Category Archives: Library

The reader

Posted on April 26, 2008 | Comments Off on The reader

Mr. B.’s second grade teacher sends home a sheet every week wherein he is supposed to log his daily reading of AR (Advanced Reader) books–at least twenty minutes a day. In fact, he reads an average of an hour each day, and by the end of each week has close to four hundred minutes of total reading. So far he prefers fantasy stories. The Pendragon series is his latest favorite. Also Magyk, the first of a trilogy plus. Products, I suppose, of our previous bedtime reading of Harry Potter, Narnia and Lord of the Rings. Despite his own reading, he still likes to be read to, especially at bedtime–fortunately for Mom and Dad, who would miss it more than he might. Someday, I know, the bedtime stories will end. But not too soon, we hope. I have sent off for Tom Sawyer, Detective, now that Huckleberry Finn is drawing to a close.

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Posted in Library, Mr. Boy, Rancho Roly Poly

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The Alamo legend

Posted on April 23, 2008 | Comments Off on The Alamo legend

Thirteen Days to Glory, originally published in 1958, is one of the better myth books of the Alamo. But having only recently read it, at A.C. Greene’s recommendation, I see that it’s shot through with questionable stuff. None is sillier than the "line in the dust" notion foisted on the legend in the late Nineteenth Century by W.P. Zuber. He was a Revolutionary war veteran who was apparently trying to make up for having sat out the battle of San Jacinto as a baggage guard.

So hardy is Zuber’s fable that the D.R.T. now has a brass rod affixed to the flagstones in front of the chapel shrine to commemorate the line. That it is a fraud is logically demonstrated in 2003’s Alamo Traces, New Evidence and New Conclusions. My other favorite Alamo books are the 2000 novel The Gates of the Alamo, with its portrayal of David–rather than Davy–Crockett and ignoring of Zuber’s line altogether, and the 1994 revolutionary military history Texian Iliad, which dismisses the line as without foundation.

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Posted in Library, Texana

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The 50+ Best Books on Texas

Posted on April 14, 2008 | Comments Off on The 50+ Best Books on Texas

This personal guide to Texas writing, by the writer/journalist A.C. Greene, has become my touchstone of late. Although I have read many of the books in it, such as Aransas, Lonesome Dove, Goodbye to a River, Hold Autumn in Your Hand, Charles Goodnight, Adventures With a Texas Naturalist, and Six Years With the Texas Rangers, there’s still many more to go. It’s been criticized for what it leaves out, which is to say a lot of cowboy and cattle industry books and history-as-history. Some, like the stark Journal of the Secession Convention of 1861 and The Commanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement, are hard to find–though the former is now available free in pdf on the Web. I’m going to try Love Is a Wild Assault next, a novel of the Texas Republic.

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Posted in Library, Texana

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Childhood’s End

Posted on April 5, 2008 | Comments Off on Childhood’s End

I enjoyed this classic of science fiction by the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Had managed to miss it in my own childhood during the 1950s (it was published when I was nine), but finally got it read last week. I can see how it’s been a prototype for many a book and movie about space aliens. The Overlords, who rule by fear and awe rather than violence, and the Overmind, which rules them, are arresting inventions. But the ending is bleak, and it’s amusing that, in the 2001 edition I have, Clarke says he grew away from the book’s major themes, such that he was by then, forty-eight years later, ninety-nine percent skeptical of the paranormal and a total disbeliever in UFOs.

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Posted in Library

Barry’s dilemma

Posted on March 30, 2008 | Comments Off on Barry’s dilemma

I see it now, having finished Steele’s A Bound Man. Barry could not disown Rev. God damn America without losing his black constituency, much of which thrives on confronting whites. But if he didn’t, he risked losing his white constituency, which wanted his non-confrontational persona. He made his choice, to stick with Wright, and now sees his white constituency diminishing. Not, perhaps, in his battle with Hilarity, with whom Rasmussen showed him six points ahead on Saturday–though the proof awaits the Pennsylvania primary. But in the five points Rasmussen had him Saturday behind John McCain.

Talking with a Democrat who attended Saturday’s state Democrat convention in Austin, one image stood out. That of the eight thousand plus attendees, all committed to Barry, doing the wave, like pilgrims at a new Woodstock. My friend was thrilled. I didn’t say anything. I kept thinking how little it means in Texas, which McCain can count on. As I think it will not mean much in the rest of the country, especially now that this previously non-confrontational South Chicago radical has crippled his own easy-going aura by clinging to a race-baiting preacher.

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Posted in Library, Scribbles

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A Bound Man

Posted on March 29, 2008 | Comments Off on A Bound Man

My copy of Shelby Steele’s book on Barry came last night via UPS while we were watching the Longhorns drub Stanford, 82 to 62. I haven’t finished it yet (it’s short), but I see that Barry already is practicing what Steele says will be his downfall (I cheated and read the last few pages): he is not a man of policy convictions honed by experience (like McCain and even Hilarity) but an empty suit trying to be everyone’s Magic Negro. Steele maintains that it will not work. I think we know, on the other hand, from Barry’s autobiography and twenty years with Rev. God damn America that deep down he wants to be a big-government, high-taxing Leftist, and if he wants to have any chance at all he’d for damn sure better keep that as quiet as possible. Newermind his race, America has never elected one of those president, either.

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Posted in Library, Scribbles

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The Aventures of Huckleberry Finn

Posted on March 28, 2008 | Comments Off on The Aventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mr. B. almost wept last night when we finished Tom Sawyer, especially after the buildup at the end about how Tom and Huck were going to swear an oath on a coffin, in blood, and become robbers. So he was thrilled to discover the story will continue with Huckleberry as the narrator. His reaction was similar when Narnia, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter books ended. Maybe a little more so with Tom, though. I think it’s because Tom doesn’t like school much, but prefers to be out having adventures. Of course, Tom and Huckleberry are super un-PC these days. Twain is writing about pre-Emancipation Missouri and uses the word nigger. Indeed Mr. B.’s teacher (No-Slack Slayton, as I think of her, though Slayton is not her real name) raised an eyebrow when I mentioned the books to her the other day at our monthly teacher-parent conference. I grinned. I just substitute slave for nigger when I’m reading. It doesn’t pop up that much anyway, and Mr. B. already knows about slavery. They learn about it in second grade now. It’s light, so far. The anti-Americanism will come later, I’m sure. If I do it right, by then, he’ll have enough perspective to see the anti-Americanism for the poltroonish claptrap it is.

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Posted in Library

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