SciFi novelist Al Past, a friend and fellow Indie novelist, left a nice review at Amazon on my newly-published Vietnam war novel The Butterfly Rose.
Al didn’t know it when he read the book and wrote the review but he was only my second reader. Check out this latest effort by our very own Cavalry Scout Books. The Butterfly is a Kindle ebook at Amazon for just 99 cents. Come on, big spender. Give it a try.
Comments Off on The Butterfly Rose
Posted in Library, Scribbles, Texana
Tagged "The Butterfly Rose", novelist Al Past
It’s a commonplace among many Vietnam veterans to despise Lyndon Johnson, not only for his escalation of the American war in Viet Nam, but because he allegedly insisted on running the war by himself, to the extent of choosing targets for aerial bombardment of the North.
Lo and behold comes a new book in which it is revealed that Johnson relied on former President Eisenhower for military advice in the running of the war. To the extent that Ike planned a lot of the stuff for which LBJ has gotten the credit/blame. Could the old Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe have been losing his stuff? Of course it was Johnson’s decision to escalate in the first place.
Comments Off on Eisenhower helped LBJ with Vietnam
Posted in Library, Texana, Viet Nam
Tagged Ike helped LBJ with Vietnam, Roberta Vasquez, The President's Club
This deceptively beautiful story may not be A.B. Yehoshua’s finest novel, but it deserves to be ranked with the best. Some of the Amazon reviewers say the English translation from the Hebrew isn’t very good, but I found it thoroughly absorbing through ten days of intermittant reading during a recent trip to Israel. And hated to see the tale end.
Absorbing, in part, because Alef Bet, as the author prefers to be known (for the beginning of the Hebrew alphabet, perhaps meaning sui generis, Latin for unique), takes such pains (without in any way seeming to do so) to put the reader in Israel with the Israelis and their daily lives. And not just “the situation,” as they call the conflict with the Palestinian leadership and the rest of their bad neighborhood’s thugs.
The book’s title has multiple meanings which are gradually revealed throughout the story and the most obvious ones are not the most telling. And the characters, ah, so realistic, the young and the old. If the dialogue sometimes leans towards the expository, each internal narrative is so richly human that you hardly notice. This one is definitely worth your time and money.
Comments Off on Friendly Fire: A Duet
The most amazing revelation in Edward Klein’s The Amateur is that the Obamas dropped the folks who got them to the White House. Never called, never wrote, didn’t even take their calls.
Talk about a sense of entitlement. And an amateurish approach to politics, the profession of the glad hand and constant stroking. Others’ hands and strokings. Not Barry’s. Presumably they’re rebuilding some of those bridges, now that they’re not running away in the polls and will need help to keep their lease.
The book is too short for the $10 Kindle price (much of it is footnotes on sources), but worth it for what it is. The liberal court media has been hiding all this for almost four years now. So Klein has done us all a favor. As, apparently, will the next insider book Barack Obama: The Story.
The latter’s revelations about Obama’s extensive use of marijuana and cocaine in high school and college are eye-openers that could have cost him the election had they been known in 2008. After reading Klein you have to wonder if the narcissist-in-chief is also doing dope in the White House while his appointees hypocritically pursue the drug war.
If you enjoy conservative economist Thomas Sowell’s books as much as I do, even if/when you disagree with him, you owe it to yourself to read his revealing autobio.
Other such men might strive only to make themselves look good. Sowell shows his occasional contentiousness even when it doesn’t reflect well on him.
His fractured family life in the South and North and sometimes youthful destitution are engrossing, as are his starts and stops in education leading to his PhD in economics. And his accidental entry into the Marine Corps and gaming of its daily enlisted life are amusing. Worth your money and your time.
Comments Off on A Personal Odyssey
Tagged A Personal Odyssey, Thomas Sowell
This good 2008 book by Burton Folsom, Jr., a professor of economic history at Hillsdale College, is a grand debunking of FDR’s effort to tame the Great Depression. He didn’t. The buildup for World War II and the war itself did. FDR succeeded only in laying the high-tax foundation of the modern welfare state.
These debunkings—another good one is Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man—are timely because Obamaloot and his socialist cronies have been explicitly following FDR’s lead since they were elected in 2008 to tame (but so far have only worsened) the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s.
Uncle Barry’s new campaign slogan “Forward!” not only is associated with European Marxism, but matches FDR’s 1936 campaign slogan “Forward With Roosevelt.”
Like FDR and his “Brains Trust,” the Obamaloots are ignorant of how business works but deeply suspicious of it, and much prefer government. So they began (as FDR did) with massive public spending (the so-called stimulus) to no apparent benefit except to their political chums (such as the bankrupt Solyndra) and a huge new welfare program dubbed Obamacare— the socialized medicine the Democrat Party has pined for since at least LBJ.
Leftie academic historians have crowned FDR “king” of American presidents. (Funny, they all think they’re kings. Michelle Obama, the first “first lady” to take numerous, expensive, tax-paid vacations, thinks she’s a queen.) But Folsom and Shlaes have the numbers and the proof that pulls back the curtain on King Franklin’s economics disaster. It’s a revealing and timely exercise, and a good forecast of the horrors ahead if King Barry and Queen Mooch win re-election.
Robert McCall was the dean of American space artists and his painting of a proposed moon base (for the 1960s Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey) still haunts my dreams.
It might have come true but for the wasted billions spent on the stupid Democrat (JFK & LBJ) war in Viet Nam. Now with Uncle Barry focused on enlarging the welfare state, it’s unlikely. Unless private companies find a compelling way to make money at it, perhaps through minerals mining.
Fortunately, there’s still time for it to happen, of course, even if it’s long after I’m gone and it turns out to be made-in-China.
Comments Off on Return to the moon
Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Space
Tagged Moon base, Robert McCall, space art
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 