On the Move by Abrahm Lustgarten - Book Review-Five Stars

 

On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten

On the Move is an extraordinary and eye opening look at where our world has arrived today and a glimpse at what now awaits us all.

Hydrocarbon combustion and more water to flush have reached their finite limits. People can be sold anything...even a war.

This is a must read book to read and heed!

Excerpts:

Despite all the talk about the climate crisis, we’ve scarcely begun to consider what is expected to be one of the largest impacts: the next great human migration.

The heat waves in the United States in 2023 were hotter and longer than those of 2022 and 2021, which were in turn worse than those of 2020, and so on. Federal data shows that those heat waves, on average, have gotten successively more intense over the last decade. In some places the droughts have gotten worse, too, the reservoir levels lower and the wildfires more destructive, while in other places the rainstorms are more torrential.

According to just about every metric, the world was hitting critical warming benchmarks sooner, and with more dramatic consequences, than expected. The most dramatic changes—ice cap melting, drought, and the thawing of the frozen Arctic—appeared to be occurring faster than even the most alarmist of climate scientists thought possible.

Arctic permafrost could push the planet over a tipping point, leading to the sudden release of so much methane gas now trapped in the soil that global atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise steeply even if governments effectively curtail industrial emissions.

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The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk by Jennifer Niven - Five Stars Book Review

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk by Jennifer Niven

The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk is a true life well-documented Arctic Ocean exploration expedition that is fast moving and guaranteed to keep the reader enticed to the very last.

EXCERPTS:

The people of the Karluk be allowed to speak on these pages in their own distinctive and passionate voices. In some places, they speak directly, and all dialogue that appears in quotes in this book comes verbatim from their own diaries or letters, or from interviews with the descendants and survivors. Likewise, any insight into the feelings or thoughts of these people comes from the feelings and thoughts explicitly expressed in their journals and descriptions of the Arctic conditions are either quoted directly or adapted from specific observations from journals and diaries of the men who experienced them.

By 1913, the Northeast and Northwest Passages had long been found, and so had the Bering Strait. The Greenland ice cap had been crossed, and the North Pole was claimed for America by Peary. But the Arctic remained much of a mystery, and the majority of its highest frozen regions were still unexplored.

They had passed through the Bering Strait and were now entering the vast Arctic Ocean. They celebrated that night with a bottle of wine. Even the teetotalers—Bartlett, among them—celebrated the momentous event, the Karluk circled the edge of the ice pack, nosing her way sluggishly through the thickening fields of white. This ice was permanent, the enormous, free-floating rafts a fixed part of the Arctic horizon, yet always shifting and drifting. Each September as temperatures began to drop and winds increased, the ice would inevitably merge into a solid, impenetrable force. Toward the end of the season, the ice would grow violent, crashing and raftering, floe against floe, as they crushed everything that lay in their path, sometimes pushing one another into great ridges, which were as insurmountable and as high as mountains.

1911, explorer Fridtjof Nansen observed: “Nowhere else have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step caused so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages.”

He knew the dangers of Arctic travel. He knew it hadn’t been much improved or advanced since Leif Erickson sailed his ship from Greenland to North America a thousand years ago. He knew the ice could trap or crush a ship until it sank without a trace. He knew a man could freeze to death or be attacked by a polar bear. He knew there were no radio transmissions or air travel over that part of the world. He knew if a ship was lost, it was lost.

BARTLETT WAS JUST as unhappy with the choice of the crew as he was with the choice of the ship. Selected out of desperation from along the western coast of Canada, one of the crewmen had only a pair of canvas trousers to his name before signing on, two of the sailors were traveling under aliases, two men smuggled liquor aboard even though it was forbidden, and the cook, twenty-year-old Scotsman Robert “Bob” Templeman, was a confirmed drug addict. He made no secret of it, carrying around a pocket-sized case that held his vials of drugs and hypodermic syringes. He was a nervous man to begin with, anxious, high-strung, and rail thin, and the drug abuse had added years to him.

Siberia meant “Sleeping Land.” It was wild country and the coldest region in the northern hemisphere, with temperatures falling to minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit in deepest winter. Only in the heart of Antarctica did temperatures ever dip lower than they did in northeastern Siberia. It was Bartlett’s first experience in this place, and he had never known such bitter, destructive cold or such harsh weather, even near the North Pole.

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American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee Book - Review - Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee

This is truly an interesting book about American wolves with many noteworthy points to ponder.

It has been said that the Americans can be sold anything...even a war.

Politicians with enormous checkbooks filled with other peoples money just couldn’t resist bankrolling the project of reintroducing wolves in parts of America where they had disappeared. Politicians are notorious for screwing up an ambush as is revealed in American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee.

Read it and pass your own judgment.

The wolf domesticated became the pet dog, man’s best friend and the worst enemy of a bicycler.

EXCERPTS:

Yellowstone’s wolves multiplied just as fast as Smith and his team had hoped they would. By the winter of 2003, the 15 wolves released in 1995, along with an additional 17 introduced a year later, had become a population of 174, divided into fourteen packs spread throughout the park

Now, just fourteen years after the first pens were opened in the Lamar Valley, the wolf population in the Northern Rockies had grown to over seventeen hundred animals.

They’d found a video of wolves demolishing a dairy cow and sent it to a couple of dozen members of Congress. He wondered how many of them had had the stomach to watch the whole thing. Louie had never lost an animal to a wolf, but he’d seen the aftermath on other people’s ranches: calves so thoroughly shredded that they looked like they’d swallowed dynamite, the snow covered in blood. Wolves and sheep were a particularly disastrous combination; stripped of their natural defenses against predators after centuries of domestication, sheep were known for making no attempt to escape when wolves came calling, and the result could be widespread carnage.

In the last count taken before wolves were reintroduced in 1995, over nineteen thousand elk were roaming Yellowstone’s Northern Range. By 2010, that number had plummeted to six thousand, roughly what it had been back in the 1960s, before rangers stopped culling the park’s herds.

Everywhere human civilization flourished, wolves were routed, until Homo sapiens, not Canis lupus, became the most widely spread species. Ironically, the dog—a domesticated wolf—became the first line of defense against depredating wolves, which grew more common as wild prey populations declined under pressure from human hunting and loss of habitat. Romans sometimes referred to dawn as inter lupum et canum: “between the wolf and the dog.” Dogs ruled the day, and wolves owned the night. Humanity’s most beloved animal and its most despised were essentially the same creature, but the wolf’s threat to the shepherd’s livelihood poisoned relations between men and wolves, and the wolf’s reputation never recovered. In Western culture, the wolf became an embodiment of wickedness, from the Middle Ages, when the werewolf myth first appeared, to Grimm’s fairy tales in the early nineteenth century. Early Christians—“the flock,” as believers were called—saw themselves represented in the sheep; their shepherd was God. The wolf that preyed

upon the flock was the devil himself. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had brought the devil back to the Northern Rockies.

They didn’t relish learning how to deal with a predator their own ancestors had so decisively defeated long ago.

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Reflections from the North Country by Sigurd F. Olson - BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Reflections from the North Country by Sigurd F. Olson

This philosophical masterpiece and compendium of insightful reflections is worthy of reading at a pace that gives the reader the time to absorb messages hidden within.

Sigurd Olson conveys his ponderous thoughtful persuasive messages in a joyful easy flowing style. I loved it.

EXCEPTS:

That became our theme song all the way. No matter what the adventure, and there were many, one of us would say, “I’ve been happier, but I can’t remember where.”

I have come to feel laughter and fun on the trails may be the secret of the joy of travel, as when one of my companions, Blaire Fraser, bellowed into an Arctic wind north of Great Slave a seaman’s ditty he loved: “Once I had a Spanish gal, and boy she was a dandy,” that song somehow took the bite out of the wind.

Intuition is different from instinct, the latter being a response to physical and physiological stimuli. When one is confronted with sudden danger, Adrenalin pours into the body in preparation for battle, flight, evasive action. When the hair rises on one’s neck and one is conscious of being followed or facing the unknown, reactions to such fears are instinctive.

Aces are born, not made. “We can train fine fliers,” he said, “but when the crunch comes, only those who act automatically survive to become aces.

I have seen horses hesitate before crossing a bridge they considered unsafe, have watched Indians skirt ice that looked perfectly solid to anyone else and have been with them when they sensed the coming of wind or storm, or an aura of impending doom.

Indians, woodsmen, farmers, and all those who spend their lives out-of-doors can smell the weather. This sense is not prompted by arthritic twinges or meteorological knowledge, but a certain something way down deep.

An old prospector friend of mine, Harry Moody, wrote me just before he died near Flin Flon, Manitoba, that we could sit across a fire from each other and carry on a conversation without saying a word. “I know what you think,” he said, “and you know what I think. It is enough just to be together sitting around a fire. We do not have to tell each other our thoughts or what we might be going to do.”

Wisdom is the key to a fuller life. If a richer one for me is enjoying my environment to the fullest, then it is up to me to cultivate my awareness of all I see.

Strangely enough there was a certain emptiness within me, and it was a long time before its full significance dawned. In a sense I matured during that moment of realization. Now I was an old-timer and could say “I’ve been to the Bay.” Someone said, “Do not take from any man his dream”; when a dream is gone, hope is gone, and life can become drab and without purpose. As long as a dream is ahead, there is always something to look forward to. No doubt that was the reason for the letdown when we came to the sea, but it was not long before I knew it was only the beginning of another dream: to see the Far North rivers of the Canadian shield. Eventually I did this, and found each realization was but an open door to another adventure. I remember so well the first time I saw the famed Athabasca after coming down the Fond du lac from Reindeer and Wollaston, the Athabasca I had read about in the journals of the fur trade, a three-hundred-mile sweep to Fort Chipewyan at its far western end, the place from which the Athabasca brigades came when heading for the Churchill and Grand Portage Post. Nor will I forget my first sight of the enormous reaches of Great Slave Lake with its countless islands, the gateway to the Coppermine River, the Thelon, and Great Bear Lake farther north; of the Great Bear River with its ninety-mile plunge to join the Mackenzie, the enormous waterway to the Arctic Sea, which the explorer Sir Alexander Mackenzie had thought was the way to the Northwest Passage and the Orient.

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My Bondage and My Freedom (Original Classic Edition) by Frederick Douglass - Five Star Book Review

 

Book Review - Five Stars

My Bondage and My Freedom (Original Classic Edition) by Frederick Douglass

This amazing autobiography of pre-Civil War history accurately depicts America’s empathy towards brutal human rights that to this day is passed down generation to generation while freedom and justice for all is bantered about like the gospel.

Frederic Douglass did a magnificent job of scrutinizing personalities and conveying his analytical observations. This book is an absolute classic!

EXCERPTS:

Hidden away down in the depths of his own nature, and which revealed to him the fact that liberty and right, for all men, were anterior to slavery and wrong. When his knowledge of the world was bounded by the visible horizon on Col. Lloyd’s plantation, and while every thing around him bore a fixed, iron stamp, as if it had always been so, this was, for one so young, a notable discovery. To his uncommon memory, then, we must add a keen and accurate insight into men and things; an original breadth of common sense which enabled him to see, and weigh, and compare whatever passed before him, and which kindled a desire to search out and define their relations to other things not so patent, but which never succumbed to the marvelous nor the supernatural; a sacred thirst for liberty and for learning, first as a means of attaining liberty, then as an end in itself most desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain what his soul pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood; determined courage; a deep and agonizing sympathy with his crushed and bleeding fellow slaves, and an extraordinary depth of passion, together with that rare alliance between passion and intellect, which enables the former, when deeply roused, to excite, develop and sustain the latter.

This is American slavery; no marriage—no education—the light of the gospel shut out from the dark mind of the bondman—and he forbidden by law to learn to read. If a mother shall teach her children to read, the law in Louisiana proclaims that she may be hanged by the neck. If the father attempt to give his son a knowledge of letters, he may be punished by the whip in one instance, and in another be killed, at the discretion of the court. Three millions of people shut out from the light of knowledge! It is easy for you to conceive the evil that must result from such a state of things. I now come to the physical evils of slavery. I do not wish to dwell at length upon these, but it seems right to speak of them, not so much to influence your minds on this question, as to let the slaveholders of America know that the curtain which conceals their crimes is being lifted abroad; that we are opening the dark cell, and leading the people into the horrible recesses of what they are pleased to call their domestic institution. We want them to know that a knowledge of their whippings, their scourgings, their brandings, their chainings, is not confined to their plantations, but that some Negro of theirs has broken loose from his chains—has burst through the dark incrustation of slavery, and is now exposing their deeds of deep damnation to the gaze of the christian people of England. The slaveholders resort to all kinds of cruelty, the slave has no wife, no children, no country, and no home. He can own nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing, but what must belong to another. To eat the fruit of his own toil, to clothe his person with the work of his own hands, is considered stealing. He toils that another may reap the fruit; he is industrious that another may live in idleness; he eats unbolted meal that another may eat the bread of fine flour; he labors in chains at home, under a burning sun and biting lash, that another may ride in ease and splendor abroad; he lives in ignorance that another may be educated; he is abused that another may be exalted; he rests his toil-worn limbs on the cold, damp ground that another may repose on the softest pillow; he is clad in coarse and tattered raiment that another may be arrayed in purple and fine linen; he is sheltered only by the wretched hovel that a master may dwell in a magnificent mansion; and to this condition he is bound down as by an arm of iron.

One of the most telling testimonies against the pretended kindness of slaveholders, is the fact that uncounted numbers of fugitives are now inhabiting the Dismal Swamp, preferring the untamed wilderness to their cultivated homes—choosing rather to encounter hunger and thirst, and to roam with the wild beasts of the forest, running the hazard of being hunted and shot down, than to submit to the authority of kind masters.

The slave finds more of the milk of human kindness in the bosom of the savage Indian, than in the heart of his Christian master.

Absolute and arbitrary power can never be maintained by one man over the body and soul of another man, without brutal chastisement and enormous cruelty.

What as a nation we call genius of American institutions. Rightly viewed, this is an alarming fact, and ought to rally all that is pure, just, and holy in one determined effort to crush the monster of corruption, and to scatter “its guilty profits” to the winds. In a high moral sense, as well as in a national sense, the whole American people are responsible for slavery, and must share, in its guilt and shame, with the most obdurate men-stealers of the south. While slavery exists, and the union of these states endures, every American citizen must bear the chagrin of hearing his country branded before the world as a nation of liars and hypocrites; and behold his cherished flag pointed at with the utmost scorn and derision.

Even now an American abroad is pointed out in the crowd, as coming from a land where men gain their fortunes by “the blood of souls,” from a land of slave markets, of blood-hounds, and slave-hunters; and, in some circles, such a man is shunned altogether, as a moral pest. Is it not time, then, for every American to awake, and inquire into his duty with respect to this subject?

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Joseph Stalin: Images of War by A. S. Semeraro Five Star Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Joseph Stalin: Images of War by A. S. Semeraro

This excellent book relates a provocative true life story of an unconscionable bully bastard paranoid short man pushing his way to the top of political power. He holds the world record for murdering twenty million of his countrymen. This fascist went on to die of old age in 1953 while still in power.

EXCERPTS:

An image of ‘Uncle Joe’, savior of his people? In reality a monstrous mass murderer.

The son of serfs who, destined for the priesthood, instead became a street-fighting revolutionary using torture and terror as tools to attain power.

Lauded abroad as a cultural giant and could, in his own country, have spellbound so many millions as an object of worship.

Whose personality cult attained Messianic proportions should be recognized not as a self-styled towering ‘Man of Steel’ but as a bloodstained, mere 5ft 5ins tall idol with feet of clay.

The Soviet Union was by this time the world’s largest sovereign state – a federation of 15 union republics, with another 20 autonomous republics and several smaller provinces. It occupied an area of 22,500,000 square kilometres (8,650,000 square miles) from Iran to Finland, from Czechoslovakia to China. It was unwieldy and needed more than the bombast of a bully like Joseph Stalin to hold it together.

outside Russia’s borders Joseph Stalin is listed alongside Adolf Hitler and China’s Mao Zedong in terms of their brutality, his image within his own country is more opaque.

History is being rewritten. The monster is being resurrected. It’s a disturbing thought as the Russian bear again sharpens its claws.

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The CIA's Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer - Book Review - Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

The CIA's Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer 

This amazing volume spills the political beans on how the US spread hypocrisy instead of democracy.

An imperative eye opening account of selling the Americans anything...even a war.

EXCERPTS:

Long before World War II ended, many Nazi leaders realized they were going to lose, so they started negotiating with the US behind Hitler’s back about a possible future war against the USSR. In 1943, future CIA Director Allen Dulles moved to Bern, Switzerland, to begin back-channel talks with these influential Nazis.

As a prominent Wall Street lawyer, Dulles had a number of clients—Standard Oil, for one—who continued doing business with the Nazis during the war.

The CIA was founded and run by lawyers, you won’t need to look any further than the overthrow of Guatemalan democracy. The Dulles brothers were partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell; time permitting, they also worked for the US government. With John Foster Dulles heading the State Department and Allen Dulles heading the CIA, they were the czars of Eisenhower’s foreign policy, and they made sure that the interests of Sullivan & Cromwell clients weren’t ignored.

The CIA has always been particularly proud of the Guatemalan operation, which inaugurated a series of bloodthirsty regimes that murdered more than 100,000 Guatemalans. In retrospect, however, some CIA veterans concluded that it may have come off too easily, leading to a certain overconfidence. As one CIA officer put it, “We thought we could knock off these little brown people on the cheap.”

Chinese “brainwashing” of US POWs during the Korean War (captured US pilots were making public statements denouncing US germ warfare against civilians).

Actually, US brainwashing experiments predate the CIA itself. 1953, under a program that was exempt from the usual oversight procedures. Code-named MK-ULTRA, many of its files were destroyed by CIA Director Richard Helms (who was with it from the start) when he left office in 1973, but the surviving history is nasty enough.

MK-ULTRA spooks and shrinks tested radiation, electric shocks, electrode implants, microwaves, ultrasound and a wide range of drugs on unwitting subjects, including hundreds of prisoners at California’s infamous Vacaville State Prison.

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Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War by Les Standiford book review -five stars

 

BOOK REVIEW = FIVE STARS

Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War by Les Standiford

Les Standiford’s book has done it again, another gem of history delivered in his fast moving account of events in America's determined fight for “Independence, Liberty and Justice for all.”

Looking back over the years that struggle has not stood the test of time. We, the people, have been trying to fix something that was not broken.

EXCERPTS:

There was a long history of friction between the colonies and the mother country prior to 1765, of course, and although much was made of philosophy and concepts such as liberty and the right to self-governance, a great deal of unrest in the decade prior to the outbreak of war also came down to money.

The colonists had no say because such matters were being debated thousands of miles away. In fact, when stated in this fashion, the reasons for the discontent of the American colonists sound much like the complaints of the contemporary citizens of Main Street when the possibility of any new tax is mentioned in Congress or during presidential debates. Nearly 250 years ago, a group of American citizens decided that the conditions under which they were governed were intolerable; eventually they realized that no change would be forthcoming as a result of mere complaint and petition. Action would have to be taken. And because such actions were illegal, often directed at individuals and property, and because they could be punished by imprisonment and even death, their undertakings and the identities of those who carried them out would by necessity be covert. In short, there was an almost simultaneous eruption within the American colonies of cells of a secret radical society committed to imposing forcible change upon the established government.

The men who came to call themselves Sons of Liberty were patriots in their own eyes and are likely to seem so in the eyes of most Americans of this day. In the eyes of the British (and not a few fellow colonists) of the 1760s, however, they were terrorists who deserved to pay dearly for the things they had done. Certainly, when they undertook to plan and carry out such actions as the Albany “Riots,” the burning of the HMS Gaspée, and the Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty were not playing at symbolic gestures that would become the stuff of cant and schoolboy legend—they were laying their lives on the line in missions at a time when many of their fellow citizens were straddling the fence between obeisance to their lawful leaders and a commitment to an untested form of republican government.

Adams would reason, “If our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves—It strikes our British Privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain: If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?”

Brought to South Carolina prior to nonimportation, the number increased to 5,000 in 1772 and 8,000 in 1773. The slave population, which had stood at 80,000 in 1769, grew by 1773 to 110,000, nearly half again as large. Modern sensitivities to the practice aside, the burgeoning population of slaves meant a corresponding drag on opportunity for craftsmen and laborers of the time. How could a free man earn a decent living, they lamented, when there were so many around him who were forced to work for nothing?

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2024: Cozumel and Playa del Carmen

 2024: Cozumel and Playa del Carmen-Our amazing Caribbean trip, December 4-15.

Jane’s younger sister and her husband Dennis were taking a Caribbean Sea cruise ship departing New Orleans aboard the 4,000 passenger ship Norwegian Getaway built in Papenburg, Germany. We went to meet them in Cozumel.

Ironically our friend Tilman Struemer had taken Jane and I to visit the ship building yard nearly the same time the Norwegian Getaway was under construction. Giant ships have been built there since the days of sailing ships. Papenburg is a long way from the open sea. This was a very impressive sight.

Back to our Caribbean Sea trip: Jane booked us on an ADO bus luxury class nonstop from Mérida to Playa del Carmen, a four hour ride to the Caribbean coast. Jane booked a studio apartment for a week at the Sofia Hotel; a great quiet location with a jungle view from our private balcony. This was a new neighborhood in Playa for us, and our favorite pizza place was next door. We loved it! The night sky was bright with the first slice of a waxing moon closely accompanied by the planet Venus. A week later at our apartment the moon was full.

Grisel and her husband Juan arrived, and we celebrated with our favorite pizza, Nino’s from next door. 

Juan exhibited his culinary expertise a few days later when he prepared Mexican huevos rancheros. They were terrific, and we declared him an excellent chef!

The Sofia had roof top swimming pool and lounging area with a Caribbean Sea view and briny breeze. Perfect!

The day we left Playa del Carmen to take the ferry to Cozumel. torrential rain poured down with storm winds generating heavy seas.

The hotel clerk called a taxi and the driver instantly appeared. The driver was extremely helpful and got us as far as he could. It was a seven block walk in the rain to get to the point of purchasing our ticket, and then an equal distance to the ship. The ferry company was extremely helpful and got me into a wheel chair pushed by a sprinting fast moving young lady up to the distant boarding ramp. The ferry was bucking and surging like a bronco against the stressed mooring lines. The dock workers efficiently grabbed the wheelchair and in unison deftly hoisted me onto the boarding ramp and then onto the jumping and jiving vessel making the process a very memorable experience. Even without my impairment that crossing would have been a challenge.

The smiling and courteous crew of the Xcaret ferry boat were extremely helpful in every way to these old sailors.

We were early for the check in at our Airbnb apartment, and the host recommended a waiting place at a nearby restaurant. We asked the restaurant employees about our apartment, and none of them had ever heard of it. One helpful waitress did a search on her phone and Jane was connected to the host, Irwing. Irwing told her to step outside and look. There he was just 20 meters away at the back door entrance.

The restaurant had good food, but the noise level was too distracting to enjoy it.

We were happy to get to our quiet, bright, clean, and very convenient apartment. We were ready for our afternoon siesta.

It was still pouring down rain as we charged up our bodily batteries. After our nap we listened to audio books and checked our emails.

Our next order of business would to do fact finding in advance of the arrival of Jane’s sister and her husband the next day. Our time with them would be short, and we wanted it to be great.

It was a seven block walk to the municipal market that we had loved on a previous trip because of the excellent variety of Mexican food at great prices and away from the tourist traps. This would be a stretch of our endurance especially on the transit challenging sidewalks. The rain has let up ,and we were on our way.

The market was literally bustling, and I found a place to sit. Jane took off fact finding as I watched a very noisy construction crew assembling a stage for live music to enliven the holiday spirits. A waitress impatiently asked for my order as Jane returned. Jane said that the market had changed, and the noise level was totally unacceptable.

It would be plan B. She did some shopping, and we hailed a motor-taxi for our ride back to our apartment.

Oh! My god! The lady driver sped off on the opposite direction from our apartment, and refused to listen to our protestations. Surely we were being kidnapped! This happens in this Mexican state of Quintana Roo, so we had good reason for concern. Finally, we were both screaming at the driver to turn around as we planned our escape route. Our protestations were finally acknowledged, and the dense driver did finally turn around. We old timers don’t need this kind of excitement!

After a light lunch, and our siesta Jane went out fact finding. We were three blocks from the waterfront.

Jane is a great detective. She had found our rendezvous spot, several resting places, and a great French café, Sucré Salé. Great news!

Rendezvous at Monument to the Reef in Cozumel.

The next morning at our rendezvous spot there was smiling Joan and her husband Dennis in a go-fast electric scooter. We took photos, exchanged stories, and headed toward our lunch spot.

Sucré Salé restaurant made us very happy. We got fully fed, has great service, and exchange of stories.

It had been fourteen year since our last get together, and we all felt this trip was not going to be enough. Dennis said that this was the best meal of their entire trip. Dennis picked up the tab that was not at tourist place prices. Thank you, Dennis.

A longtime friend of ours from Mérida was at a nearby table, and we hailed Andy Xenios over for introductions. Andy is a well known photographer/artist. His gallery in Cozumel was temporarily closed for remodeling, but he had several pieces of his work with him. Joan was amazed that we actually found an old friend this far from home.

Joan had been keeping an eye open for local art work to purchase on their vacation trip.

Andy was there with a collection of his art work and Joan purchased several. Dennis saw Joan’s enthusiasm and bought even more and made arrangements to connect with Andy for the stories behind them.

Next we walked to our studio apartment a block away for a libation, photos ,and confabulations. Joan was amazed at our apartment, its location and the price. It was less than $40 a day. We got in on the last of the off -season prices. Jane among her many attributes is a great shopper!

We stayed an extra day at off-season rates. We needed the rest.

Next, our trip home:

Another windy day, but we were on our way.

Jane went out for a taxi and a few minutes later returned with the man who gave us a tricycle ride to meet Joan and Dennis. His name was Santiago, he had been working on the ferry pier for twenty five years, and he lived around the corner from our apartment. Jane is a very lucky lady, and I am very lucky to have her.

Santiago delivered us to the ticket counter, the luggage check-in, and the ferry boarding ramp.

The sky was dark and threatening but the seas hadn't started to build up yet. Our trip was uneventful except we were placed in a handicapped section with polar ice cap air conditioning. Our neighbor must have been typhoid Mary and her overly active child was the same. We were wearing our KN95 face masks and thought our chances of infection were minimal. When you get sick in Mexico there are always a thousand suspects.

Disembarking the ferry in Playa del Carmen there was a tricycle driver looking for customers. We asked if he could take us to a taxi, and he asked where we were going, and I said; “To the ADO Alterna bus terminal.” He said. “I can do that,” and we were on our spirited at a rapid rate faster then a regular taxi.

What an adventure it was as we arrived at the bus terminal under the porte- cochére as the first rain drops came pounding down.

Jane got our bus tickets, and the line was all the way out to the street. Now the high tourist season was in affect as we paid.

Four hours later we arrived in Mérida. We took the first and only taxi and had to bargain the driver down so that we were only paying double! However, the driver Ruben got us home in record time. We entered our home sanctuary at 3:03pm.

It felt like we had been gone for three months.

It was another great adventure!

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Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu by Les Standiford-Book Review-Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu by Les Standiford

This is a powerhouse book crammed with startling revelations and background history. 

Les Standiford has added yet another crown jewel to his incredible list of fascinating and informative must read books.

EXCERPTS:

The glare of the spotlight that Trump’s presence brought has been as much bane as blessing. For this writer, what follows is an attempt to trace the record of an improbable dream of wealth and privilege carried from hand to hand, slowly working its way into shape, tempered by the intrigues of jealousy, greed, and the perpetual thirst for control.

It is the tale of how an unlikely place was born from nothing and how that place in turn spawned the perfect domicile to represent and nourish it

In that otherworldly retreat for the ultraprivileged there had been nothing like exotic Mar-a-Lago, Spanish for “sea-to-lake,”

In 1905, when a U.S.-supported revolution had resulted in the secession of Panama from Columbia and the new government’s authorization of an agreement for the building of a canal across the isthmus, Flagler had his justification for going to Key West.

In the end, the principal effect of what became known as the Oversea Railway was to transform Key West, which had always been a workingman’s town, into a tourist destination. Passengers on the Havana Special (one could board a Pullman car in Penn Station that would be ferried within a few days across the Florida Straits to Cuba)

“Now I can die happy,” a visibly moved Flagler told the assembled crowd during the arrival celebration, which included a children’s choir brought to serenade him. Later, as he was being led from the reviewing stand, Flagler turned to Joe Parrott to remark, “I can hear the children, but I can’t see them.”

In December it was a minor bit of business, upping the amount set for Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine from the high five figures into the low sixes, but the fact that she had called in her own attorneys for the work and again made no mention of any change as regarded the standing of her new husband would soon prove to be significant.

“Flagler’s opening of the east coast [of Florida] to rail travel and his resort hotels in Palm Beach and Miami marked the establishment of Florida’s greatest industries … No depressions or freezes, however damaging or painful, could destroy them, and in the following decades they would become as identified with the state as palm trees and alligators.”

“Mar-a-Lago is more of a Boca [Raton] idea than a Palm Beach idea. Mar-a-Lago is a new-money idea at an old-money location.” Shortly after Mar-a-Lago opened, when its initiation fees

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