Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert by Jeffrey Tayler BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert by Jeffrey Tayler

Trekking through Morocco's southern desert.

The author, Jeffrey Taylor, is an extremely talented writer who exquisitely paints pictures with words. His talents have made all of his memorable books classics. I am thoroughly impressed and await his next book.

When it comes to out of the ordinary outlandish adventures Jeffrey Tayler has set a standard uniquely his own.

I am thoroughly impressed after enjoying three of his high adventure escapades.

Excerpts;

During the Middle Ages Arabic became a language of science and literature and, by way of Medieval Latin, contributed to English a wealth of now common words, among them “alcohol,” “algebra,” “syrup,” and “coffee.” From the eastern realms of their empire, the Arabs brought back Hindi (“Indian,” later called “Arabic”) numerals and passed them on to Europe;

The Indian concept of zero permitted the birth of modern mathematics and science. The Arabs kept alive the ancient Greek notion that the earth was round and, through a work in Latin, delivered it to Columbus, thus aiding his discovery of the Americas.

“Come, let us show you how to pray!” Another: “Embrace Islam! If you speak Arabic you must embrace Islam!” They meant to express goodwill toward me by urging me to convert. I smiled and tried to think of a way to answer without causing offense. Noureddine came over and stood next to me. “I’m going to teach him all about Islam.” Ali said, “God will send him faith when He chooses.” “God willing!” all said. That put an end to the conversation, and we moved on. It was a tactful way to evade the question, and I would remember it.

Faith was a personal matter, and that we accepted it as such made it possible for us to become good friends.

I wanted to relax as they had, but now, with this talk of floods, I found I couldn’t. “Wait a second,” I said. “We’re camped right in the middle of this wadi and you’re telling me we could be swept away by a wall of water in the middle of the night?”

I asked Hassan what the Qur’an suggest Ruhhal use to wash themselves after sex when they were in the desert, away from water. (Bathing after intercourse is obligatory in Islam.) Did they apply the same thorn-spiked sand they used before praying?

THE SUN that had warmed us back to life at dawn in February now exhausted us by nine A.M. with its fiery April resplendence.

Life is too short to hold grudges; and we must do good to others. Bad deeds always come back to us.

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River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler - Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler

This is extraordinary trip not just trough Siberia but through more than three hundred years of brutal, inhuman, and barbarous history from the Czars to Putin. Brilliantly written and superbly edited. Fast moving without a dull moment. Worthy of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS;

In the sixteenth century Russia was poised to shed its identity as Rus’, a European state of Eastern Slavs, and become Russia, a country that would be ruled by a majority Russian population but comprise more than one hundred ethnic groups on two continents, practicing not only Orthodox Christianity but also Judaism, Islam, Shamanism, and Buddhism. Muscovy and other north Russian principalities, most notably that of Novgorod, had already penetrated the European Arctic, taking advantage of the isolation that distance and cold afforded them from Tatar-Mongolian overlords, whose presence was strongest in the warmer and more fertile regions of the south, in what today is Ukraine.

Cossacks ventured down the Lena and its tributaries out into the Arctic and Pacific oceans, sailed through the channel dividing Asia from North America, and thereby delineated Russia’s easternmost boundaries. Cape Dezhnyov, Russia’s easternmost tip (just fifty-three miles from Alaska), bears the surname of the Cossack chieftain Semyon who in 1648 first navigated the strait, preceding by eight decades the Danish explorer Vitus Bering after which it would be (unjustly) named. It is even possible that some of Dezhnyov’s men found themselves shipwrecked on Alaska’s shores.

initiating the annexation of Siberia, Ivan the Terrible and the Cossacks facilitated Russia’s transformation from a middle-size European state into the largest country on earth, a Eurasian superpower with ports on seven seas covering, during the Soviet days, one-sixth of the planet’s land surface.

Russia still stretches some seven thousand miles east to west and almost three thousand miles north to south—enough terrain to accommodate roughly twice the territory of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. Siberia, of course, would eventually yield a trove of resources far more precious than “fish tooth” and furs, including gold, diamonds, uranium, and, crucially, now, natural gas (of which it holds one-third of the world’s supply) and oil. Beneath Siberia’s permafrost lie the bulk of Russia’s 72 billion barrels of estimated petroleum reserves (the seventh largest on earth) and fourteen of its seventeen fields of natural gas. Oil alone accounts for 45 percent of modern Russia’s export revenues—in 2003 Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia in barrels pumped—and finances 20 percent of its federal budget.

The Lena River would serve as the watery highway down which Russia would travel to superpower status.

Putin spoke often of restoring the state, but for Russians, the state, since Ivan the Terrible’s days, had always been the problem, never the answer.

Life is grief, thieves get rich, the honest stay poor.

Russia is an exacting taskmaster, a bludgeoning educator, and those who suffer under its tutelage here cannot retain their naïveté and illusions—delusions—for long and survive.

As Russia steps back to autocracy, a mode of governance that led it to disaster in the past and could offer it nothing in the future, and, as well-publicized statistical indicators portend a population decline unprecedented in peacetime (Russia, thanks to calamitous birth, mortality, and disease rates, will probably shrink demographically by a third by 2050), I was seized by a desire to find out what had gone wrong. Had I really devoted my life to a doomed land?

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Imperfect Passage: A Sailing Story of Vision, Terror, and Redemption by Michael Cosgrove-Book Review-Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Imperfect Passage: A Sailing Story of Vision, Terror, and Redemption by Michael Cosgrove

This is a great book and a thought-provoking story packed with humorous witticisms. Make no mistake about it, this book is an emotional rollercoaster ride.

I was 32 years old and my wife Jane was 28 when we went over the horizon on our own homemade 46-foot sailboat, Dursmirg. We only had one regret….we didn’t leave sooner. We fulfilled our dream many times over and our adventures generated four books.

Michael Cosgrove’s fast moving book awakened many unforgettable memories.

Imperfect Passage is worthy of more than five stars.

Excerpts:

Playing golf at eighty is not an attractive picture. I had played with some octogenarians before, so I was familiar with how that goes. Here’s a bit of science for you: men in their eighties are weak and slow.

At sixty, it dawned on me for the first time that longevity wasn’t so much a concern as the quality of life I would be experiencing in the years to come. The picture of myself doddering in a wheelchair with oatmeal dripping off my chin scared the hell out of me. Over and over in my head, I heard: “Boy, you only have fifteen, maybe twenty years left

Sheehy hadn’t bothered to write about the eighties, or perhaps that she simply couldn’t come up with a snappy phrase for them, basically said it all. The “Easy Eighties?” I think not. How about the “Aching Eighties.” The “Ehh, Sonnyboy Eighties.” The “Amen-It’s-Over Eighties.” Have to write those down and send them to Sheehy for her inevitable sequel, The Final Passage. I bought the damn book anyway and started taking notes:

I no longer needed to perform for others; I would answer only to myself. My new mantra would be, “Think young, stay young.” If you’re not busy living, you’re busy dying. Go out and live your dream.

“Why don’t they ever go?” “Lots of reasons. I’ve heard ’em all. We’re waiting for the kids to graduate. We’re waiting for Uncle Joe to die and leave us the inheritance. Best one I think I ever heard: we’re waiting for our cats to pass away.”

I’ve seen enough of both sides of the divide to know that money and material objects can destroy the soul. Opulence can wrench families apart, and even our middle-class values no longer sufficiently emphasize togetherness, family, neighbors, human relationships. By our standards, the Polynesians are poor, very poor. But, if you asked them if they feel poor, they would laugh and tell you they are not poor but happy, very happy, with the only way of life they have ever known. I have no statistics to support this supposition, but I am sure that, given the lower rate of stress, the Polynesian people live happier and longer lives than the folks back home in the Mecca of materialism, Orange County, California.

Each crossing got a little bit easier. I’ve always been a firm believer that you can’t do well what you don’t do often. It makes no difference what the activity—sailing across oceans, solving complicated math problems, or making love.

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Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F. Thompson Book Review

 Book Review - Five Stars

Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F. Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXCERPTS:

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

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

Which he was. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and a hell-raiser, but he was also a brilliant writer and craftsman of the language, facts that are still overshadowed by his Wild Man persona. This is the persona most people think of when they hear the name Hunter S. Thompson, if they know the name at all. And that is a shame. 

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

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

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

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXCERPTS from Portage by Sue Leaf

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

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

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

Her indomitable Irish persistence saw her through.

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

EXCERPTS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

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

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

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

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

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

EXCERPTS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

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

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

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

An excellent history lesson and must read book.

Excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Book Review - Five Stars

Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

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

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

EXCERPTS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

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

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

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

EXCERPTS;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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