Missive #321 Published 30 July 2024

"No one has been so well equipped as C. S. Forester to dramatize the sea battles of the War of 1812, to characterize the heroes more skillfully, or to comprehend more shrewdly the world unrest that made it possible for an infant republic to embarrass a great nation rich in one hundred years of sea triumphs." — Book promo @ Amazon

Missive #320 Published 29 July 2024

This is part of the American Folkways Series which I have found to be very interesting although all the books are dated they provide some great history. Highly recommended!

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Missive #317 Published 24 July 2024

WAS IT LUCIFER Saul Goodman was after? He was beginning to almost believe it was. But Goodman was a New York cop; only juries believed in fairy tales. And this crazy case that had fallen in his lap—the Iluminatus; did it really exist, a great and dreaded secret cult, counting kings as members over the centuries, a colossus of crime and occult conspiracy? Witchcraft or world blackmail, it was Saul Goodman's baby now, and even the President saw it his way, holding back the National Guard to give Goodman time to track down the evil behind Illuminatus—before it unleashed the anthrax plague that threatened to destroy all creatures great and small.... As weirdly wonderful as the best of Vonnegut, as suspensefully off-beat as Casteneda, here comes Part II of ILLUMINATUS, a vulture's eye view of the dark side of human comedy.

Missive #316 Published 23 July 2024

At a crucial point in the twentieth century, as Nazi Germany prepared for war, negotiations between Britain, France, and the Soviet Union became the last chance to halt Hitler's aggression. Incredibly, the French and British governments dallied, talks failed, and in August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. Michael Carley's gripping account of these negotiations is not a pretty story. It is about the failures of appeasement and collective security in Europe. It is about moral depravity and blindness, about villains and cowards, and about heroes who stood against the intellectual and popular tides of their time. Some died for their beliefs, others labored in obscurity and have been nearly forgotten.

Missive #313 Published 17 July 2024

This is the third book in the Hector Lynch series: after the fact I found that I had read it out of order. I'll now have to read the second one in the series. Severin's fiction is better than his non-fiction in my opinion although he uses a lot of what he learned to write the non-fiction. There are more in the series that I'm going to sometime get to read.