Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough - Book Review Five Stars

 

Book Review - Five Stars

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough

Excellent well-written and edited in-depth coverage of an era in history that ever after altered many generations to come. Worthy of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS:

Scandinavia as an interconnected cultural sphere involving other indigenous peoples who inhabited the peninsula. These groups did not necessarily share the same linguistic background or cultural practices as the Norse, and yet they were notable players in the Viking Age story. The most important of these were those known as Finnar by their Norse-speaking neighbors. They were the ancestors of Scandinavia’s modern-day Sámi population. For the most part, they were nomadic hunters and fishers with ready access to valuable Arctic furs and skins. Their primary territories ranged across the far north of what is now Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Hailing from Arctic Norway, Ohthere himself made much of his wealth through trading with and collecting tribute from his neighbors. But the Norse–Sámi relationship was also characterized by intermarriage and cross-cultural influences. There is also archaeological evidence that the Sámi also operated in southern areas of Scandinavia.

Through the eighth century the north began to develop rapidly in new ways. Much of this had to do with money. After the economic slump that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a new influx of silver coins spread into northern Europe, lubricating the wheels of trade. Already by the year 700, new trading centers had sprung up on both sides of the English Channel. There was Quentovic, near Boulogne on the French coast; Hamwic, just outside what is now Southampton; Lundenwic, an Anglo-Saxon trading port upriver of the old Roman city of Londinium, where Westminster now stands; and Dorestad near the mouth of the Rhine, in the modern Netherlands.

The importance of food production, it is no surprise that the basic unit of Viking Age society was the farmstead. The people who lived on it tended to be largely self-sufficient. They grew, fished or hunted whatever they could, bartering with neighbors or itinerant merchants for anything else.

Other necessities, such as textiles, tools and building materials, were also produced at or near home. Animals were exploited down to the last useful sinew. The majority of the population lived close to subsistence levels much of the time, although fluctuating between scarcity and abundance from season to season and year to year. Life was tough and unrelenting, kept up through physical effort in the face of an uncompromising natural environment. Their material world was one of wood, wool, flax, bone, stone, leather and antler, hand-wrought and fashioned, with metal a precious commodity to be treasured and recycled.

The Norse world converted to Christianity far later than most of northern Europe. This means we have far more information about their pre-Christian beliefs and practices than, say, those of Anglo-Saxon England before the conversion. But on the other hand, this can lull us into a false sense of security. We need to remember that our written descriptions of Norse pagan practices and beliefs come from outside the system. Texts from the Viking Age itself were written by Christian or Islamic writers from other parts of the medieval world. They tended to be openly repulsed by whatever they deemed ‘pagan’, and reluctant or unable to understand it on its own terms. Later texts from within the Norse sphere itself were written well after the conversion to Christianity. This makes it difficult to know whether these accounts actually reflect what people did, said or believed centuries earlier.

There are times when love and lust lead to sex. There are times when sex leads to pregnancy, and times when it doesn’t. And both outcomes can prompt a range of emotions, from the very good to the very bad. Every single human living in the Viking Age was there because of sex and pregnancy. But it’s extraordinarily hard to find evidence of the experience of pregnancy, with all its complex emotions and potential outcomes, in either the written or the material record. Partly, this is a consequence of the fact that, if you had a womb, you probably didn’t have much of a voice in the official records, and so that limits the types of evidence available to us.

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RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WAR YEARS. 1940-1945 - John M. Grimsrud

 

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WAR YEARS. 1940-1945

I was born in 1940.

My first remembrance of those war years is that I could see real hate in everybody’s eyes as they chanted “kill the Nazis.” The chant “kill the Nazis” became “kill the Germans” by the end of the war.

There were 13 countries overrun by the Axis powers (Fascists), Germany, Spain, Italy, and finally Japan.

The U. S. issued 13 different commemorative five cent postage flag stamps depicting all of these overrun countries.

A link to the stamps: Click here.

I obtained a three by four foot world map that I framed and made into a stamp map where I affixed and labeled the countries stamps, and so opened my education in geography and interest in world history.

In 1944 when I was four years old, I ran away from home. Getting a beating, slapped around, and having soap rubbed in my eyes got me going. Mom said that I hurt her and now she was going to hurt me.Grandma’s apartment was nine blocks away, and I was on my way.

Wartime gasoline rationing made the streets quiet, and the East End Drug where Grandma’s apartment was located I knew well. It was my best-loved sanctuary…I loved Grandma, and she loved me. She named me stakkar, and said in Norwegian that means “poor thing.” Grandma was fully aware of her daughter’s personality and her eccentric dangerous behavior.

Great aromas wafted up from Grandma’s humble little kitchen where Scandinavian cookies were always in abundance. Her dessert specialty was prunes whipped up in whipping cream, oh so good!

Grandma was also a “poor thing.” When Grandma was sixteen years old she and four of her brothers set sail for America saying a final farewell to family and friends, and returning was not going to be an option.

Grandma told me a story about when the sailors played a prank on her bringing her a banana to see what she would do with it. Her little Norwegian village was isolated amd only accessible by boat in good weather with no electric or phone where they spoke only an Old Norse dialect. She had never seen a banana.

Grandma and her brothers headed west in America and did not stop until they reached a place where they could speak Norse. North Dakota is where they settled, but it was not yet a state, and Indian raids were serious business. You could see a long way in Dakota Territory but you couldn’t see much. There wasn’t anything to obstruct your view, not even a tree for a bird to sit in…they had to hop around on the ground. The soil was fabulously rich, and farming was a dream come true, not like rock bound Norway. Land was free for the taking.

Grandma married Edwin Benson, a landed Norwegian. He and his brother weren't taught any work ethics, and after the parents died the farm was lost. The sad part was that oil was later discovered on the farm land.

Grandpa Benson took a job as a watchman on the railroad when he moved to Superior, Wisconsin, with his wife and three daughters.

When the great depression hit and the “Hoover Days” began the family took up residence in a humble shanty in the woods east of Brule, Wisconsin.

My father married my mother, Myrtle Benson, the second of the three daughters and provided her widowed mother Bertha an apartment above his East End Drug Store.

Back to my runaway story, yes it was “poor thing” Grandma.

Grandma’s apartment:

Prominently displayed on her living room wall was a large sepia photo of her younger brother in his military dress uniform. He died in 1918.

I met one of Grandma’s brothers, Ingvald, who was a cook aboard a Great Lakes ore carrier that frequently called at Duluth-Superior harbor. He would always came to visit his sister Bertha arriving by city bus. One day when I was with my father in his car in downtown Superior, I spotted Ingvald at the corner of Belknap and Tower where he would transfer to the East End bus line. My Dad stopped and picked up Ingvald and drove him to Grandma’s apartment above the East End Drug Store. Gasoline was rationed at this time. but Dad received gasoline ration stamps because his drug store did home deliveries of medicine. Dad’s blue Studebaker coupe had to out last the war, rusted out floor boards and all.

Back to Grandma’s apartment, and my runaway story:

Grandma had a still working very old desk top tube radio that we would tune into for noon time weather and news plus some favorite evening broadcasts. During the war news was especially important for us and couldn’t be missed.

Her well-worn dining room table and chairs were part of a set with a bureau of drawers filled with her few valuables.

She treasured an envelope from her family in the Old County. It had been opened and resealed with an ornate tape decorated with Nazi swastikas. Inside the envelope the letter had been meticulously blanked out to censor the message. This was my first hand look at Fascism that was spreading across Europe with lightning speed and killing thousands in its wake. From the very northern tip of Norway on the Arctic Ocean at Kirkenes all the way south to the Straits of Gibraltar in southern Spain fascism had total control of the west coast of Europe. This was frighting and resistance was imperative. The U. S. was at the same time battling fanatic Kamikaze Imperial fascist Japan in the Pacific Ocean.

I have to interject that in 1944 I was only four years old, but I have to expand on this monumental story of my family’s involvement of resistance to Hitler’s Nazi invasion of little neutral Norway with a population of 3 million.

In the predawn hours of April 10, 1940, three German battle ships flying British flags stealthy and deceptively entered the Oslo Fjord refusing to halt on demand and identify themselves. My Grandfather’s nephew then performing his military duty (national guard), took aim with his Krupp German made cannon and sent 1,600 of the deceptive invading Nazi’s to the bottom of Oslo harbor. Neutral Norway whether they wanted it or not had entering the war and would be brutally occupied. They would be just one of the thirteen invaded countries of WWII.

Grandma’s oldest daughter, Esther enlisted in the military and was off to war. Her youngest daughter Nelly Bergland married a career military man who served five years in Europe during WWII, and was later sent off to Korea.

My dad’s older brother Lawrence was inducted into the army infantry and shipped off to North Africa and then to Italy where he was involved in the bloodiest invasion battle of WWII at Anzio, Italy. That brutal experience altered him for life.

Dr. Rudy Christianson, my father’s very best friend, I called him my “Uncle Rudy” gave his life to the war effort taking amphetamines “speed” so that he could do his life saving surgery until he literary dropped. Less than three years after the war his heart quit.

My father was deferred from military service because he was vital to the efforts at home, but his father, born in 1879, was eligible to be called to service. I remember my father, born in 1908, telling me that regarding military inscription of his father, he told him,

“How could they take an old man like you?”

Back to Grandma’s apartment: I was safe with Grandma.

There came a knock on the door and Grandma had me hide in her bedroom. There was a police man inquiring about me. Grandma protected me, and she sent the policeman on his way.

In retrospect looking back on this incident I learned about poisonous personalities and how deceptive and cunning they could be. Bipolar psychopathic personalities are impossible to live with and absolutely no positive outcome can ever be expected.

What sparked my memories?

I recently listened to the audio version of the book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I highly recommend it. It is apropos to our current times.

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Small Acts of Courage by Ali Velshi, Book Review-Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy by Ali Velshi

This is a powerful treatise, conveying messages extremely important and timely.

This absorbing family history is worthy of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS:

If we want to prevent the murder of the next George Floyd, it will require more than just reforming the way we police. It will require us to build a society where the rights, privileges, and protections of citizenship—and the responsibilities of citizenship—are shared by all. As my family’s hundred-year journey illustrates, for far too many people, achieving true citizenship and belonging in a new country is no easy endeavor. It can be long, arduous, and beset by discouraging setbacks at every turn. And for all of us as a society to work together to build a shared notion of citizenship, to build a truly united there are those who still maintain a sort of “yes, but” defense of Great Britain’s imperial project: that it was worthwhile because, in the end, the British left their former subjects with the rule of law and better railroads and “Western values.”

The ill effects of colonialism were compounded by environmental catastrophe. Waves of drought parched and devastated the land, wiping out whole crops and herds of livestock, leading to mass starvation. In the first half of the nineteenth century there were seven famines that killed, by conservative estimates, around eight hundred thousand people. The second half of the nineteenth century was worse, bringing seven additional famines that killed over 15 million. All the while, tons of Indian wheat were being exported to feed the British back home, and the money and resources that might have eased the devastation caused by famine had gone elsewhere, taken by the British and used to support their various military adventures overseas. The starving people of India were left with no choice but to go elsewhere themselves. Between 1830 and 1870, nearly 2 million workers left the country in search of better prospects. That was the Big Bang. The Indian diaspora was born.

In a cruel twist of fate, they left their homes and their families to toil on behalf of the same empire that had devastated their native land and forced them onto the open seas in the first place.

Scandal: when companies like MCI and WorldCom and Enron were caught cooking their books to hide billions of dollars in losses from investors. We covered those stories ad nauseam, and it was the first time that we, as financial journalists, confronted the idea that some of the people who we are all excited to have on our TV stations were a bunch of crooks. Then came cascading crises of confidence in our institutions and leadership: the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown. As I traveled the world reporting, going to places like Hong Kong and India, people would ask me, “Why can’t you guys be more like Al Jazeera?” Meaning: “When are you guys going to stop being ESPN and really report the news and hold people to account?”

I can remember being at CNN the night that Barack Obama was elected, back in the days when CNN had twenty people at a time in the newsroom in rows of desks. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. We were all caught up in watching history unfold, and I was thinking, “This is it. This was the big thing America needed to do that it hadn’t done, and now we’ve broken through that.” Even if you didn’t buy into the absurdities about a “postracial America,” there was a sense that we’d made a giant leap forward, and it was almost impossible to imagine things going backward from there. Obama himself leaned hard on Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous formulation that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” But with all due respect to both of those men, that’s not actually true. It’s wishful thinking that people need to abandon because it breeds a complacency that things will just continue to get better on their own. Everything about my family’s story tells me that the arc of history bends the way you bend it. That was true with the National Party in South Africa in 1948, it was true with Idi Amin in Uganda in 1972, and it’s been true in America for quite some time. For the past fifty years, extremist right-wingers have been bending it the way they wanted, and with Trump’s election, we finally got to the result of their efforts.

Everyone knew they were breaking curfew and were subject to arrest. These people, thousands of them, had taken it upon themselves to take that risk. But they were just walking, and there was no threat that called for an armed response. I’ve covered the G8 and the G20, these international conferences that draw all kinds of rock-throwing anarchists and the like, and every cop in every major city on earth learned years ago: if you’re trying to control a crowd, you don’t incite the crowd. It’s never good. So the minute they opened fire, I knew it was the result of a deliberate choice. Subsequent recordings that came out indicated, especially when it came to journalists, cops were on a hunt that night. They were jacked up. They were pumped up to do this, and we were fair game. The Minneapolis police chief himself was a decent, honest official, but his power was hamstrung by the police union, and the head of the police union in Minneapolis was a big Trumper.

So you had some cops who were juiced on this whole Trumpian mantra of “You need to rough people up a bit.” Because other than that, there was no reason to do it. None. But they did it. They were excited to do it, and they continued to do it for hours all over the city. They chased people down. It was completely unnecessary, and it was wrong. A few months later, the whole episode came up again because Trump started ranting about it on the campaign trail as part of his whole attack on the media. “I remember this guy Velshi,” he said, recounting the incident. “He got hit in the knee with a canister of tear gas and he went down. He was down. ‘My knee, my knee.’” He was wrong about every detail, by the way. It’s all on video. But Trump makes up lies even when he doesn’t need to.

The truly disturbing part of Trump’s speech was what came next, when he lavished praise on the police for attacking an American journalist. “It was the most beautiful thing,” Trump said, “because after we take all that crap for weeks and weeks, and you finally see men get up there and go right through them, wasn’t it really a beautiful sight?” Then the crowd erupted in cheers and applause.

What makes it important is not only that armed agents of the state believe that it’s OK to take unprovoked shots at both civilians and journalists but also that millions of American citizens are willing to cheer that on. It is chilling to realize there is a large and vocal faction in this country that is ready to burn it to the ground before they’ll share it with anyone who doesn’t look like them or doesn’t think like them. They stand ready to tear down everything that makes America special—indeed, everything that makes America possible, like the right to vote and the right to a free and independent press.

Up until Minneapolis, I thought of myself as someone covering those fights. It was only when I got shot that I fully realized I was in the fight. That belated realization came, in part, simply because, even as a brown guy in Donald Trump’s America, the system continued to work fine for me. It still works fine for me to this day. I make a good living. I go about my life without any real fears for my physical safety. I worry about larger societal problems, but day to day I’m good, which means I have a certain perspective on the promise of this land and I could easily go right on taking that promise as guaranteed. But I can’t anymore, because I know that promise is not guaranteed. To any of us.

It has to be good enough for all of us. As has been said many times by those much wiser than me, if one of us is in chains, none of us are free.

It’s not enough for society to be good enough for some of us. It has to be good enough for all of us. As has been said many times by those much wiser than me, if one of us is in chains, none of us are free. This is what my father and mother and sister knew. It’s what my grandparents and great-grandparents knew, despite their total lack of a formal education. Justice isn’t justice until it’s universal.

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Haakon the Good (Vikings of Norway) by Ole Åsli - Book Review Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW

Haakon the Good (Vikings of Norway) by Ole Åsli

This easy reading novel of the Viking era takes the reader through the years of transition into Christianity and the end of the Old Norse pagan ways.

An informative glimpse is provided of everyday doings in a very historical and pivotal point in history.

I found the book well done, interesting, and entertaining.

Excerpts:

‘You are right, young man! Let me explain. In our belief all men are God’s children. And as we priests are God’s voice on earth, we tend to say such things like “my son”. I haven’t given it much thought, truth be told, but you are right, it is a bit strange. And maybe we should be better at explaining our behavior so that we don’t put people off. And you are also right that we are concerned about lying. In fact, that is one of the Ten Commandments; “Thou shalt not bear false witness”, which means that you should not tell a lie. Have you heard about the Ten Commandments?’ ‘No,’ Haakon said. ‘Where I am from, kings and jarls and chieftains give the commands.’ ‘Is that so?

But what do you think about God?’ Siegfried poked Haakon in the chest with his index finger. ‘I think he is one God, among many, who likes getting gifts and giving commands, but gives very little in return. Had he been a king, he would’ve been a bad king. Not a very popular king.’ Hauk almost chuckled. But he held it in, worried about how the tiny man and his God would react. They were in his house after all. He would be close by. ‘And your gods, Thor and Odin, are they more generous?’

‘That was a good game,’ Hauk said. ‘You really showed them how it’s done.’ Haakon smiled. ‘It’s not about winning, Hauk. It’s about finding solutions that help everyone. That’s the true mark of a successful negotiation.’ In a real-life negotiation, trust me, most men will give anything to get the upper hand. They can accept a lot, if they just can walk away feeling they won or got a better deal than their adversary.’

Besides making a good deal for everyone, I’ll have to make my adversaries think they won?’

someone chuckled, and laughter rippled through the crowd. Haakon raised a hand. ‘Nonetheless, I promise to do my utmost to be a fair and just king if you will have me. A leader cannot lead without the trust of his people. A king cannot rule without their support.’ Cheers erupted from the assembly. Haakon continued. ‘But these are just words,’ he said, and the crowd hushed again. ‘It’s easy to say words, as the jarl has just demonstrated.’

Haakon raised his horn of ale in a toast, his voice ringing out above the jubilant throng. ‘To Arrow, a warrior reborn! May his victory remind us that strength lies not only in skill, but in the power of unity!

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The Accidental President by A.J. Baime - Book Review Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World by A.J. Baime

Truman’s presidential odyssey began on April 12, 1945, the day Franklin Roosevelt died. It is impossible to overstate the shock to the world FDR’s death caused. “The Romans must have felt this way when word came that Caesar Augustus was dead,” the columnist I. F. Stone wrote at the time.

This amazing book covers the tumultuous days from post WWI, the Roaring Twenties, Hoover administrations "get rich" for financial insiders that crashed markets, saw foreclosures of homes, businesses and brought about the great depression, known as the “Hoover Days”. It also set up President FDR for four terms that saw the United States enter WWII.

After reading this informative and amazing book you will see that FDR’s pick of Harry Truman as Vice President did America a great favor.

What came next derailed American democracy, and was the last war that America would win.

EXCERPTS:

No generation had ever lived through such leaps of innovation so ruthlessly squeezed into a lifetime. The ubiquity of telephones, movies with sound, paved streets roaring with motorcar traffic, the rise of the supermarket with branded products such as Post Toasties cereal and Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon mayonnaise—none of this had existed thirty years earlier. The war had accelerated the speed of modernization. Truman could recall as a young man of nineteen reading about the Wright Brothers’ first controlled flights. Now the U.S. Army Air Forces were flying thousands of 56,000-pound B-24 bombers, equipped with radar and gyrocompasses that enabled the dropping of bombs on precision targets. Racial integration, women on assembly lines—it all felt like an H. G. Wells novel. In the previous eighteen months the nation had come of age.” Americans—especially in Washington—felt the pull of destiny, that their country had become the world’s moral arbiter.

The month had flown by in a montage of historic events. The Axis surrender in Italy, the execution of Mussolini, the suicide of Hitler, the Russian capture of Berlin, Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, the liberation of death camps, the firebombings of Japan. The United Nations Conference was under way in San Francisco, and the president had been briefed on the most startling secret in human history.

Bastards,” “yellow monkeys,” and vermin-infested “louseous Japanicas.” But American feelings toward the Japanese went beyond racism. A hatred had sunk deep into the American consciousness following Pearl Harbor, a hatred that did not come into play in the European war, even toward the Nazis.

The bomb was on the way.

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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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