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This rather ponderous tome which arrived today.
Wow, nice find. Enjoy that read!Really lucky find at a thrift store: George Witton's Scapegoats of the Empire. It's the only first hand account of the Bushveldt Carabineers in the Boer War. Not being particularly flattering to the empire, it was suppressed when first published in 1907. Witton was one of the defendants, along with Handcock and Morant, in the trial that was dramatized in the film, Breaker Morant. Interesting reading so far.
Slip opinions. Justice Sotomayor's dissent in Schuette v. BAMN is legally illiterate.:icon_smil
You expected differently?
"Of Time And The River," by Thomas Wolfe. I've had this sitting on my shelf for years...
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," I somehow missed this one as a kid and a few months back read a book "When Books Went to War," which described the military's program of working with book publisher during WWII to produce cheap, easily portable books for the servicemen and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" was mentioned several times as a favorite. Just started it, so I'll report back when I've gotten into it.
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," I somehow missed this one as a kid...
I tried it but the grinding poverty and dark depressing story just wore me out.
"Of Time And The River," by Thomas Wolfe. I've had this sitting on my shelf for years, having started and abandoned it at least six times since the year 2000, and am determined to get thru it this time. There are individual passages that are breathtaking, but there's an awful lot of vamping for time in between them.
Wolfe is like that. There are times when he's all over the place and you're thinking "what the hell is he talking about", but when he's on his game, holy sweet cherry pie with whipped cream on top...he has no equal.
But this was the reason why these things could never be forgotten — because we are so lost, so naked and so lonely in America. Immense and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on for ever and we have no home. Therefore, it is not the slow, the punctual sanded drip of the unnumbered days that we remember best, the ash of time; nor is it the huge monotone of the lost years, the unswerving schedules of the lost life and the well-known faces, that we remember best. It is a face seen once and lost for ever in a crowd, an eye that looked, a face that smiled and vanished on a passing train, it is a prescience of snow upon a certain night, the laughter of a woman in a summer street long years ago, it is the memory of a single moon seen at the pine’s dark edge in old October — and all of our lives is written in the twisting of a leaf upon a bough, a door that opened, and a stone.
For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the streets of life alone.
His description of a cross-country railroad trip in "River" is one of the most sublime things I've ever read. The essence of Americana, boiled down into a prose poem.
"He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it.[/"I]
“This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.”
“The lives of men who have to live in our great cities are often tragically lonely. In many more ways than one, these dwellers in the hive are modern counterparts of Tantalus. They are starving to death in the midst of abundance. The crystal stream flows near their lips but always falls away when they try to drink of it. The vine, rich-weighted with its golden fruit, bends down, comes near, but springs back when they reach out to touch it...In other times, when painters tried to paint a scene of awful desolation, they chose the desert or a heath of barren rocks, and there would try to picture man in his great loneliness--the prophet in the desert, Elijah being fed by ravens on the rocks. But for a modern painter, the most desolate scene would have to be a street in almost any one of our great cities on a Sunday afternoon.”