as interesting for someone who does not have that much interest in the war.

54wildbill
Bewerkt: mrt 30, 2013, 10:08 am

mistake

55wildbill
mrt 28, 2013, 8:05 pm

i want to delete

56RidgewayGirl
mrt 28, 2013, 8:56 pm

Cowpens is about an hour from me. We've taken the kids on the anniversary of the battle a few times, when there are reenactors in costume and it is always a great experience.

57baswood
mrt 30, 2013, 6:29 am

Wildbill; I share your puzzlement in reading philosophy, I have come to the conclusion I just don't think in that way, although it does not stop me from trying again.

58avidmom
mrt 30, 2013, 3:48 pm

I have to stay away from this thread, it's leading me back down the path of my Civil War addiction! The Landscape Turned Red sounds very, very interesting.

59wildbill
apr 7, 2013, 8:33 pm

Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century
This is a very detailed narrative that covers the military history of WWI from the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. The author's discussion goes through to the end of the war but the emphasis is from July 1, 1916 to the end of 1916. The characterization of the battle as the first battle of the twentieth century is emphasized by the author's constant reference to the battle as the beginning of industrial war.
There is much more to the book than just a description of horrific casualty figures. The author provides a very good analysis of the changes that were brought to the battlefield by the increased industrialization of society. One of the major changes is that WWI is the only war where the majority of casualties were caused by artillery and not guns and bullets.
The author does a good job of explaining how the French beginning with the Battle of Verdun developed tactics that made greater use of artillery on the battlefield. The English had such great casualties on July 1, 1916 because they refused to utilize the knowledge that had been gained by the French. Slowly the English changed their tactics and developed greater manpower resources than the French. This allowed them to take the greater burden of the fight against the Germans.
With the beginning of the Somme the Germans slowly began losing the war. The author provides a good description of the changes in tactics made by Ludendorff in the German offensive of early 1918. However, industrial war became a contest of resources which Germany could not win.
This book introduced new ideas into the discussion of how WWI was fought. It also provided a good narrative of the battlefield action and the personalities of the leading generals. The author's new insights made it a very good book about a conflict that has been overshadowed by the rest of the violence of the twentieth century. I did think it was a bit long but it was never boring.

60NanaCC
apr 7, 2013, 9:00 pm

I am really enjoying following your thread. The Landscape Turned Red and Three Armies on the Somme sound very interesting, as well as several of the others you've mentioned. I also read and commented on The Island at the Center of the World on my thread. I really enjoyed that one. I am adding a few of the other books you've reviewed to my ever growing TBR.

61wildbill
apr 9, 2013, 6:19 pm

> 60 My thanks for your kind words. I take some time selecting the books I read and I follow authors whose books I enjoy. So many books, so little time is all too true.

62wildbill
apr 11, 2013, 6:50 pm

A Coney Island of the Mind
This is a very good book of poetry that I have had for decades and never read. ROOT gave me an excuse to read it and for that I am truly thankful. Ferlinghetti ran a publishing company which published Allan Ginsberg's Howl. He was tried and acquitted on obscenity charges in San Francisco for selling that book. Many people think of Ferlinghetti as a Beat poet but he prefers to call himself a bohemian. Whatever you call it he writes very good poetry and this book was translated into nine languages. I also own an LP where he reads many of the poems in this book and I easily found many videos of him reading his poetry on the internet.
He writes with a down to earth working class attitude and a wry sense of humor. Accompanying the humor his poems often include a cold splash of water in your face dose of reality. I prefer to give you some examples of his poetry and let you decide what his style is. The book is short but poetry gets a lot of meaning and impact out of a few words. I only started reading poetry regularly about seven years ago after getting some very good anthologies from my Library of America subscription. I have grown to enjoy the different way that language is used in poetry and I am working to make it a bigger part of my reading diet.
One of my favorite poems is titled "Dog" and has some lines that have a way of constantly going through my mind.

"The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog's life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
...........
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with"

How can you forget, a real tale to tell and a real tail to tell it with?

Ferlinghetti's description of the life of a poet.

"Constantly risking absurdity
and death
wherever he performs
above the heads
of his audience

the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making"

The cold splash of water in your face.

" Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter........
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead"

This is the kind of book I save a five star rating for. I will keep this by my bed so I can read a poem or two when I feel the need.

63Mr.Durick
apr 11, 2013, 7:09 pm

I engineered a call in radio show on a campus radio station for a while in my undergraduate years. A friend of the host was in the studio putting down Ferlinghetti; he read some of it aloud on the air -- he came close to singing. Then off air he talked about how bad it was. I asked, "Didn't you listen to yourself?" The host said afterwards that the fellow was at a loss for words; he couldn't respond. It may be that Ferlinghetti is simple and sings simple songs, but I remember (not memorized) that last poem that you cited, probably from reading A Coney Island of the Mind. It achieved some permanence for me and is not trivial.

Robert

64baswood
apr 11, 2013, 7:28 pm

I am a fan of Ferlinghetti and yes I have always associated him with the beat poets. In his way a great populariser of poetry. He is not difficult to grasp, but his poetry can surprise and shock, and it has a sense of fun. It makes us smile when we think about it. Nice review wildbill.

65rebeccanyc
apr 12, 2013, 9:02 am

It is decades since I read any of those "beat" poets, but I can picture those little square black and white books published by City Lights in the 60s and still have Howl. I read Gary Snyder too back in those days.

And I smiled too when I read "and a real tail to tell it with"!

66SassyLassy
apr 12, 2013, 1:56 pm

Thanks wildbill. I'll have to dig out some of that poetry this weekend and just absorb.

67wildbill
apr 12, 2013, 9:25 pm

Disco for the Departed
The title describes a dance in the middle of the night populated by spirits of the dead. The sound of the rhythm eventually draws Dr. Siri Paiboun to a clearing deep in the forest where he joins in. This is one of many entertaining scenes that are woven together by the author in this entertaining murder mystery. The story is set against a background of the world of Cuban spiritualism. At the heart of the mystery is a bizarre ceremony where the hearts of two lovers are removed at the moment of death and then united for the afterlife.
A separate plot line is the journey of Mr. Geung as he returns to Vientiane from northern Laos where he has been exiled. Mr. Geung's goes 300 miles through the jungles of Laos to carry out the duties of his job. He does the entire journey on foot with many adventures along the way. He emerges as a delightful person who has a surprisingly strong strength of character.
The mystery begins with the discovery of a concrete covered corpse in a cave which had been home to Laotian revolutionary communists and will be part of a high level Communist Party meeting and social gathering in a few days. Dr. Siri is brought in to solve the mystery before the Party meeting. His contacts with the spirit world are very important to his ability to solve the mystery. The solution was quite a surprise and I will leave it that way.
A really good ending made me glad I read the book. In ten terrific pages filled with humor the author tells a perfectly orchestrated story that ends with a complete victory for a lovable little guy over an arrogant bully. Mark Twain would have been proud of how well it was done.

68mkboylan
apr 13, 2013, 5:46 pm

Love that series - have to get back to it.

69wildbill
apr 14, 2013, 8:47 pm

I am reading it on kindle. The price is not bad.

70RidgewayGirl
apr 14, 2013, 8:56 pm

Loved the Ferlinghetti. The dog with his own dog's life to live.

71wildbill
apr 17, 2013, 8:10 pm

Seven Guitars by August Wilson.
This is part of a series of plays referred to as the Pittsburgh Cycle or the Century Cycle. Each play, except for one, is set in Pittsburgh in a different decade of the 20th century. This play, set in 1948, is the seventh one that I have read. They are all very powerful stories that provide a glimpse into the life of black Americans.
All of the scenes in this play are set in the back yard of a two story apartment building. The reader is an onlooker into the day to day lives of the characters, the seven guitars. They either live in the building or are constant visitors from the neighborhood. The central character is Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton. He is a blues guitarist whose latest record has just become a hit and is often heard in the background. He just finished 90 days in jail for vagrancy that being he didn't have any money in his pocket. When he got out there was a letter waiting for him inviting him back to Chicago to do some more recording. He is trying to get his girlfriend Vera to go with him but she is still angry because the last time he left her and took off with someone else. Hedley raises chickens in the basement and kills them and then sells chicken sandwiches around the neighborhood. He is always singing a song from his father about the money Buddy Bolden is bringing him. Canewell plays harmonica for Barton but it is in the pawn shop with Floyd's guitar right now. Red Carter, the drummer for Floyd, Louise and Ruby round out the cast. Louise and Red like to play whist and Ruby has come up from the South looking for a man.
The poverty in everyone's life is their constant enemy in the struggle for human dignity. The color of a person's skin is a circumstance beyond their control that gives them the hereditary status of an underling like a serf in the days of feudalism. This fuels a constant undertone of violence that builds into a tragic climax and at the end we are back at the funeral of a young man that was the opening of the play.

72stretch
apr 17, 2013, 9:56 pm

This sounds like the prefect pilgrimage into plays/drama I been looking for this year.

73wildbill
apr 18, 2013, 7:17 pm

#72 When I started reading Wilson's plays I thought I could go through three or four quickly because they are so short. I found out they have too much emotional impact to go through them like that.

74wildbill
apr 20, 2013, 8:05 pm

I just removed two books from my currently reading list and started a fascinating book The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies. The authors focus on ant colonies where the individuals working together engage in farming, raise other insects for food and engage in complex communication primarily by the exchange of pheromones. I'm very enthusiastic about reading this book and may write a journal by chapters to keep up with my exploration of the world of ants.

75mkboylan
apr 20, 2013, 8:13 pm

Oh good for you! I look forward to your review. If you get a chance to see his Charlie Rose interview it's wonderful. Wilson is an amazing person.

76rebeccanyc
apr 21, 2013, 7:21 am

Took a look at the insect book and Holldobler is definitely an ant expert and Wilson is legendary. Should be a great book!

77wildbill
mei 5, 2013, 7:48 pm

The Curse of the Pogo Stick
Someone is out to murder Dr. Siri. While he is at a meeting of communist bigwigs in northern Laos a dead body comes into the morgue that is booby trapped with a hand grenade. Anyone performing an autopsy on the body would have have ended up in very small pieces. Nurse Dtui, her husband, Mr. Geung and Dr. Siri's new sweetheart get busy trying to find who is behind this plot. Unfortunately the clues they find lead them into a trap set up by the evil woman who is after Dr. Siri. When we last see them they are surrounded by people with guns who are set to take great delight in killing them all. You have to read the book to see what happens next.
Up north Dr. Siri and Judge Haeng are traveling through the jungle when their convoy is attacked. Judge Haeng runs off into the jungle and Dr. Siri is brought to a Hmong village. The villagers need Yeh Ming to perform an exorcism on one of the daughters of the village headman who has become afflicted by the curse of the pogo stick. Dr. Siri is taken to a hut and is shown the pogo stick which brought a curse on the whole village. It was evidently a souvenir from American fliers and afflicted all the children in the village with an uncontrollable desire to jump up and down for hours.
Dr. Siri is taken to see the afflicted daughter who has been impregnated by a powerful demon. In their first encounter the demon beats up Dr. Siri leaving him scared and injured. Dr. Siri gets some quick shaman lessons and goes into the Underworld to try to save the girl.
Meanwhile Judge Haeng is lost in the jungle until he wanders into the village and ......... you have to read the book.
The story ends on a romantic note as Dr. Siri has the opportunity to find out how good a lover he is at the age of 73.
This is another enjoyable visit with Dr. Siri and friends with enough suspense to keep the reader interested in the story and plenty of drinking and other types of fun. If it was not the best book in the series I have read so far it was definitely good enough to make me want to read the next one.

78wildbill
Bewerkt: mei 8, 2013, 8:59 pm

Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac
This is a collection of eight poems written in a stream of consciousness style. In a note by the author he describes them as blues choruses limited in form by the size of the page in the small breast pocket notebook in which they were written. Sometimes the word meaning will carry over from one chorus to another, sometimes not. Some words from the author.

" It's all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig is shot."

" I'd better be a poet
or lay down dead"

This is nothing like any poetry I have read before. According to some reading I did about Kerouac this is not considered some of his best poetry but I thought it was terrific. Each one of the poems was written in a different location like Orlando, Florida or San Francisco. There is some reflection of the location in the poems but they are mostly about what the author is thinking about that moment. As I read the rhythm of the words seemed to just carry me along with what ever thoughts came into the author's mind. The more I read I came to understand that the writing was more disciplined than it seemed and the author had to work really hard to project the spontaneity he wanted to convey to the reader. There were allusions to all types of experiences from a boxing match between Sugar Ray Robinson and Tiger Jones to Lil Abner cartoons.
The author uses nonsense words and lines of French spinning my head around. The more I read the more I felt like I was not observing but participating in the experience created by the words. I could only read about 20 or 30 minutes at a time before I would get lost in the poetry and have to step back and get a mental and emotional rest. One example:
Message from Orlanda: -----
You guys cant explore
all of outer space, unless
you want to spend
a million million million
million million million
billion billion bullion
bullion years at it
--- and when you gets
there, and you cant
even get there, give my
regards to Captain Bligh

And lissen, before you leave,
how bringing my money
with you to preserve
in eternity, see, I
can cash in when
I get there & spend it
on
space
travel

I quit looking for meaning and just went along for the ride and I am sure I will go back for more.

79baswood
mei 9, 2013, 8:51 am

whateverturnsyouon wildbill. Book of Blues sounds worth a read.

80wildbill
Bewerkt: mei 9, 2013, 7:58 pm

Six by Suess: A Treasury of Dr. Suess Classics I was reminded recently that I should hang on to my child-part because it is too important to lose track of. Thinking of that I picked up this book which has been on my shelf for years. I had to take the wrap off before I read it. I bought it because one of the stories The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins was a favorite of mine before I turned ten. It is still a very good story. Bartholomew goes into town with some cranberries to sell and when the king comes by he takes off his hat but there is still one on his head. The king gets very upset but no matter how often Bartholomew takes off his hat he still has one on his head. He gets sent to the executioner, but he refuses to cut off Bartholomew's head because he can't get his hat off. As he takes off more hats each new one becomes more ornate with jewels and feathers. The 500th hat is so magnificent the king buys it for 500 pieces of gold. When Bartholomew hands the king that hat his head is finally bare.
The book also contains Horton Hatches the Egg, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant an elephant's faithful one hundred percent." Then the egg hatches and an elephant with wings comes out. How the Grinch Stole Christmas is probably the best known story because of the television show. The last story The Lorax was written in 1971 and is about the spoiling of the environment.
The book has all of the original drawings in full color and Dr. Seuss's verse is very entertaining. Reading these stories put a smile on my face and I will always have a place where I can enjoy the child in me.

81wildbill
mei 22, 2013, 7:08 pm

Confederacy of Dunces An apt subtitle for this book would be Ignatius J. Reilly versus the world. When we first meet our hero he is waiting for his mother in a store wearing his green hunting hat with green ear flaps. He is a very large man subject to internal attacks from his pyloric valve that lead to Distinctive large, loud burps. In the store he gets into an altercation with the police in the form of Officer Mancuso, part of the menagerie of characters all vying for the title of the nuttiest human being on the planet and none of them any competition for Ignatius.
Reilly is 30 years old and lives with his mother. He spends his time in bed writing a magnum opus on Big Chief note books in pencil and crayon. He is forced to seek employment when his mother steers her old Plymouth into a building incurring a sizable bill for the damages done. First he finds work at Levy Pants, an old family business on it's last legs. The owner, Mr. Levy and his wife are engaged in a constant battle as he neglects the business and she berates him about anything she can think of the more personal, the better. Ignatius leads a revolution of the work force who figure out he is crazy, stop demonstrating and go back to work.
He then moves to a career as a hot dog vendor. The high point of this career is selling hot dogs on Bourbon Street dressed up as a pirate complete with ear ring and plastic cutlass. He is less than successful since he eats not just the profits but all of the product he he can carry around in his mobile hot dog stand. All through the book he carries on a relationship by mail with Myrna Minkoff which could be styled the Marxist and the Medievalist with Myrna as the Marxist. Another fun spot is the House of Joy a B-girl bar whose owner sells porn on the side and pays a black man named Jones $20.00 a week to sweep up while he cracks jokes about his mistreatment. I listened to an audio edition and the narrator did a great voice for this character.
I could go on a lot longer but I think you get the idea. The book goes from very amusing to laugh out loud funny as Ignatius goes through the world in his own reality in a contest struggle with the rest of the world. He loses a lot of the battles but refuses to give up the fight. He speaks of the whims of fortuna and forges ahead. He not only refuses to conform he is horrified and angered that he is expected to. I should have read this book long ago and I am very thankful to the ROOT group for getting it off my shelf. I recommend it highly and am only saddened by the fact that it was the only book completed by the author during his adult life. He wrote one other book when he was 16 but it was not a work of humor.

82avidmom
mei 22, 2013, 10:40 pm

>80 wildbill: Who doesn't love Dr. Seuss? When he died I was working in our local paper's newsroom. The editor read the wire and announced that Dr. Seuss had died. A collective "Awww....." was heard. My aunt got very close to interviewing him for her master's thesis. Sadly, he passed away before she got the chance. :(

>81 wildbill: Confederacy of Dunces sounds like so much fun! I'll add it to my wishlist ....

83rebeccanyc
mei 23, 2013, 7:38 am

Well, count me in as one of the few people who didn't like A Confederacy of Dunces. In fact, it's one of the few books I never finished (and even wished I hadn't started)! Obviously, I didn't get the humor; it was wildly praised when it first came out, which is when I tried to read it.

84dmsteyn
mei 23, 2013, 11:24 am

Hmmm, I'm unfortunately with Rebecca on this one. But I was only 15 when I read it, so I might try it again sometime...

85rebeccanyc
mei 23, 2013, 1:50 pm

I was in my late 20s, and it was a liberating experience for me to realize I didn't have to finish a book I didn't like!

86mkboylan
mei 23, 2013, 1:56 pm

Wow Rebecca! You're about 40 years ahead of me in maturity! and probably 40 behind physically!

87rebeccanyc
mei 23, 2013, 2:01 pm

Well, I don't know about maturity, Merrikay, but if you do the math of late 20s when the book came out in 1980, you can see I'm no spring chicken!

88mkboylan
mei 23, 2013, 2:22 pm

thinking with my mouth open again.

89wildbill
mei 23, 2013, 7:59 pm

I started the book at least four times before I finished it.

90wildbill
Bewerkt: mei 23, 2013, 9:04 pm

Causes of the Civil War This book has been hanging around my library for a long time. It is a book of readings that I am sure was used for a lot of college classes. The readings are grouped under seven topics listed as possible causes of the war. After reading through the book my conclusion is that slavery and the maintaining of white supremacy were really the causes of the war. Slavery was the economic engine that made the South run after the invention of the cotton gin and also a social system justified by the belief in white supremacy. I think white supremacy was necessary to racial chattel slavery as a way to justify treating other human beings the way slaves were treated. It also gave the non-slaveholder a reason to support the system. No matter how poor and ignorant you were if you were white you were better than the African-American slaves. That gave the majority of the Southerners who didn't own slaves a very good reason to fight in the Civil War.
The articles vary from one-half of a page to five pages going from primary sources up to the time the book was written in 1959. They provide a very interesting look at the way attitudes to the Civil War changed over time. For example in an article from 1860 Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, makes it clear that slavery was the cause of the war. In an article he wrote in 1868 he has joined the supporters of the "Lost Cause" theory and says that the war was all about state-rights. One author writing in 1923 analyzed the effects of the subtropical climate on Anglo-Saxons and came up with the idea of "Tropic Nordics". They came from the Deep South and developed a towering race pride and an inclination to ride over racial groups considered to be inferior. All of the inmates are not in the asylum.
The articles I found most interesting focused on the cultural differences between the North and South. They reminded me of The Mind of the Master Class a fascinating book on Southern intellectual history I read some years ago. All of the articles point to the fact that there were real differences between the North and South and the Civil War was in some ways an inevitable conflict. The book sets out a wide variety of points of view and lends some credence to the idea that the Civil War isn't really over yet. I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in American history.

91wildbill
Bewerkt: jun 23, 2013, 3:05 pm

Cop Hater
This is the first book in the 87th Precinct series. I finished it about two weeks ago and I am surprised how well I remember it. It is set in a summer before air conditioning and instead of hello people just say "It's hot". The book begins with the murder of one of the detectives from the 87th. He is shot in the back of the head twice with a .45. As when any police officer is killed the precinct goes into overtime. Steve Carella and his partner, Hank Bush, catch the case. The only problem is that there is no physical evidence except for the shell casings.
Besides the murder the story follows the relationship between Bush and his wife and the romance between Carella and Teddy. Bush and his wife don't get along at all while Carella and Teddy are in the infatuation stage of their romance. Teddy is a deaf mute with very expressive facial and physical expressions that make her a very special person. Bush's wife is a drop dead beautiful woman with a nasty attitude.
The story heats up as another detective is murdered with the same gun. Bush and Carella are working 24-7 chasing clues that aren't there. Then the same killer murders Hank Bush. He doesn't go down easy. He shoots his killer and tears some of his hair and face off. This gives Carella some clues. Then the killer goes to a doctor to get treatment and now Carella has a police artist sketch. Things move real fast and then it ends with action, suspense and surprise. The ending is worth the price of the book.
I was impressed with McBain's writing. Good characters and a good pace that keeps the story moving. A friend of mine gave me about 15 of these and I look forward to reading them.

92wildbill
jun 25, 2013, 7:35 pm

Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
This is a very good book that provides fresh information and insights on a subject that has been written about a great deal. The author is a skilled writer who brings a sense of immediacy and literary craftsmanship that provide the reader with an entertaining and informative experience. I started with the audio edition of the book which I listened to twice. I then bought a print edition which has copious maps, illustrations and photos. The print edition also has an extensive index and notes which made me glad that I bought it. The audio edition ends with a short interview of the writer which was very enjoyable.
The hallmark of the book is new information and a fresh outlook on all aspects of the most written about battle of the Civil War. The biographical information on the participants is a good example. I had never heard that the Union general Dan Sickles was one of the first persons to be acquitted of murder on a defense of temporary insanity. George Pickett is portrayed by the author as a male version of a dumb blonde whose main virtue was being a Virginian. There is a lot of detail on the politics of both armies. Lee's army had a bias for Virginian officers and the split between the McClellan advocates and the Republican generals was still affecting promotions at this time. In his interview the author comments on Meade's bias in favor of McClellan's attitude against abolitionists.
There is extensive coverage of the historiography of the battle particularly the Southern libels of Longstreet as the man who lost the battle. The author points out that the legend of the 20th Maine was greatly aided by Joshua Chamberlain who lived until 1906 and wrote more than a few articles about the fight on Little Round Top. He neglected to mention the actions of the three other regiments that were there on the Union side.
The author makes very intelligent use of comparisons between the Civil War battles and battles in contemporary European wars. He uses these comparisons to make a point not just show off. I especially enjoyed the author's analysis of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. He uses comparisons with some of Lincoln's prior speeches and Lincoln's emphasis in all of his speeches on the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
This book was just published this year and I would not be surprised if it is a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize. It has the combination of excellent scholarship and stellar writing I have found in other Pulitzer winners. I liked the book a lot and I heartily recommend it particularly for anyone interested in the Civil War.

93NanaCC
jun 25, 2013, 8:43 pm

>92 wildbill: this one goes on my wish list. Thank you for the review.

94dchaikin
jul 20, 2013, 10:23 pm

Just catching your review of Guelzo's Gettysburg. That is a terrific review and you have left me very interested.

95wildbill
Bewerkt: jul 23, 2013, 8:51 pm

The Analects of Confucius
The title of the book was the translation adopted by Western scholars in the late 19th century of the words Lun Yu. The editor of this edition translates Lun Yu to mean Ethical Dialogues but uses the standard title out of respect for the tradition that has grown up around it. The original meaning of Analects was "literary gleanings". Having read the book I think that Ethical Dialogues is a better description of it. The book contains 20 books with numerous chapters which are two to five paragraphs long.
Each chapter conveys a significant statement of ideas in very short phrases. This is partly a function of how the Chinese language works. In chapter 15.24 a disciple asks Confucius, " Is there a single word that one can practice throughout one's life? Confucius answer is "like-hearted considerateness" which is a translation of the Chinese word shu. Through the use of characters the Chinese language is able to express complicated ideas in one word. Reading the book made me wish that I could read it in Chinese. I remember just a very little bit of what I studied in college but enough to get a hint of the difference in how the language works. The pictographic aspects of the characters are another feature of the language that make the meanings of the characters very complex and subtle.
Confucius defines light-hearted considerateness as "What you do not wish for yourself, do not impose on others." This is referred to as the Chinese Golden Rule. While the spirit may be the same it is very different from "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." All through the chapters is a discussion of the same ideas. Humanity, righteousness, sage men, the way and virtue are concepts which are repeated over and over giving the reader different aspects of lessons in how to live properly.
Voltaire said of Confucius; "He was the first great teacher who did not require divine inspiration." While the term Heaven is used very often there is no concept of a personal God. The philosophy of Confucius was the bedrock of East Asian civilization for over two thousand years. The editor cites modern examples in the East and West of respect and admiration for Confucian ideas. The strict emphasis on the duties of obedience within the family and from the individual to the ruler were, for me, the most negative aspects of the ideas.
This is truly a great book. It carries a great deal of meaning in a small package. I am sure that with each reading I would find something different. It gave me some understanding of a philosophy of life that is very, very different from Western ideas.

96baswood
jul 23, 2013, 7:01 pm

Excellent review of The Analects of Confucius

97wildbill
jul 23, 2013, 8:56 pm

>96 baswood: Excellent is better than very good, Thank You.

98dchaikin
jul 23, 2013, 10:12 pm

Enjoyed your review on Confucius.

99wildbill
jul 25, 2013, 9:12 pm

Two Years Before the Mast
This is a true life adventure of two years of the life of an American sailor in the 1830's. It had been sitting on my shelf for several years; an American classic that that I felt would be dull and monotonous. Instead it was a lively tale of travel and danger.
The author was a student in Boston who developed problems with his eyes and could not pursue his studies. He decided to sign on as a jack tar sailor on a ship bound for California round the horn. Living a sailor's life for two years.
The life of a sailor was hard labor day and night. The moments of adventure and drama were interspersed between long periods of the boring, confined life of a sailor aboard ship. Many of his diary entries read "The same." The author's ship, The Pilgrim, was engaged in the hide trade. A long trip around Cape Horn brought them to California. Once there they traveled up and down the coast from San Diego to San Francisco swapping trade goods for cattle hides. The reader is given a trip to a foreign country as he reads about the author's travels. In Mexican California status was based on the color of your skin. At the bottom were the Indians who provided the labor for the white skinned descendants of the Spanish conquerors. The Castilian dialect was cultivated as another sign of status. The coastline and the desert were the landscape of the author's travels. The author rode everywhere he went in California. They had very many horses and they would ride them at a gallop and when they were tired stop and pick up fresh horses. The rush of the wind atop a running horse with the smell of the sea in the air was one of many invigorating images contained in the book.
The author quickly learned the Spanish language and had many stories to tell of the people of California. As a sailor he mingled with the laboring class and became particularly attached to the kanakas. These were people from the Sandwich Islands/Hawaii. The kanakans were susceptible to illnesses common in the white population. The author helped to save the life of a kanakan friend by making sure he got medicines from the ship that another kanakan would not have been given.
Between the boring times were some vivid memories. The power of a Captain of the ship was made clear to the author in a brutal scene. One of the common sailors shot off his mouth to the Captain just at the wrong time. The Captain shouts his orders and the sailor is seized up. His shirt is ripped off and he is tied with his arms out face down on the bulkhead. The Captain takes a piece of thick rope and whips the sailor screaming at him that he will be his slave. Finally the sailor screams for the Captain to stop. The author thinks to himself that this is the way it is on ship. If you oppose the Captain, first it is mutiny then it is piracy and you swing for either one. The author later became involved in the anti-slavery movement.
Another moment was one of great beauty. When they went back around the horn it was winter in Antarctica and they got into the ice. In the pack was an iceberg of enormous size. It towered over them and the shape and color were a miracle of nature. The center of the iceberg was a deep indigo and as it got to the edges it was blue and then white. It moved slowly and great cracking sounds broke the quiet that hung in the air. A once in a lifetime experience for everyone there.
I could go on. I enjoyed the book very much. The author kept a diary of his trip and used that to write the book. There are dates scattered throughout the book. The writing was understated and moved with a good pace. The language has some interesting differences that reminded me of the difference in time. I recommend it as an interesting journey to another time and place.

100rebeccanyc
jul 26, 2013, 9:05 am

I've heard about that book for years. Sounds like fun!

101NanaCC
jul 26, 2013, 10:56 am

I agree with Rebecca, Two Years Before the Mast does sound like fun. And Amazon has it free for Kindle.

102mkboylan
jul 26, 2013, 11:05 am

Thanks for the great review and thanks Nana also! I'm grabbing it.

103wildbill
Bewerkt: jul 28, 2013, 8:50 pm

Gulliver's Travels
The first time I started this book I was in my teens. This time I was able to get past the first fifty pages and found an enjoyable and at times disturbing book. The book contains elements of satire, science fiction and ends with a scathing indictment of the human race.
The best known tale is Gulliver's voyage to Lilliput. Lilliput is a miniature world on a scale of one inch to a foot compared to the world we live in. Gulliver lives with the king and in one episode puts out a fire in the palace by urinating, an event which does not endear him to the Queen. He becomes a hero by stopping an attempted invasion of Lilliput by the people of Blefuscu an island that lies close to Lilliput. The people of Lilliput and Blefuscu have an ongoing dispute over which end of the egg should be opened. This is a life and death matter to those involved and I took it for a satire on the religious disputes which were rampant during the author's life, (1667-1745). Gulliver leaves Lilliput when he learns they have decided to put out his eyes and imprison him.
He does not stay long in England and his next voyage finds him in Brobdingnag. In this land he is the Lilliputian and the average man is 72 feet tall. As in Lilliput he ends up living with the king and they spend time talking about the differences between their two countries. Gulliver's adventures in this land focus on the dangers he faces because of his size. Something akin to some of the episodes in The Incredible Shrinking Man. Gulliver's journey out of Brobdingnag is one of those adventures. When Gulliver went out he would be carried in a room size basket. On one occasion he he taken near the sea and left by himself in the basket. The basket is picked up by a large eagle and then dropped when the eagle was attacked by another bird. He is rescued from the sea and ends up back in England.
In one of his most interesting adventures he travels to the land of Laputa. It is a city in the clouds peopled by an unusual looking race whose interests are music and mathematics. The author showed a great deal of imagination in his description of how the world flew through the air propelled by magnetic power. This voyage is very brief and after several other brief voyages he comes to the land of the Houyhnhnms.
The Houyhnhnms have the shape and form of horses. They can speak and are the dominant race in their land. Living with the Houyhnhnms are a race called the Yahoos. The Yahoos resemble homo sapiens and they perform the functions of the beasts of burden in that country. The Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos find Gulliver very confusing. The Yahoos wear no clothes and for a long time Gulliver keeps his on so he will not be mistaken for an inferior Yahoo. Once he is seen without clothing he is labeled a Yahoo with all of the connotations of inferiority of those peoples. He is able to learn the Houyhnhnm language and convinces his master that he is a cut above the average Yahoo. When he tells his master that in his country the Yahoos ride the Houyhnhnms he is at first not believed. Gulliver then discourses on life in Europe and war and the use of weapons, the deceitful practices of diplomacy and business. His master is appalled and tells Gulliver that the Houyhnhnms do not know how to say that which is not true. He tells his master that in his country the Yahoos castrate the Houyhnhnms to control them and this starts a social revolution.
The Houyhnhnms periodically have a grand assembly of their wisest men. This time the topic of discussion is the information Gulliver has imparted. The Houyhnhnms decide that the Yahoos have some of the despicable qualities of greed and lust for power and thus are a danger to them. It is decided that all of the male Yahoos will be castrated so that the race will be eradicated. They will train mules to be their beasts of burden to take the place of the Yahoos.
Gulliver is told that he will have to go back to where he came from. By now Gulliver has decided that only the Houyhnhnms are truly civilized and the thought of leaving is heartbreaking. He returns to England a very unhappy man. He has to force himself to tolerate the presence of his wife briefly at dinner. He can no longer tolerate the practices of his nation in conquering other peoples and taking their land for colonies. The thought of any cruelty to horses puts him in a spasm of grief. I do not doubt the sincerity of the author's feelings. He once wrote a tract on the the practice of eating children as an answer to the food problem. To all those who may occasionally say, "People are no damn good", raise a glass to Jonathan Swift.

104dchaikin
jul 28, 2013, 10:23 pm

You've been reading some great stuff. Enjoyed your tour through Gulliver's Travels.

105avidmom
jul 28, 2013, 11:59 pm

Two Years Before the Mast was a book my college history teacher put on his "required" reading list. So I bought the little paperback of it and never read it. It's been sitting on my shelves for um, um, a long, long time. I should give it a whirl.

106wildbill
Bewerkt: jul 30, 2013, 12:21 pm

Reading some classic literature has really opened my eyes to a world I have never spent much time in. I have been pleasantly surprised by the contemporary quality of some very old books. Two Years Before the Mast was very enjoyable. Gulliver's Travels was somewhat disturbing. But disturbing makes you think about things and that is good.

I don't say thank you often enough to everyone who drops by and makes such nice comments.

107baswood
jul 30, 2013, 11:58 am

I too could not read Gulliver's Travels as a teenager. Enjoyed your review.

108wildbill
jul 30, 2013, 12:25 pm

> 107 I am sure we were not the only ones. The writing is stuffy and the section on the Houyhnhms was at the least unpleasant.

109wildbill
aug 23, 2013, 10:40 pm

The Thin Man
This novel has a distinctively different atmosphere and tone from the the other novels I have read by Dashiell Hammett. It has none of the dark noir quality of The Red Harvest and Sam Spade would be distinctly out of place at a party given by Nick and Nora Charles. Hammett's smooth transition to such a different style of writing is a master craftsman at work. Hammett gives Nick Charles the witty repartee you might hear from Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Round Table. He wakes up at 11:00 a.m. and his first words are a request for "Something to cut the phlegm." He has a slick self confidence and does not appear to be fooled by the emotional posing of the Jorgensen family. Nora possesses an insightful intelligence and gets her share of good lines poking fun at Nick. At the same time there is a suspenseful murder story playing out to keep the reader interested. The story is set in the 1930's but the Depression is never mentioned. Nick is an ex-detective who now works full-time managing his wife's money. The story begins with the murder of someone connected to an old client of Nick's.
The old client was Clyde Wynant. His ex-wife married a European gigolo and now they are the Jorgensen family. Mimi, the ex-wife, is still attractive and has a bubbly exterior. She can also be mean as a snake when protecting what she wants. Nick Charles explains that Mimi always lies and when she is caught she will just come up with a different lie until you get tired of asking her questions. Her 18 year old son walks around snooping on everybody and asking about the meaning life. His sister Dorothy is a little older, an attractive airhead who spends a lot of time in speakeasies.
Hammett rounds out the characters with Wynant's lawyer and the ubiquitous Police Detective. The detective has some depth but the lawyer seems the typical high money professional and not very likeable. The plot moves well and has a good share of interesting twists and turns. They all spend a lot of time drinking and there is another murder to keep the story going. The ending is well done, very quickly with a surprise that ties up a lot of loose ends.
I thought the book was very well written. The author is able to shift moods quickly and his characters leave vivid lasting memories. This was a good book and I recommend it as an intelligent enjoyable reading experience. Hammett's five novels certainly left quite an impact on American literature.

110rebeccanyc
aug 24, 2013, 7:23 am

Interesting to read about the book, since I always enjoyed the movie!

111NanaCC
aug 24, 2013, 11:26 am

I can't believe that I never read The Thin Man. I might need to rectify that.

112wildbill
aug 24, 2013, 3:02 pm

>110 rebeccanyc: I have seen the movie several times. The book is so well written that I rarely thought of the movie while I was reading it.

113baswood
aug 24, 2013, 4:49 pm

Enjoyed your review of The Thin Man

114wildbill
aug 24, 2013, 6:55 pm

Shiloh, 1862
There was much that I found to enjoy in this book. The author tells a great story using many primary sources to give the reader a good idea of what it was like for the men who fought in the battle of Shiloh. He particularly focuses on the letters and diaries of enlisted men who were in the thick of the fighting.
Shiloh was a very significant battle and much has been written about it. The author points out that there were more casualties in this battle than in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War combined. The book is about 400 pages and the narrative of the battle starts about one-half way through the book. The introduction to the battle is very helpful to understanding why it was such an important event. One of the stories in the book I enjoyed concerned Grant during the Mexican War. This incident is in Grant's memoirs and told about Grant riding Indian style on the side of a horse as he races through the streets of a small town in Mexico to get ammunition for his men.
In writing about the battle the author emphasizes the lack of training the soldiers had, particularly the Southern soldiers. Many of them had only been in the army a matter of weeks and the fight between the two armies quickly became a "soldier's battle". It resembled a rugby scrum with very little use of battle formations. The Northern soldiers may have had a little more experience but the Confederates made up for it with their experience using a rifle and their savage fighting style.
The Southern commanding general was killed in the afternoon of the first day of the battle. Grant was all over the field that day on the Northern side trying to keep his army together while he was waiting for reinforcements. By the afternoon of the second day the Southern army was described by one of their officers as a wet pile of sugar ready to fall apart. P. G. T. Beauregard, who took command of the Southern army made a decision to take his army off of the field. The description of the battlefield littered with the bodies of dead and wounded men was realistically graphic.
The book was well written and covered many aspects of military life during the Civil War. On the negative side I felt there were some glaring mistakes that make it hard for me to recommend it. The one example that sticks in my mind involves Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the war. The author wrote that Lincoln suspended the Bill of Rights. I find it hard to understand how a mistake like that made it through to publication. There is a lot of difference between the Bill of Rights and the writ of habeas corpus. There were other similar mistakes that make it difficult for me to rely on the rest of what the author wrote and recommend this as a history book. There were statements made by the author that I felt were exaggerated to puff up the importance of the book. The academic world is very competitive and maybe the author tried just a little too hard to make his book attractive to the reader. Maybe I am being too picky. You are welcome to read the book and decide.

115wildbill
sep 8, 2013, 7:03 pm

The Merry Misogynist
This volume in the Dr. Siri series has a much darker tone than the previous books. The author has moved away from the clever stories with numerous drinking parties and incidents of humor. These changes have helped to add depth to the characters and ended what was becoming a repetitious pattern to the stories.
The growth in the relationship between Dr. Siri and Daeng, his wife, is another element in the maturing of the series. At one point Dr. Siri comments that the two of them are becoming one which is shown by the active part Daeng takes in the story. One advantage of reading a series from the beginning is to watch the development of the characters. Many authors in mystery series sacrifice the development of female characters to the development of the plot. Colin Cotterill is to be applauded for not falling into that pattern.
The story is about a psychopathic serial killer who preys on young women. The murders are carefully planned ritualistic acts that feed off of the pathology of the killer. The author uses the voice of the killer, referred to as Phan, to tell significant parts of the story. His misogynist hatred for his victims and cool calculating planning of the murders add an element of real horror to the story. Through the voice of the killer we are introduced to his next victim as he plots another murder. The investigation becomes a personal struggle between Siri and Phan as the book moves to the climax.
Phosy, Dtui's husband, works on the case with Siri while Dtui is busy giving birth to their daughter. While the hunt for Phan proceeds Siri is also looking for the "Crazy Indian" who has disappeared. He is a person of the streets and his disappearance is associated with visits to Siri from his old dog who died may years ago. The Laotian bureaucracy is present in the person of housing department inspectors who have discovered that Siri is living with Daeng and has given over his house to a collection of unregistered persons. This adds some humor to the story add allows Judge Haeng to make an appearance.
The book ends with a series of twists and surprises and I had to read it twice to find out exactly who did what to whom. There is a real element of fear for the life of Siri that adds to the suspense. This is the best book I have read in this series so far. There is real evil in the character of Phan and the author brings him up close and personal. There is humor to balance his story and Siri and Daeng, newly weds at 70, provide hope for everyone.

116mkboylan
sep 9, 2013, 12:44 am

wonderful review!

117NanaCC
sep 9, 2013, 8:15 am

This is definitely a series I will get to eventually. I see so many good reviews. Thanks for the push.

118wildbill
Bewerkt: sep 10, 2013, 10:41 am

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Barbara Tuchman has been one of my favorite historians since the first time I read Guns of August. I have started A Distant Mirror several times and never got very far. I started this time listening to an audio book and liked it so much I took out my print edition. There is a difference between the two and listening to a book is not the same as reading it, particularly nonfiction. Recently I listened to an Gettysburg:The Last Invasion three times to get the feel that I had read it. Listening is a lot less taxing so sometimes it is all that I can do. For that I count on good narrators and the woman who narrated this book is one of the best.
The Black Death 1348-1350 killed an estimated one third of the population of humanity from Iceland to India. In the first paragraph of the foreword the author sets out this event as the primary theme of her book. Intertwined with that story is a biography of Enguerrand de Coucy VII. He was one of the most powerful barons of France in the mid to late 14th century and an important political and military leader. The chronicle of his very active life helped set the tone for the book. Society and government went through significant changes as the decay of feudalism was leading to the rise of the nation state. The Reformation was bubbling up in the teachings of Wycliffe and Hus. A shift in military technology took place as the armored knight was consistently defeated by the working class longbow men.
The author paints out all of these themes and many others with a broad brush and then fills in the picture with a myriad of details that fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The details tell of hours of research, the author sitting in the middle of stacks of open books with a notepad in her hand.
Descriptions of rich women wearing costumes that were so wide they had to go through a doorway sideways. Festivals and carnivals where the poor were in charge making bawdy fun of the rich and powerful. Churchmen who purchase their offices and then stumble and mumble trying to read a service.
The plague came in two forms, bubonic and pneumonic, and either one killed in a matter of days. There were numerous cures a few of which were as fatal as the plague. One city did keep the incidence down by a program of strict quarantine. Once one person in a house showed any symptoms all of the members of the house were locked inside to die. The drop in population meant that workers were scarce and could command higher wages. Whole villages went fallow because there was no one to work the fields. One response to the plague were the flagellants. They began to rival the church and were quickly put down.
The church still held great power. The schism of two Popes meant more venality was needed to support two Holy Sees. The schism did great damage to the legitimacy of the church as some rulers played off one Pope against the other.
France and England fought so much they called it the Hundred Year's War. England still ruled in Bordeaux and Calais and Guienne were ceded to England in 1360. The French lost a series of battles because they insisted on fighting in armor on muddy fields in constricted spaces. The English soldier used his longbow or a pike and defeated the flower of chivalry. The last great battle was Nicolopis where the Ottomans defeated the might of Europe with the help of their Balkan subjects.
I could go on and on but the author does a much better job. Barbara Tuchman was an historian to her fingernails. It was a career she chose and worked at for decades. She wrote good literature that made history interesting for millions. The fact that she was not an academic freed her from the specialization that is a requirement in academic life. She put a number of very good books on the shelf in her career and this was one of her best.

119wildbill
sep 9, 2013, 8:58 pm

> 116 " Wonderful review" I won't be able to get my hat on. Thank you.

> 117 Hello NaNaCC good to hear from you. Everyone I have read likes this series. They are sold as an ebook at a nice price.

120baswood
sep 10, 2013, 8:53 am

I liked Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. I thought that by highlighting the story of Enguerrand de Courcy VII she was able to get behind the historical events to give her readers a real feel for the social conditions of the times. A book that is of interest for the general reader as well as those people specialising in the period.

121rebeccanyc
sep 10, 2013, 11:54 am

I was already planning on reading A Distant Mirror, which I've had on the TBR for probably 25 years, because of my fictional medieval reading, but you're encouraging me to move it up even faster. I love Barbara Tuchman and don't quite understand why I never read this when I bought it.

122wildbill
Bewerkt: sep 14, 2013, 11:24 am

The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War
The author is a professor of military strategy at the U. S. Naval War College. The writer assumes that the reader has a reasonably broad body of knowledge about the war and begins his narrative at that point. It is a technical analysis of the military history of the war that I found a bit impersonal and at times rather dry. I felt the author should have followed the lead of Herman Hattaway, the author of How The North Won: A Military History of the Civil War. Hattaway's book was a similar technical analysis of the military history of the war. He made good use of a large number of quotations from Bruce Catton, a writer with a journalist's eye for the human side of life, through the pages of his book and made it more engaging. This author had some interesting ideas but in my opinion history is first and last about people and this book lacked the personal touch.
The premise of the book is that the South lost the war because of their failure to create and implement an effective military strategy that met their political needs. This comes straight from the maxim of Clausewitz that war is the continuation of politics by other means. I agreed with several of the arguments which the author made to support this premise. At the beginning of the war the South possessed a mass of wealth in the form of a large cotton crop. Instead of selling the cotton and buying weapons they established an informal embargo to force England and France to come to their aid. They had memories of the French aid to the colonists which helped make the American Revolution successful. England and France did not come to their aid and it was not until the second year of the war that the South had decent arms for their soldiers.
In his assessment of the political leadership of the two combatants the author is very critical of Jefferson Davis and gives passing marks to Lincoln. Davis had much better experience for the task. He graduated from West Point, served in the Mexican War and was Secretary of War under Buchanan. The only experience Lincoln had was a short term in the militia in the Black Hawk War. The difference was that Lincoln was a better manager and he was open to learning instead of assuming that he knew everything. Davis would have preferred the position of commanding general and took his role as commander-in-chief very seriously vetoing bills passed by the Southern Congress that he felt impinged on his powers in that role. At the same time although vastly outnumbered he insisted on attempting to defend every mile of the perimeter of the Confederacy. As a consequence the South quickly lost the forts that controlled the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers and then New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy.
While acknowledging Lee's tactical skills the author uses Lee's own words to describe his strategic failings. Lee is quoted as saying that the great victory at Chancellorsville did not bring to the South one acre of conquered territory and the Northern casualties would quickly be replaced. Lee's failure to win any battles on Northern territory doomed the South to defeat. In contrast Grant by 1864 was pressing the South at several critical points. The South was outnumbered and forced to wage a defensive war which they could not win. Grant kept Lee engaged in Virginia while Sherman destroyed the productive capacity of the lower South.
I did find reading the book worthwhile and learned a good deal. The author displayed a deft command of a large body of knowledge about the war. The author's big picture analysis of the war added a new level to my understanding of the history of the Civil War. While I could spend a lifetime reading about the Civil War I have the urge to move on to another topic. In the last year I have read two good books about Medieval history and I would like to learn more about that era. So many books, so little time.

123wildbill
sep 23, 2013, 9:29 pm

Winesburg, Ohio
This is a collection of short stories written about life in small town Ohio published in 1919. The author had grown up in a small town in Ohio and was very familiar with the kind of place and people he was writing about. As I read the stories I was struck by the similarity of this work with Spoon River Anthology. Each of the stories was the story of a different resident of Winesburg and the tone of the stories was similar to stories of loneliness and unhappiness in Spoon River. Reading about the book I found that I was only the most recent reader to see this similarity. The author had supposedly read Spoon River in one sitting from cover to cover long before he started writing this book. Some earlier readers of Winesburg referred to it as Spoon River in prose.
The book is very well written and takes the reader instantly to life in small town America just after the turn of the century. The characters are well done and I felt like I knew them after reading one or two paragraphs of their story. The author wrote in a style of modern realism with no sentimentality for the place or the people he portrayed. The people of Winesburg shared feelings of isolation and loneliness leading lives of quiet despair in a time and place where life was not intended to be fun. Reading the book I felt immersed in those emotions which at times subtracted from my enjoyment of the book.
The only character who appears in all of the stories is George Willard. The characters are revealed in their relationships with Willard much as the characters in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter were revealed in their relationships with John Singer. Winesburg has elements of a coming of age story about Willard. He is a journalist on the town newspaper, the Winesburg Eagle, who is restless and unsatisfied by life in a small town. By the end of the book he leaves Winesburg with ambitions to become a serious writer. The last story is a short description of Willard getting on the train to leave Winesburg. His friends come to the station to see him off. At the end of the story Willard is sitting in the train and opens his eyes to see that Winesburg has disappeared to "become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood".
As a work of literary art I felt the book was well done and effective. I came to know the characters and shared a part of their lives. The experience was no more enjoyable than the lives of the characters. George Willard's decision to leave Winesburg to seek a different life was the author's present of a ray of hope to light our lonely way.

124avidmom
sep 28, 2013, 12:53 am

>122 wildbill: While I could spend a lifetime reading about the Civil War...
Same here! Sounds like an interesting book but I feel more of a push towards reading those Catton books I have had on my shelf now for so many years.

125wildbill
sep 28, 2013, 11:41 am

> 124 I am reading Grant Moves South which is one of the last two books I have by Catton which I have not read. He is an excellent writer and I have audio editions of several of his books which I have listened to several times.

126dchaikin
sep 28, 2013, 9:42 pm

Just catching your last several reviews. Enjoyed them. Interesting about Winston Groom's errors in Shiloh, 1862. Thanks for reminding me I should read Tuchman.

127wildbill
okt 13, 2013, 7:17 pm

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley and a Fatal Meeting of the Minds at the End of WWII
Dr. Kelley was the prison psychiatrist who evaluated the Nazi leaders who went on trial for war crimes after the end of WWII. I have another book Nuremberg Diary written by G.M. Gilbert who was the prison psychologist and was looking forward to reading this book. Unfortunately this book was more of a biography of Douglas Kelley than a book about the Nuremberg trials. Dr. Kelley left before the trials finished and the whole last half of the book is about his life up to the time he committed suicide.
The part of the book that is about Nuremberg begins with the arrest of Goring. He came in with 16 suitcases of belongings including one full of jewelry and another one full of percodan tablets. Percodan was not a well known drug at that time and the Allied doctors had to send the tablets to Washington for analysis. It took a number of months to slowly wean Goring from his addiction to the drug because of the high dosages he was taking.
Goring was a charismatic man and Kelley quickly formed a strong relationship with him. The book does not provide much information about the German leaders besides Goring and Hess. Hess was very unstable and claimed to have amnesia. He was evaluated by several teams of doctors to make sure he was competent to stand trial. During the trial Hess made a statement that he had been faking his amnesia which appeared to be true to some extent but he was mentally impaired and had some good days and mostly bad days.
Kelley administered Rorschach tests to all of the prisoners and the author wrote a good deal about them in several different parts of the book. After Gilbert arrived at the prison he worked with Kelley on testing the prisoners since he spoke German and Kelley did not. The results of the tests were evaluated by several doctors at different times as late as the 1990's. The purpose of evaluating the test results was to try to determine if the prisoners had similarities in their personalities that led them to become Nazis or they were just different people who decided on their own to follow Hitler. One group led by Gilbert said they saw similarities in the test results that showed a Nazi personality type. Kelley disagreed and concluded that the prisoners were an ambitious and intelligent, except for Streicher, group of men who rose to the top in the Nazi power structure. The premise of Kelley's conclusion was that what happened in Germany under Hitler could happen in any country. By and large the doctors who evaluated the results agreed with Kelley.
The biography of Kelley is not uninteresting but it was not why I read the book. After his return to the U.S. he built a career as a psychiatrist and specialized in forensic psychiatry. He taught at Berkeley and worked with police forces across the country. He did evaluations of people accused of crimes and became very well known in his field. He was an A personality who was driven to learn and achieve. He raised his oldest son with a strict regimen of activities aimed at turning out an intellectual superman. When the boy was seven years old Kelley would give him lists of words to memorize every day. Needless to say Douglas Jr. rebelled and ended up being a postal worker. At the end Kelley's demons became too much for him too handle and he committed suicide in front of his wife and son by taking potassium cyanide. Goring had done the same thing the night before he was scheduled to be hanged.
I don't recommend the book. There were parts that were interesting but the parts never came together to tell a coherent story. If you want to know about the psychology of the Nuremberg prisoners read Gilbert's book.

128avidmom
okt 13, 2013, 7:22 pm

Sorry that the book was a disappointment; it sounds like it went off in too many directions at once. The subject of the psychology behind Nazism sounds fascinating, though, (and depressing!).

129mkboylan
okt 13, 2013, 8:51 pm

Good review tho - good info and good recommendation!

130RidgewayGirl
okt 13, 2013, 10:30 pm

Thanks for reading that book so that I don't have to.

131baswood
okt 14, 2013, 6:20 pm

Fascinating review of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

132wildbill
okt 17, 2013, 9:05 pm

Thank you very much for all of the nice comments. I haven't posted many books lately and it's nice to know I haven't been forgotten.

> 128 I think the point was that there was no particular psychology behind Nazism. Most of them were just regular people in an unusual situation. If you can handle it a good book to read is Ordinary Men:Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

133wildbill
Bewerkt: okt 25, 2013, 7:58 am

The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
This was a fascinating book that is definitely in my top five for 2013. It was written by research scientists about the natural history of social insects and how they evolved. If you don't "believe" in evolution you will hate this book it is a constant theme in the book. I learned a lot. The book is mostly about ants with some about bees and a little about wasps. I call it my "Ant" book. Ants are incredible. It didn't seem that hard to read. I just accepted the facts that some of the bio-chemistry I didn't understand. I still got a lot out of it.
It's the size of a coffee table book with photos and drawings appropriate to that genre. There were about seventy photographs and each one of them was excellent. Many showed the insects as if you were looking at them under a low power microscope. A majority of the line drawings were done in a series of four to six drawings to illustrate specific behavior patterns discussed in the text. They were also used to focus on anatomical details such as glands inside the insects. I would enjoy going through to look at the pictures.

A superorganism is defined as a society such as an insect colony that possesses features of
organization analogous to the physiological properties of a single organism.

There are three basic behavioral mechanisms discussed that allow the ants to develop into a superorganism.
The first is altruism. The vast majority of the insects in the colony do not reproduce but instead spend their lives raising someone else's offspring. This runs contrary to the basic drive to reproduce. It is the first step down the evolutionary path to the development of a superorganism.
Altruism allows for the development of division of labor which allows some of the insects in the colony to function as a separate physiological process within the superorganism. Some of the insects do nothing but gather food for the colony. They bring in the food in a raw state and then another group of insects turn the raw food into something edible for the members of the colony. The foragers needs for shelter, food and protection are met by other specialized insects within the colony. In some species the division of labor changes as the needs of the colony change. If there is too much raw food some foragers may adopt another role necessary for the colony such as processing the food. The adoption of another role may require the insect to change some of their physical characteristics to those required by their new role. Often these changes are triggered by some method of communication between the individual insect and other members of the colony.
Communication is the third requirement for the development of the superorganism. Much of the communication is chemical. The insects have incredible sensitivity to a large variety of chemical markers produced by the other insects. Once a forager finds a food source they will put down a chemical trail for other foragers to follow. The chemical trail may let other insects know what type of food there is, the quantity or how far away it is. This is a simplistic example that is multiplied by the vast number of operations necessary to keep the colony going. There is also a lot of physical communication. The variables involved in physical communication are only limited by the number of body parts each insect has and how many insects can be involved in the actions. Some foragers will lead other insects to a food source by maintaining physical contact as they walk down the trail. They also pass food and body fluids.
At the top level of complexity are the leaf cutter ants. The authors state that they are the second most complex society in the world and I will not argue with them. There are many different species of leaf cutters who all live by raising the same species of edible fungus. They cut up leaves to provide a growing medium for the fungus. Some species use the silk from larvae to hold pieces of cut up leaves together and build growing beds for the fungus. There is a photo of an ant holding a larvae above some leaf pieces and you can see a line of silk from the larvae down. Truly amazing were the species who have a symbiotic relationship with parasites that produces antibiotics for the fungus. These ants showed up about 45 million years ago.
Reading this book made being a scientist sound like a nice way to live. A lot of the research that was described seemed like play for grownups. In the chapter on colony architecture the scientists would fill a colony with plaster of paris or molten aluminum and them excavate the dirt to reveal the structure of the colony. Some of the photos had large groups of ants with colored dots on them so the scientists could follow their activities. I am really glad I took the time to read this book. Maybe I will get an ant farm.

134mkboylan
okt 24, 2013, 9:04 pm

Well your review sure made me want to read it! Sounds pretty wonderful.

135qebo
okt 24, 2013, 9:50 pm

132: I got The Superorganism last year after reading The Leafcutter Ants, an excerpt (perhaps modified) with many good qualities that would benefit from context. Here’s a recent blog post with a video showing the molten aluminum casting of an ant nest.

136rebeccanyc
okt 25, 2013, 8:09 am

The authors of this book, as you probably know, are world-renowned for their work on ants and bees. Bert Holldobler is probably the primary expert on ants, and E.O. Wilson is an expert on a lot of things. This sounds like a fun book.

137baswood
okt 25, 2013, 4:49 pm

Those damn forager ants that guide others to a food source are a real menace in early summer where I live. We seem to spend much time in breaking up ant trails, sometimes unsuccessfully. Excellent review of The Superorganism. I dare not read it for fear of being too sympathetic towards the ants. fascinating stuff.

138NanaCC
okt 25, 2013, 5:19 pm

My granddaughter received an ant farm as a gift last year. It was very interesting. The unit was filled with a gel that they eat, and when the ants were added they ate their way through it, creating paths that criss-crossed throughout. It was interesting to watch them through the clear sides of the farm.

139wildbill
Bewerkt: nov 25, 2013, 7:08 pm

The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution
This book much more than a military history of the Battle of Antietam. It is a very good analysis of the political events surrounding the battle including the issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The author also tells the story of the career of George B. McClellan as the commander of the Army of the Potomac.
George B. McClellan was named commander of the newly formed Army of the Potomac in August of 1861 after the disastrous Union defeat in the First Battle of Bull Run. The author begins this book shortly after the end of the Peninsular campaign in August of 1862. The Army of the Potomac had been defeated by Robert E. Lee and John Pope was appointed to command the Army of Virginia. McClellan's troops were slowly being transferred to Pope leaving McClellan a general without an army. McClellan was typically slow in getting his troops to Pope which contributed to Pope's defeat in the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope was removed and Lincoln reluctantly placed McClellan back in command of Pope's troops which were united with the Army of the Potomac.
During this time McClellan had been making efforts to gain control of the Union's political policy. Working with members of the Democratic party he opposed Republican members of Congress who had passed legislation freeing the slaves in the District of Columbia and the Second Confiscation Act which provided for the liberation of slaves owned by "convicted rebels". McClellan wanted to leave slavery as it was and seek a negotiated peace with the South. This argument is backed up by the author's inclusion in the book of some of McClellan's correspondence which was not previously available. Members of his staff advocated a military coup to make McClellan a dictator. Lincoln in July of 1862 had presented the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to the Cabinet and was waiting for a Union military victory to issue it to the country.
In August of 1862 Jefferson Davis made a decision to change the Confederacy's defensive military policy and invade the North. In the west the troops of Braxton Bragg and Kirby Smith were sent into Kentucky. In the east Lee's Army of Northern Virginia began an invasion of Maryland. As Lee moved his army into Maryland he split his forces and sent Stonewall Jackson to capture Harper's Ferry. The plans for movements of Lee's army were written up and distributed in what was called Special Order 191. On September 13 a copy of the order was found wrapped around three cigars in an abandoned camp by Union soldiers. It was delivered to McClellan that day and he then possessed the battle plans of his enemy.
The author does an excellent job in describing the military action which took place leading up to the Battle of Antietam. He begins each chapter with the time and place of the events described and makes what is a rather complex series of events easy to follow. His description of the Battle of Antietam follows this pattern going hour by hour over the different areas of the battlefield. The battle was one of the most hard fought of the war. Lee was outnumbered and forced to fight on the defensive. McClellan's attack was not well coordinated and late in the afternoon Confederate reinforcements arrived saving Lee's army from destruction. The battle is well known for the largest number of casualties suffered by American soldiers in one day.
After the battle Lee's army retreated back to Virginia. McClellan was convinced that this victory was his moment to assume control of Union military and political strategy. Instead five days after the battle Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This event marked the moment when the Civil War became a war of revolution which resulted in the destruction of slavery and the subjugation of the South. McClellan was removed from command on November 5 and ordered to report for further orders which never came.
This review is a cursory description of a book filled with details that create a panorama in time. I found this to be an excellent work of history. The author went beyond the usual narrative to describe the basis for some of the monumental changes that occurred during the Civil War. He was able to portray the interaction of events and personalities and give the reader an understanding of how historical change happens.

140SassyLassy
nov 26, 2013, 11:16 am

Have to get The Superorganism. I once took a course on Social Insects which I absolutely loved. The leafcutter ants were the best! Had I taken it earlier, I probably would have pursued entomology, but switching majors in my last semester seemed just too daunting. Glad to see there are others interested.

bas, what have you used on the ant trails? This year was a major incredible year for ant hills all over the area and a topic of discussion everywhere.

141baswood
nov 26, 2013, 12:02 pm

SassyLassey, I'll answer your question on my thread - it might not be suitable here especially after widbill's review which emphasised the "Beauty Elegance and Strangeness of Insect societies.

142mkboylan
nov 26, 2013, 12:23 pm

Good call bas!

143SassyLassy
nov 26, 2013, 4:15 pm

Okay, beauty and elegance here, blood and gore elsewhere.

144wildbill
dec 25, 2013, 2:36 pm

Tao Te Ching
Written by Laozi shortly before the Analects of Confucius this classic Chinese text has been more frequently translated than any book except the Bible. It is one of the foundations of East Asian thought that is still read today. The Tao Te Ching provides a combination of spirituality, common sense advice and a little nonsense to remind us that we live in world that cannot be known. Much of the text is open to a wide variety of interpretations. The beginning is a famous quote that provides a good example:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

There is an important thought conveyed in those two lines that loses its' meaning if you try to reduce it to an objective fact.

On the other hand the following lines are simple good advice about how to live your life.

In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.

One of the author's favorite devices is the use of contradictions to express an idea.

When the Tao is present in the universe,
The horses haul manure.
When the Tao is absent from the universe,
War horses are bred outside the city.

The Tao Te Ching is eighty-one verses and each time I read it I discover something new. For me that is the hallmark of a truly great book. The edition I have is filled with full page pictures and has the original Chinese on the opposite page from the translation.

145wildbill
dec 25, 2013, 3:50 pm

Grant Moves South
This is the second volume in a biography of U. S. Grant. The series was begun by Lloyd Lewis and after he died Bruce Catton finished the last two volumes. Catton is one of my favorite authors and Grant has grown in my estimation the more I read about him. Reading Grant's Personal Memoirs began my real appreciation for him.
The book begins with Grant's first command in the Civil War, the 21st Illinois Volunteer Regiment. The governor's memories of Grant were that he was a plain man a description that followed him throughout the war. Grant took charge in his quiet way and soon his regiment developed a respect for the "quiet man". That was the way it was all through Grant's career in the Civil War as from one command to another he took care of what he referred to as "the business".
This book follows Grant's career through the Battle of Vicksburg. I am reasonably familiar with Grant's military career and was much more interested in Catton's portrayal of the personal aspects of Grant's life. I don't know how Catton felt about Grant before he wrote this book but his admiration for Grant is very apparent here.
A prime example is how Catton goes out of his way to squelch all of the stories about Grant's drinking. He goes into great detail to prove wrong an incident from a book by Sylvanus Cadwallader. Cadwallader was a reporter covering the war who got to know Grant. He supposedly came across Grant on a boat on the Mississippi in the middle of a drinking bout. He spent the next three days rescuing Grant from whiskey and finally getting him back to his command post. Grant's chief aide, John A. Rawlins, was present when Grant got back. Rawlins, whose father had been a drunk, was very severe on Grant about drinking and demamnded the whole story from Cadwallader. Cadwallader then told him everything. Catton cites a personal letter written by Rawlins two days after this supposedly happened which has no mention of the incident. Catton concludes that Cadwallader's story which was published decades after the incident and Grant's death was simply a story to get a book published not true at all. I found it interesting that Catton went to that much trouble to disprove the story which I had read in Cadwallader's book.
Another interesting incident where Catton attests to Grant's character invovled a visit to him by Mary Livermore from the Sanitary Commission in the winter of 1863. She was on a mission to have twenty-one sick soldiers who needed to be discharged from the army. She had heard all of the horror stories about Grant and was prepared for the worst. Catton quotes from her notes, " Grant was not a drunkard....... The clear eye, the clear skin, firm flesh and steady nerves of General Grant gave lie to the universal calumnies then current....". Mrs. Livermore then presented Grant with the story of the sick soldiers and their brief conversation ended inconclusively. The next day a staff officer delivered the signed paperwork to Mrs. Livermore giving the soldiers their discharges.
Catton also described Grant as a man who was most happy when he was with his family. I remember a description of a smiling Grant sitting in a chair with his children all around him playing.
But Grant was also a General and according to Catton a general with a core of iron. He compares Grant and Sherman. Sherman was known as a man who talked about the horror of war but Grant was the general who dealt in casualties as part of the job and never flinched. When Sherman took Atlanta he fought by maneuver and never had great casualties. Grant was never afraid to order an assault and take casualties.
I enjoyed the book. Of course there is much more too it and it was all very well written. Most important this is about Grant as a person and according to the author a very decent person.

146wildbill
dec 25, 2013, 7:17 pm

Looking for Rachel Wallace
This is the first book I have read in the Spenser series. The book was well written and suspenseful and I will have to try another volume to see if the shortcomings I found are isolated to this book or present throughout the series.
Spenser in this book is acting as a bodyguard for Rachel Wallace. Rachel Wallace is a writer and a self proclaimed lesbian radical feminist. Her publisher has hired a bodyguard for her, against her wishes, because she is receiving death threats associated with the publication of a new book. Her new book is an expose of discrimination against women which names prominent business people and their misogynist attitudes and actions. The threats are signed by a right wing group which calls itself RAM (Restore American Morality).
Spenser went from being a boxer to his present occupation. As he describes it he was a good but not great boxer. That meant he could make a living at it but it would not be worth the physical cost to him. He is very direct with an irreverent sense of humor. Ms. Wallace has very little sense of humor. She makes that clear at their first meeting which to say the least does not go well.
She fires Spenser after an incident at the offices of First Mutual Insurance. Ms. Wallace is there to speak with a group of women to talk about her book. As soon as the men in charge find out who she is they call security to have her thrown out. She wants to make it hard for them by going limp so they will have to physically remove her. Spenser escorts her out and after they have a short discussion he is terminated. Then Rachel Wallace was kidnapped.
Spenser is called by her publisher and starts investigating. He gets a lead and as he is going to interview a KKK grand dragon he is beat up by four of the dragon's friends. Then he goes back and starts beating people up. First is the grand dragon and next is Mingo who hired two guys to run Wallace and Spenser off the road before she fired him. Very soon Spenser finds Rachel Wallace in the attic of the rich people's house. Two guys come up the attic stairs with guns and Spenser shoots them. One guy gets two in the head and the other guy gets his in the throat. Then Spenser has to knock out an elderly rich woman to keep her from trying to bite him.
There is plenty of suspense at the end and Rachel Wallace tells Spenser she felt good when he shot her kidnappers. What struck me was that Spenser said nothing about killing two people. He didn't try to disable them he just killed them and put his gun away. The book was well written, moved well and there was a good plot twist at the end. It didn't bother me that Spenser killed the kidnappers I just felt that what he did was close to murder.

147baswood
dec 26, 2013, 4:31 am

Tao Te Ching Your version of the book sounds wonderful.

148rebeccanyc
dec 26, 2013, 10:01 am

It's too bad most people can't live up to all the good advice the Tao Te Ching and other works give us. But it sounds like a fascinating book anyway.

149wildbill
dec 26, 2013, 2:38 pm

It is very difficult to communicate the content of the Tao Te Ching. The meaning of the chapters is very slippery to say the least.

150wildbill
dec 26, 2013, 9:41 pm

Slash and Burn
Another adventure in Laos with Dr. Siri Paiboun and the usual suspects. Auntie Boopoo seems to have become a regular. Cotterill seems to have fun describing the clothing and makeup of a middle age transexual . Her occult powers have told her that Dr. Siri is in serious danger and she has become a stowaway on a hunt for an MIA.
At a local market just over the border in Thailand someone recently bought a photograph of an American helicopter pilot. He had flown at a base in the area in the 1970's. He and his helicopter went down one night and nothing was ever found. He is the son of a politician so the Americans and Laotians have set up a joint mission to look for him or his remains.
Since Dr. Siri is a coroner, the only coroner, and you might need one, he and the mortuary staff and friends are all on the ride. There is also an American Senator, Laotian security people and lots of food and beer. They all fly up into a corner of Laos where there used to be a big Air America base, back in the day, and move into an old hotel. The first day they get in their trucks and go to a remote base they have set up to talk to the local Hmong people who were living there when the chopper went down. The group set up their tables and people lined up, each one with their original guaranteed souvenir from the chopper crash. They go through this for a day and a half and find nothing valuable. Then in come a group of about eight men carrying a bundle on their shoulders. They put it on the ground and it is a genuine piece of a helicopter with the id number of the chopper they are looking for.
The only problem is that they can't take it back to the air base to take it apart. While they have been looking for the helicopter the sky has filled with smoke. They are grounded up in mountains full of tall trees where are not any decent roads. They take their trophy back to the hotel and the next morning they find a corpse.
The nominal head of the mission was an old Vietnam hand who had worked for the CIA at the embassy. He is found hanging from a door knob in his room. It looks like a suicide but Dr. Siri quickly discovers that the ligature marks show he was murdered and then placed there. The story proceeds from there as the author fashions a well written, entertaining tale full of suspense, good times and surprises.
Coterill in each one of the series volumes I have read so far does a very good job of mixing the old and the new. The stories are a combination of a visit with some old friends and new ideas about the evil that men do. The corpses start turning up at the hotel, isolated in smoke, just like bodies at an old English country house in an Agatha Christie novel. Vietnam as the public face of all of the money and corruption that drives the story is pulled aside at the end to reveal something much older and more elementary as the motive for all of the killing and destruction.
The unique touch to the whole series is the Laotian circus. All of the crazy characters and truly alien landscapes. Shamans with green eyes and thirty-three teeth. A place where you have to put your fingers in your ears when Mr. Geung bangs the gong. A gentle people in an old part of the world run by fanatic communists.
I am glad to know that the author has just written another volume in the series. I hope he writes many more.