Loving Scott: A Memoir by Pat Horner, BOOK REVIEW-FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Loving Scott: A Memoir by Pat Horner

A biographical memoir and emotional look into a dysfunctional life of recreational drugs, alcohol, and personalities that complicated lives of exceptional people.

My wife and I are life-long friends with the author’s husband David. David and Pat have visited us in Mexico. They are wonderful intelligent people who found each other, and now enjoy an action packed life together.

This beautifully written and informative book is a great opportunity to glimpse into a real life story of love, tragedy, and loss.

EXCERPTS:

Throughout childhood and his careers in the New York drag scene and makeup business, Scott stayed humble and grounded. He connected instantly to people while he wove through the cruel homophobia of society and the bravado and craziness of the fashion world.

Escape lured me, but as I waited for something, anything to alleviate that sick, deep feeling of dark clouds outside the window, I was reminded by the ever-occurring sun that life would go on, and so should I.

Her lecture tour with Gloria Steinem was described by Gloria as “the Thelma and Louise of the seventies.” “I had to speak first because after Flo, I would have been an anticlimax.” Gloria said. While onstage, a disgruntled man asked Flo if she and Steinem were lesbians. “Are you the alternative?” Flo asked. I was reminded of Dorothy Parker’s words, “Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.”

Flo had dabbled in acting and was comfortable onstage. I was not. After her rousing speech against the Vietnam War, sexism, racism, oppression, and political apathy at the University of Minnesota, Flo called me up onstage to sing “We shall Overcome.”

I developed the photographs, the arm chair was empty—only the kids were at each side. It was supposed to be a family portrait but I had pressed the wrong button and the self-timer didn’t work. This photo spoke to me years later, depicting my psychological separation from the kids due to my growing addictions. I had gone missing.

Lucky for me the forgetfulness and feeling out of control assured me of never becoming attached to LSD. I was too confused.

I was in love again and in denial of our dependence on drugs and alcohol.

I was not a Deadhead but simply someone, fueled by drugs, who fell in love with a musician. Or was I falling in love with drugs?

My poor husband. Years later when I asked how it had been for him during the first years after Scott passed, he said, “It was hard going.”

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Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell - Book Review Five Stars

Book Review - Five Stars

Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell

As WWII was ramping up to begin, fascism was spreading across Europe on the wings of the Blitzkrieg with blood thirsty Francisco Franco and his like-minded followers clamoring for despotic dictatorship. There would ultimately be thirteen overrun countries by war’s end and countless millions of slaughtered victims.

As the French writer André Malraux put it, “Fascism has spread its great black wings over Europe.”

How quickly memories fade as history is about to repeat itself only now with much more sophisticated and deadly weaponry.

EXCERPTS:

The late 1930s were a grim time. Not only had Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini established dictatorships in Germany and Italy, but in half a dozen other countries, from Portugal to Lithuania, Hungary to Greece, régimes of the far right had risen to power, some of them, like the Nazis, making dark threats against Jews. Even in England, the British Union of Fascists boasted fifty thousand members; wearing black tunics, black trousers, and wide black leather belts, they paraded through Jewish neighborhoods of London under a flag with a lightning bolt, shouting insults, giving the straight-arm salute, and beating up anyone in their way.

In the first weeks of fighting, the plotters and their troops occupied roughly a third of Spain. The dominant figure among them quickly became a young general, Francisco Franco—ambitious, puritanical, devoutly Catholic, and possessed by a fierce belief that he was destined to save Spain from a deadly conspiracy of Bolsheviks, Freemasons, and Jews.

He spoke of Germany as “a model which we will always keep before us” and kept a photo of Hitler on his desk. “It is necessary to spread terror,” declared another general, Emilio Mola. “We have to create the impression of mastery [by] eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do.”

Eliminated they were, with a violence far greater than anything seen when Hitler or Mussolini had first seized power. As Franco’s armies advanced through Spain, it was with a ferocity that Europeans had assumed their right in colonial wars but that had seldom been unleashed in Europe itself since the Inquisition. Trade union leaders and Spanish Republic officials, including forty parliamentary deputies from the governing coalition, were bayoneted or shot on sight.

Most regular army officers had joined Franco, and quickly Hitler and Mussolini began supplying his forces with airplanes, tanks, and other weapons, and, from Italy, whole divisions of infantrymen. Against these forces the Republic mustered a smaller number of loyal officers and soldiers, and, trained hastily or not at all, badly armed militias organized by trade unions or left-wing political parties. Desperately short of rifles, artillery, tanks, and warplanes, it tried to buy these weapons overseas. But Britain, France, and the United States were, in varying degrees, leery of the Republic’s left-leaning government, and all of them were loath to fuel a war that might spread to engulf the continent. They declared that they would not sell arms to either side in Spain and pressured many smaller countries to follow their lead.

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, Book Review - Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition) by Jared Diamond

Extremely thought-provoking and extensive in its worldwide scope. This tome answers numerous questions of civilization’s evolution.

EXCERPTS:

A history limited to developments since the emergence of writing cannot provide deep understanding. It is not the case that societies on the different continents were comparable to each other until 3,000 B.C., whereupon western Eurasian societies suddenly developed writing and began for the first time to pull ahead in other respects as well. Instead, already by 3,000 B.C., there were Eurasian and North African societies not only with incipient writing but also with centralized state governments, cities, widespread use of metal tools and weapons, use of domesticated animals for transport and traction and mechanical power, and reliance on agriculture and domestic animals for food. Throughout most or all parts of other continents, none of those things existed at that time; some but not all of them emerged later in parts of the Native Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, but only over the course of the next five millennia; and none of them emerged in Aboriginal Australia.

Why were those societies the ones that became disproportionately powerful and innovative? The usual answers to that question invoke proximate forces, such as the rise of capitalism, mercantilism, scientific inquiry, technology, and nasty germs that killed peoples of other continents when they came into contact with western Eurasians. But why did all those ingredients of conquest arise in western Eurasia, and arise elsewhere only to a lesser degree or not at all?

Chapter 1 provides a whirlwind tour of human evolution and history, extending from our divergence from apes, around 7 million years ago, until the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. We shall trace the spread of ancestral humans, from our origins in Africa to the other continents, in order to understand the state of the world just before the events often lumped into the term “rise of civilization” began. It turns out that human development on some continents got a head start in time over developments on others. Chapter 2 prepares us for exploring effects of continental environments on history over the past 13,000 years, by briefly examining effects of island environments on history over smaller time scales and areas. When ancestral Polynesians spread into the Pacific around 3,200 years ago, they encountered islands differing greatly in their environments. Within a few millennia that single ancestral Polynesian society had spawned on those diverse islands a range of diverse daughter societies, from hunter-gatherer tribes to proto-empires. That radiation can serve as a model for the longer, larger-scale, and less understood radiation of societies on different continents since the end of the last Ice Age, to become various hunter-gatherer tribes and empires. The third chapter introduces us to collisions between peoples from different continents, by retelling through contemporary eyewitness accounts the most dramatic such encounter in history: the capture of the last independent Inca emperor, Atahuallpa, in the presence of his whole army, by Francisco Pizarro and his tiny band of conquistadores, at the Peruvian city of Cajamarca. We can identify the chain of proximate factors that enabled Pizarro to capture Atahuallpa, and that operated in European conquests of other Native American societies as well. Those factors included Spanish germs, horses, literacy, political organization, and technology (especially ships and weapons).

END...GUNS...

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Famous Faces of the Spanish Civil War: Writers and Artists in the Conflict, 1936–1939 - Book Review 5 stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Famous Faces of the Spanish Civil War: Writers and Artists in the Conflict, 1936–1939 by Steve Hurst

Famous Faces of the Spanish Civil War is a fascinating and enlightening in-depth look at the people involved in the Spanish Civil War.

Spain was invaded by Franco, and his fascist followers. The dictatorship he  installed was the last of that era that endured after WWII. He finally died in office of old age. The brutal blood spilled by his insanely and dementedly-driven organization was among the most barbarous of that war.

EXCERPTS:

International Brigades disbanded and leave Spain. Aid from the USSR diminishes to a trickle. The Republican army confounds pessimists by its courage and endurance, but it cannot survive faced with overwhelming quantities of war machinery supplied by the fascist dictatorships.

The Frente Popular was largely controlled by the Communist International, but few of the Cairo society were communists. Most of my mother’s friends were liberals or socialists, but my auntie Mimi and auntie Margaret were staunch members of the Conservative Party who, like Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, had the good sense to see that Franco and his allies, Mussolini and Hitler, were the enemies of British interests in the Mediterranean.

Orwell’s assertion that Spain would end up a fascist state whichever side won, (meaning either Franco style fascism or Stalinist fascism) was both unproven and unlikely.

Franz Borkenau describes, from his own experience, the initial enthusiasm for the Republic of the peasants and citizens of small towns in Aragon, enthusiasm that was turned to bitter hatred by the senseless destruction, the burning of churches and the torture, or murder of anyone that Durutti or his subordinates suspected of being a ‘fascist’. It was Gustav Regler, seasoned fighter and dedicated Commissar, who remarked that men like the poet Aragon and his extremist followers disgraced the Republic and provided ready-made propaganda for the newspapers of the far Right.

The Germans wanted to try out and perfect the Blitzkrieg technique that would later prove so successful in Poland and in France. Mola preceded his advance on the Basque provinces with a chilling warning broadcast to his enemies and dropped from the air in leaflets. He told them that he was about to terminate the war in the north. He concluded that he would ‘Raze Vizcaya to the ground’. Unable to reinforce the Northern army, the only thing the Republican High Command could do was to launch diversionary attacks. These succeeded, at least to some extent, near Segovia, at Brunete, at Huesca and in the Guadarama mountains north of Madrid.

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