How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain by Crawford by Alan Pell Crawford-Book Review

 

Book Review-Five Stars

How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain by Crawford by Alan Pell Crawford

After reading all of Twain’s writings this book was a great way to look into this champion of American story tellers life from a different prospective. I loved the book that gave me a glimpse of this rare personality to see the motivating forces driving him and the financial conundrums he faced, and how he and his family handled them. This book puts a real human face on a one of a kind man...my hero.

EXCERPTS: He was rich. Raised in genteel poverty in small towns in Missouri (when Missouri was still the West), Twain as a grown man had rubbed elbows with the greatest business tycoons of the time. As the author of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he had seen the world, or much of it. Russian princes and English lords fawned over him. Hundreds of thousands of people bought his books and lined up to hear him speak. With his earnings—and his wife’s inheritance—he had built a startlingly opulent, twenty-five-room mansion in high-toned Hartford, Connecticut.

He could see himself as one of the true benefactors of the era. And it was an era he had named when he chose the title of one of his own bestsellers: The Gilded Age.

The turning point, for him as well as for the riverboats, was the Civil War. He was in New Orleans in April 1861, when President Lincoln announced a blockade of the South, including the Mississippi, and Twain was suddenly out of work. While Bixby stayed on throughout the war, piloting an ironclad Union gunboat, Twain, a Southern sympathizer in his early years, had other ideas.

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Preview of Coming Attractions: Hurricane Ian

 

Preview of Coming Attractions: 

Hurricane Ian just swept across Florida. September 2022.

Ironically 22 years earlier hurricane Isidoro was on the same track across the Caribbean, and headed for Florida. My wife Jane emailed her friend Deb in Florida with the news to be on the alert. Deb replied to Jane, “you better take another look”. Sure enough Isidoro headed north then took an abrupt dog-leg turn to the west on track for Yucatan. Steering currents driven by a pressure gradients from an approaching cold front miraculously diverted this giant storm away from Florida.

Isidoro turned west ravaging the north coast of Yucatan sending salty storm surges 20 miles inland.

Isidiro then turned southwest directly at Mérida where it would ravage us in Mérida for 12 tortuous hours. The electrical commissioner announced on the public radio that the service would be cut for three hours while the storm passed.

It would be three weeks before the electric and water service was restored. Outlying districts were without service for up to six months.

Our good friend Armando Troyo had the good fortune to have sold his waterfront home two months before the hurricane struck. After the hurricane his home was gone and even the land it stood on.

This was a very bad storm, but in 1987 hurricane Gilberto, a category five hurricane slammed Yucatan full force driving sea going freighters into downtown Cancun, destroying the first three floors on all structures on the beach, knocking down all the power poles from Cancun to Mérida and not leaving a single leaf on a tree for 150 miles inland from the sea.

Back to Florida: Having lived aboard our boat for 22 years and built or renovated seven waterfront properties in Florida we were observing climate change first hand. At that time there were one or two category five hurricanes every century. Now category five hurricanes strike more than three times per season.

We have a friend on the East Coast of Florida who recently had four direct hits in one year. They have extensive waterfront property.

In the early 1990’s we divested ourselves of all of our waterfront properties and boats. We are very glad we did, and that we have all of our boating experiences behind us. Fortunately we didn’t face a hurricane loss in Florida.

However hurricanes in Florida, the latest being Ian, have left many homeowners destitute because they could not get insured, didn’t get insured or the insurance companies refused their claims. They are now homeless.

We have observed climate change is a reality. Science deniers are blind to reality or don’t care.

This is a preview of coming attractions.

More on Hurricane Isadoro

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown BOOK REVIEW

 BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown

One of the best and most informative books I have read about the Viking era. It is filled with insight, well-researched and wonderfully edited. I loved this glimpse into the dynamic world of history altering courageous high seas pioneers.

EXCERPTS:

If Iceland was settled by Viking bands disgruntled with the king of Norway, there might not have been enough young women to go around. Yet a wife was essential to running a farm. There were certain things no self-respecting Viking man would do, such as weaving or sewing. No man would milk a ewe or make cheese. No Viking would cook, unless aboard ship, and even then it was considered demeaning.

Without a woman (wife, mother, sister, or daughter), a man could not be king of his own hill.

Once the Vikings were in the islands, we can assume they acted as they had in Norway. They were loyal to their king and considered anything in another kingdom fair game. Given that the coast of Norway alone had seven or eight “kingdoms” in the 700s, that made for some fairly loose rules.

History of the Vikings, “Robbing your richer neighbors was a simple way of redressing the injustices of nature.”

The Norse legacy in the British Isles is mainly linguistic. Thousands of towns have Norse names like Derby, Kirby, Wadbister, Isbister, Winskill, Skaill, Laimiseadar, Lacsabhat, Heylipoll, and Kirkapoll, while from Norse the English language gained such words as egg, ugly, ill, smile, knife, fellow, husband, birth, death, cast, take, kettle, steak, leg, skin, lost, mistake, law, and brag. Not to mention ransack.

Why did Viking hordes suddenly descend on the Western world (and some of the Eastern) between 793 and 1066? The smart answer is because they could: They owned the best ships on the seas. But what was driving them? What inspired their technology? Modern historians have not come up with any better explanations than did the medieval monks trying to see God’s purpose in the burning of their churches. According to Adam of Bremen: On account of the roughness of its mountains and the immoderate cold, Norway is the most unproductive of all countries. Poverty has forced them thus to go all over the world and from piratical raids they bring home in great abundance the riches of the lands. In this way they bear up under the unfruitfulness of their own country.

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Viking sailing directions-Greenland to North America. First sail south until butter softens, then turn west.  It works!

Friends - DOING OF DUDLEY DOOLITTLE OCTOBER 2022 10th edition

Doings of Dudley Doolittle: This is the name I use in the sometimes hilarious, outrageous, or cynical short stories posted monthly.

A fictitious name will be used in most of the stories. It is there to protect the identity of the guilty.

These true stories are over half a century old or more.

FRIENDS - DOING OF DUDLEY DOOLITTLE OCTOBER 2022 10^th edition

On our maiden voyage of our Dursmirg in 1972 at Erie, Pennsylvania, we met a couple of Irish\Polish characters that became good friends.

We docked at the city pier in downtown Erie, an extension of the main street that looped around the famous sailing ship of Admiral Perry. (In the War of 1812, the ship made a decisive victory over the British in the Battle of Lake Erie).

Our new acquaintances plugged in our shore power to their there snack bar concession stand on the pier, and a friendship was made.

We had just arrived from crossing Lake Superior, passing through the Soo Locks, transiting Lake Huron, the St. Clair River, visiting many ports along the way including a week docked at Lonz Winery at Middle Bass Island in Lake Erie. Then on to Cleveland, Ohio, and then Erie, Pennsylvania. This was lovely September weather with apples and berries to harvest.

In Erie we invited our new friends over for beer aboard our boat. They loved our galley beer tap. The keg was sucked dry, and our new friends would take us the next day to Koehler Brewery to fill it up. But, first it was off to Nunzi’s restaurant for their specialty.

Tom was a retired policeman. He and his lovey wife had two sons and a daughter.

Tom was a throat cancer survivor, but he had lost his voice box. Miraculously he trained himself to speak, but only while exhaling. The doctors were amazed. Tom’s doctors told him that cigarette smoking was not the cause of his cancer. Why quit? He trained himself to smoke again by pinching the open breathing hole in his throat.

Later the family moved to Florida. We kept in contact and visited them several times. They made us feel like part of the family.

One spring day while Jane and I were returning home to St. Augustine, Florida, with our shrimp trawler Secotan, we docked at a marina near where Tom and his wife lived to fuel and called them. Tom’s wife answered and said to me “Things have changed, but we need to see you.” They drove to the marina. Tom had definitely began to waste away but still managed his big Irish smirk upon seeing us. He stoically told us that his cancer had returned and his days were numbered. He lifted up a gauze bandage covering up his throat and revealed what remained of his cancer ravaged throat. It was ghastly in the extreme. I shall never forget it.

At that moment I said to myself; “There is not enough tobacco in the entire world to make what Tom is going through worth it.” Tom’s wife continued to smoke, and they were both gone in a short time. My dad used to say; “Nothing is so bad it is not good for something.” I never touched tobacco the rest of my life.

After thought: In a country with the very best politicians that money can buy, the tobacco industry bought lobbyists and clever lawyers raking in billions of dollar for the next 40 years, and unmercifully condemning customers and their families to torturous deaths.

Now I don’t smoke and I don’t chew. And I don’t go with girls who do.

INDEX TO DUDLEY DOOLITTLE STORIES

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