Grab the Nearest Book...

[chris2c4u]

Re the Devil in the White City - Chicago, Andalho. Hope you post again!

 

[Master_Kain]

Book 1:

"Come on," Carroway teased.

Book 2:

The page is blank

Book 3:

"It's beautiful."

Book 4

Despite the time, servants ran to meet them, taking their horses.


All from the same series wonders if anyone knows them though it might be hard to from some of the sentences.

 

[chris2c4u]

A necromancer series, MK? Hope you get to post again!

 

[trysail]

...In Melville's world, men ashore gaze to sea and men at sea gaze to shore. The deck, as much as the ground, burns beneath their feet...


...His predecessors in the gentlemen-goes-to-sea genre, including Dana, had never quite got beyond the tone of the Brahmin slumming among the hoi polloi, but Melville opened himself to the sailor's life and became genuinely part of it. He shed his pretensions. He discovered that at sea competence counts more than breeding. He learned to live at a constant pitch of sentry alertness, since a split second of drowsiness or reverie could kill him. This was to be the theme of that memorable chapter in Moby-Dick, "The Mast-Head," in which Ishmael reflects on how easy it would be to slip from his height and be dashed to death on the deck below, or, if the ship were listing, to disappear with a quiet splash into the sea. In White-Jacket, in a sentence both reportorial and allegorical, Melville remarks that, "Sailors, even in the bleakest weather... never wear mittens aloft; since aloft, they literally carry their lives in their hands, and want nothing between their grasp of the hemp and the hemp itself...


...One can only imagine how Melville's mother and sisters reacted to hearing about the Polynesian girls applying tropical oil with their "soft palms" to his "whole body" and then competing "with one another in the ardor of their attentions." No wonder he had looked forward "with transport" during his days in the Marquesas to his nightly body rub, which gave him, he was sure, "such sensations" as no sultan in the seraglio had ever enjoyed. But it is a long way from raconteur to author, and most who try to make the transition fail to go the distance. Many young men, Elizabeth Hardwick points out, "have held forth over their schnapps and received a like urging to proceed from the conversation to the blank white page," but in the cold light of morning they find that writing is a more arduous business than spinning tales in the night...


...In Captain Ahab, Melville had invented a suicidal charismatic who denouces as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose— an invention that shows no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon...


...( Total earnings from the American sales of Moby-Dick would ultimately come to $556.37, considerably less than Melville had realized from any previous book. )...


...What "Bartelby" brings into view is the fact that all boundary lines between power and submission, mine and yours, right and wrong, too little and too much are finally nothing more than conventions to which we cling lest we lose our grip and tumble away into the infinity of unforseen possibilities...


...The Confidence-Man was about a time of hectic expansion when, in Baldwin's phrases, "swindling was raised to the dignity of the fine arts" and Americans were continually inventing new forms of "elaborate machinery of ingenious chicane." It was a time when paper money was promiscuously printed ("let the public believe that a smutted rag is money" as Baldwin put it, and "it is money"), when every borrower was ready to cheat every lender by putting up as collateral arid land, or infirm slaves, or worthless stock, and when lenders cheerfully loaned money that they did not have. Confidence, it seemed, was always misplaced...



​

-Andrew Delbanco
Melville: His World and Work
New York, N.Y. 2005.




I was first introduced to knowledge of Herman Melville's life by my book dealer relations who related the reasons for the scarcity of first editions of Moby-Dick ( as many are aware, it was a commercial flop, then the Harper Brothers' warehouse where the unsold copies remained burned to the ground). It was only many years later that I got around to reading Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, Mardi and Billy Budd and was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed them. To some— myself included— it is a source of pride and satisfaction to know they've read nearly immortal words and encountered some profound insights to the human condition in their original state.

Delbanco is a professor at Columbia. Of Melville, he observes that "the New York of his youth, where letters were delivered by horseback messengers, became in his lifetime a city recognizably our own, where the Brooklyn Bridge carried traffic and electric lights lit the street." While there will always be holes in Melville's life because of the nature of his life, the book is thoroughly researched and detailed.

 

[tcost]

"And, speaking of which, I must needs abate this monstrous moustache."

_The Reluctant King_, by L. Sprague de Camp.

 

[trysail]

...On Sunday, January 29, 1939, Luis W. Alvarez— a promising young physicist who worked closely with Ernest Lawrence— was sitting in a barber's chair, reading The San Francisco Chronicle. Suddenly, he read a wire service story reporting that two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had successfully demonstrated that the uranium nucleus could be split into two or more parts. They had achieved fission by bombarding uranium, one of the heaviest of the elements, with neutrons. Stunned by this development, Alvarez "stopped the barber in mid-snip, and ran all the way to the Radiation Laboratory to spread the word." When he told Oppenheimer the news, his reply was, "That's impossible." Oppenheimer then went to the blackboard and proceeded to prove mathematically that fission couldn't happen. Someone must have made a mistake...


...Los Alamos had an unusually high percentage of single men and women, and naturally, the Army had little success in keeping the sexes apart. Robert Wilson, the youngest of the lab's group leaders, was chairman of the Town Council when the military police ordered the closing of one of the women's dormitories and the dismissal of its female residents. A tearful group of young women, supported by a determined group of bachelors, appeared before the Council to appeal the decision. Wilson later recalled what happened: "It seems that the girls had been doing a flourishing business of requiting the basic needs of our young men, and at a price. All understandable to the Army until disease reared its ugly head, hence their interference." In the event, the Town Council decided that the number of girls plying their trade was few; health measures were taken and the dormitory was kept open...


...Truman's interactions with scientists were never elevated. The president struck many of them as a small-minded man who was in way over his head. "He was not a man of imagination," said Isidor Rabi. And scientists were hardly alone in this view. Even a seasoned Wall Street lawyer like John J. McCloy, who served Truman briefly as assistant secretary of war, wrote in his diary that the president was "a simple man, prone to make up his mind quickly and decisively, perhaps too quickly— a thorough American." This was not a great president, "not distinguished at all... not Lincolnesque, but an instinctive, common, hearty-natured man." Men as different as McCloy, Rabi and Oppenheimer all thought Truman's instincts, particularly in the field of atomic diplomacy, were neither measured nor sound— and sadly, certainly were not up to the challenge the country and the world now faced...


...Oppenheimer's larger plans for the Institute often met with resistance— particularly from the mathematicians, who had initially thought he would favor them with appointments and an ever-larger share of the Institute's budget. The arguments could become extraordinarily petty. "The Institute is an interesting Paradise," observed his perceptive secretary, Verna Hobson. "But in an ideal society, when you remove all the everyday frictions, the frictions that are created to take their place are so much more cruel."...


...For years, [ Lewis ] Strauss served as president of Manhattan's Temple Emanu-El— ironically the same Reform synagogue Felix Adler abandoned in 1876 to form the Ethical Culture Society. Proud of both his Jewish and his Southern heritage, Strauss pointedly insisted on pronouncing his last name as "Straws." Self-righteous to a fault, he remembered every slight— and meticulously recoreded them in an endless stream, each entitled "memorandum to the file." He was, as the Alsop brothers wrote, a man with "a desperate need to condescend."...


​

-Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
New York, N.Y. 2005.




I read a review and recommendation of this biography when it was initially published. It took some time for the book to bubble up on a shelf at the local library where, upon catching sight of it, I grabbed it.


Aside from the fact that this biography is well worth reading, Bird and Sherwin seem intent on making a low key social comment using Oppenheimer's life as the excuse. There's no denying that the actors in the "Red-baiting, Commie-under-every-bed" McCarthy era went waaaaaay too far and fear was used to advantage by some opportunistic, ethically-challenged martinets. That's really not an insight that's subject to much disputed these days; thus that undercurrent rings a bit hollow. Otherwise, the book is enjoyable.


Much to the evident delight of the authors, the question of whether it was necessary to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki troubled Oppenheimer subsequent to the war's end. They needn't have wrung their hands so needlessly; all that was necessary was to ask any American serviceman faced with the prospect of an invasion of Japan.

 

[chris2c4u]

I'll tell yeh. Show a bird your varicose veins and she'll be on you like a fuckin' barnacle.

Roddy Doyle, Bull Fighting.

 

[Fish_Tales]

(Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma)

Discussing the sex life of corn.....


To surmount this last problem, each flower sends out through the tip of the husk a single, sticky strand of silk (technically its 'style') to snag its own grain of pollen.

 

[Daydream_weaver]

"Pain blossomed, low and deep and bone-jarring."
*Dark Demon by Christine Feehan

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

"Kant imagined that this destiny would include enduring peace among nations, ensured by a kind of world governance - a final, ironic payoff for the millennia of antagonism and 'unsocial' striving."

Robert Wright
Nonzero
The Logic of Human Destiny

 

[trysail]

...At an early age, I had turned to reading as a way for the world to explain itself to me. Here, at last, I had stumbled into the store that would open up a hundred universities for my inspection. I had dropped out of nowhere and found myself at the gates of my my own personal Magdalen College in Oxford. Here I could punt down the Cam through the hallowed grounds of Cambridge University, take notes on Balzac at the Sorbonne, rush to my morning class on Dante in Bolongna, or sprint toward an honors class in Harvard Yard. The great writers of the world sang out in darkness and greeted me with the pleasure of my arrival...

...There have been hundreds of novels about the Civil War, but Gone With The Wind stands like an obelisk in the dead center of American letters casting its uneasy shadow over all of us. It hooked into the sweet-smelling attar that romance always lends to the cause of a shamed and defeated people. Millions of Southerners lamented the crushing defeat of the Southern armies, but only one had the talent to place that elegaic sense of dissolution on the white shoulders of the most irresistable, spiderous, seditious, and wonderful of American heroines, Scarlett O'Hara...


​

-Pat Conroy
My Reading Life
New York, N.Y. 2010.




I first sampled Conroy by reading The Prince of Tides. I was previously aware of his literary success and the sudden appearance of that volume in my favorite used book store gave me all the excuse I needed to give him a try. It's unusual for me to read fiction: Barth, Tyler, le Carré, Twain, (John) Irving and Mencken make up the vast majority of my forays into the genre. Nevertheless, Conroy struck a chord, most likely due to some geographic and cultural familiarities. We are, after all, spawn of tidewater. It can't be denied that Conroy has penned some memorable lines.

My Reading Life is a series of autobiographical essays and vignettes about his formative literary influences. It's not an unpleasant way to spend parts of evenings. Written in fifteen chapters, the book lends itself to being picked up and put aside as necessity dictates.

 

[yeishia]

The image created will gradually gow and direct you even through the tough times.

Raising your Spirited Child. (Workbook)

Mary Sheedy Kurcinka

 

[kimberlee]

She tells herself to run, but can't. - Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

 

[trysail]

...He had discovered a cafeteria in Saint-Germain-des-Prés without waiters, which was the only restaurant in Paris he would enter.

"I starve without this place," Mr. Hara said. "French velly bad. French hate Japanese people."

"The French hate everybody."

He toasted our friendship with a glass of red wine held aloft, then said to me, "Are you mad at Mr. Hara for Pearl Harbor?"

"No, of course not, Mr. Hara. Are you mad at me for Hiroshima?"

"Mr. Hara velly, velly solly for Pearl Harbor. Velly solly for the Japanese people. Japan should have attacked France. That would be velly good."

"You don't mean that, Mr. Hara."

"Yes," he said fiercely, "then Mr. Hara would kill all French waiters. They hate Japanese people."

As we ate, Mr. Hara began reciting a list of atrocities committed against him in French restaurants. He talked and ate at the same time. He was not dextrous with a fork. He had ordered peas, and I do not think a single pea passed between his lips. There were peas on his shirt, sitting singly and in pairs on his arms, peas in his wine, peas spread across his side of the table, and peas rolling toward mine. When the peas were dispersed, he began dismembering his chicken breast with inelegant, skewering movements of his knife and fork. The chicken hit the floor twice, shooting off his plate like a flushed quail. He would pick it up, apologize, continue his bitter fulmination against the French nation, and beat at the chicken with his utensils. When the meal was done, I looked at Mr. Hara finishing his pea-flavored wine. When I saw his face, I could not keep from hooting. There were peas on his chin, red cabbage hanging from the buttons of his shirt, chicken morsels on his upper lip. Remnants of his entire meal were scattered over his face and body. He laughed with me; then, staring at his fork, he declared, "Fork velly hard. Chopsticks velly easy. The French invent fork? No, Mr. Pat?"

"I don't know, Mr. Hara."

"Yes. They invent fork. Because they hate Japanese people."

​

-Pat Conroy
My Reading Life
New York, N.Y. 2010.

 

[trysail]

...The hanging party came into the square, and Aliena emerged from her reverie. She looked closely at the prisoner, stumbling along at the end of a rope, his hands tied behind his back. It was William Hamleigh...


...Willam was going to make a bad end.

His eyes were wild and staring, his mouth was open and drooling, he was moaning incoherently, and there was a stain on the front of his tunic where he had wet himself...


...It took a long time but the crowd remained quiet throughout. His face turned darker and darker. His agonized writhing became a mere twitching. At last his eyes rolled up into his head, his eyelids closed, he became still, and then, gruesomely, his tongue stuck out, black and swollen, between his teeth...


​

-Ken Follett
The Pillars of The Earth
New York, N.Y. 2002.




An architect friend had been insisting that I read the book for several months and a sister had been haranguing me to read it for years. I finally succumbed to the pressure. It's rare for me to read fiction and both are well aware of it, nevertheless asserting that the book was closer to history than fiction.

They're wrong. While it is entertaining, engaging and escapist, the book is every bit as boringly predictable and formulaic as one would expect a bestselling work of fiction ( and— god help us all— an Oprah Book Club selection) to be. At nearly 1,000 pages in length, it'll burn a lot of the hours that you sought to fill by picking it up in the first place. On the whole, there are better ways to spend time.

 

[TheGrind]

It was another three quarters of a century before the first settlers appeared on New River. They were introduced under the sponsorship of James Patton, the great forerunner of Virginia's first generation of great expansionists. He was an English sea captain who had made more than a score of Atlantic crossings with shiploads of immigrants and redemptioners. Becoming at last fired with a desire for himself to become a part of this beckoning new world to which he had brought so many others, he persuaded the same Governor Gooch of Virginia who had made the first Ohio Company grant to assign him 120,000 acres of land in the wilderness to the southwest of Virginia's then frontier. His venture was more than a land speculation for he proposed to take personal charge of the grant's development and himself to introduce actual settlers. In 1748, continuing to extend his colonizing, he established two seventeen-year-old Irish youths, William Ingles and John Draper, on New River. Their station became the first English settlement on the western slope of the Allegheny divide.

The Old Northwest in the American Revolution (1977)
A series of essays put together by David Curtis Skaggs

The essay on page 28 titled: The Great Crossing by Dale Van Every (1961)

 

[trysail]

On the last day of January, 1630, 'Lieutenant-General' Pietersz was taken out to be 'broken from under upwards, and the body put upon a Wheel.'

Breaking on a wheel, as it was generally known, was the most painful and barbaric method of execution practiced in the Dutch Republic and was, in effect, a form of crucifixation. In Pietersz's case the condemned man, stripped to a pair of linen drawers, would have been led out to a scaffold on which had been assembled a huge cart wheel— still fitted with an axle— a bench, some ropes, and a thick iron bar. He would have been lashed, spread-eagled, to the bench and positioned so that the executioner had easy access to his limbs. Taking up the heavy bar, and with great concentration, this man would have proceeded to smash the bones in the prisoner's arms and legs, starting with the fingers and the toes and working slowly inward. The aim was to completely pulverize each limb, so that when Pietersz was lifted from the bench onto the wheel, his upper arms were broken in so many places that they could be twisted and bent to follow the circumference of the wheel, while his legs were wrenched backward from the thighs, forced right around the outer rim, and tied off with the heels touching the back of the head. The latter operation was difficult to complete without allowing the broken femurs to protrude, but a skilled executioner took pride not only in ensuring that his victim remained fully conscious throughout the operation, but also in crushing his bones so thoroughly that the skin remained intact. As a further refinement, it was common for the condemned man's ribs to be stoved in with several further blows, so that every breath became an agony.

Once the grisly operation had been concluded, Pietersz's wheel would have been hoisted upright and the axle thrust deep into the ground close by the scaffold so that the Stone-Cutter's final moments could be witnessed by the assembled crowd. Death— generally as the result of internal bleeding— might take hours; in a place such as Batavia, the dying man's pain and distress would have been exacerbated by the cloying heat and the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that would have filled his eyes and mouth. The strongest men sometimes survived into a second day, and Pietersz, a brawny army veteran, may not have lapsed into unconsciousness until the early hours of February 1630.


​

-Mike Dash
Batavia's Graveyard
New York, N.Y. 2002.




This is a riveting account of history's bloodiest (and possibly least known) mutiny. I have only encountered one such sickening and horrifyingly graphic account of being "broken on the wheel" before— that being the 1707 execution of the Livonian nobleman and patriot Johann Reinhold von Patkul at the hands of Sweden's Charles XII detailed in Robert Massie's Peter The Great. I have never forgotten Massie's horrific description from the day I read it.

 

[OnHarry]

But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absense of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance.

The Swerve, How The world BECAME MODERN
Stephen Greenblatt

This book details the attempts by the humanists in the fifteenth century to find and transcribe ancient Latin and Greek texts. In particular the epic poem On The Nature Of Things by Lucretius which postulated that if in fact there was a god or gods then he/she had no interest in the everyday mundane activities of mankind. Also that there was no afterlife and no heaven or hell you lived and when you died everything that was you disapeared and ceased to exist full stop.

 

[trysail]

The government's interest in the arts or culture was entirely fictitious, just another bid for control. For all the bright talk there was a reflex of pessimism when it came to action. No one wanted to have children in Singapore, not many people even wanted to get married. The city-state kept evolving, but because the rule was "conform or leave," Singaporeans remained in a condition of arrested development, all the while being reminded that they were lucky to be governed by inspired leadership— in effect, the Lee [ Kwan Yew ] family.

Lee was a social leveler, but like all levelers he had elevated himself, introduced contradictions, and created a society in which there were privileges for the few, monotony for the many. Lee and his planners were full of great ideas. The trouble was— and it seemed to me a fault of most repressive, power-hungry people— they didn't know where to stop...

***​

In my Bangalore hotel I had found a discarded copy of Dream Catcher, by Margaret Salinger, a memoir of her experience growing up in the J. D. Salinger household. It was a humane and insightful account of a volatile man whose moods dominated the family. He was not lovable, vulnerable Holden Caulfield, but paranoiac and self-important, with an easily ruffled disposition. Margaret convincingly made the case for the Salinger household having all the traits of a cult and J. D. himself the severe attributes of a cult leader.

In the course of the book, Margaret mentions her father's interest in Raj Yoga and Sri Ramakrishna, who was Vivekananda's guru. She quotes from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna:

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on "woman and gold," I say, "Shame on him!" Woman and gold are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he cannot act as he likes.

"The only thing worth reading" was J. D. Salinger's judgement on this bit of pompous misogyny...

​

-Paul Theroux
Ghost Train To The Eastern Star: On The Tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar
New York, N.Y. 2008.



I'd known of Paul Theroux for decades but had somehow never managed to read anything by him until I read The Happy Isles of Oceania a couple of years ago. I enjoyed that book, thus when I saw "Ghost Train" on the library shelf, I picked it up. In this book, Theroux attempts to retrace the journey that formed the subject of the book that made him ( The Great Railway Bazaar ).

He paints a grim picture of much of Eastern Europe, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, India, Myanmar, Cambodia and Russia. The few kind words he seems to have are restricted to Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan.

Theroux is a bit of an enigma. He clearly has misanthropic tendencies and may be just one more in a long line of confused, anarchistic phonies. For the most part, only the young can travel the way Theroux does in this book; the vast majority of the West's middle-aged need the creature comforts to which they've become accustomed. Attempting to sleep in a overcrowded compartment filled with drunk Russians or reeking train platforms filled with squatters is not their idea of a "good time."

 

[trysail]

The military sweep through southern Maryland is ongoing and intense. Searches of towns and homes have turned up nothing and it is clear that the time has come to scour more daunting terrain for Booth and Herold. A combined force of seven hundred Illinois cavalry, six hundred members of the Twenty-second Colored Troops, and one hundred men from the Sixteenth New York Cavalry Regiment now enters the wilderness of Maryland's vast swamps.

"No human being inhabits this malarious extent" is how one journalist describes this region. "Even a hunted murderer would shrink from hiding there. Serpents and slimy lizards are the only living denizens.... Here the soldiers prepare to seek for the President's assassins, and no search of the kind has ever been so thorough and patient."

The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous. First, the troops assemble on the edge of bogs with names like Allen's Creek, Scrub Swamp, and Atchall's Swamp, standing at loose attention in the shade of a thick forest of beech, dogwood, and gum trees. Then they form two lines and march straight forward, from one side to the other. As absurd as it seems to the soldiers, marching headlong into cold mucky water, there is no other way of locating Booth and Herold. Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in the painstaking weeklong search for the killers.


​

-Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard
Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever
New York, N.Y. 2011.



Someone gave me a copy of this book; I wouldn't have picked it up otherwise. It's a shame that trees had to die so that Messrs. O'Reilly and Dugard could regurgitate something ( with virtually nothing to add and in lousy prose, to boot ) that has been the subject of 3,976 previous books. Don't waste your time on this.

 

[trysail]

His costumed make-believe was played against a backdrop of blood and terror. Pugachev's imperial decrees, proclaiming that the nobility must be killed, unleashed a frenzy of hatred. Peasants killed landlords, their families, and their hated overseers. Serfs, who had always been considered resigned, submissive to God, the tsar, and the master, now flung themselves into orgies of cruelty. Noblemen were dragged from their hiding places, flayed, burned alive, hacked to pieces, or hanged from trees. Children were mutilated and slaughtered in front of their parents. Wives were spared only long enough to be raped in front of their husbands; then they had their throats cut or were thrown into carts and carried off as prizes. Before long Pugachev's camp was filled with captured widows and daughters, who were distributed as booty among the rebels. Villagers who persisted in recognizing "the usurper, Catherine" were hanged in rows, nearby ravines were filled with bodies. Desperate townspeople, not knowing what their interrogators wished to hear, gave stock answers when asked whom they considered their lawful sovereign: "Whomever you represent," they replied.

​

-Robert K. Massie
Catherine The Great: Portrait of A Woman
New York, N.Y. 2011.



Bob Massie is a national treasure. I got hooked on him by reading Nicholas and Alexandra in 1979 and have gone on to read everything he's written since. I have yet to be disappointed.

His books are meticulously researched and written in polished prose. I was particularly enthralled by Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (1991) as I have a lifelong interest in naval history. If you asked today's average citizen what were the causes of World War I, you'd most likely elicit a blank stare. Before I read Dreadnought, if you'd told me one of the proximate causes of the "War To End All Wars" was a sovereign's withered arm, I'd have looked at you as if you were a lunatic.

The subject of this biography is someone that virtually every student of history is aware of but knows little about. Catherine truly was extraordinary— courageous, decisive, and a formidable person. Those with but a cursory acquaintance are most likely aware of her notoriety for numerous sexual liasons; there was a lot more to her than that. Along with England's Elizabeth I, Catherine has to rank as one of history's most amazing women.

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i3k5QTBMtLC8.jpg​

 

[trysail]

...And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, terrorists had learned two dangerous lessons from America's weak response to previous attacks— on our embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, in Somalia, on the World Trade Center in 1993, on the military training facilities in Riyadh and at the Khobar Towers housing complex, on our embassies in East Africa, and on the U.S.S. Cole. First, terrorists came to believe they could strike with impunity, that the U.S. response was likely to be inconsequential. Second, they learned that if they did attack U.S. assets or personnel, we might well change our policy or withdraw...


...But in 1993 the Iraq Intelligence Service (IIS) attempted to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush...


​

-Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir
New York, N.Y. 2011.




It was worth reading if, for no other reason, to learn about the man's background, life and thinking. I borrowed the book from the library; I'm up to my eyeballs in books and wouldn't buy this one.

 

[trysail]

...After an amicable evening with his wife and family and several houseguests, Bent was awakened at the crack of dawn by someone warning that the Indian mob along with some Mexicans had reassembled, drunk and bloodthirsty, and was headed his way. Bent met them at the door and asked their purpose. The answer was direct and not good.

"We want your head, gringo, we do not want for any of you gringos to govern us, as we have come to kill you."

"What wrong have I done you?" Bent responded. "I have always helped you. I cured you when you were sick and never charged you."

"Yes," cried an Indian, "and now you must die so that no American is going to govern us!" With that, a shower of arrows enveloped Bent at his door, which he managed to slam shut and bolt. His family, now thoroughly alarmed but still dressed in nightclothes, was horrified to see three arrows sticking out of the governor's face and blood streaming everywhere.

The mob began breaking the thin mica windows of the Bent's adobe home while rocks and more arrows flew inside and cries of "Kill the Americans" rose to a pitch along with war whoops and curses in both the Spanish and Pueblo tongues. The family could hear people clattering on the roof, trying to smash through. In deperation, someone suggested they endeavor to break through the wall the adobe shared with the house next door, and the women frantically set at this task using fire pokers and kitchen tools. Bent, meantime, was shouting out a broken window, trying to reason with the mob, but they only laughed and cursed at him. Gunfire coming through either a window or the door hit Bent in the face and stomach, while the women hysterically beat and clawed at the soft adobe bricks.

Soon they had cracked a hole large enough for a human body and after the children had gone through Bent's wife, Ignacia, was adamant that the governor should go next. But the arrows sticking out of his head would not fit through the narrow opening and Bent was obliged to withdraw and pull them out from beneath his skin before reentering the hole "holding his hand on top of his bleeding head." Just then some Indians burst into the house and confronted Ignacia with a gun. Her servant, a Navajo woman, jumped in between her mistress and the gunman and was shot.

The shooter then struck Ignacia with the gun butt and was about to finish her off when one of his companions discovered the hole broken into the wall and crawled through. Other Indians had already broken into the next-door house and were wandering its rooms. By then Bent was enfeebled from his wounds and lying down, his head cradled by Mrs. Thomas Boggs, one of his houseguests. With his stunned and horrified family watching, a Pueblo named Tomás Romero burst in and seized Bent by his suspenders and jerked him up, only to smash him to the floor, pounce on him, and scalp him alive. Other Indians riddled Bent's body with arrows and still others finally put him out of his misery in a hail of gunfire.

The assailants stripped Bent of all his clothes and began to mutilate him with knives. Some reports said he was decapitated. A plank was brought and Bent's bloody scalp was stretched upon it, nailed with brass tacks. This was then proudly paraded through Taos by the drunken mob...

​

-Winston Groom
Kearny's March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846-1847
New York, N.Y. 2011.




Do you know the author? He may be the most successful author nobody recognizes.


The book is worth reading. The years of its focus were pivotal in American history— a fact that is neither widely known nor generally appreciated. I read Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder a couple of years ago (which Groom cites as a primary source); the two books are enjoyable and somewhat duplicative but both are commendable.

 

[kimberlee]

He scratched under the soiled bandage. - Steelflower by Lilith Saintcrow

 

[trysail]

Hôtel de Sourise
(Archives Nationales)
Line 1 Métro to Saint-Paul or Line 11 Métro
to Rambuteau


After leaving the Hôtel Carnavalet, you have only to walk a few blocks along the Rue des Francs Bourgeois to the Hôtel de Soubise, where the eighteenth century aristocracy met, gossiped, and listened to music. These aristocratic gatherings were also called salons, although the qualities sought in the guest list were totally different from those in the salons held by women such as Madame de Tencin. Members of the bourgeoisie, no matter how talented or witty, were not invited. Here invitations were based on birth, not intelligence. What was deemed important was that guests had family trees with roots firmly planted in feudal times, that their manners were impeccable, and that they were properly attired. The ideas of the Enlightenment had barely touched this class.

This was the aristocracy descended from knights, who centuries before had received their huge estates in exchange for military service to the king, and, with those estates, their place in society above all other classes. Their idea of chivalry— honor, glory, Platonic love, and gentlemanly behavior— which they accepted without question, dated from this early period, and had been, like the aristocracy itself, anachronistic for centuries, since at least the time of Joan of Arc, when the paid army came into being. This "code of chivalry" had by the eighteenth century degenerated into little more than a code of gentlemanly behavior. Of all the more modern trends, only materialism and moral laxity, both antithetical to the twelth-century code of chivalry but characteristic of the eighteenth century, permeated the Rococo walls of salons such as those held here and at the Hôtel de Soubise.


​

-Ina Caro
Paris to the Past: Traveling Through French History by Train
New York, N.Y. 2011.




I picked up the book because of its title and discovered, to my surprise, that the author is the spouse of Robert Caro— noted biographer of Robert Moses and the lying, swindling, crooked, blackmailer, Lyndon Baines Johnson.


To my further edification, I discovered that Ina Caro is the only person that Robert Caro has trusted to do research for his celebrated biographies. Now I know where the Caros vacation.


If you are a Francophile, you'll enjoy this book.