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What are you reading at the moment?

MATTERHORN (A Novel of the Vietnam War) by Karl Marlantes

INSIDE OUT by Barry Eisler
 
1. A biography of Chesty Puller.
2. A history of the sulfa drug
 
Haven't read much these past few weeks, have been moving but did manage to finish...
Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. Have several of Morris's other books also about Roosevelt who I find such an intriguing, vain personality, but still adore. The book starts out a little bloody with his "journey Pleistocene" as he puts it about the year or so he spent in East African on safari. Very interesting read, full of adventure, drama, humor and so much vanity. After this read I have to admit he may have had a bit of a cause to be. Good stuff about a much beloved president who's popularity was won outside of his office, through his adventures.

Ciao, Obsequium :kiss:

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt
 
The Rider: Tim Krabbé
Translated from Dutch by: Sam Garrett

A cycling classic by the author of
The Vanishing And The Cave.
 
Finished Orhan Pamuk, They Call Me Red. All good and well, but I must be tired of fiction in general, novels especially.

Began Danube by Claudio Magris and I'm enjoying it much more. Magris is a professor of literature from Trieste; his book is a travelogue, following the course of the Danube, sprinkled with historical trivia and reflections on writing and Mitteleuropean history. Magris' flights of philosophizing aren't the best part of the book, but there's more than enough substance left to make the book interesting.
 


He was now undeniably miserable. "It feels like my insides are digesting themselves," he wrote to his wife in mid-September. The source of his unhappiness was, as usual, other people. The other people who bothered him the most were his own investors. When he opened his fund, in 2000, he released only his quarterly returns, and told his investors that he planned to tell them next to nothing about what he was up to. Now they were demanding monthly and even fortnightly reports, and pestered him constantly about the wisdom of his pessimism. "I almost think the better the idea, and the more iconoclastic the investor, the more likely you will get screamed at by investors," he said. He didn't worry about how screwed-up the market for some security became because he knew that eventually it would be disciplined by logic: Businesses either thrived or failed. Loans either were paid off or were defaulted upon. But those people whose money he ran were incapable of keeping their emotional distance from the market. They were now responding to the same surface stimuli as the entire screwed-up subprime mortgage market, and trying to force him to conform to its madness. "I do my best to have patience," he wrote to one investor. "But I can only be as patient as my investors." To another griping investor he wrote, "The definition of an intelligent manager... is someone who has the right idea, and sees his investors abandon him just before the idea pays off." When he was making them huge sums of money, he had barely heard from them; the moment he started actually to lose a little, they peppered him with their doubts and suspicions...
​


-Michael Lewis
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
New York, N.Y. 2010.



It's Michael Lewis— and another classic tale of the fate of individuals doing battle against the mob. When humanity sees others making what appears to be "easy money," mob psychology is triggered. No matter how illogical or illusory the idea, a significant portion of people succumb to the notion that it'll go on forever. Bureaucrats and people in governments and large organizations are swept up in the rush and woe unto the individual who has the temerity to observe that "the Emperor has no clothes."

A handful of people ( mostly outsiders ) saw this particular train wreck coming and were able to get very, very rich by capitalizing on the most recent episode of human folly. Unfortunately— from the perspective of society— it was one of the largest follies in history following in the footsteps of the Tulip Bulb Bubble, the South Seas Bubble, the Mississippi Bubble, the Nifty Fifty Bubble, numerous previous real estate Bubbles and the Dot Com Bubble.


 
At Home, by Bill Bryson. This should be required reading for anyone who wants to write period fiction.
 
"I have always thought that King Arthur existed."

The Discovery of King Arthur: Geoffrey Ashe
 
THE HONORABLE SCHOOL BOY by John Le Carre.

And a fascinating book about salt. Amazing stuff.
 
The End of Fairth, by Sam Harris
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
 

... It was just about 2:00 P.M. when a British shell landed squarely on the southwest bastion of Fort McHenry, and exploded with a blinding flash. For a brief second everything was lost in a ball of fire and smoke, then it cleared away, revealing a 24-pounder dismounted and its crew sprawled at odd angles in the dirt.

Several members of Judge Nicholson's Fencibles rushed over— but they were too late to help Lieutenant Levi Clagett or Sargeant John Clemm, two of Baltimore's prominent merchants who served in the company. As the dead and wounded were carried off, Private Philip Cohen must have felt lucky indeed. He had been standing right next to Clagett when the shell landed, yet escaped without a scratch.

So many of the garrison seemed to live charmed lives. Captain Henry Thompson dashed through a hail of shrapnel carrying messages to and from Hampstead Hill. Master's Mate Robert Stockton constantly exposed himself as Commodore Rogers's courier. And every man in the garrison had a horseshoe in his pocket that terrifying moment when a shell finally did crash through the roof of the magazine. It didn't go off... just lay there sputtering as some quick-witted hero doused the fuse in time.

This was too close a call for Major Armistead. He ordered the powder barrels cleared out and scattered under the rear walls of the fort. Better risk one or two than see the whole place go up. Private Mendes Cohen of the Fencibles joined the crew in rolling out the kegs. It was dangerous work with the shells flying about, and he finally took a moment to rest— by sitting on the end of a full powder barrel.

Toward 3:00 P.M., Major Armistead suddenly noticed that three of the British bomb vessels had weighed anchor and, together with the rocket ship, were moving toward the fort again. Apparently, Admiral Cochrane felt he had softened it up enough— that it could no longer hurt his ships even if they came within range. Now they were closing in for the kill.

That was all right with Armistead. For six hours he had sat taking his punishment, firing only occasionally to reassure Baltimore that he was still holding out. But most of his guns were sound and his gunners thirsting for a chance to work off their frustrations. Now they stood at the embrasures aching to go. At the Lazaretto across the Northwest Branch, Lieutenant Rutter stood ready too, as did Lieutenant Solomon Frazier's flotillamen on the gunboats in the channel. The British ships glided closer— two miles... a mile and a half. Then with a roar that shook the whole harbor, Armistead let go with everything he had...
​


-Walter Lord
The Dawn's Early Light
New York, N.Y. 1972.



The Bicentennial of the War of 1812 is approaching. As everyone knows, Francis Scott Key was inspired by the repulse of the British attack on Baltimore and Fort McHenry to compose a poem— "Defence of Ft. M'Henry" that was subsequently sung to the tune of "Anacreon in Heaven." Only later did it come to be known as "The Star Spangled Banner."

The War of 1812 is not well-remembered. The Bicentennial will undoubtedly see the appearance of new histories. I am aware of at least one book, Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815, that will be available this month. A little remembered history of the naval war, The Age of Fighting Sail, was authored by C. S. Forester ( yes, THAT C. S. Forester— in one of his few works of non-fiction). It's a highly readable account that details the surprising successes of the fledgling, underdog United States Navy against the world's biggest and best. It was this book that first introduced me to the heroic voyages and battles of Constitution ( "Old Ironsides"), President, Java, Guerrière, Hornet, Wasp, Saratoga, Congress and Constellation— among others. Several of those names are mythic and form the backbone of U.S. Navy history and tradition. Most will recognize ship names that appear many times over in U.S. naval affairs. The privateer schooners known to history as Baltimore Clippers bedeviled British commerce throughout the war. The multitude of privateers built and based there formed a substantial part of the rationale for the British attack on the city.

 


...The Englishmen followed the Florida coast for a little more than a week and arrived off the Outer Banks of North Carolina in early July. The Outer Banks are a line of narrow, sandy islands extending approximately 150 miles, from near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in the north to Cape Lookout in the south. Created by prevailing winds and currents, the islands act as a barrier between the Atlantic Ocean and the shallow waters of the sounds within: Currituck, Albemare, and Pamlico. Fernandes had to skirt the Outer Banks for over a hundred miles before he found a passage between the islands that the ships were able to navigate, albeit with some difficulty. Entering Pamlico Sound, they dropped anchor about a mile from the island of Hatarask and gave thanks to God for their safe arrival.

Amadas and Barlowe were aware of the significance of their arrival off the American shore. They would be the first Englishmen to set foot on mainland North America in the vanguard of an English New World colony...

...The English had not seen any local peoples since arriving off the Outer Banks, but it is certain that the Indians had seen them. The two ships would not have taken the Indians entirely by surprise; they had seen such ships before. From the 1520s onward, Europeans had occasionally sailed by the Carolina coast on their way to the Chesapeake Bay or farther north, and in 1558 some ( probably Spanish or French ) sailors had been shipwrecked on the Outer Banks. The men had remained a few weeks on the island of Wococon before putting to sea in a makeshift boat and had perished soon after; Indians had found the remains of their boat washed up on the shore.

A Spanish ship had arrived off the coast some years later. The ship had been trying to reach the Bahia de Madre de Dios ( Chesapeake Bay ) to return an Indian convert called Paquiquineo, known as Don Luis to the Spanish, to his homeland...

...Besides their own experiences of Europeans, it is probable that the Indians had picked up news of other white men who had entered lands to the south and north of them. Information passed by word of mouth from one group to another across hundreds of miles, and peoples of the Carolina region may well have heard stories of the Spanish in Florida, who had built forts and made war on the peoples of those lands. They may also have heard that a small group of Spaniards had tried to build a settlement on the Chesapeake Bay but had been destroyed by the Indians there ( in 1571 )...
​


-James Horn
A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2010.



European efforts to colonize North America began more than 250 years before the creation of the United States. That's a lot of history that basically isn't taught and with which few are familiar.

I was always aware of the failed colony of Roanoke and the trivial fact that Virginia Dare was the first English child born in the "New World." I was not, however, aware of how much was known about the effort. I was completely unaware that historians have always known the location of Roanoke, assuming that it had long ago disappeared in the tangled growth of the regnant wilderness. The story of the colony is interesting; Sir Walter Rale(i)gh, a temporary favorite of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, was an entrepreneur/pirate/hustler of the first water. He succeeded to the colonial rights that she originally granted to his cousin, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and was the moving force behind the 1587 colonizing voyage to Roanoke Island. The location resulted from two earlier reconaissance voyages made to the area in 1584 and 1585. The choice of a location for the settlement was not wise as the lack of a safe harbor was a contributing factor in its demise. Of course, part of the reason for that poor choice was fear of detection by the Spanish.

The author, James Horn, is employed at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and is, thus, immersed in colonial history. This account relates the long background rivalry and eventual war between Spain and England that contributed to Roanoke's disappearance. In so doing he recounts the 1565 Spanish destruction and massacre of a French Huguenot colony in Florida ( Fort Caroline— said to have been located near present day Jacksonville ) as well as the brief existence of a Spanish settlement in the Chesapeake. That was news to me; I'd never previously read or heard of that Spanish settlement.

 
I just finished Michael Dobbs' "Never Surrender" and will start "The Outfit" by Richard Stark. With Winston Churchill at their centers, the former is the second volume of a novelized series about how Britain persevered during World War II. The latter is pulp fun. Originally from the early 60s, there must be a dozen or more books in this series chronicling an ethical gunsel named Parker. "The Outfit" is the series' third entry. Admittedly there's nothing edifying about Parker but his adventures certainly do entertain. If you've ever watched the movie "Point Blank" starring Lee Marvin, then you're familiar with the work.
 


Almost every town in France now has a museum of 'daily life' or of 'popular arts and traditions'. Most of them are stocked with artefacts that would otherwise have disappeared or turned into expensive accessories in homes and restaurants. The roughly decorated chests, the butter churns and baskets, the wooden tables with smooth, saucer shaped depressions into which the soup was poured, bear witness to the resilience of their owners. They have the dignity of objects that shared a human life. Each one contains the ghost of a gesture that was performed a million times. They make it easy to imagine a life of hard work and habit.

Naturally the artefacts are the best examples available: the hefty cradle, the expensive plough with metal parts and a manufacturer's name, the embroidered smock that was kept in a chest as part of someone's trouseau and never saw the pigsty or the field. As survivors, they tell a heartening tale of endurance. Other companions of daily life— the rotting bed, the treasured dung heap, the stench-laden fug of human and animal breath that could extinguish a burning candle— are impossible to display.

Sometimes, the person who was survived by her possessions appears in their midst and the purposeful display is belied by the photograph of a face scoured by hardship. The expression is often one of faint suspicion, dread or simply dull fatigue. It makes imagining the life that belonged to these objects seem a blundering intrusion. It seems to say that daily existence is harder to fathom than the obsolete tools and kitchen utensils, and that, if it could be recreated, the staple diet of a past life, with its habits, sensations and smells would have a stranger taste than the most exotic regional dish.

Written descriptions of daily life inevitably convey the same bright sense of purpose and progress. They pass through the years of lived experience like carefree travellers, telescoping the changes that only a long memory could have perceived. Occasionally, however, a simple fact has the same effect as the photograph in the museum. At the end of the eighteenth century, doctors from urban Alsace to rural Brittany found that high death rates were not caused primarily by famine and disease. The problem was that, as soon as they became ill, people took to their beds and hoped to die. In 1750, the Marquis d'Argenson noticed that the peasants who farmed his land in the Touraine were 'trying not to multiply': 'They wish only for death'. Even in times of plenty, old people who could no longer wield a spade or hold a needle were keen to die as soon as possible. 'Lasting too long' was one of the great fears of life. Invalids were habitually hated by their carers. It took a special government grant, instituted in 1850 in the Seine and Loiret départments, to persuade poor families to keep their ailing relatives at home instead of sending them to that bare waiting room of the graveyard, the municipal hospice.

When there was just enough food for the living, the mouth of a dying person was an obscenity. In the relatively harmonious household of the 1840s described by the peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin, the family members speculate openly in front of Émile's bed-ridden grandmother (who has not lost her hearing): 'I wish we knew how long it's going to last.' And another would reply, 'Not long, I hope.' As soon as the burden had expired, any water kept in pans or basins was thrown out (since the soul might have washed itself— or, if bound for Hell, tried to extinguish itself— as it left the house), and then life went on as before.

'Happy as a corpse' was a saying in the Alps. Visitors to the villages in the Savoy Alps, the central Pyrenees, Alsace and Lorraine, and parts of the Massif Central were often horrified to find silent populations of cretins with hideous thyroid deformities. (The link between goitre and lack of iodine in the water was not widely recognized until the early nineteenth century.) The Alpine explorer Saussure, who asked in vain for directions in a village in the Aosta Valley when most of the villagers were out in the fields, imagined that 'an evil spirit had turned the inhabitants of the unhappy village into dumb animals, leaving them with just enough human face to show that they had once been men.

The infirmity that seemed a curse to Saussure was a blessing to the natives. The birth of a cretinous baby was believed to bring good luck to the family. The idiot child would never have to work and would never have to leave home to earn money to pay the tax-collector. These hideous, blank creatures were already half-cured of life. Even the death of a normal child could be a consolation. If the baby had lived long enough to be baptized, or if a clever witch revived the corpse for an instant to sprinkle it with holy water, its soul would pray for the family in heaven...

...Categorical terms like 'peasants', 'artisans' and 'the poor' reduce the majority of the population to smudges in a crowd scene that no degree of magnification could resolve into a group of faces. They suggest a large and luckless contingent that filled in the background of important events and participated in the nation's historical development by suffering and engaging in a semblance of economic activity.

Even with a short term view, these categories turn out to be misleading. Rich people could fall into povery and peasants could be rich and powerful. Many peasants lived in towns and commuted to the fields. Many were also craftsmen, traders and local officials, just as many so-called aristocrats were semi-literate farmers. Statistics based on a mixture of surveys, censuses and guesswork give what seems a balanced view of the whole population. In 1789, three-quarters were described as 'agricultural'. A century later, the agricultural population had fallen to about 48 per cent, while 25 per cent worked in industry, 14 per cent in commerce and transport, 4 per cent in public services and administration and 3 per cent in the liberal professions, and 6 per cent were independently wealthy. But for reasons that will become clear, these figures always exaggerate the tidy divisions of the population and underestimate the number of people who tried to live off the land.​

-Graham Robb
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War.
New York and London, 2007.


Pure serendipity led me to pick up this book whilst strolling amongst the stacks at the local library. What good luck!

Unbeknownst to most all (from the dust jacket description), "While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language. Historians and anthropologists of the time referred to this land, without irony, as 'Gaul' and Julius Caesar was still being quoted at the end of the nineteenth century as a useful source of information on the inhabitants of the vast interior.

Graham Robb describes that unknown world— before and after the shattering arrival of modern civilization, from the end of the ancien régime to the early twentieth century— in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages..."

For me, it was a truly eye-opening book; I was totally and utterly ignorant of the extent to which medieval conditions predominated throughout almost all of France right up to the dawn of the twentieth century. Amazing!

 
Our Sunshine by Robert Drewe - it's a fictional account of Ned Kelly, the famous Irish-Australian outlaw. I think I've probably read it every year since I bought it back in the early 90s and it still works.
 
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