What book are you reading?

Empire of the Summer Moon is incredible - it should be mandatory reading in every school in America.

And of course I know who Jack Hays is and noticed your PF screen name immediately when I first started posting.

I wish America still had people like Quannah Parker, Jack Hays, and Ranald S. Mackenzie, AND Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow - but it don't, to our detriment. I hope to visit Chief Plenty Coups' grave site before I die.

 

I read A Bridge Too Far many years ago. I would also recommend by Ryan The Last Battle, a history of the last 100 days of the war in Europe. Ryan really made history come alive with so many first person sources and stories; enjoyable reading.

 

Thanks for the recommendation. My current project, begun during COVID lockdown, is to work through my own bookshelf, reading books I bought fully intending to read but never got around to.

 

"A People's tragedy" Orlando Figes.

 

Just finished "Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941" by William L. Shirer

 

Just finished reading “Once There Were Wolves” a fictional account of rewilding the Scottish Highlands by reintroducing wolves. Scotland has been doing some rewilding projects but I don’t know if wolves have actually been reintroduced yet.

 

Finally read Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard....Great Book

 

I am re-reading... Consider Phlebas - Wikipedia
Consider Phlebas, first published in 1987, is a space opera novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. It is the first in a series of novels about an interstellar post-scarcity society called the Culture.

The novel revolves around the Idiran–Culture War, and Banks plays on that theme by presenting various microcosms of that conflict. Its protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchul is an enemy of the Culture.

Consider Phlebas is Banks's first published science fiction novel and takes its title from a line in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. A subsequent Culture novel, Look to Windward (2000), whose title comes from the previous line of the same poem, can be considered a loose follow-up.

 

I just started watching “foundation” on tv, based on Isaac Asimov’s books, so I’m reading those right now. I’m loving them so far! His themes are quite relevant for today’s world.

 

Re-reading the Bible.. It has a definitive beginning and a definitive end.
Anyone ever read the "Wheel of Time" series?

 

I just finished reading Follow The River - the story of Mary Draper Ingles...

23-years old, kidnapped with her two young sons in July 1755 by Shawnee Indians, taken from her home near Blacksburg, VA, through the wilderness to a Shawnee village in present day Portsmouth, OH, and gave birth along the way, outside... Her children were given away, she was sold to French traders who took her farther west down the Ohio River to Big Bone Kentuky, and she escaped with an older German woman captive.

She walked home, over 500-miles (includes detours up feeder river detours to where she could cross the feeder rivers, and then back down to the Ohio and New Rivers), the last third the way naked, arriving in December 1755 - the trip took her 45-days.

And she gave thanks to God.

Anytime you think you did anything hard in life, or that you have grit, know this - you are weak, and gutless, compared to that 23-year old woman...

 

Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

 

Bad News. How woke Media is Undermining Democracy

Batya Unger-Sargon

 

Fascinating.

I read somewhere that captivity narratives were the first form of American Literature:

 

I bet that's a good book.

There was one quote my father kept on the desk in his office and it was from Calvin Coolidge - needless to say it's stuck with me to this day:

 

I'm almost finished reading Mike Rapports' 1848 which chronicles the revolutions and counter-revolutions of one of the most tumultuous years in Western history and politics:



https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1848-mike-rapport/1100922876

One of the things that stood out for me in the book was this old daguerreotype of a line of barricades in Paris that was shot during the street fighting in 1848:

 

I’m reading the “Narrative of Sojourner Truth.”

Born into slavery 1797 in New York State, received her freedom in the early 1800s when the state’s Emancipation Act went into effect, and became an important abolitionist.

 

I'd be interested to hear what you think of that book after you've read it, James.

 

I'm currently bouncing between a couple of Christmas presents my wife bought me:





Havel's Open Letters includes his masterpiece "Power of the Powerless". It's been a real literary treat reading that and "Self-Reliance".

 

Just finished Grant by Ron Chernow.

 

That's a good book. I suspect you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Chernow's a fine biographer. Alexander Hamilton is my favorite, but it probably could be considered an overly sympathetic portrait that glosses over many of the things that made Hamilton a lightning rod for criticism.

 

I've always had a positive view of Hamilton. I'm mindful of this great insight:
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

As for Grant, I was struck by how modern he was.

 

I share your view of Hamilton, and I think it's pretty clear that Chernow does, as well. Some might be critical of his somewhat sympathetic portrayal but I think he did everyone a service writing a biography that doesn't get lost in his negatives and controversies.

Great observation.

Chernow's accounts of Grant's campaigns prior to Vicksburg also helped me fully appreciate what a brilliant and aggressive general he was, both on the strategic and tactical levels. I imagine people out in the Midwest are more cognizant of this than we are in Virginia where Grant didn't get the opportunity to put those qualities on display as much as he did out West. I know many people would disagree with me on this, but in my estimation Robert E. Lee had nothing on Grant.

It's hard to think of a man who was more suited to be a leader of men:

from Quotes About Grant
https://libguides.css.edu/usgrant/home/quotes

"It has been a matter of universal wonder in this army that General Grant himself was not killed, and that no more accidents occurred to his staff, for the general was always in the front (his staff with him, of course), and perfectly heedless of the storm of hissing bullets and screaming shell flying around him. His apparent want of sensibility does not arise from heedlessness or vain military affectation, but from a sense of responsibility resting upon him when in battle...
-- Colonel Ely S. Parker

It's little wonder people compared Grant to George Washington.

 

~ I read parts of a few chapters. Scary creepy stuff. I am afraid it is more accurate and factual than I would like ...