Monday, March 18, 2024

Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F. Thompson Book Review


 
Book Review - Five Stars

Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F. Thompson

This book review is somewhat disjointed because Hunter Thompson and his entire family were totally and continually blitzed out on high times dope.

When Hunter J. Thompson was buzzed in the 1970’s, and when the world was deeply divided, disillusioned, and dropping out was a way of life for those that could, my wife and I made a very timely escape. We were having the time of our lives living aboard our home built 46-foot dream boat Dursmirg, going where the wind blew, when the spirit moved us, and the price was right.

At that time Florida had four notorious anchorages where like minded boaters congregated, St. Augustine, Miami/Dinner Key/Coconut Grove, Marathon/Boot Key and Key West. Our friend Nira used to claim; “There are so many junkies in Monroe County (the Florida Keys), that you could become one by osmosis”

This is where we encountered Hunter J. Thompson, the drug fiend and mischief-maker. One Sunday evening a group of Bubba Schill’s friends gathered aboard his old Nova Scotia sailing schooner for his weekly one pot eating extravaganza. We were among them laughing, joking, and enjoying being down in the
Florida Keys… As usual it was a boisterous happy group. Suddenly there hanging on the gunnel of the sailboat was this strange dripping wet person wearing diving goggles. This person finally got our attention, and he exclaimed; “I screamed, hollered, and nobody would come and get me so I swam out.” This was the notorious Hunter J. Thompson!

I might add here; neither my wife Jane or I used any mind altering drugs except alcohol.

Read the book.  It is a real peek into the real world of that day and time, both enlightening and tragic.

EXCERPTS:

He was portrayed as such by Bill Murray in the 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam. In 1998 Terry Gilliam directed Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which, though it did capture more of the complexities of the book, still presented Hunter primarily as a drug fiend and mischief-maker. Which he was. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and a hell-raiser, but he was also a brilliant writer and craftsman of the language, facts that are still overshadowed by his Wild Man persona. This is the persona most people think of when they hear the name Hunter S. Thompson, if they know the name at all. And that is a shame. He was first and always a writer in the best and highest sense of the iconoclast, more buffoon than satirist. He was portrayed as such by Bill Murray in the 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam.

In 1998 Terry Gilliam directed Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which, though it did capture more of the complexities of the book, still presented Hunter primarily as a drug fiend and mischief-maker.

Which he was. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and a hell-raiser, but he was also a brilliant writer and craftsman of the language, facts that are still overshadowed by his Wild Man persona. This is the persona most people think of when they hear the name Hunter S. Thompson, if they know the name at all. And that is a shame. He was first and always a writer in the best and highest sense of the word, in which writing is a vocation, not an occupation. Everything else was secondary. Drugs, family, lovers, friends, sex, adventure, they all came after writing. And into his world I came in 1964, when he was twenty-seven, poor, and living in an unheated shack with his new bride.


The fact that at fourteen I was taking acid, and worse, that my mother was actively supporting it. I also remember hearing that someone once asked Hunter at a lecture how he would react if he found out his son had taken acid. He responded, “I’d beat the shit out of him.” I did not talk to Hunter about my drug use then or in fact ever. And he never asked. He didn’t want to know.


For all the progress we had made over the past eight or nine years, our relationship was still filled with tension and I was exceedingly wary of him. Though I didn’t hate him any longer, I was still angry with him for being so difficult, unpredictable, volatile, unreasonable, and selfish. He was often such a bastard.

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Friday, March 8, 2024

Portage: A Family, a Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf - Book Review Five Stars


BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Portage: A Family, a Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf

Portage is a wonderful collection of dream-fulfilling canoeing adventures commingling with nature and spiced with tidbits of historically enlightening information.

Sue Leaf and her husband Tom chose a good way of life...very satisfying and immensely rewarding while ecologically living with nature.

This is a great lesson plan for humanity to follow while reaping gratifying returns with positive self-sustaining rewards.

I loved all the chapters, but my favorite was when Sue shared her experiences canoeing the Bois Brule River in Douglas County, Wisconsin. I grew up near the Brule, and some of my earliest adventures were in a canoe on Brule.

Click here for a link to a chapter of one of my wild experiences on the Brule.

EXCERPTS from Portage by Sue Leaf

Mr. Ito had packed a book and a lawn chair and would spend the time on shore, but Bob and Joanne and I could paddle about to our heart’s delight. I rushed home to change into my swimsuit and get permission. I can still hear my father’s voice. “Oh, I don’t know, Susan Jean. That sounds like not a good idea. Too dangerous. Those canoes are tippy. What if you capsized?” “I can swim,” I pointed out. “I’d wear a life jacket. The Itos have life jackets. They’re required by law.” “Yes, you can swim,” he countered. “But can you swim in deep water? No, no, you can’t go. It’s just too dangerous.” My temper flared. This made no sense! The Itos weren’t foolish. They were very smart, in fact. All sorts of people paddled canoes without fear, without endangerment. I was not going to lose this opportunity. “Well, I don’t care. I’m going,” I declared.

I had the skill to be on the water, that normal people went out in canoes every day, that risk was involved in everything one does.

What amazes me even now is that this time there were no consequences. No one yelled when I got home. No one clobbered me. I wasn’t grounded. I lost no privileges. My parents and I must have reached a kind of détente that day,

How fortunate we sometimes are, the blind and naive young who operate without the benefit of experience. I realize now that I myself had been a canoe that day, cutting with ease through the water, swiftly gliding into my future.

What is: the good life.” Never wanting more, never striving for more, never trying to accumulate stuff. Surely those seventeen-year-olds in Mr. Johnson’s classroom, at least two of them, saw even then the glimmer of wisdom when it is asked this way. The veracity of this statement is especially obvious when sitting in a canoe, making your way across sparkling blue water, with everything you will need for the night and the next morning stowed in Duluth packs wedged between thwarts. One’s needs and desires are bounded by what is, and surely it is good, beauty, and grandeur apparent at every hand.


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Thursday, March 7, 2024

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy - Book Review Five Stars


BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy

Full Tilt is laced with cynical and thought-provoking witticisms and humorous observations. Dervla Murphy, a young Irishwoman struck off alone by bike in the dead of winter to mingle with the natives of countries from Ireland to India, eat their food, drink their drinks, and live as they did. She ventured off the main roads into remote villages, up high mountains, across parched deserts. She was at times hot, freezing cold, parched, drenched. and exposed to lepers, tuberculin, and all sorts of unvaccinated people. She was no stranger to heat strokes and dysentery.

Her indomitable Irish persistence saw her through.

In my long life I have only encountered two of these glib-tongued stand-alone personalities who were uniquely unforgettable and a treasure to know. Needlessly to say I loved the book and the author.

EXCERPTS:

For days I had been living in a state of permanent saturation from the waist down, so that the only sensible reaction was lots of rum and no fuss.


The excitement of approaching for the first time the sinister Iron Curtain. At each bend I looked eagerly for tangled masses of barbed wire, watch-towers manned by vigilant soldiers armed with machine-guns and binoculars, and alert policemen keenly observing every movement for miles around. But not one of these thrilling phenomena appeared and it was only when I saw a locked, five-foot high gate across the road that I realized I had arrived at the significant point.

Viewing the desk and reflecting that if I wanted to enter the spy business here was my chance to make away with a fine collection of vitally important seals.

Stamps on my passport are the only souvenirs that I can afford to collect, and I didn’t want to be cheated of this one.


The Bulgarian Embassy in London had issued me with a visa valid for only four days. Now this genial policeman, who spoke fluent English, took one look at the card, said that it was ridiculous, and issued me with a new visa entitling me to stay in Bulgaria as long as I wished! After which we sat by the stove and amiably discussed our two countries over glasses of brandy.


Nowhere did I see any evidence of extreme poverty and the average citizen – a cheerful, singularly unapressed-looking individual – appeared to be adequately clothed, housed and fed.


I am far too reactionary to regard ‘backward peasants’ as being ipsofacto in need of modernization; yet in fairness I must give my personal impression of that side of the Communist coin which is not popular among Western propagandists.

The citizens of these countries provide for their deprived brothers as generously as do the tax-paying citizens of a Welfare State and the disparity between the circumstances of the disabled of Persia and the disabled of Britain is no greater than that between the circumstances of the working men of the two countries: in fact it may well be less, though the distribution of funds is more haphazard. Also the Muslim method of providing ‘Social Services’ has the important virtue of maintaining a natural and humane link between individuals. It is obviously more desirable to have citizens giving to beggars voluntarily, out of compassion, rather than to have them grumbling paying taxes to an impersonal government which dispenses what is left, after its civil servants have been paid, to unknown sufferers who are mere names in a filing cabinet.


I must admit that it’s difficult to get adjusted to such a fetid atmosphere, in which one is always conscious of the power of money over integrity.


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Monday, March 4, 2024

1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman - Book Review

 


BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman

This true story tells the tale of the end of three hundred oppressive years in Russia, and America and Russia’s entrance into a world military power struggle which neither were prepared for.

It is an era that should never be forgotten, but history lessons have a disgustingly short memory.

Political power is governed by the very best politicians that money can buy.

A very impressive and well documented book deserving of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS:

The next word they decoded gave them pause. It was “Mexico.” De Grey and Montgomery looked at each other. This was an odd country name to turn up in a wartime communication. For one thing, Mexico was neutral in this war, although its president was hardly a friend of the Allies and had good relations with Germany and Berlin. The next name they decoded was even more incongruous: “Japan.” In fact, it popped up several times in this first part of the dispatch. Japan had been on the side of the Allies since August 23, 1914—but, alarmingly, the dispatch was worded as if Tokyo were about to become Germany’s ally. Thoroughly worried, the two code breakers worked with fierce determination for the next two hours. What emerged was a secret message from Berlin to Washington in two parts. The first contained what they knew was a diplomatic bombshell: on February 1, Berlin informed its ambassador in Washington, Germany would resume its unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping.


German submarines, known as U-boats, had sunk merchant ships without warning, and without picking up survivors—making no distinction between cargo ships of enemy combatants such as Britain, France, and Russia, and neutral ships such as those from Holland, Spain, and America. All those ships unloaded cargo, including industrial goods and sometimes even ammunition, in Allied ports; all were therefore fair targets, in the German view. This ruthless approach to war,

While Europeans ruthlessly fought other nations for land and treasure, Americans did not—those holding this belief conveniently forgetting that, in the nineteenth century, the United States fought for land and treasure more than once: against various Native American tribes; against Mexico in 1844; and, that same year, very nearly against Britain over the Oregon Territory.


In 1915, the year that fighting on the Western Front was bogging down in stalemate and Russia was suffering its first major setbacks, Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. “Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, ‘You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours. Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance.

The American president said, a position London and Paris vehemently denied. From their perspective, the whole justification since August 1914 had been that they were the forces of civilization fighting against their opposite, while the Germans were ruthless and bloodthirsty Huns whose aggression and violations of international law knew no bounds.


January 22, 1917, also marked a milestone in American history. Wilson decided to deliver the speech before the Senate, the first time a president had done so since George Washington. Copies would be distributed to every major capital in Europe at the same time. He also did what no president had ever done, not Washington nor Jefferson nor Abraham Lincoln nor even Theodore Roosevelt: he explained why American leadership was essential to the world.


peace without victory” an international catchphrase just as Wilson’s note of December 18 had done with “league of nations.” Editor Herbert Croly of the New Republic, the house organ of high-grade Progressiveness, was quoted as calling it the greatest event of his life. Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, told the president that “the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy. that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion.” It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, “among the Immortals.”

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Sunday, March 3, 2024

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion By Jeff Guinn - Book Review

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion By Jeff Guinn

The Mexican/United States border has aggressive money/land grabbing opportunists, mostly political and corporate, on both sides each lacking human empathy. This has been ongoing through good times and bad. There might not be any good guys and the poor will always be the looser.

It has been said that it is far better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Also might is right.

An excellent history lesson and must read book.

Excerpts:

All of the major fighting took place on Mexican soil, and the better-equipped and -organized American forces prevailed.

Veracruz in Mexican history. In 1519, Cortez brought his invaders ashore there, launching three centuries of enslavement by Spain. Veracruz was where America landed many of its troops during a war that took half of Mexico’s territory. The French occupied Veracruz in 1864 as the first step in its Mexican conquest. The American arrival in 1914 was assumed to signal another full-fledged invasion. American military commanders in the field certainly thought so, and were surprised to receive orders to remain in Veracruz instead of next striking 230 miles west at Mexico City.

1847, Mexico was forced to negotiate a peace settlement the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, America came away with almost one million square miles of new territory that included all or part of what would become the states of California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming, plus the Nueces Strip, which remained so uninviting that General William T. Sherman subsequently suggested that “we should go to war again, to make them take it back.”

In return for about half of its nation, Mexico received $15 million, plus the cancellation of another $3.25 million in American business claims. The country’s leaders did what they could for Mexican nationals who suddenly found themselves living in the United States.


German suggestion to Mexico of reclaimed land deliberately didn’t include California. That great prize was intended to lure Japan into a German alliance. Those two nations remained in an official state of war, but it would be ideal for the Germans if, as their unrestricted warfare throttled the Allies in Britain and Europe, Japan attacked California while Mexico assaulted Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Japanese officials would be reluctant to meet with representatives of Germany, but Mexico and Japan were friendly.


Japan might be convinced to change sides, especially if the Germans dangled California as a potential reward. The Germans considered Japan’s chances of taking California far superior to Mexico’s odds of regaining any portion of the other three states, but in any event those outcomes would not be Germany’s concern. It all hinged on Carranza, and, if the United States declared war on Germany, whether his enmity for America would incline him to accept the German offer.


American diplomats in Germany routinely accepted messages, including those in code, addressed from German officials to their nation’s diplomats in Mexico.

telegrams were initially sent to the State Department in Washington; officials there passed them along to the German ambassador and his staff, who used America’s Western Union to make the final transmissions to the German embassy in Mexico City. Zimmermann’s telegram was sent through both the Swedish and U.S. transatlantic cable systems.


German leaders enjoyed the irony of the U.S. helpfully transmitting a message intended against America’s best interests.

The Germans did not know that British intelligence regularly intercepted all telegrams sent over Swedish and American cables and that Britain’s agents had cracked the German code.


The headline in the New York World was representative: “MEXICO AND JAPAN ASKED BY GERMANY TO ATTACK U.S. IF IT ENTERED THE WAR.”

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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor - Book Review - Five Stars

 

Book Review - Five Stars

Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

This is a biographical story of Willa Cather and her tremendous literary accomplishments that have stood the test of time. My wife and I first listened to the audio book of My Ántonia years ago. We were enthralled and listened again...it was extraordinary, and then we both read the digital story on our Kindle readers. My Ántonia is a monumental and classic book worthy of more than five stars.

Before you read Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. You are in for a treat.

EXCERPTS:

No one who reads My Ántonia forgets the tale of Russian Peter and Pavel, driven from town to town and finally out of Russia after saving themselves, the last of a wedding party, by throwing the bride to a pack of wolves that have swarmed the wedding sledges: “[T]he groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and “For Ántonia and me,” says Jim, “the story of the wedding party was never at an end.

As if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.” Nor does any reader forget poor traduced Ántonia delivering her own out-of-wedlock baby: “That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child.” (What a painful, peculiar pleasure the scene gives.) It is with My Ántonia, so consecrated to memory, that Cather arrives at her deepest theme. She would have understood T. S. Eliot’s remark that we live not just in the present but in the present moment of the past, past and present being the warp and weft of all experience. The lively hoard of contingent occurrences that add up to a life is infinitely to be cherished. When little Leo, one of Ántonia’s many children, plays his grandfather’s violin, Cather’s motif of the pastness of the present and presentness of the past is consummated. “In the course of twenty crowded years,” says Jim, speaking for his maker, “one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

The book’s motto—“The best days are the soonest gone”

I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women; they understood my homesickness and were kind to me. These old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talked more freely to a child than to grown people. I have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if I had got inside another person’s skin.”

Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School in June 1890. She came first in a class of three and accordingly delivered the valedictory address. Her spirited theme was “Investigation versus Superstition.” She hailed the former and damned the latter.

In one as young as Willa, here only sixteen, it is unnerving: “There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation,” she declared to her audience, “a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.”

The shocking news of the fall of France in June 1940. What she’d always regarded as a second homeland had gone under. She wrote to Zoë Akins that “the heritage of all the ages is being threatened.” She followed the war with anguish, particularly the Battle of Britain that followed. Churchill was her embodiment of Periclean heroism. It was at this time that she befriended Sigrid Undset, the famed Norwegian writer and refugee from the Nazis, also a Knopf author, whose elder son, a lieutenant in the Norwegian Army, had died in the early days of the war. She liked Undset’s work and, more important, regarded her as an embodiment of the European values Nazism was laying to waste.

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Monday, February 12, 2024

They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri-Book Review

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri

This is a true political story from the prospective of a young girl who became a victim of geography with the result that her entire family and country live in constant terror and fear of their occupiers. 

Read this fast moving story that is excellently written. Form your own opinion...but read it!


EXCERPTS;

First impressions don’t tell the whole story. To get that, you’d have to look across the main road of our village, to the hill on the other side of the valley. There sits the Jewish Israeli settlement of Halamish, a gated community with neatly arranged red-tile-roofed homes, manicured lawns, playgrounds, and a swimming pool. But Halamish wasn’t always there. It was illegally established on our village’s land in 1977. It’s one of hundreds of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land in violation of international law. These settlements are essentially Jewish Israeli colonies, and they continue to multiply at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. Over the years, we’ve watched the creeping expansion of Halamish, its settlers confiscating more of our land and resources with the full approval of the state of Israel. Not just approval, but facilitation, too. Israel installed a military base right next to the settlement, to protect its residents and to make our lives in the village a living hell.


In 2002, Israel began constructing a massive separation wall under the pretext of security. Palestinians call it the apartheid wall because it’s meant to separate Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from Israel “proper,” but also from occupied East Jerusalem and from the Israeli settlements built inside the West Bank. The wall is several hundred miles long and, in some areas, made of imposing concrete slabs that stand over fifteen feet tall. If that’s not egregious enough, the majority of the wall was not built along Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 boundary, but rather on Palestinian land inside the occupied West Bank. This means its path was deliberately planned to swallow up more of our land and cut right through our villages.

Two weeks after my birthday, on February 13, my trial officially began. I entered the courtroom to see, in addition to my relatives, scores of journalists, NGO observers, foreign diplomats, and activists pouring in. But as soon as the judge entered, he ordered everyone but my immediate family out of the courtroom, saying it was for my own benefit, as a minor, that the trial be held behind closed doors. What a joke, I thought. If they cared about my benefit or protection to any degree, why did they ensure that their cameras were rolling on the night of my arrest? Probably to appease an angry Israeli public that felt humiliated by my confrontation with the soldiers and to humiliate me.

If the judge was concerned about what benefited me, surely he should factor in my and my family’s preference. But he didn’t, instead insisting that the trial remain closed, most likely because a public trial meant more negative press for Israel.

A trial carried out in the dark guaranteed that the world would not continue to see how my rights, like the rights of so many other Palestinian children, were being infringed upon.


My personal message to you all is that we must tie our societal struggle to our national struggle for liberation. We must boycott, isolate, and pursue Israel as a war criminal.


Whatever their agenda was had totally backfired on them. They had embarrassed their country, not thinking that the whole world would turn against them and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They had tried to make an example out of me, but really, they had only exposed their country as the brutal human rights violator it so unabashedly is.

If educating the world about our nation’s struggle was my mission in this life, I vowed to carry it out as honorably and as effectively as possible.

Crimes at the hands of the Nazis, and all of humanity should stand against such murderous hatred and make sure it’s never repeated. But how does that give Zionists the right to push us off our own land to make a country for Jews alone? Why should Palestinians compensate—lose our homeland, our property, our rights, even our lives—for the Holocaust committed by Europeans? We shouldn’t have to pay for the crimes of the Europeans against Jews. That’s just wrong.


We need to find a way to live here in one country, with everyone as equals, not in this apartheid state where Palestinians are forced to live on shrinking pieces of our homeland while the best land is reserved for one group. The world did not accept this in South Africa. Why would they accept it in Palestine?


Jewish settler named Jacob Fauci was captured on camera telling a young Palestinian woman named Muna El-Kurd, who was standing in her own backyard, “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it.” The video of Fauci, who spoke perfect English with a Long Island accent, went viral. His brazen sense of entitlement to steal a home he knew belonged to a Palestinian family highlighted the decades-long struggle residents of Sheikh Jarrah and other Jerusalem neighborhoods were facing just to remain in their own homes.


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Thursday, January 25, 2024

Impermanence; Life and Loss on Superior's South Shore by Sue Leaf - Book Review Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS 

Impermanence; Life and Loss on Superior's South Shore by Sue Leaf

Thought provoking platitudes of a place I knew all too well. It is where I grew up, bicycled, canoed, sailed, beach-combed, camped and eked out meager living while becoming acquainted with and friends of the locals.

Sue Leaf took me on a beautifully described trip down memory lane. I loved it!


EXCERPTS:

There was a bank across the street with a digital clock flashing the time (11:27) and the temperature (58 degrees), and a bit of advice: “You can’t—take it—with you—but try—going—somewhere—without it—SAVE!” I wondered if there was a deeper message in this slogan.


She now talks in terms of the “embodied energy” of old buildings. This is a broad concept that incorporates the cost entailed to construct them and also the money spent to produce their materials—like quarried stone or cut timber—and, too, the incalculable value of virgin wood, so much finer-grained and sturdier than today’s plantation-grown trees.

Sue seemed to be the catalyst that galvanized the town into rethinking its relationship to its past and perhaps to standing up a little straighter.


This is a reflection of an older man, one who has the depth of experience to put such a profound loss into perspective. It comes from someone who has struggled against the dominant current of conventional society, someone who values something that most people do not. I think about this as I trudge along a ski trail in new snow, often a solitary pursuit and now a pursuit made lonely by this unnerving thought: the age of cross-country skiing is drawing to a close.


there are weeks in the summer when these great bodies of water sleep like placid woodland ponds.” But this can change within minutes. Squalls with high winds launch themselves with fury. Waves pile high, with shorter troughs than in the ocean, so recovery is difficult. At the end of the season, ice accumulates on boats, on decks and rigging. Rescuing any crew in trouble requires stamina, skill, and courage. And that was why the keeper drew from a pool of local sailors well versed in Superior’s capricious moods.

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Sunday, January 21, 2024

The Traitor's Wife by Sarah Steele

 


BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Traitor's Wife by Sarah Steele

A fast moving novel of Italy under fascist Germany's brutal invasion during WWII, and some painful fallout that was years in the making. As the story pulled together it became worthy of a five-star rating.

EXCERPTS:

Luisa’s father was a quiet but ardent anti-Fascist. He believed in strong women – he’d married one, after all. Luisa was clever at a time when women were expected to be housewives and mothers.’ Rosa let out a long breath. ‘Life under Mussolini was difficult for women.


Citizens held themselves a little straighter and prouder when they recalled the Four Days of Naples: the people’s insurrection had proved to the world that the Nazis could be defeated.


We had lived under the Fascists for twenty years before war broke out. They were terrible, dangerous times, especially for women, and people were angry. Women were angry.’


I heard what happened to that woman in the street yesterday – shot down in front of her child. Franco said you were there?’ Luisa nodded. ‘I’ll never forget the sound of that child’s screaming.’


You think the Germans are bad? Stalin is a whole lot worse.’ ‘Have you seen what the Germans are doing out there, or are you too busy making deals with them?’


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Thursday, January 11, 2024

Our Year - 2023

 

Our Year - 2023

First the fun things:

Alix and Basil paid us a visit in January and released us from our pandemic exile. They tested negative for Covid before we met for our first breakfast out since March of 2020. We had a wonderful time with them.




Jane’s cousin Lyle and his wife Diane took a cruise ship from Galveston, Texas, to the Port of Progreso. We took a Didi taxi to Progreso and met them for several hours of talking and eating. Jane felt honored by the visit.




 


In May we spent a month in Playa del Carmen visiting with Grisel and her husband Juan...always fun. Grisel has a big place in our hearts. We wish she lived closer to us.









Breakfast out is our favorite activity. We had many with Rosario May and her kids. We celebrated all our birthdays at a breakfast.



For the Record:

In 2023 a striking difference from other years was climate change, record heat, an increase in pollution, and flaming red sunsets at our home in tropical Mérida, Yucatan Mexico, 21º North Latitude. Mérida is city of nearly two million with far too may motor vehicles plus mega power plants straining at their limits.

Twenty-seven percent of Yucatan’s agricultural land has been lost to ever expanding growth.

Fifty years ago when we first arrived in Yucatan, Mérida's population was 175,000 with three gasoline stations, and bicycling was a lark. We had blue sky above and thousands of bright stars at night. Wellwater was safe to drink. Half the housing in Yucatan was made of 100% recyclable materials sourced from the forests. These palm frond thatched homes have vanished replaced by Tio-Sam cement block houses not environmentally friendly making brown outs irritating. The finite potable water supply is dangerously low. Droughts have devastating impacts making wild fires deadly and dangerous. There are just too many toilets to flush! Even with these problems the city is expanding at a roaring rate with no end in sight.

I had read the books by John L. Stephan's of his Yucatan exploration of 1842. In the appendix of volume 1, pages 264 to 271, the morning, noon, and evening temperatures were recorded in an airy shaded place for a year and a half. Those temperatures never exceeded 89ºF. Temperatures we encountered in 1980s Mérida were the same as 1842.


During the last five years climate change significantly accelerated. We had eight consecutive months of record setting temperatures above 100º F or 38ºC every day. Mérida went from a scorching oven to a blazing hell: A preview of coming attractions.

Note: listen to the audio book; Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Valliant to see where our environment is headed.

To avoid the hot season last May, we went to the Caribbean Coast for a month.

On our return to Mérida we coped with the heat in our ecologically friendly home. With no air conditioning unit we used nature to our advantage.



We continue to do our daily exercise routine that includes bicycling and eating breakfast out weekly. Getting around town and to the beach have become wonderful and affordable using the Didi taxi service. There is no excuse for owning a car in Mérida.

Guarding our health is still extremely imperative. The pandemic plus yearly influenza coupled with mosquito-born infections make peremptory precautions of inoculations, social distancing, and face masks essential for senior citizens, and those with asthma absolute necessity.

For amusement Jane has been giving me bread making lessons...she ingeniously has been baking bread from age 10 with the priceless lessons from her two Swedish grandmothers and her mom...I am not yet at graduate stage of learning the thousands of culinary tricks. The learning curve seems unending...it is fun, creative and educational.

We never run out of fun and interesting things to learn and do. We read a lot of books and also listen to audio books. John reviews the books he reads on his blog.

Wishing for an adventurous and healthy 2024.

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