Missive #179 Published 18 December 2023

The Pyrates is George MacDonald Fraser's tongue-in-cheek homage to the swashbucklers of yore. In these rollicking pages you'll find tall ships and desert islands; impossibly gallant adventurers and glamorous heroines; devilishly sinister cads and ghastly dungeons; improbably acrobatic duels and hair's-breadth escapes; and more plot twists than you can shake a rapier at. A deliriously entertaining combination of high-seas action-adventure and comic hi-jinx.

Missive #176 Published 14 December 2023

There is more to this latest volume in the""Mainstream of America"" Series (Lewis Gannett, Editor) than is indicated by the subtitle: The Settling of the Eastern Shores, 1607-1735. As is proper, the author, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and author of four similar studies, writes of time and place, problems and personalities, in the early American settlements on the Atlantic seaboard, but gives as well a sense of the first stirrings of nationality, of future independence, of which the settlers were barely aware.

Missive #175 Published 12 December 2023

This is what I would call a coffee table book that was originally published as an online book in 2012. There is very little text however the 140 photographs do have captions. Some of them are interesting others not so much.

Missive #172 Published 7 December 2023

This book was published almost 30 years ago with the author predicting what was going to happen over the next 10 to 40 years. A lot of what he thought was going to happen has come to pass. An interesting read although I think the race wars will be driven by 'elites' hiring racial groups to do their fighting for them. Time will tell.

Missive #171 Published 5 December 2023

The second volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume 2 chronicles the history of ancient Greek civilization. Here Durant tells the whole story of Greece, from the days of Crete's vast Aegean empire to the final extirpation of the last remnants of Greek liberty, crushed under the heel of an implacably forward-marching Rome.