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Sunday Morning Book Thread 10-07-2018

Library of Grant Halstead

Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, and everybody who's holding your beer. Welcome once again to the stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, a weekly compendium of reviews, observations, and a continuing conversation on books, reading, and publishing by people who follow words with their fingers and whose lips move as they read. Unlike other AoSHQ comment threads, the Sunday Morning Book Thread is so hoity-toity, pants are required. Even if it's these pants, which look, I don't know, maybe like Depends, only for kinky people.

Pic Note

Grant Halstead is the author of the spy-thriller novel Smith's Protege, about "John Smith", an unsavory sort in low places that the government still finds uses for, and how this legacy is passed on from one Smith to the next and now it's 1940 and Germany's atomic research needs to be stopped, so who're they gonna call? Anyway, as to his library, Grant says he

...built these shelves and others in the house because we are a family of readers. Our interests are different though and the shelves are generally divided between biography and history for me, literary fiction for her etc. This set of shelves is a good example of the compromises in marriage. You can see she organized some of her stuff by color which is, of course, insanity. Hanging on the wall is a hand down table-top that started out with Arkansas grandparents and has since lived in New York, Oxford etc. My better half added the carnival wheel and I pretend to like it because I like her!

"A family of readers." I like that. And you can click on the library pic to see it real big.

Vintage Google:

#InThe80sWe had our own Google pic.twitter.com/jqnWEeS3Fv

— Helen ???? (@HelenMaryMe) September 14, 2018

Back in the 1980s when Mrs. Muse and I were first married, we inherited money from her father and we used some of it to buy a brand new set of Britannicas, just like what's in the photograph. We thought it would be a good investment for our children's education, but unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. We rarely used them, even though we were homeschooling all three of our children. They just took up shelf space and collected dust. A couple three years, Mrs. Muse finally said, we need the shelf space for other books and we never use the Britannicas, so they've got to go. We tried to sell them, but nobody wanted them. Especially not now in the Internet Age. So we ended up just giving them to Goodwill. I think it's kind of sad.

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®

BOOF (v.): Nobody really knows what this word means, but it's something Brett Kavanaugh did, so it has to be bad.

Usage: Kav boofed a gal in Reno just to watch her cry.

A Good Read

Is it just me, or is there something creepy about this pic? I mean, other than "Ace" in the title, which means that they're Up To No Good. What are they trying to set on fire? Is this some sort of 'Lottery' reboot only this time with burning at the stake?

Tool of Corruption

We all know that colleges and universities are progressive factories whose goal is to produce students who become instruments of social change, i.e. SJW agitators. I was fascinated by this article in the indispensible City Journal that discusses one of the methods by which this goal is accomplished:

In 1970, after campus antiwar protesters ransacked and set fire to the administration building at the University of South Carolina, the school’s president appointed a task force to find a solution to student unrest. Many meetings, workshops, and encounter groups later, the university came up with an answer, and it was nothing so simple as expelling vandals and arsonists. No, the key was to teach students to “love their university,” starting with a new semester-long orientation course for freshmen.

This was the birth of something that came to be known as First-Year Experience (FYE) wherein students are inculcated with the proper "woke" values. The program starts with a "common read", a book which is sent to incoming students in the summer before school starts.

And guess what books get chosen for this? If you're thinking maybe Plato, or Dante, or Shakespeare, you'd be wrong. Bunch of dead white guys. What do they know? The book varies from campus to campus, but last year, for example, the University of Oregon assigned Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He was invited out to speak, but acted like, get this, a diva:

Last year, when the University of Oregon assigned Between the World and Me for the common read, it paid Ta-Nehisi Coates $41,500 for a campus appearance (while also meeting his contractual requirement to be supplied with Nature Valley Oats ’n Dark Chocolate granola bars), and afterward students complained that the university hadn’t gotten its money’s worth. Coates was scheduled for a speech and question-and-answer session lasting 75 minutes, but he left the stage after 40 minutes without taking questions. Somehow, it didn’t feel very inclusive.

When you're as woke as he is, you can get away with these sorts of things.

Another book used as a common read is Real American which author Julie Lythcott-Haims calls a "post poetry memoir". It goes something like this:

The daughter of a white British immigrant and black American doctor who was once assistant surgeon general of the United States, she grew up in good neighborhoods and thrived at school academically and socially. In high school, she was a cheerleader and president of her class as well as the student council. But despite those successes, despite the degrees from Stanford and Harvard, despite the well-paying jobs and a bestseller she published on how to raise children, her memoir is a saga of oppression.

But she does know how to milk the "woke" market for all it's worth. Compiling your life's petty slights, snubs, and annoyances into an ideology of oppression can be very lucrative.

The article explains how FYE became the nationwide FYE industry, thanks to Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Also, that surveys indicate that students are tired of being lectured to on race - by which the FYE admins concluded that this meant what the students needed was more lecturing on race:

“We know that students are not great at identifying their own learning moments,” explained Sarah Crawford-Parker, another of the Kansas administrators. They’d seen similar student ignorance in a survey a few years earlier, when the common read was Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. This unorthodox choice was rated a failure by the facilitators, who objected to Hemingway’s “misogyny” and “hypermasculinity.” Yet somehow, the students considered it a success. Most reported learning something useful from a book by a dead white male.

How about that? This reminds me of a story told to me by a friend who spent a school year back in the 70s on some sort of exchange-student program in the Soviet Union. He visited the Hermitage Art Museum in Leningrad and noticed a curious thing: everybody was looking at the old stuff, i.e pre-1917, and the Hermitage does have a lot of really good stuff. Nobody wanted to look at the post-Revolution "woke" crap because everybody could see it was crap and they were all tired of being lectured to about the glories of communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Everything that the progressives get their hands on, they turn into sh*t. They produce crap art, garbage research, and junk science. This is why I have hope in the long term - they can't continue to win with crap, garbage, and junk. Yes, I know they've taken over lots of things, hollowed them out, and are still wearing their skins and demanding respect. But that last bit, respect, is getting harder and harder for them to get. They've turned academia into an empty echo chamber and the media into a pathetic clown show. And the harder they push, the more crap they produce, and the more people get fed up and walk away. And the more that their failures become manifest, the louder they screech, which turns even more people off and, we've got a long way to go, it's going to take awhile, but the progressives are on a self-reinforcing, self-destructive spiral that they will be unable to free themselves from.

But read the City Journal article. It's long, but well worth your time.

Moron Recommendation

71 On the recommendation of someone on the book thread, I just finished Silk and Cyanide, a truly outstanding autobio by Leo Marks, one of the premier Brit codebreakers. His staff was almost, if not entirely, female. The generals and etc. for whom he worked were males, of course. I highly recommend the book.

Posted by: pep at October 04, 2018 11:12 AM (wW03z)

Now this does look like an interesting book: Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code Maker's War, 1941-45

In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptopgraher of genius. In Between Silk and Cyanide, his critically acclaimed account of his time in SOE, Marks tells how he revolutionised the code-making techniques of the Allies, trained some of the most famous agents dropped into France including Violette Szabo and 'the White Rabbit', and why he wrote haunting verse including his 'The Life that I have' poem. He reveals for the first time the disastrous dimensions of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland; how the Germans were fooled into thinking a Secret Army was operating in the Fatherland itself, and how and why he broke General de Gaulle's secret code. Both thrilling and poignant, Marks's book is truly one of the last great Second World War memoirs.

$9.99 on Kindle.

And while I was looking at the Marks book, Amazon showed me this book, The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy by Judith Pearson, and all I've got to say is, wow. I make a lot of fun of KAFs (kick-ass females) in movies and TV shows, but here is a woman of whom I can truly say 'grrl power!' without sneering.

Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 to follow a dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer.

After watching Hitler roll over Poland and France, she enlisted to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret espionage and sabotage organization. She was soon deployed to occupied France where, if captured, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Gestapo was all but assured. Against such an ominous backdrop, Hall managed to locate drop zones for money and weapons, helped escaped POWs and downed Allied airmen flee to England, and secured safe houses for agents. And she did it all on one leg: Virginia Hall had lost her left leg before the war in a hunting accident.

Soon, wanted posters appeared throughout France, offering a reward for her capture. By winter of 1942, Hall had to flee France via the only route possible: a hike on foot through the frozen Pyrénées Mountains into neutral Spain. Upon her return to England, the American espionage organization, the Office of Special Services, recruited her and sent her back to France disguised as an old peasant woman. While there, she was responsible for killing 150 German soldiers and capturing 500 others. Sabotaging communications and transportation links and directing resistance activities, her work helped change the course of the war. This is the true story of Virginia Hall.

She sounds totally badass. The Kindle version goes for $4.99.

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In a response to a question requesting books by authors similar to Steven Pressfield, Tuna writes:

I've enjoyed Adrian Goldsworthy's "'Vindolanda" and "The Encircling Sea". A third in the series is coming out in June. Goldsworthy is a Roman scholar so he knows what of he speaks. What he's done is use the recent archeological discoveries at Vindolanda as starting points for his fiction. Clever really.

Posted by: Tuna at September 30, 2018 10:30 AM (jm1YL)

Adrian Goldworthy has written quite a number of books, mostly (non-fictional) histories. But Vindolanda is advertised as a "gripping, authentic novel set in Roman Britain" in the year 98AD:

The bustling army base at Vindolanda lies on the northern frontier of Britannia and the entire Roman world. In just over twenty years time, the Emperor Hadrian will build his famous wall. But for now defences are weak as tribes rebel against Rome, and local druids preach the fiery destruction of the invaders.

It falls to Flavius Ferox, Briton and Roman centurion, to keep the peace. But it will take more than just a soldier's courage to survive life in Roman Britain.

This is a hugely authentic historical novel, written by one of Britain's leading historians.

The Kindle edition is a reasonably priced $7.69.

Books By Morons

A friend of moron author Neovictorian her novel, Love in the Age of Dispossession which is a

Coming-of-age novel following a small-town Gen X American girl named Kitty, from her senior year in high school to her life as an extremely unsuccessful lawyer in Manhattan.

The novel begins with three days in the life of a group of high-school friends in 1993, culminating in a fistfight on the village green over the honor of the Prom Queen. The scene then shifts to New York City. Kitty is called back home for a funeral, and then, years later, someone from her small-town past pays Kitty a visit that changes her life.

You can also read Neovictorian's extensive review here.

Love in the Age of Dispossession can be purchased on Kindle for $2.99/

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Moron author TheJamesMadison's novel The Battle of Lake Erie: One Young American's Adventure in the War of 1812 is now available for purchase and download:

1813.

The second war with Britain rages on from the Canadian frontier to the Caribbean. America fights against British arrogance at sea in service to its war with Napoleon.

One of the centers of the overall contest is the Great Lakes that separate America from Britain's holdings in Canada. On Lake Erie, an America squadron, desperate for reinforcements to supplement its sparse crew, led by a young man from Rhode Island, Oliver Hazard Perry, is about ready to take action against the largest collection of British naval power in that theater of war.

Oliver's younger brother, James Alexander, serves on board the American flagship as a midshipman. The two brother team will take up arms against the British in one of America's finest naval battles.

Join them for an adventure that details the grit and daring of the American spirit.

$4.99 on Kindle.

Don't forget the AoSHQ reading group on Goodreads. It's meant to support horde writers and to talk about the great books that come up on the book thread. It's called AoSHQ Moron Horde and the link to it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175335-aoshq-moron-horde.

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So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, insults, threats, ugly pants pics and moron library submissions may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.