Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

The book is only 7500 words; it originally appeared in Holiday as a magazine article in 1949.  E.B. White, one of America's great wordsmiths spent a long hot weekend in New York City and wrote this homage.  He captures a city that is concurrently paradox and paradigm: the center of the world's commerce, entertainment, and politics -- the United Nations building was under construction that summer -- a melting pot of freedom-seeking exiles from across the globe and stifling American towns, home to opportunity and racism, exhausting wealth and desperate poverty, and in flux.  Famous old neighborhoods, monumental edifices, and landmark destinations were already being mourned as they were displaced by newer, shinier, glitzier skyscrapers.  And yet, White recognized that to be in New York was to simultaneously challenge a visitor to become part of the crush and to lose oneself in anonymity, appreciating the past while understanding the future was fully under construction as it alw

A straight-up suspense novel spread across the cities and bush of South Africa.  There is a diamond heist, a rhino smuggled from Zimbabwe to a South African ranch, a rogue cargo ship that might be smuggling high-powered explosives to Cape Town's Muslim terrorists, murderous street gangs, and self-employed crooks.  Tracking all the bad guys are South Africa's Presidential Intelligence Unit, the CIA, the South African Police Service, and a couple of private investigators.  Trackers is divided into three rather distinct books which make the characters and plots easy enough to keep abreast of and Meyer's strength is in making each book gripping and just related enough to the others to make pages fly by, even if nearly all of the women characters in the book appear to have only one character trait: buxomness.

Back in November 2017, John Kelly, President Trump's Chief of Staff, said “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”   Ta-Nehisi posted an article in the Atlantic shortly thereafter, " Five Books to Make you Less Stupid About the Civil War ."  Battle Cry of Freedom  was top of the list.  With good reason. Until the casualties of the Vietnam War were fully counted, the number killed by the Civil War, more than 600,000, was greater than all of America's wars combined.  Kelly's wish that such a calamity could have been avoided is not unreasonable, but as the first third of McPherson's book makes unavoidably clear, the Civil War was fought over the South's insistence that enslaved blacks were property.  Southern owners of other human beings made clear that their property could only be taken by theft and even in such cases, southern owners had as much right to search for and regain their human property as they did when searching f

Peter Gaiman may be one of the finest read aloud voices in audio books and when he reads his own books it's a real treat.  In Norse Mythology  Gaiman brings Odin, Thor, Loki, giants, trolls, and the Valkyries to life and does it in the order in which they emerge first from the void of the earth and then from one another.  I was struck by the parallels to Native American myths and Greek myths.  Thor is powerful, Odin omnipotent, and Loki a trickster and conniver.  The gods are self-centered, deceitful, vain, and manipulative.  For the primitive people whose lives were subject to the whims of gods and fate, it must have all been very satisfying.  Myths, however, are best digested one or two stories in a go, like Bible stories, so their lessons and morals can be pondered and discussed.  Gaiman's voice is wondrous, but taken as a whole -- one story after another -- the book is not so easy to read, or even listen to, too quickly.

bar·do ˈbärdō/ noun (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death. Abraham Lincoln's son Willie died of typhoid fever during the midst of a party at the White House.  While guests were sipping imported wines, poor William expired leaving his mother inconsolably depressed and his father, the President of the United States without hope or happiness.  The party, the mindsets of Abe and Mary Todd, and descriptions of William's illness are detailed with exquisite clarity with extracts of historical texts.  In the meanwhile, in a nearby bardo a huge cast of characters, not unlike those in Thornton Wilder's Our Town , grapple with the arrival of Willie to their cemetery where the large cast is neither dead, nor alive, nor fully aware of their own condition.  They bicker and prod, mingle and show off, apparently ad nauseam.  And then we