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I just finished listening to the audio book of Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country. This is a wonderful book in whatever format it is experienced. However, the reader of the audio book was absolutely perfect, pegging the South African accents of various peoples.
The book was published in 1948 and set in 1946. It is a book of many flavors including that of a cautionary tale. Knowing a little of the history of South Africa after Continue reading “Keep Well, Go Well”
I had a very brief and exceedingly undistinguished career in the Boy Scouts of America. I am going to attribute the briefness to the frequency to which my family moved due to the nature of my father’s work. I started the Boy Scouts in Toms River, New Jersey. I do not remember much about that experience except we met in the basement of a church of some Protestant denomination. I remember learning the Scout salute, handshake and some knots.
Best I recall I went on one camp out with the troop to a larger jamboree of Continue reading “I Finished a Task Started in Childhood”
To be blunt, I am not quite sure I liked this novel. It took me two checkouts from the library separated by a few weeks to get through the book. I did get sucked into the narrative at the latter half of the book. Having said that, this is also a novel that if you can get through it, it sticks in your mind.
The best way I can come up with to describe this book is Theodore Dreiser riffing on Dostoyevsky’s psychological drama in Crime and Punishment with the second half of the book a courtroom drama.
My problem with the book is threefold. Continue reading “An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser”
I’ve been fascinated by Benjamin Rush ever since as a grade schooler, I realized that there was a signature on the Declaration of Independence with the same last name as mine, Rush. Rush is not the commonest of last names. Of course, I fantasized that he might be a direct ancestor or other relation. At that time there had not been a lot of genealogy done on my family. Since then I have discovered that we are related, not closely, but related. We are 3rd cousins 6 generations removed. We share a common ancestor, Capt. John “Old Trooper” Rush. What is interesting about John Rush is that he was a captain in Oliver Cromwell’s army. If you remember your English history, Cromwell briefly established a republic in Great Britain in the 1650s. Capt. Rush later immigrated to the Pennsylvania colony.
There are several reasons that Benjamin Rush has been assigned to the second tier of founding fathers. Continue reading “Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father by Stephen Fried”
Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” ~ 1st Corinthians 7:1
Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. 9 But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. ~ ~ 1st Corinthians 7:8-9
I sometimes think that I must have been a Russian living in the 1800s before being reincarnated during the Eisenhower administration. For some reason, Russian literature of that period talks to me. Tolstoy is one of my favorite authors, and I thoroughly enjoyed this novella of his.
The reviews I read on this book declared that Tolstoy wrote it to advocate abstinence as Continue reading “The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy”
Quick quiz:
Question 1: Name the most critically acclaimed book written by George Eliot?
Question 2: What is George Eliot’s real name? Continue reading “Silas Marner by George Eliot”
Just some rambling thoughts about The Grapes of Wrath, which I just recently read for the first time.
My first ramble is why did it take me so long to get around to reading this book?
If you read much you know that certain books stay with you more than others. For me, such books are Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, several of Jack London’s books and Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy to just name a few. This book will join that list. It is a powerful novel not easily forgotten. Continue reading “The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck”
The main point of this book is that words matter. And the words that we debate with have been chosen by the conservatives to the detriment of progressive causes.
Someone recently posted on Facebook a quote by Robert A. Heinlein that sums up our current political situation nicely:
“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
The authors phrased it thusly: Continue reading “The Little Blue Book by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling”
This book was first self-published by D. H. Lawrence in Florence, Italy in 1928. It was banned from publication in Great Britain until 1960. It was not published in its original form in this country until 1959. It was considered much too pornographic, however it is pornographic the way Playboy is. You have a mass of text, and then there will be a racy passage. I say racy as by today’s standards it is all rather mild. Lawrence spends more time dealing with the emotionally altered state that good sex brings on than a physical description of sex. Most of such passages are relatively mild. Continue reading “Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence”
This book could have been very easily retitled Men in Love, but that would have gotten Lawrence more grief than he was already experiencing. It is a continuation of The Rainbow focusing on two of the Brangwen sisters Ursula and Gudrun. Ursula, of course, was the focus of the later part of the first book. This is a novel more driven by character than plot. It is also a book in which Lawrence spends a good deal of time expressing his views on class, materialism, industrialism, marriage, love and not so obliquely, homosexuality. Continue reading “Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence”