Quickies

Reviews, that is.

I'm a voracious reader.  I read when I'm eating, I read when I get up, I read at night, I read on the ... well, never mind.  And I read fast.  So my little blurbs on the side bar are often behind, sometimes by several books.

I stare at a computer screen all day, every day for work.  I'm computer screened out by the end of the day, which is one reason I don't watch TV very much.  And why I have no interest in Nooks and such.  I want print on paper, I want to hold a book in my hands.  Fortunately, I've discovered the book shelf at the local Goodwill.  $1 for paperbacks, $2 for hardback.  I'm in heaven.  You don't get that lovely new book smell, and there isn't as much variety as a book store, but, still.  Given the cost of books these days, I'm much more likely to take a risk at $1 than I would be at the $17 publishing price.  And I'm finding some really good books there, the latest being:

Yowza!  There's a scene in a disaster/adventure movie where astronauts sent up to save the world find a rickety space station and a half-cracked cosmonaut.  That's a pretty accurate picture of the Russian space station MIR towards the end of its life.  The cosmonauts weren't crazy, though.  They were just overworked, exhausted, buried under stress, and had a totally different space philosophy than ours.  And we started sending astronauts up to MIR in the '90s.  Aging and cluttered, MIR wasn't great anyway.  Extra oxygen was generated from chemical oxygen canisters - and one of them sparked during replacement.  Yeah boy, an acetylene torch in space, right in a spot that blocked evacuation with the Soyez emergency ship.  Even more fun was when a docking supply ship hit a solar array and put a 3 centimeter hole through the wall of one of the modules.  Decompression, destabilization, and drift that moved the solar arrays so that they could no longer get enough sunlight to generate power.  There's a point in this book where I think I stopped breathing and had to remind myself that I know enough history to know everybody got out alive.  But you start thinking "What else could go wrong?"  And then you find out because it does.

Mostly it's fiction on the shelves, but a good variety of that.

Lyrical.  It won't get cycled back as a donation.  It's mid-60's and Grandma is dying.  As the family waits, stories of their small mountain community during her days are woven through the narration.  I think I respond to this because this could be the Whetzell Settlement, and the stories are the stories I wish I had recorded.  But I didn't stop to listen before the time machines were gone.

I hope kids are reading.  Obviously good books are still being published for them:

Buxton was a community of former slaves who had escaped to Canada through the Underground Railroad.  It's located about 75 miles east of Detroit, and there's a museum there that I'd like to visit.  Elijah is 12, the first of the community to be born into freedom.  All he knows is a neat and comfortable farming community built by people who, for the first time in their lives, have been able to keep the profits of their labors and build lives without fear of their families being taken from them.  There is a scene where Elijah refers to himself as "nigger" and receives a backhand slap that sets him on his heels and a lecture that makes it clear it's not to happen again.

The book made me angry.  Not the book, per se - it's very good.  It made me angry to compare these people to so much that goes on today.  When freedom came, the roads were full of men searching for the families sold away from them.  For decades, blacks who tried to be a part of the governing process in the South were caricatured as clowns who would run rampant, misuse their positions, profit from corruption.  And what do we have now?  A whole industry of corrupt race-baiters like like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who have proved the point of those who caricatured blacks 100 years ago.  We have baby-daddies with multiple children that they don't really care about and leave for someone else to take care of.   They are a disgrace to their ancestors, to people who suffered and fought for freedom, family, respect and lives of their own.

And once in a while there's a classic.

Some time in the dim past I read The Old Man and The Sea.  He always looks like Spencer Tracy in my mind's eye.  This book is a series of vignettes, pictures of Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s.  It's interesting - so many familiar names:  Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald.  Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.  A community of artists and authors all together as "The Lost Generation".  Despite the names I recognized, I wasn't sure I liked his style until I hit the first chapter with F. Scott Fitzgerald.  When Hemingway first met the Fitzgeralds, he didn't know the Scott was a raging alcoholic.  He let himself get talked into a trip with him, and it's hilarious as confusion and annoyance moves to "Oh crud!  How do I get this guy home?"  Unfortunately, a check of the local library shows that I don't have a local resource for other Hemingway writings - I'd like to read some that were based on his war experiences.

I've gone through a bunch of others, some good, some excellent.  Most will go back as donations, but some are keepers, and I've got a shelf full of others waiting on me - I do a sweep now and again when I'm over on that side of town.  I just have to be in the mood for the genre or subject.    Recently I snagged this one for $1, definitely a "Score!":

Just waiting for the right time to dive into it.

Rewind

It was supposed to be another icky, stormy day today, and other than laundry I really didn't have that much that absolutely need to be done.  The biography of Millard Fillmore that I just finished made me aware of what I had forgotten about some of his predecessors in office, particularly James K. Polk, president #11.  So I decided to rewind history a little and re-read my biography of Polk before moving on.  As it turned out, we got very little of the system that is now hammering New England with a nor'easter.  I spent the day on the sofa next to the Christmas tree reading anyway.

Polk is another president who contributed enormously but is largely ignored.  The diaries he meticulously kept during his presidential term are available, but at $130 for the set and only covering the period of his administration they weren't a good introductory option.  Maybe if I ever have one of those Kindle/Nook thingies I'll read them.  Today was spent on the same biography I read a year of so ago - a 150 page, rather condensed biography from the American Presidents series.

Polk was a Tennessee protege of Andrew Jackson - "Young Hickory" to Jackson's "Old Hickory", and he was the first "dark horse" candidate to emerge from a presidential nominating convention.  Ferociously political, considered dour and lacking in social skills, he declared that he would run for one term and one term only, and he kept his promise.  He entered the presidency with a declaration that he had four goals to achieve in the four years of his term:

1) Obtain full control of Oregon (which covered what is now both Oregon and Washington) from the English with whom we were sharing it.

2)  Obtain California from Mexico, whose government was still unhappy about Texas.
 

3) End financial control of federal funds by private banks by re-creating President Martin Van Buren's independent treasury.

4)  Lower tariffs, which were placing heavy burdens on  the non-industrial, agrarian areas of the U.S.

He accomplished all four between 1845 and 1849, changing the geography and economy of the country profoundly.  Yet because of his flawed and quirky personality, his accomplishments are barely acknowledged.  In the end, the author concludes:

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has compared Polk's standing among presidents to that of Harry Truman:  "Neither Polk nor Truman was one of those creative presidents who make the nation look at things in a new way...But both had the intelligence and courage to accept the challenge of history.  History might have broken them, as it broke Buchanon and Hoover.  Instead it forced them, not into personal greatness, but into the performance of great things.

He did great things. That is a powerful epitaph.

Reading Season

Some time ago I decided that I really needed to read at least one biography of each of our presidents.  I would do it in order, which would help re-enforce historical context as their lives overlapped. The overlap would also help counter the fact that every biography is going to have a bias, for good or ill.  Different authors covering same periods at least would give a broader perspective.

I've run into some problems in pursuing this goal and I haven't gotten very far.  First, it's doggone hard to find good biographies of some of our presidents.  Really, there are more biographies available about Elvis than about Martin Van Buren, yet we were having a bit of a problem with Canada during Van Buren's administration:  among other things they burned one of our ships and sent it over Niagara Falls.  Granted, if Washington is is your hero, as he is mine, there is an abundance problem rather than a dearth problem; it's hard for me to not to pick up a new Washington biography when I see it.  More importantly, and an added complication, our history isn't made up of just our president, or even of just the events of our own country's history.  You can't read about Washington without adding biographies of Franklin and Hamilton.  And George III and and Lafayette.  A biography of Jefferson also means exploring Napoleon.  And then there are other legends who are worth reading about just for fun:  Daniel Boone, Francis Marion.    Things percolate elsewhere:  the French Revolution.  Revolutions in Europe in the mid-1800s.

We are at president # 44 in our history now. I've just finished reading about # 13, Millard Fillmore.  Not the best biography in the world; rather like, as one reviewer commented, an extended information pamphlet.  And you rather wonder where the editor was at times:  this guy might know history but he is not a good writer, and his grammar and punctuation can be annoying.

But I've learned a great deal from it, and I ended up giving it 4 stars over at Amazon.  Fillmore was vice president when President Zachary Taylor died in 1850 after just over a year in office.  He has been largely ignored, yet he served during a time of enormous turmoil over slavery and issues surrounding it, and his handling of several explosive situations kept the country stable enough that it was able to hold off civil war for another decade.  He was a man of integrity, and whether you agree with his decisions or not, it's clear that he made them with the Constitution and the good of the country uppermost in his mind.

Now I'm glad it's the season for stretching out with a book, because I can't go any further without delving into John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Danial Webster, the political giants of the era. I've opted for a threefer that I hope covers them sufficiently for me to feel that I can move on:

I've also dredged up biographies of # 14, and # 15, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, who reside at the bottom of the barrel as far as presidencies go.   Then I have to make a decision:  which biography of Lincoln should I read?  That's going to be one of those where dearth is not the problem.  But maybe by the end of this reading season I will have made it at least through president # 16.