Fresh Start

I retired from the classroom in May. I still sub and teach a couple of classes at a local college, but I have more time to actually read for pleasure.

This semester I also get to teach a class that will cover four recent works that I will try to make a few comments about. I hope to read 25 books for pleasure in 2019. I doubt that I will review all of them, but I plan to make comments while reading or post a quotation or two that I find interesting.

If I review a book that you've read or record a quotation that you enjoyed reading, feel free to leave a comment below

Current Reads

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Eward O. Wilson

Sixty pages in: Wilson has given a brief, breezy, highly readable history of the Enlightenment as as he begins to lay out his theory that science can be used to unify all knowledge.

Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice

Thirty-five pages in: Rice's fictional Jesus is sailing from Egypt to Jerusalem.

First Post

I'm cheap in an oxymoronicly extravagant way. I seldom buy hardbacks unless they are on sale at Barnes and Noble. I do, however, spend way too much on paperbacks. Of course that means that I'm always behind the curve.

A couple of years ago, a wise gentleman told me he writes an essay over every book he reads. Lately, there has been several Internet memes about books that have changed lives here and here. There's an older list here. There have also been summer reading memes here and here. I know each meme recycles.

Anyway, it seems like a good idea to write a short entry about each paperback I finish. If nothing else, it should keep me on track as I try to read a variety of fiction and non-fiction

The Rising Tide by Jeff Shaara

I loved Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, a novel about Gettysburg that featured character sketches of both famous players like Lee and lesser know soldiers like Chamberlain. His son Jeff has created a cottage industry by using that formula for other Civil War events, the Mexican American War, the Revolutionary War, WWI, and, with The Rising Tide, WWII.

I thought that The Killer Angels turned Lee into a classic tragic hero, flaws and all. The Rising Tide doesn't have that classic turn, but Eisenhower, Rommel, Patton, Montgomery, and other famous lights of the era are shown with flaws intact. However, the doubts seem realistically, but the egos seem almost cartoonish.

Jack Logan and Jesse Adams are fairly well drawn characters, but both seem to lack the development that Michael Shaara used to create Joshua Chamberlain.

Nonetheless, the novel does a good job of showing the doubts that have to plague any soldier of any rank in a battlefield situation. Shaara also illustrates the enormous logistical demands of a war.

Grade: B

A Quote: But success will come not just by strength alone. Success will come because history demands it. I will not entertain the notion that Adolf Hitler's vision of the world can ever prevail, that one evil man can erase thousands of years of the evolution of civilized society. You do what you must do, General. Your campaigns for the new year might indeed be difficult. But you will prevail. It cannot be any other way.--Franklin Roosevelt (pages 237-238)