All posts by David Todd

Politics

A Needle, A Knob, A Mesa, A Plateau

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You can’t go around it. How do you handle it if you’re the government and have to navigate through a surge of immigration? [Photo by James St. John]
Following up from my last post, the current failures of the USA immigration system are, I believe, due to the physical and bureaucratic infrastructure for immigration not being able to handle the huge increase in immigrants from all over the world, but especially from nations south of us. By not having the infrastructure systems in place, we are not doing good by these immigrants; we are perhaps doing harm. No one is trying to mistreat immigrants. Our system is simply overwhelmed.

The Biden administration opened the southern border to accept a vast number of immigrants outside the standard quota amounts. Obviously the physical and bureaucratic infrastructures didn’t grow enough to handle them. I’m not sure the systems have grown enough to handle the prior immigrant floods from before the Trump years.

But that brings up a good question. How much do you increase the size of the bureaucratic systems and facilities to handle a temporary flood? If you develop too much to handle what is truly a temporary spike, you have wasted money and provided very little benefit. But if the increase in needs is going to be with us a while, it’s time to increase our capacity to handle needs.

This of it like you’re driving across the Great Plains and in the distance you see the land rise ahead of you. What kind of formation is that? It could be what geologists call a “needle’. A very high but narrow piece of land that sticks up, created by erosion of everything around it. Or it could be a knob. It might be just as high as the needle, but it’s bigger around. Just looking at it from afar it looks shorter than a needle, but it could in fact be taller, the breadth of the formation fooling you.

Next you have the mesa. This is a much wider high landform. You might not be able to see from end to end. After that comes the plateau, a broad landform, the extent of which usually can’t be seen from the ground. The height of a plateau can be deceptive, as there’s no adjacent lower ground to compare to (except at the beginning of the formation).

What does all this have to do with immigration? Is the spike in immigration to the country like one of these landforms? A needle—that is, of extremely short duration but perhaps very high? A knob—a little longer in duration? A mesa—something that, if you climb up it and keep traveling, you’ll be on it for a while? Or a plateau—an increase in elevation that appears to be permanent?

Because, the response you make to the spike in immigration will be different depending on what you are facing.

You really can’t respond to a spike like a needle. It’s extremely temporary. If you climb up it and traverse it you’ll be descending before you know it. This might be like one of the group of several thousand immigrants who came on foot across our border with Mexico. If it happens one time, you can’t really plan for it.

Responding to a knob-like spike is harder. Maybe the situation in Haiti was like this, with the response being temporary protective status. That might have gotten us up the knob but not across it.

The mesa came when those groups of immigrants came one after the other from Mexico. We had no idea if were facing a needle, knob, mesa, or plateau. Hence, our response appeared to be more or less inaction, when in fact we were desperately trying to find housing, food, and medical care for these immigrants.

Response to a plateau-type spike in immigration requires some serious work on our part. It can’t be done in a day, though it might come one quickly, appear to be a needle-like spike, but turn into something else.

That is what I think has happened to our immigration system. The spikes we thought would be needle-like, hence needing no real response, turned out to be either a mesa or a plateau. The immigrants came, with government approval, that approval being either expressed or via neglect. Our system was overwhelmed. Immigrants who came at the beginning of the mesa were not properly processed and hence are being processed now. Our system still isn’t big enough to handle the spikes from past years. Inadequate housing. Lack of medical care. Lack of support in terms of employment. No one to help them become Americans in fact and culture.

So I’m giving the current immigration officials somewhat of a pass in terms of their performance and blaming past officials whose failure to understand just what unfettered immigration meant resulted in their approval for the immigration spike. I hope, for the immigrants’ sake, we build up enough of a system to document everyone. I hope, for the taxpayers’ sake (both current taxpayers and future taxpayers who will have to pay off related borrowing) that we develop efficient systems just large enough to handle the mesa, and maybe an occasional needle or knob, and not a plateau that will perhaps never come,  or, if it comes, never again reduce to former baseline levels.

Politics, rant

A System Overwhelmed

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An ICE facility near Atlanta.

Our political commentary tends to be exaggerated. If the other side is elected, the apocalypse will quickly be upon us. If the Democrats take control of Congress, we will quickly be overrun with illegal immigrants and militant Muslims. If Republicans maintain control of Congress, our democracy [sic; republic] will soon disappear. Send us money so we can run ads and convince the electorate to vote for us.

Part of this exaggerated, apocalyptic rhetoric has to do with our immigration system. All politicians say it’s broken. They also say elect me and I can fix it. But they’ve been saying this since at least the 1980s, maybe since the post-WW2 refugee crisis. Occasionally the system is altered and we see temporary improvement. But a few years later and we always seem to be right back where we were, with an immigration system approaching chaos. That’s certainly where we are now.

How did we get here? And what does that say about our world, our nation, and perhaps ourselves? How do I approach this? Describe where we are today and work backwards? Or start where we were after WW2 (or why not go back to the immigration floods of the early 1900s or mid-1800s?). And do I make this post general or specific? “Scholarly” or familiar?

Well, I have no special expertise on immigration, so it can’t be scholarly. But I am an observer, and I’m able to see how what has happened in one area of life also happens in another area. That allows me to set up certain over-arching principals that seem to govern society at large.

It will take a while to set this up, so stick with me for a while if you can.

I first noticed the principal of overwhelmed systems—call it bureaucratic infrastructure if you like—after the 2001 attack on the USA by Moslem terrorists who hijacked airplanes on Sept. 11 and used them as weapons against us. In response, Americans made a huge amount of charitable donations to help people affected by the mini-apocalypse. The government also appropriated and spent a lot of money in the 9/11 aftermath. Organizations that were used to receiving and spending a million dollars a year suddenly had $10 or $20 million to deal with. A government used to sending 1000 tons of materials overseas suddenly had to send 100,000 tons. The charitable and governmental infrastructure simply wasn’t there to handle it.

It’s just money, you say. Put it in the bank, then write the check and send the aid where it needs to go. Alas, it’s not that simple. A person qualified to handle a million dollars may not be qualified to handle $10 million. A government agency set up to deliver that tonnage to an overseas port (such as in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait) may not be ready to deliver a hundred times the tonnage to a landlocked nation (such as Afghanistan). The charities handling post-9/11 issues were severely criticized at the time (think Bill O’Reilly) for the poor job they were doing with allegations of fraud in handling the donations. As was the government for the work it had to do. The same thing happened after the massive charitable outpouring following the Haitian earthquake. Maybe also after the 2004 tsunami. The criticism was probably just. The performance giving rise to the criticism was predictable.

The same thing has happened to our immigration system. It requires an infrastructure of courts, judges, clerks, lawyers, means of assimilation, housing. Most of that is provided by government; some is private sector. It all worked reasonably well when we had a limit on the number of immigrants admitted each year and a quota system as to where they came from.

But the large increase in immigrants during the Obama years, refugees from Haiti in (probably) Bush and Obama years, and the flood of immigrants during the Biden years broke the system. We didn’t have enough administrative clerks to take down immigrants’ information and then to know where they went. We didn’t have enough housing in place (remember the forced transporting of immigrants to use empty NYC hotel rooms?). We didn’t have enough courts, judges, law clerks, or immigration lawyers to handle the massive increase.

We might seem to be a big country, but we were set up to handle fewer than a million immigrants per year and were simply overwhelmed with multiple millions. So what did we get? I guess we got camps, where lots of immigrants are temporarily housed, where conditions are poor, where women and children are next to gang members, while we try to sort out 20 million immigrants with a system built to handle a million. It takes time. But these are not internment camps as much over-the-top rhetoric states. They are housing camps poorly assembled and probably poorly run by an overwhelmed government agency.

So what have we done by allowing these immigrants to come in without proper paperwork, with inadequate means of following up? Have we made their lives better? We might have done better if we hadn’t had a feeble-minded president followed by an infantile megalomaniac president. Both have made mistakes, though of a different kind. I assume the civil servants working under them are competent. They are simply overwhelmed.

Let’s not think we are doing a good thing by taking in more immigrants than we are prepared to handle. We are harming, not helping, them.

Alas, this post has grown too long to handle discussion of what I believe are overarching conditions that the immigration issue is a symptom of. Perhaps another time.

book reviews, History

Book Review: Abba Eban, An Autobiography

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The dust jacket was ruined at just 100 pages of reading this 610 page memoir mistitled as an autobiography.

The quest continues, the quest to clear out my bookshelves. For about the fifth straight time, I chose a book, not with the idea of enjoyment, but with the idea of gaining space. But, my choice wasn’t just to get rid of a book. Enjoyment was also on my mind, or at least learning something. The book was Abba Eben: An Autobiography. He was an Israeli diplomat and scholar.

I remembered his name from my teen and young adult years. His name came up in newspapers, his face was on TV. He spoke before the UN, took part in negotiation sessions. For most of us, he was the face of Israel for me.

The book is a 610 pg, hardback tome with smallish font. It is extremely detailed in descriptions of Israeli politics. The 6-Day war of 1967 takes 100 pages to describe. The 1973 Yom Kippur war, a 30-day campaign, took another hundred pages. Every conversation with another nation’s diplomats, every telegram, every phone call seems to be documented in the book. That made it somewhat boring as an autobiography, but interesting as a history. It certainly wasn’t what I expected.

Since the book was published in 1977 (as Eben left intense public service) and Eben died in 2002 at age 87, a lot of his life is not covered. That gave an unbalanced feeling. This would have been better as a memoir, maybe titled My Role in Israel’s First Thirty Years. The book succeeds with that title and focus and would have been about a 500 page book. But it really fails as a true autobiography.

So should you go out and find and read this almost 50-year-old book? Only if you’re a history nerd, or want to know more about Israel’s formative years, it’s a great book. For those reasons, I give it 4-stars. But it is not a keeper. Today it goes in the donation box.

History, Politics

A Political Observation

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Please forgive my crude sketch. It’s the best I can do with my limited artwork ability degraded by my post-stroke impairments.

I mostly try to avoid politics on the blog, but here I take the plunge for an issue I care about. I’m currently reading the autobiography of Abba Eben (three days away from finishing, so a review coming probably next week). Thus I’ve been thinking a lot about Israel of late. A cousin who, I believe, approaches life from the conservative end of things, perhaps extremely so, posted this on social media.

If you’re worried about the outcome of the midterms, you can rest easy knowing that Netanyahu will still be America’s president…

To which I facetiously responded, in part:

The last conspiracy theory I heard that is as ridiculous as this was that LBJ assassinated JFK at the launch of the moonshot.

After that she later posted, in part:

Quoting Abbas Araghchi (whoever he is): “Without Israel, There is No Hamas, ISIS, Al-Quada, 9/11, Epstein, AIPAC, Or The JFK Assassination.”

A different cousin who approaches life from the Left wing, so far out there on the left wing that he thinks all Trump voters are Nazi fascist f——- c——- child rapists, etc., posted this on social media:

Trump is owned by Israel because they have videos of him raping children. If you dont know this basic fact then you live in a fantasy world.

It’s interesting how the Left-Right continuum on Israel is not really a continuum at all. Rather, the two ends of the line bend into a circle and meet. The overriding views of both Left and Right extremes seem to be hatred for Israel. Hatred for Israel knows no political ideology. Nor gender.

Does hatred for Israel equal hatred for the Jews? I’m not prepared to say that these two cousins hate the Jews, but it’s a very small step from hating Netanyahu and hating Israel to hating the Jews.

I’ll be the first to admit that, in their extreme response to the Palestinian attack in 2023, Israel has crossed the line from goodness to evil. They have destroyed all the goodwill they built up in their measured response to Arab initiated wars in 1947-48, 1956, 1967, 1973, the 1988 ff intifada, and a few others I’m forgetting. Not only have they lost goodwill, they are raising up in the Arab world the next generation of terrorists and will reap the results of that in 20 to 30 years. They need to stop the Gaza campaign and take the lead in rebuilding Gaza after first spearheading a massive humanitarian relief effort for Gaza. Then they, and the world, need to assist the Palestinians in forming their own nation—something that’s been offered and rejected multiple times in the past—and that nation agreeing to live in peace with Israel. It could be that the West Bank and the Gaza strip will need to be two separate nations. I’m still thinking that over.

I support Israel but do not support what they’ve done in Gaza, what it seems they continue to do in Gaza.

family, Health, miscellaneous

Carrying On

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The days of routine continue, with occasional shake-ups.

Thursday Sept 24, Lynda fell while getting out of our minivan. A trip to the ER showed nothing broken, but her rt wrist is quite bruised and is slow to heal. She’s doing okay through her time of limited capacity.

The traffic light where I have to turn to get Ezra to the high school in the morning is malfunctioning. The left turn signal will not come on and cars are backing up. Eventually a few cars slip through on the red light when no one is coming. I did that this morning after waiting in line over five minutes for the left turn signal to appear, which it never did.

We go for lab work this morning, with regular doctor appointments to follow in a week. Not major, just a break in the routine.

I’m making changes to the layout of my office for Ezra to have a place to do his homework, with space to lay out books and papers. This will be a two-day process, I think.

I got a long letter written yesterday, to a man in prison who might be in a bad way. Today I have a thank you note and a get well note to write. These two will be handwritten. We’ll see if I can do it.

As part of the office re-doing, stuff in the dining room has been exposed, stuff we need to put away or store or something. But first we need to buy a China cabinet for the dining room. I’ve found one on-line, but the logistics of getting it have so far stymied me. Maybe I’ll work on that today.

I made contact with a locksmith to see about having my front door lock worked on, but somehow the matter dropped. Gotta get that going again. Also, gotta call about pest control. We at least know who we’re going to use.

These are just to-do list items, but, given that I’m now feeling my age and perhaps more than my age, is a seemingly insurmountable task that needs to be finished before the next one can be undertaken. I hope to be able to return to multi-tasking someday.

Christianity, expatriate life, family, History, Writing

Thinking Back

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Will this be the title of my autobiography? Stay tuned.

My current read is a large autobiography. How large? Let’s just say I’m on page 448 and am not quite 3/4 of the way through it. So it’s going to be a while before I finish it and post a review.

So what to blog about today? I’ve been slowly putting together material for my own autobiography. Not because my life is notable enough for the world to care, but perhaps someone in the family will. My plans are to write it and leave it behind, at least as reasonably completed electronic files if not printed on paper.

This is surprisingly more difficult than I expected. What are the things I should put in it? How to organize it? What to title it? What style to write in—very formal or casual stories? Do I analyze my life or just report it? How long to make it?

As to titles, I’ve thought of these possibles:

  • The Journey Was A Joy
  • Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies
  • Tales Of A Vagabond

My current thinking is that I’ll use the third of these, but I’m still thinking about it.

One thing I’m also wondering about is how much emphasis to put on transitions as opposed to everyday living. The important transitions I could easily focus on are:

  • Death of my mother in 1965, when I was 13
  • Off to college in 1970
  • Relocation from New England to Kansas City upon graduation in 1974
  • Marriage in 1976
  • Birth of our children in 1979 and 1981
  • Move to Saudi Arabia in 1981
  • Move to Asheboro, NC in 1984
  • Move to Kuwait in 1988
  • Iraq invades Kuwait 1990
  • Move to NW Arkansas in 1991
  • Retirement 2019
  • Move to Lake Jackson, TX in 2026

The listing of these transitions show why Tales of a Vagabond is one of the titles I’m considering and the one I’m currently favoring.

The transition I’m thinking about most currently is my move to Kansas City. This made no sense. I had four job offers I was considering. Three were in Boston and one in Kansas City. Surprisingly, the KC one was for the most money despite the much lower cost of living compared to Boston. But if I worked in Boston, I could have lived at home in Rhode Island and taken the commuter rail to Boston. What to do, what to do? I took the job in KC. When my last semester was over, I loaded up my 1966 Plymouth Valiant with 3-speed on column, well-used snow tires in the rear trying to get some last little use out of them, and headed west.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

So I’m now wondering, 52 years after the event, why I did it. I guess I needed a complete break, a change in surroundings. I was taking baby steps in my new spiritual life, and I needed my physical life to also be new to allow those baby steps to quickly transition to the start of spiritual maturity. That’s my current analysis.

Well, back to writing. Currently working on the next volume in The Forest Throne series.

 

Decumulation, family, memories, Stars and Stripes

An Artifact Passed On

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Mauldin published this even while the Italian campaign was ongoing.

What do you keep, what do you discard, what do you find a new home for?

Those were the hard decisions we were faced with—are still faced with—as we downsized and moved from Arkansas to Texas. Many of the artifacts I’m thinking of came from our parents and grandparents, and a few a bit older than that. It seems wrong to throw them out, but who will want them when we pass on? From a sense of nostalgia and history, will anyone really look at them again? From a sense of storage space, who has enough to handle five generations of artifacts?

Mauldin’s cartoon portrayal of Dad at a linotype machine may add some value to this artifact.

I’ve been earnestly dealing with this since at least 2020. The first things to go were Dad’s tools. What boy doesn’t want his dad’s tools? My brother and I split the tools (he took the vast volume of hardware) after Dad died in 1997. Twenty years of having them clog up my garage and never using them convinced me to get rid of most of them—though not the offset box wrenches. In fact, dealing with them and realizing that Dad never got rid of anything, leaving us a house full of treasures and junk to deal with, gave me a negative example that I’m trying not to leave to my kids. When I hit the grave, I hope to have one chair, one small table, one bed, one dinner place setting, three changes of clothes, and enough books to keep me interested according to the condition I’m in at the time.

Mauldin had a way of showing the G.I.’s story in his cartoons.

One artifact from my dad had me stumped for a while. It’s a book Dad sent home from Italy during WW2: Mud, Mules, and Mountains, a book of war cartoons by Bill Mauldin. I know I’ve written about him and Dad before. Both Bill and my dad were assigned to the Stars and Stripes, Dad as a typesetter, Bill as the famous cartoonist. Dad told me Bill often had him (Dad) pose for him as he (Bill) drew his cartoons, not to depict the man necessarily but to get the body posture correct.

Bill gave Dad a copy of this book in Italy and signed it. But it wasn’t a simple signature. It was a quick pencil drawing of a man at a linotype machine, as Dad would typically have been. The inscription was to “Tod” rather than “Todd” (though there might be a part of a second “d” there), and Mauldin signed his name. Dad mailed the book to his parents in Rhode Island rather than carry it through a war zone. My grandparents opened the envelope, perhaps read the book, returned it to the envelope, and put it away for safekeeping.

Thus it sat until I found it some time between 1997 and 2022. When I donated copies of the Stars and Stripes to the University of Rhode Island library, I kept the book, believing it to be something special. Recently I read it (mostly pictures), showed it to my daughter (who knew her grandfather), and made the decision that it’s something I shouldn’t keep.

In thinking about how to “dispose” of it, I decided to send it to my nephew, Chris, who still lives in RI. I have a number of photographs to send him, and this will easily go in the larger envelope. Chris is as interested in family history as I am, and he and his boys will enjoy having it. Other family in the area will enjoy getting to see it.

I hope, if Chris ever decides he doesn’t want it, he sends it to the URI library to add to the Norman Todd Stars and Stripes collection. But once it’s his, the choice is his. The gift from me comes with no strings attached.

Is the book valuable? Copies are on sale for $25-30 on Amazon and Ebay. Possibly the pictorial signature adds to the value. I mean, how many people have an original and unique Bill Mauldin cartoon? But, again, that decision now rests with the receiver of the gift.

Thanks, Dad and Bill for passing down this memory to us, and to Oscar and Lilly for preserving it. You done good.

 

miscellaneous, reading, Writing

Wanting Something Else

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Carlyle in 1855, so nine years after the letter in question.

One of my reading places is The Carlyle Letters Online, which has 11,000 letters written by Thomas and Jane Carlyle. They were active letter writers during the Victorian era in England, and earlier mostly from Scotland. Thomas wrote for a living. He struggled in the early years, picking up encyclopedia hackwork and magazine contributions as he could get them. By around 1840, with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson championing Carlyle’s books in the US, he had reached a measure of financial comfort. I’ve written other blog posts about Carlyle.

Maybe two months ago, I came across an interesting tidbit in one of his letters and wanted to blog about it. But I faced a dilemma of my own making: how to properly reference the letter and location? Traditional referencing, handed down through various academic organizations, expects you to give the publisher, publisher’s location, name of publication, author name, page no., etc.

I’ve come to believe that’s an archaic way of doing references in the Information Age. Here’s my example. The specific letter I’m interested in was written 8 April 1846 by Thomas to his wife Jane, who was on holiday at a seaside villa. It’s been published in a  4-volume biography of Carlyle by Anthony Froude written in the years after Carlyle’s death in 1881.  That biography has been republished, and the letter has been in other collections of Carlyle’s letters. Now it’s available at the Carlyle Letters Online.

Since there are so many potential sources for someone to go to check my work and the quote I’m fixing to give, it seems like the traditional methods of citing sources forces the reader to get a copy of the exact publication the person doing the quote used and find the page. How about we do something like this.

Here’s the letter I want to make the quote from. I find an interesting observation of Carlyle in the third paragraph of the letter. Assuming the paragraph breaks are Carlyle’s own and not the publisher’s [online publisher in this case], why not just cite the source as a particular letter written by Carlyle to a particular person [his wife] and found in a particular paragraph? In this case, it would be:

Carlyle, Thomas; a letter to his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, 8 April 1846, paragraph 3. Accessed 7 September 2026 at Carlyle Letters Online.

If the quote is from a long paragraph, you can add a letter to designate approximately where in the paragraph the quote is from, e.g. paragraph 3a, or 3b, or 3c…. In this case the quote comes from a relatively short paraph and starts the paragraph, so a letter shouldn’t be needed to clarify the location. The person wishing to verify the quote can look through the entire paragraph if necessary, which is no more work than having to scan an entire page based on the traditional citation method.

Of course, my method will result in the person making the citation having to do a little more work to count up the paragraph and decide on the letter designation, but I think it’s time well spent. Of course, I doubt if anyone at the Chicago Manual of Style or other organizations care about my better way of doing it.

Well, that’s a lengthy introduction. Time to give the quote.

I really wish you could find an eligible House somewhere out under the quiet sky,—removed fairly from these tumults and loud-braying discords of every kind; which it is growing really horrible and miserable to me to spend the remnant of my days among!

Carlyle, Thomas; a letter to his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, 8 April 1846, paragraph 3; accessed 7 September 2026 at Carlyle Letters Online.

Thomas was at their London home, Jane at some friend’s seaside villa near Liverpool. He was working on the second edition of his book about Oliver Cromwell, she just lazing around and enjoying her holiday. Thomas had asked her to look around for a house in a quiet place they could rent for a season to get away from London’s summer climate.

I must say I sympathize with him. How often do I think it would be nice to get away for a long stretch, not have to worry about home repairs, organization of stuff, other routines. It would be nice, if I could swing it, to have a cook and a house maid. I think we could do without a butler and a footman and a chauffer. We sort of tried that with a four week road trip last summer that included a week on Cape Cod (unpleasant) and two weeks in the Berkshires (very nice). Perhaps we’ll get to do that again some day.

Well, that’s my post for today. Not exactly earth shattering—that is, of course, unless the CMOS sees this and decides to adopt the Todd Method as an alternative way of making citations.

ETA: I see that I also posted about this comment in this letter earlier this year. I forgot about that. Ah, well, it was obviously still on my mind.

Daddy Daughter Day, Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Harmony of the gospels, letters, miscellaneous, The Forest Throne, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

Somehow Gotta Get Writing

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Sold one of these last week, the first one in several years.

Life has been quite busy for a while now, including some family stuff that has taken away much of my free time. Except for minor work on the next book in The Forest Throne series, I haven’t done any writing for a while. I have done a little editing the last two days on the harmony of the gospels I wrote close to twenty years ago to get it ready to share with a friend.

Almost every day the urge to write hits me. A novel. Non-fiction. An essay. Letters. A blog post. Doesn’t really matter. Just let me get back to writing.

And one of these, same conditions.

But it’s been hard to set my mind to it. I’ve had a little time, here and there in bits and snatches, but at those moments I just couldn’t shift gears from whatever had most recently consumed my time. I took a few notes on paper. I did some organization of what may eventually become my autobiography. I better organized my computer files and folders. I found a good quote in one of Thomas Carlyle’s letters that will serve for a blog post. Ideas for essays passed through my head, and I documented a few.

But actual writing has been almost nil. Last Monday I couldn’t even get my act together to make a blog post. I’ve been wondering if my decision back in June to cease actively trying to sell books has contributed to this writing lethargy. Maybe so. But a few sales in August, despite no advertising of any kind, should have perked me up. Yet, no real writing.

and one of these. Someone dug quite deep into my backlist.

So here I am on Saturday writing a post to go live on Monday. This morning I completed—or nearly did—a project organizing family photos and papers. It felt good to have that done and not hanging over my head. Some home renovations are just about done. One door to be hung whenever our contractor gets to it. That includes a mended bookshelf, which will allow us to finish shelving our books. That will be a good feeling. And a little locksmith work.

I think, to ease back into writing, I’ll go back to that Carlyle letter and see if I can write a meaningful blog post on it for next week’s post. Then I’ll pull The Forest Throne book back up and work on it a little. One grandchild is anxious that I do that. Maybe getting some words on paper, or rather pixels, will be a few what I need to jump start my writing. Maybe September will be the month.

book reviews, History

Book Review: The Hour of Peril

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About two or three weeks ago, I finished reading The Hour of Peril. It’s been on my bookshelf for about 10 years, waiting for its turn at the top of my reading queue.

A great read. Helps to round off the history of the pre-Civil War period.

Written by Daniel Stashower, subtitled “The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War”, it’s the story about the South’s animosity to Lincoln and various plots—real or imagined—of preventing Lincoln from ever reaching Washington DC to be inaugurated. Lincoln had to go by train into Maryland and through Baltimore.

Maryland was a slave state. They had great fear of what Lincoln might do to end their way of life, that is, their ability to own their fellow human and force them to work for them. Thus, they had such animosity toward Lincoln that many of them thought murder was the answer. This is unfathomable to me, the idea that murder is a solution to a problem. But that speaks to human depravity.

The main character in the book is not Lincoln, but Alan Pinkerton, the famous detective. He was tasked with protecting Lincoln in sort of a pre-Secret Service way. Knowing how the South was, and watching the southern states secede one by one, and anticipating Maryland to follow suit (which they did not do), Pinkerton assembled a team of operatives and tried to infiltrate them. The threats to Lincoln seemed credible, so Pinkerton employed some subterfuge to see that the president elect arrived safely. We meet many of those operatives as the book unfolds, along with some who spoke openly of wanting to murder the president-elect.

The book is excellent. An interesting and easy read, it starts somewhat slowly. We are expecting to see Lincoln in transit, but instead we get a lot about Pinkerton and how he got to the point by 1861 where he would be protecting the president-elect. But the historical build-up is good. Some people want to just focus on Lincoln and forget that there was a team around him, the forerunners of today’s “handlers.”

If you prefer shoot-em-up action, this isn’t the book for you. But if you like learning about details of historical events, by all means grab a copy and read this.

So I give this an enthusiastic 5-stars. But, alas, it is not a keeper, and is already in the donation box, giving way for some other book to show prominently on my shelves.