The Reindeer Hunters: A Novel by Lars Mytting - Five Star Review

Book Review - Five Stars

The Reindeer Hunters: A Novel by Lars Mytting

A great book, a tremendous history lesson, and an intriguing read.

Lars Mytting shows excellence in delivering a very memorable look into how little Norway went from the poorest nation in all of Europe to becoming the richest in less then half a century.

EXCERPTS:

I bought a ticket to just the next stop, but stayed on all the way to Lillehammer, and walked into Helleberg’s sporting and hunting shop, where he saw a Krag-Jørgensen. The Krag had been patented in 1894 by Colonel Krag and Gunsmith Jørgensen, and was manufactured by Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk just as the chamber charger had been, though a sea of craftsmanship and technical advancements separated the two. The Krag had attracted attention around the globe as the world’s most advanced and precise rifle, and it was Norwegian.

The projectiles were amazingly long and just 6.5 millimetres in diameter, with an muzzle velocity of an unbelievable 770 metres per second, so there was nothing on this Earth that moved faster than the bullets shot from a Krag, and it was said to be able to kill from a distance of 600 metres. All the bother of preparing the chamber charger to fire was eliminated with a little waterproof cartridge, and not just that: the Krag could take up to six cartridges at once! He had studied the mechanism closely.

On the train home he had sat in the gangway next to an old lady from Hundorp, the Krag clamped between his knees, and at each station more folk came over to take a look, all wanting to see if the magazine really flipped open as they had heard, and if the mechanism was really as smooth as everyone said, and the old woman said if they could make something that fine here in Norway, there were no limits to what the country could do when they got rid of the Swedes.

In Fritzner’s Old Norse dictionary and discovered that frjá did not necessarily mean “friend”. In an even older sense it meant “to love”.

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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Book Review Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

This is a witty, cynical, thought-provoking novel delivered with fast moving dialogue. I found he book misanthropic and unrelentingly fast moving.

EXCERPTS:

He allowed himself to be querulous about how the Americans had promised us salvation from communism if we only did as we were told. They started this war, and now that they’re tired of it, they’ve sold us out, he said, pouring me another drink. But who is there to blame but ourselves? We were foolish enough to think they would keep their word. Now there’s nowhere to go but America. There are worse places, I said. Perhaps, he said. At least we’ll live to fight again. But for now, we are well and truly fucked. What kind of toast is right for that?

The words so stark and black on a bare white page—“consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Nothing Emerson wrote was ever truer of America, but that was not the only reason I underlined his words once, twice, thrice. What had smitten me then, and strikes me now, was that the same thing could be said of our motherland, where we are nothing if not inconsistent. On our last morning, I drove the General to his office at the National Police compound.

Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

The mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.

These were thoughts, not deeds. We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.

He was more interested in threatening the shoplifters with severe bodily harm until they fell to their knees, surrendered the items hidden in their jackets, and kowtowed for forgiveness. Bon was merely teaching them the way we had been taught. Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars.

Christian ideas being so important to the American people that they had granted them a place on the most precious document of all, the dollar bill. IN GOD WE TRUST must even now be printed on the money in their wallets.

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Up from Slavery, an autobiography - Five Star Book Review

 Up from Slavery, an autobiography by Booker T. Washington

An autobiography of one of the most outstanding personalities that left his political and philosophical imprint on America after the Civil War. An exemplary citizen.

EXCERPTS:

The slave system on our place, in a large measure, took the spirit of self-reliance and self-help out of the white people. My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, ever mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry. The girls were not taught to cook, sew, or to take care of the house. All of this was left to the slaves. The slaves, of course, had little personal interest in the life of the plantation, and their ignorance prevented them from learning how to do things in the most improved and thorough manner. As a result of the system, fences were out of repair, gates were hanging half off the hinges, doors creaked, window-panes were out, plastering had fallen but was not replaced, weeds grew in the yard.

As a rule, there was food for whites and blacks, but inside the house, and on the dining-room table, there was wanting that delicacy and refinement of touch and finish which can make a home the most convenient, comfortable, and attractive place in the world.

Withal there was a waste of food and other materials which was sad. When freedom came, the slaves were almost as well fitted to begin life anew as the master, except in the matter of book-learning and ownership of property.

I would say that I think I have learned, in some degree at least, to disregard the old maxim which says, “Do not get others to do that which you can do yourself.” My motto, on the other hand, is, “Do not do that which others can do as well.”

I make it a rule to clear my desk every day, before leaving my office, of all correspondence and memorandum, so that on the morrow I can begin a new day of work. I make it a rule never to let my work drive me, but to so master it, and keep it in such complete control, and to keep so far ahead of it, that I will be the master instead of the servant.

There is a physical and mental and spiritual enjoyment that comes from a consciousness of being the absolute master of one’s work, in all its details, that is very satisfactory and inspiring. My experience teaches me that, if one learns to follow this plan, he gets a freshness of body and vigor of mind out of work that goes a long way toward keeping him strong and healthy.

I believe that when one can grow to the point where he loves his work, this gives him a kind of strength that is most valuable.

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It Would Be Night in Caracas - Book Review - Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo

Fascism seems simple to sell to the populous. Witness its explosive expansion as it swept the world before WWII. Central and South America fell into that same drainpipe and the US teeters on the brink at this moment.

This timely novel is an eye opener.

It could happen anywhere.

EXCERPTS:

When the money to fund the fleet dried up, the state decided to compensate members with a little bonus. While they would receive a full revolutionary salary no longer, they would have a license to sack and raze with abandon. Nobody could touch them. Nobody could control them. Anyone with a death wish and an urge to kill could join their ranks, though in truth many acted in their name without any connection to the original organization.

They ended up forming small cooperatives, collecting tolls in different parts of the city. They erected tents and spent the day nearby, lounging on their bikes, from that vantage spying their prey before kicking the bikes into life and hunting them down at gunpoint.

I went down the seven floors on foot. A woman started weeping loudly upon arriving in the ER. Her father was the man with the gunshot wound that two nurses had pushed past me earlier. He had died before reaching the operating room. They cut us down like trees. They killed us like dogs.

Mountains of boxes, sticks, mattresses, and almost twenty government-logo-stamped boxes of food. The people who were given those packets had certain obligations: to show up without question at any event or demonstration in support of the Revolution; and to deliver simple services that went from denouncing neighbors to forming commands or groups in support of the Revolution.

What began as a privilege for civil servants spread as a form of propaganda and then of surveillance. Everyone who collaborated was guaranteed a box of food. It wasn’t much: a liter of palm oil, a packet of pasta, another packet of coffee. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they gave out sardines or Spam. But it was food, and hunger had a tight hold on us.

The sewage had risen far above our heads. It had buried us. Him, me, the rest. This was no longer a country. It was a septic tank.

I glanced around the room one last time. My mother and I were the last inhabitants of the world that fit inside these walls. Now both were dead: my mother, my home. My country, too.

If she wants to live, Adelaida must leave Venezuela, and her old self, behind

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Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks - BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks

Cloudsplitter is a novel of the American Civil War from the beginning seeds that took root and divided the nation, murdered thousands of dedicated and determined zealots, and smolders on to his very day.

This revelation reveals the closed-mindedness and mass mob mentality that can be sold anything, even a war.

EXCERPTS:

The motives of the pro-slavers for coming out to Kansas were no less mixed than those of us Free-Soilers: like us, they had come for land, for pecuniary advancement, and to wage war over slavery, usually in that order. And, to be truthful, their wild, violent, racialist, and pro-slavery rhetoric was no more incendiary than ours. The difference between the two sides was that, whereas their rhetoric was Satan’s, ours was the Lord’s. They shrieked at us from Satan’s camp, and we trumpeted back from the Lord’s. That is how Father saw it. We were not superior to the pro-slavers by virtue of our intrinsic morality or our intelligence or our farming and animal husbandry skills or our weapons or even our courage, he daily preached to us. No, we were made superior solely by virtue of Him whom we had chosen to follow. The stinking darkness of institutionalized slavery had made the Southerners into a foul and corrupt people. It had stolen their souls and had made them followers of Satan. For centuries, they had resided in a permanently darkened pit, and thus, to them, the world was a dimmed, low, pestilential place. We, however, when we gazed onto the world, we stood as if on a peak bathed in the bright light of freedom, which enabled us to see the true nature of man, and therefore, simply by following our own true nature, we were able to follow the Lord God Almighty.

Liberate all the white and black children of the Lord from the obscene stink and corruption of slavery. Simply, if we would defeat Satan, we must first defeat his most heinous invention, which was American Negro slavery.

Belief in that higher law required us to dedicate our lives to the overthrow of chattel slavery and racialism.

Father stamped his feet and grew nearly apoplectic with rage against the regulars, as he did against the President of the United States, the Democrats, and even the Republicans, against the abolitionists back East who were now and then reluctant to send him money and arms, against the timidity of the Free-Soil authorities in Lawrence and Topeka, and, always, against the pro-slavers, the Missourians, the Border Ruffians, the drunken Southern Negro-hating squatters down along the Pottawatomie River who were threatening in their newspapers and meetings to wipe the Yankees, and especially us Browns, off the face of the earth.

They were a staggering, loutish bunch of poor, ignorant, landless Southerners, men who bragged that they had come over to Kansas to help themselves first, by seizing abolitionists’ land-claims, and the South second, by killing as many Yankee nigger-lovers as they could find.

They have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.”

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My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy by Katherine Clark - Five Star Book Review

 BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy by Katherine Clark

In 1972 as fate would have it my wife and I first encountered Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, on the maiden voyage of our dream boat Dursmirg. This was one of the Sea Islands with no bridge or telephone and had just gotten electric. The population was 85 and eleven were white. Pat Conroy had just been there, written his controversial book The Water is Wide and monumental change was about to change this place forever.

It was an enchanting place still locked in a forgotten century with more ox carts than automobiles.

We fell in love with the place and even wrote a book about it, Sailing the Sea Islands: Travels of Dursmirg.

We were so very lucky to to find this once in a lifetime place and the timing was right.

This biographical story of Pat Conroy is a classic and a real gem...we loved it!

Excerpts:

When someone once asked him why he collaborated with me on this book, Conroy replied, “My vanity got the better of my false modesty.” Although I love that response, I believe he was being—as usual—comically self-deprecating. A more serious and true answer to that question can be found I think in The Lords of Discipline, when the protagonist Will McLean reacts to the cruelties and injustices he experiences by vowing to himself: “I shall bear witness against them.” Conroy himself suffered cruelties and injustices throughout his life, from the time he was a child beaten by a violent and abusive father. The man who emerged from the crucible of chronic trauma was a warrior of words, determined to bear witness to the wrongs inflicted on the innocent and vulnerable by the corrupt and powerful. Pat Conroy never stopped being such a warrior, never ceased in his mission to bear witness against all kinds of evil, both individual and institutional.

There was a time when I had blood surging through my veins, when I was young and could not do enough good for the world. So Bernie and I applied to the Peace Corps. When we never heard from that, Bernie found out about this job on Daufuskie Island.

It was the first year of teacher integration, and the county was in a bind. They needed some white schoolteachers on this all-black island, which had two black teachers there already. So Bernie said, “Pat, why don’t you and I go over, rent a house and live there?

In the world of literature I don’t like bindings; I don’t like handcuffs; I don’t like readers who point and say you cannot go there; you are not allowed to go.

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Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex by Owen Chase - book review

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex by Owen Chase

In the early 1800s at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution demand for lubricants and illuminating fuel oil drove demand for whale byproducts to price levels that skyrocketed the whaling industry. This story is a part of that frenzied rush to harpoon every last whale, akin to the manic determination to exterminate every last buffalo and passenger pigeon.

This true and gripping narrative is stranger than fiction. The second half of the book is a collection of more stranger than fiction whaling thrillers.

EXCERPTS:

From the accounts of those who were in the early stages of the fishery concerned in it, it would appear that the whales have been driven, like the beasts of the forest, before the march of civilization into remote and more unfrequented seas, until, now they are followed by the enterprise and perseverance of our seamen even to the distant coasts of Japan.

The ship Essex, commanded by Captain George Pollard, junior, was fitted out at Nantucket, and sailed on the 12th day of August, 1819, for the Pacific Ocean, on a whaling voyage. Of this ship I was first mate. She had lately undergone a thorough repair in her upper works, and was at that time, in all respects, a sound, substantial vessel: she had a crew of twenty-one men, and was victualed and provided for two years and a half. We left the coast of America with a fine breeze, and steered for the Western Islands.

Of the passage of this famous Cape it may be observed that strong westerly gales and a heavy sea are its almost universal attendants: the prevalence and constancy of this wind and sea necessarily produce a rapid current, by which vessels are set to leeward; and it is not without some favorable slant of wind that they can in many cases get round at all. The difficulties and dangers of the passage are proverbial; but as far as my own observation extends (and which the numerous reports of the whale men corroborate), you can always rely upon a long and regular sea; and although the gales may be very strong and stubborn, as they undoubtedly are, they are not known to blow with the destructive violence that characterizes some of the tornadoes of the western Atlantic Ocean.

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The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology by James A. O'Kon - BOOK REVIEW

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology by James A. O'Kon

The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology is an extensive compendium of the stand alone scientific knowledge base that impacts the world’s economic and health environment to this day handed down to us by the ancient Olmec/Mayan civilizations.

This was an excellent book except for the following that were important to development of the world’s economic health and overlooked in the book: 1. Nixtamalization of maize (Indian corn) and numerous medicines such as hypnotic drugs like morning glory blossom seeds. If you eat four seeds you will feel good, but if you ingested forty you will begin building pyramids.

2. The Chontal Maya and their extensive sea going trade network to North America, South America and the Caribbean Sea. Copper from upper Michigan, Inca produce and craftsmanship plus the sharing of sustaining agricultural technology...just a few of the multitude of acquired and innovated achievements that being the hemisphere’s largest exporter of sea salt. This sea salt trade was commandeered from the Maya by the conquistador Spanish and continues production in northern Yucatan to this day.

EXCERPTS:

At the height of their civilization, their scientific and technological achievements were more advanced than any other culture on the planet.

Maya created written almanacs of solar and lunar cycles of Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn with great precision.

Maya mathematical system used a base of 20, rather than a base of 10 (used in European mathematics), and enabled the calculation of massive numbers using only three symbols in addition to the basic functions. Their development of positional mathematics enabled the calculation of numbers in magnitudes of the hundreds of trillions.

These masters of the written word not only chronicled the history of the Maya and executed daily correspondence that managed the city-state, but they wrote thousands of books dealing with numerous and diverse subjects including history, royal lineage, matters of astronomy, mathematics, calendars, technology, medicine, law, ritual, music, and the natural history of plants and animals, among other subjects. During the Classic Period, from AD 250 to AD 900, the sophistication of Maya arts and sciences soared while Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages. When the Maya were enjoying the good life in their grand cities with populations of 100,000, London was a swampy river trading town with 9,000 inhabitants.

A popular part of American and world history books, the chronicles of the King under Spanish Colonial rule, and best-selling novels, all of which brought the romantic story of the Inca and their bridges to the attention of the world. This was not the case for the Maya, whose civilization had collapsed 600 years before the conquest and did not have Spanish chronicles describing examples of their lost technology.????? (only in the state of Yucatan)

Because of the records left by the Spanish chronicles, the Inca had a historic advantage over other pre-Columbian cultures, with the exception of the Aztecs. The Maya did not have this advantage. The Maya civilization and its technology had collapsed 600 years before the conquest. ???? (not so)

Maya society optimized their disposable time for advancing science and expanding ideas. This disposable time was made possible by the bountiful harvests that enabled city dwellers freedom from farm labor. Nixtamalization?

Maya cities were masterpieces of artistic and technological creativity brought to realization by the invention of cast-in-place concrete, tall structures, efficient infrastructure, and city planning. The urban city-states were a tour de force of Maya intellectualism. The Maya transportation systems with all-weather roads and seagoing vessels brought wealth to the city-states by enabling successful trade throughout Mesoamerica and across the seas. Chontal Maya?

Fortune turned against the Maya: between the fateful period of AD 790 to AD 910 the greatest drought in 7,000 years engulfed the Yucatan, brought about demographic devastation on a scale unparalleled in world history, and destroyed their exquisite scientific civilization. (only in the northwestern Yucatan)

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Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid - book review

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid

A once in a life time epic adventure brought to fruition by a young high school graduate of Norwegian extraction. Meticulously planned and spurned on by youthful exuberance this escapade would prove to be a dangerous undertaking.

I originally read the book over thirty years ago. This trip had been in my mind my whole life and as adventuresome as I am I was very happy that Eric Sevareid made the trip and documented it so exquisitely to satisfy my dreams of wanderlust.

The book is a real thriller even on the second read.

Excerpts:

Two young men about to graduate from high school, begins as do many youthful dreams. On the cusp of adulthood, with nothing ostensible to lose, Eric Sevareid and his friend Walt Port decide to leave the comforts of their homes to seek adventure—in a secondhand, eighteen-foot, voyageur-style canoe. While Minneapolis was already a mature city in 1930, the wilderness of the great north woods was as close as a train stop, or two, away. Early in the boys’ trip, just a few hundred into the eventual 2,500 miles, they look out over the Minnesota River from a tower at Fort Ridgely. From this high vantage Sevareid muses that there is much more river ahead! Their long trek north along many rivers, passing early trading posts and eventually reaching the great Hudson Bay and sea beyond, would be the first documented canoe trip along this historic route.

I am sure there were tears in his eyes, and I know there were tears in mine, and in Walt’s. Half a mile away, at the first bend, we turned and saw his tall figure at the water’s edge. He was still watching us. The doctor’s parting words repeated themselves in my brain continually during the rest of the day: “Don’t let anyone, no matter who he is, convince you that your trip can’t be completed.

"You have youth and strength, and courage too, I hope, and with a little common sense you can do it.”

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Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz - book review

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz

Extraordinary documentary of the evolutionary progression of organized religion and governmental extremes that taxed, punished and tortured to build a power base while amassing ill-gotten wealth.

This tome is a collection of facts arranged chronologically as civilizations evolved.

Points proven; It is far better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent.

EXCERPTS:

Jesus Christ said much about love, but precious little about sex. Although his own life was relatively chaste by local standards, the fine points of sexual behavior were not his main concerns. He made no statements on carnal relations between the unmarried or homosexuals, he was tolerant of prostitutes, and he was less harsh toward adulterers than the Jews had been. But Jesus the man did not last long in this world, and soon his word was taken up by others. His most influential followers were consumed with sex in all of its permutations and devoted much of their attention to questions of sexual morality. Jesus’s relative indifference never prevented the Christian fathers from devising a violent array of restrictions in the Savior’s name.

First generation of Christian sages was the Apostle Paul, who taught that sexual behavior could be nearly as bad as murder: Homosexuals, masturbators, adulterers, anyone who sought sexual satisfaction for its own sake were, he said, to be barred from the kingdom of God.

Paul was no great proponent of matrimony either.

Marriage was a crutch for those too weak in their faith to give up sex entirely. “It is better to marry than to burn,” so if they could stand it; those who were already married should stay with their husbands and wives. No more divorce, remarriage, prostitutes, or concubines were permitted. To keep a lid on adulterous desires, Paul instructed husbands and wives to submit to each other’s sexual demands

For the common Christian, sex was acceptable in limited quantities, at least until Judgment Day.

Polanski’s crime was an accident of history. It was only recently that encounters between men and girls that age became illegal at all. Had he been caught less than a century earlier, the law would have looked the other way. California’s legal age of consent during the nineteenth century was ten, as in most other states in the Union (in Delaware, it was seven). The state raised it to fourteen in 1889 after a tussle between Christian pressure groups and male legislators.

Depictions of male homosexuality were risky even though private homosexual sex was no longer strictly illegal. There were more prosecutions against homosexual pornographers than there were against homosexuals. “Sapphism” was particularly irksome to the police. Absent special certification, women were not even permitted publicly to wear men’s clothing in public.

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