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.
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.
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.
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.
I really wanted to read this, but found it impossible to get through.
Normally when I do a book review, I do it in a separate post, trying to say what I found good about it, what I found bad, and making a recommendation on whether I thought it would be worthwhile for my readers to read. I’m breaking that pattern with this post, however, and discussing two books, books I tried to read but failed to finish. Both of these books are already off my bookshelves and added to the donation box.
One of these is The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns. I bought this book new in 2010. We were on a trip to Yellowstone. One afternoon as the rest of our party were resting, I sought out a bookstore/coffee shop, found one, and bought this book as being probably of interest. I read maybe twenty pages over the next week, found it to be terribly academic and tedious, and laid it aside. A few weeks ago I scanned my shelves for something to read that I would then get rid of. This popped out, and I decided to give it another chance.
Alas, after fifty or more pages of its 610, I found it just as difficult as before. It goes into great detail of how Gutenberg’s printing press and moveable type forever changed the dissemination of information. Yes, I know that’s true, but I guess I don’t need 610 pages of academic nonsense to tell me that. My advice is don’t bother with this book.
I gave it three tries; I’m done with it. Sorry, C.S.
The other book I’ve blogged about before here and here. It’s C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love. After getting through the first two-thirds, I set it aside for a more opportune time. That time came; I picked it up again. I finally got to Lewis’s analysis of Spenser’s The Fairie Queen, which I had sensed all the rest of the book was pointing to. I was looking forward to it.
Alas, it was, if anything, worse than the first two-thirds. I could understand almost nothing Lewis wrote. I read some of his extensive quotes from Spenser’s epic poem and found it incomprehensible. Twenty pages more and I laid it aside.
Unless you already love English literature from pre-Shakespearian days, don’t bother with this.
Back in the dark ages, must have been 1999 to 2000, I saw an episode of Larry King Live where George H W Bush promoted his book, All The Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings. This was more or less Bush’s post-presidential memoir. At least I think it’s in place of a true memoir. I didn’t research that question.
Regular readers of this blog will know I love reading collections of letters. And I always liked the first president Bush. I voted for him in the Kansas presidential primary in 1980. I was out of the country during his 1988 presidential run and can’t remember if I got an absentee ballot in. I know I voted for him in 1992. He made a good presentation of his book in that 1999 or 2000 interview, and I made a mental note to pick up a copy. Way led on to way, and it was several years later when I found it for sale used and picked it up.
Way continued to lead on to way, and it was only a little over a month ago when I finally pulled it off the shelf and read it. It is a collection of letters (Pres. Bush’s), not of correspondence (incoming and outgoing). And it’s not comprehensive. It’s a selection, made probably Bush himself and an editor. The collection begins just before his enlistment in the Navy during World War 2, continues through his business years in the oil field, his jump into politics—running for Congress and both winning some and losing some, then as Republican party chairman, US rep to the United Nations, CIA director, US ambassador to China, then to vice-presidential and presidential years. Plus, a chapter or letters after he lost the presidency in 1992 to the book’s publishing in 1999.
The letters have been selected, of course, to put Bush in a good light. But it appears to be an excellent selection. They show a lot of humor, such as an award given to cabinet members who dozed off in cabinet meetings. There were letters to his parents and children. I found this great excerpt in a 1974 letter to his sons.
Don’t confuse being ‘soft’ with seeing the other guy’s point of view. …[U]nderstand too that power accompanied by arrogance is very dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous when men with no real experience have it—for they can abuse our great institutions.
Great sentiments from a nice guy. Yes, Bush was an understanding man who went about his jobs with quiet efficiency. Bush gained a reputation in the press of being a wimp—a weakling in foreign affairs and unconcerned with domestic affairs. That reputation is blown to smithereens in these letters. Bush continued Reagan initiatives that resulted in the Iron Curtain coming down, the end of the Cold War, and the break-up of the Soviet Union. He put together a coalition of nations that drove Iraq out of Kuwait—something especially close to me. Those are not the actions of a wimp. The contemporary press got it wrong; history is getting it right.
At 634 pages and ten to fifteen pages a day, it took me a while to get through it. But I’m glad I did. It was well worth reading, and I give it a strong 5-stars. But, alas, it’s not a keeper since you can’t keep everything. I’d put it in the donation pile, except I dropped the book on the patio one day and it split at the spine. So into recycling it will go. If you have an interest in history, or if you have a thing for letters, it’s well worth seeking out and reading.
In the full cover, the photo and text is not out of center. This Amazon photo of the cover is, though.
About a month ago, I wrote about the projects I had on my to-do list and what I might tackle next, what would come after that. I have no shortage of projects in some stage of thinking through.
So after thinking through my projects list, and after having finished my income taxes, I spent a little time at paperwork reduction, then jumped into my list. The first item that seemed best to me was revisions to my book The Saudi Years in Letters. This promised to be the shortest of my projects, and it truly did go quickly.
First, I loaded the recently found letters into the book and formatted them. That added around 16 pages to the document. Next, I proofread the book using Word’s text-to-speech read-back feature. I was able to go through the book in three or four days. I probably could have done it all in a day and a half except for the concentration fatigue. Proofreading caused me to flag four letters to check against the originals. That took only an hour to do.
That brought me up to formatting the overall book. I had to do that page by page, making sure to have text and photos in right relation to each other, eliminating excessive white space and adding white space where needed. This took a day of work and eliminated about five pages from the file. I uploaded the new text file to Amazon without re-doing the cover. Alas, the extra pages from the extra letters were a few too many for the existing cover to work, so I had to re-do the cover. Fortunately , I was able to re-size the cover and upload the book to Amazon in about an hour.
So the project is finished, right? Not quite. As I went through the on-line layout checking of the book, I saw that it would be possible to add six to eight photos without having to reformat anything. Should I do it? That would mean finding the right boxes in storage closets (not impossible), going through the photos, making selections, scanning and formatting. A day or two of work, most likely.
I decided not to do that right now. If I let the book go out to my kids and grandkids, the intended audience, with a little extra white space, I’d say no big deal. I’ll take a few weeks to work on something else, then maybe come back to this.
Or interest due to our time living in the region, but not a keeper.
As I mentioned in a prior post, my wife and I don’t read many of the same books. I rarely recommend a book I’ve read to her, and when I do, she rarely reads it. She recommends books to me more often, and when she does, I seldom read it. One she did recently and that I read was The Rise of Babylon: Signs of the End Times by Charles H. Dyer with Angela Elwell Hunt (1991, updated 2003). First, a little about how we happened to have this book.
My sister Norma sent this to our dad in March 1991. It was one her church in Indiana was studying. Lynda and I were relatively newly returned from Kuwait (in July 1990), Iraq had invaded Kuwait (Aug 2, 1990), and the USA had led the coalition that liberated Kuwait (Jan-Feb 1991). Hence, the book had family interest. We must have taken this from Dad’s house upon his death in 1997, but tucked inside it was a letter from Norma to Dad transmitting the book, along with a photo of Norma. I have no way of knowing if Dad ever read the book or not. Since Lynda read the paperback before me, it had the signs of having been used.
I read this over about a 10-15 day period ending a week or so ago. I found it to be an easy read, helped along by excellent layout and typesetting. Dyer wrote this between the waning days of the Iran-Iraq war (which was 1980-88) and the invasion of Kuwait on 2 Aug 1990, although with a few changes to reflect its publication in Jan 1991. Dyer had, on several occasions, been in Iraq in the second half of the 80s as a guest of the government to witness how Iraq, at the instigation of then-leader Sadaam Hussein, was working on rebuilding the ancient city of Babylon. I believe Dyer’s intention was to demonstrate how Hussein’s intentions for Babylon were a movement to the end times as predicted in the Bible.
While the book is informative and interesting, I don’t think Dyer achieved that aim. He tried to do too much in one small-ish book. He started with the pre-biblical history of Babylon from various extra-biblical sources. That was well done, though a bit short of detail for my historically minded mind. He also failed to give a simple list of the ancient sources, forcing his readers to make their own list from the handful of footnotes and other research. But what the book contains, assuming it is a faithful extraction from the ancient chronicles, is good.
Dyer then gets into the Old Testament era, dealing with people groups and mentions in the historical and prophetic books. Once again, there is almost too much there for a book of this length. I felt that the treatment was shallower than I wanted.
The last part of the book was based on mentions in Revelation, and how judgment will yet fall on Babylon, how the ancient ruins Hussein was desperately wanting to rebuild to his own glory, touting himself to be the new Nebuchadnezzar, would be annihilated before the return of Jesus foretold in Revelation. Once again, I felt that this part of the book was shallow. Dyer presents his case (interpretation of the prophecies) well, but not in enough depth to allow me to really sink my teeth into it.
I read the 1991 version of the book, which must have been written mostly before the events of 1990. The 2003 updates might be interesting to read. But, I repeat that the book is trying to accomplish too much in too little space. Either a larger book or two volumes or more references to other sources would have been most helpful. I must say though that the book has spurred me on to want to do more research, so in this sense it succeeds.
Yet, from me it has earned only 3-stars. It is already in the donation box, and our over-stuffed bookshelves are just a little thinner.
Catherine and Peter never should have married. This is the story of how Catherine dealt with it.
My wife and I don’t read many of the same books. Even our Bible study and devotional books are different. That’s one of the reasons our home library is so large. I’m trying to pay more attention to what she’s reading (to be a dutiful husband) and at least consider reading books she recommends to me. One of those was Imperial Highness by Evelyn Anthony.
This historical novel, first published in 1983, is closer to a biography than a novel; yet it meets the technical definition of a novel. It’s about Princess Catherine, of a somewhat lesser German principality, who at age 16 married the future tzar of Russia. It was an unhappy marriage, as the tsarevitch was hard to get along with and the two teenagers were ill-suited for each other.
Anthony paints a very unhappy picture of Catherine’s life. Both partners found love in the arms of others and rarely saw each other except at official court functions. Spoiler alert: Catherine does a better job of winning public opinion to her and winds up as empress, deposing her husband after his mother’s death.
This is a good, relatively short read. It’s difficult for me to pigeonhole it as to genre. Consider it biography masquerading as historical fiction. It’s worth reading if you like that kind of book.
I give it 4-stars. I’ll never read it again, but I might do some other research on Catherine. It’s not a keeper, however, and I rise from my office chair right now to put it in the donation box.
A few days ago, we were in Lake Jackson, Texas, visiting our daughter and her family. On previous trips, I took some of the grandkids to the planetarium as a small outing. The lady working the planetarium on the first of those outings was Lauri Cruver Cherian. We conversed a while, learned we were both authors as second careers, both members of local writers groups, and that neither of us lived in our native state. We connected on Facebook, and have kept abreast of each other since then.
So when I found out Lauri had scheduled a book launch event for her newest book, to be held in Lake Jackson at the same time we were planning to be there, I built my local schedule to have time to attend. While I’ve attended author events before, this was my first time to attend an official book launch. My reasons for attending were to support Lauri, also to get some ideas on how to do a book launch should I ever decide to do one for one of my books.
Reading from the book at the book launch
It was held at the Lake Jackson Historical Museum in the downtown area. I arrived about 25 minutes early, and was the first one there other than Lauri and a couple of workers. That gave me time to make a quick circuit of the first floor of the museum. It included well-presented displays, and I marked it as a place to come back to on a future trip for a full tour.
The book Lauri presented was Come On In, Don’t Be Lonesome [available at Book Baby and to be released 10/31/2025 at Amazon]. It’s a story based on events in her family history. Her grandfather ran a rooming house in the Seattle area (so she’s a transplant to Texas). Lauri read from the first chapter, and it’s obvious the book is seasoned both with salt and humor. It looks like it will be a good read.
I counted about 35 people in attendance, though it might have been a few more. I think she sold a good number of books, and was kept busy signing copies, her husband helping with the selling. Alas for her, I didn’t buy a copy. Our decumulation effort has resulted in my paperback book buying budget being $0. We have to see things leave the house, not come in. Possibly I’ll get an e-book copy.
Check out Lauri’s website. It has more information about her and all four of her books.
As for the book launch, it was extremely well done. Advertising by her and the museum no doubt generated the good attendance. Looking at the infrastructure she set up (four tables, one for selling, one for signing, two for food); banners; podium; sound system; computer with slide show going) made it all look rather daunting just thinking about all the work involved. I think I’ll still go with publishing my books without formally launching them.
