Missive #586 Published 31 October 2025

Isolated but far from impotent, Sharpe and his trusty riflemen hold off vast Napoleonic forces in the Portuguese wine country. With years to go before the Corsican Menace is safely quarantined, there is never any doubt but that intrepid, supremely resourceful Richard Sharpe, amiable hero of 18 previous outings (Sharpe's Prey, 2001, etc.), will prevail, though Cornwell, always using good history and always explaining where he has fantasized, never fails to engross and beguile. Sharpe is every gentle reader's secret vision of his or her own self: the victim of idiotic superiors, the idol of his troops, unsure of his place in the world, utterly sure of his place in battle. And doesn't he go to the loveliest places! Now he's in greater Oporto, home to the great red wine and the great English red wine–exporting families, where Bonaparte's troops threaten the city and such lovely citizens as Kate Savage, heiress to House Beautiful and a port fortune, who has disappeared.

Missive #585 Published 29 October 2025

These stories are not a dark as the the two novels by her that I have read. But they are strange or maybe weird is a more apt description. They are all very short short stories with the ebook being only 115 pages. An entertaining read which may not be liked by everyone but you might give it a try.

Missive #584 Published 27 October 2025

Now, in Against the American Grain, Gary Paul Nabhan—cultural ecologist, environmental historian, and lyric poet of the American Southwest—illuminates the outlines of a history too long in the shadows. Whether Indigenous, LatinX, priests, nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it is the resisters, performers, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins who are constantly reshaping America. They have, against all odds, recolored and recovered the future of North America through outrageous acts of resistance.

Missive #578 Published 14 October 2025

The Collapse of Antiquity, the sequel to Michael's …and forgive them their debts is the second and latest book in his trilogy on the history of debt. It describes how the dynamics of interest-bearing debt led to the rise of rentier oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome, causing economic polarization, widespread austerity, revolts, wars and ultimately the collapse of Rome into serfdom and feudalism. That collapse bequeathed to subsequent Western civilization a pro-creditor legal philosophy that has led to today's creditor oligarchies. In telling this story,The Collapse of Antiquity reveals the eerie parallels between the collapsing Roman world and today's debt-burdened Western economies.