First Days

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 5, 2004] Hello from north of the Shumagin Islands! I’m writing from on board the USCGC Alex Haley. We left the dock yesterday morning, so smoothly it looks like we know what we’re doing. I think that would be CPO Ross at the conn, who also brought us…

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My favorite robber baron.

Andrew Carnegie is my favorite robber baron. Here are some reasons why. From the Carnegie Library wiki: A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Two thousand five hundred nine Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, including some belonging to public and university library…

Read more My favorite robber baron.

He had worn [his gun] on duty on only three occasions in his ten years in the Police Municipale. The first was when a rabid dog had been sighted in a neighboring commune...The second was when the president of France had driven through St. Denis on his way to see the celebrated cave pantings of Lascaux nearby...The third time was when a boxing kangaroo escaped from a local circus. On no occasion had Bruno’s gun ever been used on duty, a fact of which he was extremely but privately proud.

# Permanent link to Miss Marple meets A Year in Provence

Good characterization and good period detail make Judith Rock's The Rhetoric of Death an engaging read. It's France, 1686, in the middle of Louis XIV's secretly continued persecution of the Protestant Huguenots. Jesuit father-in-training Charles du Lac connives at the escape to Protestant Switzerland of Huguenot cousin (and childhood love) Pernelle. For his -- and their -- own safety fearful relatives hustle him out of southern France to Paris, where he takes up a position at the Jesuit college Louis Le Grand. Trouble follows him, however -- a student is murdered, the student's brother attacked, and Charles is caught up in a power-play between religion and politics that reaches as high as the Sun King's own court, and he must navigate it safely and see the guilty brought to justice if he and his family are to survive.

In the author's note Rock says, "I have tried to make the story's people true to their own century, and not just us in costume." She succeeded.

# Permanent link to Jesuits in Love (and Murder)

Old Home TownOld Home Town by Rose Wilder Lane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lane really, really didn't like the small town America in which she was raised, and in particular she didn't like the lifestyle it forced upon the women living it.

The first chapter is a beautifully written indictment of the nameless Midwestern town in which the story is set. Parochial, insular, stuffy, middle-brow, Lane's old home town is obsessed with what is proper and especially what isn't.

The rest of the chapters are stories told by a young girl named Ernestine about other women who live there, and most of them are pretty easily identifiable as wish fulfillment on the part of the author. The old maid escaping seduction by town ne'er-do-well by her own pluck and the timely appearance of a new suitor. The hired girl forced by gossip to marry the husband when the wife dies, which ends about as well as you might expect. A wife who leaves her husband and goes on to become a couturier. The selfish old woman who lies about her daughter being fast to her daughter's suitor so he'll jilt her and she'll have someone at home to take care of her. Ernestine's "fast friend" Elsie falls for a traveling man with disastrous results. The town beauty elopes with a hayseed, and a mother sells her beautiful daughter to the highest bidder, with homicidal results.

In the last chapter, Ernestine has finally had enough (and so have we) and against the wishes of her parents leaves home for school in NYC. You don't so much as cheer as think, "What took you so long?"

Lane writes

...there were two clear ways to flaunt one's loss of modesty and virtue; one was to wear red, the other was to be seen needlessly gadding around uptown.

Makes me want to put on my reddest outfit and prance right up town. I'm certain that was exactly how she meant me to feel.

Click here to read all my reviews on Goodreads.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5IABqwVO2U&w=480&h=390]

# Permanent link to The Old Home Town Don’t Look the Same

It is a quite staggering reflection that when Cook left Canada for the last time in 1767, he was still a non-commissioned officer. It is also a staggering reflection on the Lords of the Admiralty of the time that, because of their innate snobbish conviction that officers and gentlemen are born and not made, Cook did not quite qualify for a commission. He had been in the despised Merchant Service, he had sailed before the mast in the Navy, he was poor and his origins were obscure. There could have been little doubt left in the Admiralty by that time that in Cook they had the greatest seaman, navigator and cartographer of the generation. But a commission? Hardly. Hardly, that is, until they realised that to send a naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in the greatest exploratory voyage ever undertaken, under the command of a non-commissioned officer wouldn't be quite the thing to do. For one thing, it would redound most dreadfully upon the alleged competence of those who did hold commissions, and, for another, it would not look good in the history books. So, belatedly, they made him a lieutenant.

# Permanent link to Captain Cook, the Alistair MacLean version