Category Archives: Library

The Trees

Posted on October 6, 2008 | Comments Off on The Trees

You mought find it curious, I’ll warrant, that the dialect Yankees have always associated with hillbillies, crackers and rednecks, in fact originated in their own neck of the woods. And so Conrad Richter delivers it in The Trees, the first (1941) book in his Awakening Land triology.

It’s the memorable story of Worth and Jary Luckett, and their spirited children, especially daughter Sayward, woodsies all, who pull up stakes and leave behind their puncheon-floor cabin in 1780s Pennsylvania, treking single-file into the virgin forests of the Ohio Valley to start anew.

Their "early, vigorous spoken language," Richter notes in his foreward, "contrary to public belief, had its considerable origin in the Northeastern states, whence it was carried by emigrants into pioneer Ohio and adjoining territories, where today it has largely disappeared, and along with the Pennsylvania rifle, into the South and Southwest, where it has more widely survived…"

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Posted in Genealogy, Library, Texana

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That enthralling voice

Posted on September 2, 2008 | Comments Off on That enthralling voice

Baby Barry as the corrupted wizard Saruman from LOTR? So says the Seablogger in what some might see as a stretch. But when it works, it works, and it sure works for me.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Scribbles

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Is Mac inside Barry’s OODA Loop?

Posted on September 2, 2008 | Comments Off on Is Mac inside Barry’s OODA Loop?

Chet Richards, one of the guardians of the theories and memory of the late, great Air Force fighter-pilot and military strategist John Boyd questions this contention of Charlie Martin’s in American Thinker re Mac’s choice of Sarah Palin for veep. Martin uses the term too loosely, suggests CR who says it’s too early to tell. CR’s claim that the pick was predictable, however, is probably unique. No one else I know of expected Mac to pick a woman. I think the old Navy fighter pilot, indeed, has generally been inside Baby Barry’s OODA Loop for some time now with his sharp, quickly-produced teevee ads. Whether he can stay there remains to be seen.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Science/Engineering, Scribbles, The War, Troops

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A difference of fathers

Posted on August 23, 2008 | Comments Off on A difference of fathers

The pre-campaign memoirs of B. Hussein Obama and John Sidney McCain, like their presidential candidacies, couldn’t be more different, despite similiar titles: Obama’s Dreams from My Father and McCain’s Faith of My Fathers.

Mac’s book, published in 2000, is the spirited yet self-deprecating narrative of two fighting admirals, Mac’s father and grandfather, and his use of their examples about duty and honor to survive five years of torture and abuse as a prisoner of war with his self-respect intact. 

Obama’s tale, published three years earlier, is of his search for identity, and for the black father who abandoned him and then died in an accident. Barry had little faith or much of anything else to fall back on, except for the sacrifices of his mother’s white, working-class family. Yet race, rather than the example of the white grandmother who raised him, became his guiding conception. In the end, as Victor Davis Hanson puts it, I just couldn’t take his "idealization and myth-making about a polygamist, alcoholic and absentee Marxist father."

Not many people will bother to read both books, I’m sure, but if they do, they’ll have no trouble figuring out who’d make the best president of the United States.

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Posted in Library

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Daily joins others on the block

Posted on August 14, 2008 | Comments Off on Daily joins others on the block

The Austin American-Statesman is for sale, not a surprising development given the state of the Internet-oppressed newspaper advertising industry. It joins the San Diego Union-Tribune which went on sale yesterday. Maybe they should try advertising on Craigslist to see who wants to buy.

UPDATE:  Wouldn’t the locals be intrigued, upset, horrified, whatever, if the United Arab Emirites decided to buy? Might be more diversity than the good liberal town is prepared to accept, eh?

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Posted in Library, Texana

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Almost, but not quite, in Iraq

Posted on August 12, 2008 | Comments Off on Almost, but not quite, in Iraq

One more very good reason not to vote for Baby Barry. He’d just throw it all away:

"The Iraqis aren’t yet confident enough to stand entirely on their own; al Qaeda’s savagery still imposes too much fear, while Iran is training terrorists next door. In counterinsurgency, the people must know they are protected. Gen. Petraeus has proven that intimidation can be defeated by placing American soldiers among the population."

Worth the read, from fav author Bing West. 

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Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Library, The War, Troops

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Truman

Posted on August 7, 2008 | Comments Off on Truman

David McCullough’s pullet-surprise book Truman told me a lot about the man that I never knew: That he farmed six hundred acres as a young man, riding a cultivator behind a pair of horses, risked his life in World War I commanding a field artillery battery, and failed as a haberdasher before the Pendergast political machine of Missouri asked him to run for county judge. It’s a lively and touching book, told mainly via Truman’s many letters and diary entries, and those of others who knew him well.

 I originally bought the almost thousand page volume in paper, but it fell apart, so I bought a hardback. That way, Mr. B. can read it when he’s older–and benefit from knowing probably the last president without a college degree.

It’s a good thing for McCullough that his book was published before the Web came along, or it might have been jarred, as it is somewhat for me, by the story of Truman’s eldest grandson. McCullough hardly mentions him, except as a child Truman doted on. I got curious and did a Web search on him. Addicted to drink and drugs, his confused life is a sad footnote to his famous grandfather’s achievements. If McCullough knew the grandson’s tale, he should have included something about it. Even if it would be quite a counterpoint.

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Posted in Library

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