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.
Taking a break today from my last series of posts (on the Goldilocks Zone) to report on my recent doings.
Today is a rain day. No chance to work outside unless the rain clears this afternoon. So I’m working indoors. Also, since this is a Saturday, the only stock market work I had was wrapping up my weekly spreadsheet. I greatly simplified my spreadsheet in June when I resumed trading activities, so that spreadsheet updating now takes all of ten minutes.
I transcribed four of my father-in-law’s WW2 letters. I’m now up to 65 complete. It looks like well over 100, maybe as many as 200 yet to go. I never said it would be quick or easy.
Yesterday I finished the second editorial pass (the first pass having been two years ago) on Vol 6 in the A Walk Through Holy Week study. I think two more quick passes and I’ll be ready to publish.
Typical rainy day activities for me are filing papers and updating the check book. Not really feeling like doing either one today, but we’ll see. For sure I’ll get in an hour or more of reading. Oh, yeah, I’ll have to prepare supper, and perhaps vacuum.
The infamous “Jacob’s Well photo”. One copy should be sufficient. The next generation will most likely toss it.
Of the many things our parents left us, or came to us in other ways, I think the most burdensome is photos.
Photos? Yes, photos. Those pesky little glossy things, or some matte finish, depicting people of long ago, houses once owned or lived in, vehicles once driven, and landscapes visited. No doubt those who left them to us thought, “What a treasure this is for our children (or grandchildren), to see great-aunt Matilda all dressed up for the derby. Oh how they will cherish them.”
No idea who these people are. Cool car, though.
Except nobody now alive ever met great-aunt Matilda. Only those who studied the family genealogy knows who she was and how she fits into the family relationships. And only those who ever will study genealogy will ever care.
This was the situation after a week’s worth of work on the 5,000.
Photos tend to add up. Just looking at the photos on Lynda’s side of the family, I estimate that we have 8,000 photos. No, I’m not exaggerating. That’s probably 3,000 from her dad’s side and 5,000 from her mom’s side. Just looking at her dad’s side, he was something of a hobbyist photographer. He inherited various family photos from his parents, who got at least some of them from their parents. He looked at those old photos, some as tiny at 2×3 inches, and had enlargements made; then multiple copies of the enlargements; then smaller copies having the developer play around with the tint and border and resolution. So one tiny old photo marked “Jacob’s Well” on the back was shown to be a photo of his grandfather’s family, showing two older men, one older woman, and seven children (the youngest not yet born)—some on horses, some standing on the rocky landscape.
Jacob’s Well is a feature in Clark County, Kansas, now incorporated into a park. Except we’ve visited the park—not every square inch of it, mind you—the landscape looks more like what you see at the family ranch in Logan Township, Meade County, Kansas. I could believe the photo is mis-labeled, except another family member in another branch that didn’t even know each other until 2015 has a copy of the exact same 2×3 photo and it is also labeled “Jacob’s Well.” What to do?
Is this photo a keeper? Surely it’s the Cheney family, but how do you identify the people? One of the older men is the father, Seth. The other is uncle Frank Best (most likely). The older woman is mother Sarah, the youngest child Rose, the older girl Cora. But which of the others are William, Clarence, James, and Walter? We can make an educated guess, based on size. But these people were all standing at least 20 yards away from the cameraman. There’s really no way of knowing who’s who.
The photo is from 1898, based on Charlie, the youngest child, being born in 1899. The question becomes: how important is it to keep this photo? And the multiple copies of the enlargement? And the multiple copies of different tints, borders, and resolutions?
This has come up now because another family member, who didn’t want the photos when Lynda’s dad died in 1996, has accused us of hoarding them because we didn’t drag them out every Thanksgiving and Christmas so that we could look at them “as a family.” Now he wants to look at them, divvy them up, and do so at a high school reunion in July. Even though we would have to impose on a relative for a venue. Even though Lynda was thinking she didn’t particularly want to go to the reunion. And actually, the demand to go through the photos included the 5,000 from the other side of the family. It is physically impossible. Reunions are times to see friends, swap stories, share meals. How will it be possible to sort through these photos and make decisions on their final resting place on a reunion weekend, even if you layover a couple of extra days? You can’t; it’s impossible. And some day, we’ll have to do the same with all the photos we took over the years.
So we are going through them. Album by album, box by box, folder by folder. After three weeks, we can see a little light at the end of the tunnel on the 3,000 (estimated) from the dad’s side, and have made some progress, at least to the point of knowing what we have, on the mom’s side. Duplicates have been identified and those we want removed from the overall collection as keepers. The albums have been checked and are currently being re-checked. Four other albums have been consolidated into two and are ready for re-checking. We are very close to boxing the non-keepers and shipping them to this family member with a note saying, “We’re so done with these; keep what you want, destroy the rest.” The other 5,000 will hopefully follow in about two more weeks.
Yes, destroy them. Our kids won’t want them. We don’t know anyone else’s kids that want them or even want to see them.
What was meant to be a blessing, and what served as a blessing to three or four generations and maybe 100 people, are now a burden. Let them die a peaceful death.
Volume 1 went from boring to overbearing, but managed to get the story across.
It was probably in 2008, during our last trip to Yellowstone National Park, that I dropped in a bookstore outside the park and bought two books, The Yellowstone Story, Volumes 1 and 2. I read the first chapter of Volume 1 right away, got busy with other things, and set it aside. When we got home I picked it up again, read the next four chapters, and laid it aside, wondering if I’d wasted my money.
You see, the first five chapters were, to the best of my recollection, boring. They were about the years before the creation of the park, and were essentially: This party came to Yellowstone from this direction, saw this and that, and left by that direction. Chapter after chapter. No wonder I put it down.
But several months ago, I was in The Dungeon, looking for things to get rid of, and my eyes landed on a short stack of books that had been damaged by water maybe fifteen years ago. I figured I would read these (if the water hadn’t rendered them unreadable), then sell or donate them. One was The Potter’s Wheel—it was very readable. Another was Christ and the Inheritance of the Saints—it was more badly damaged and deteriorated by age, and unreadable. Two others were the two volumes of The Yellowstone Story.
Volume 1 is lightly damaged, whereas Vol 2 severely damaged. Remembering how boring Vol 1 was at the start, I still decided to read it so that I could discard it. So after finishing What If Jesus Was Serious, I opened Vol 1 to chapter 6, about 1/3 into the 326 page book, and began reading. It was the story of the formation of the park. And the story was quite interesting—for a while.
As the story of the early years of the park unfolded, the book bombards the reader with names of people and places. I found keeping them straight was impossible. Buckskin Jim, Yellowstone John. Bill the Hunter. Whatever they were, they all ran together very quickly.
If you could get through the names, the story was good enough. This was the USA’s first national park, and no one really knew how it should be run. Local folks from nearby Montana and Wyoming began poaching game and stealing timber. The railroads fought over which one could run a spur into the park. Visitors had poor accommodations and brought bad reports home. But somehow, the park survived the encroachments and ineffective leaders.
Volume 1 ended with the ending of civilian leadership, around 1885, thirteen years after the park was formed. Volume 2 must start with the first government leaders. I finished Vol 1 yesterday, but will hold off on Vol 2 (if it is sufficiently readable) a couple of weeks while family things are front and center. Vol 1 was extremely well researched, with numerous endnotes making reference to park records, letters, newspapers, Congressional and Territorial records. I started reading them but quickly gave up as being too time consuming. The book is truly written on a scholarly level. It is far from the typical souvenir book you buy at tourist sites.
So how do I rate this book, will I ever read it again, and what do I do with it? Despite the boredom of the early chapters and name bombardment from cover to cover, I give it 4-stars. I don’t think I will ever read it again, unless I read some in the early chapters to see if my seventeen-year-old judgement is the same. I’ll hang on to it until I get past however much of Vol 2 I can read, then I will dispose of them in whatever way seems best.
