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Missive #326 Published 5 August 2024

I had never seen Master John Wyclif so afflicted. He was rarely found at such a loss when in disputation with other masters. He told me later, when I had returned them to him, that it was as onerous to plunder a bachelor scholar's books as it would be to steal another man's wife. I had, at the time, no way to assess the accuracy of that opinion, for I had no wife and few books ...'So begins another delightful and intriguing tale from the life of Hugh de Singleton, surgeon in the medieval village of Bampton, near Oxford, and bailiff of Bampton Castle at the behest of Lord Gilbert Talbot. Hugh sets his cap at the delightful Kate, who proves equally resourceful in the search for the missing books. Some very determined adversaries are out to stop him, permanently if necessary - but are they motivated by greed or a more personal animosity? Then the corpse of a poor scholar, who had tried to sell one of the books, is found in the river: but he had not simply drowned ...<.p>

Missive #324 Published 3 August 2024

A very interesting book. It is no coincidence that social media sites use the same techniques to hook their users as the slot machines builders use to hook their players. The book explains a lot about why generation Z is how and why they are the way they are and what can be expected from future generations to come. The good news is that this is a worldwide issue since the Internet is worldwide so the United States is only at a disadvantage to those countries that suppress smartphone usage by their children. The bad news is there are countries that do that.

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.

Missive #312 Published 15 July 2024

The Build-up , Volume 3 of the Stecher Trilogy , picks up the thread of White Mule and In the Money . Although all of the novels deal with the triumphant rise of an immigrant family in the early 1900s, The Build-up is more concerned with the overwhelming drive and ambition of Joe Stecher's wife, Gurlie. After years of hard work, careful planning (and his wife's badgering) Joe's printing business is providing his family with a comfortable income. As soon as her financial goal is realized, Gurlie focuses her attention on another area.

Missive #310 Published 13 July 2024

A user’s guide to economic, political, social and cultural collapse. In the face of political impotence, resource depletion, and catastrophic climate change, many of us have become reconciled to an uncertain future. However, popular perception of how this future might actually unfold varies wildly from "a severe and prolonged recession," to James Howard Kunstler's "long emergency," to the complete breakdown of civilization. In The Five Stages of Collapse , Dmitry Orlov posits a taxonomy of collapse, offering a surprisingly optimistic perspective on surviving the sweeping changes of the day with health and sanity intact. Arguing that it is during periods of disruption and extreme uncertainty that broad cultural change becomes possible, Orlov steers the reader through the challenges of financial, commercial, and political collapse.

Missive #308 Published 10 July 2024

Don't Believe the Hype

Since this book was written, millions of people have taken…, mescaline, mushroooms, whatever. If you've never tried it, chances are you know somebody who has, and they could probably give you a far better story. Huxley's book is boring as hell. He goes on and on with endless descriptions of some work of art (which unless you are an art major, you've never seen) and is constantly referring to artist and people whom you've probably never heard of. Most the time, I had no idea what this guy was talking about. Maybe my drug addled brain just has a hard time with such high-falutin concepts such as 'Gesualdo's madrigals' . The rest is just a lot of big talk. Read it if you must. People will think your're hip and that's worth two stars I suppose.