No comments about The Good Fight That Didn't End: Henry P. Goddard's Accounts of Civil War and Peace.

1 comments about A Coloring Book of Civil War Heroines.

1. In 56 pages there must be over 30 heroines discussed and drawn in this book. While originals are unclear for many of the images, the text is well written to give us an idea of who each was the role she played in relationship to the Civil War of the USA. I say "relationship" on purpose but not all of these women were soldiers or directly involved in the war. The illustrations are a bit too shaded and detailed for easy coloring.

No comments about The Life of J.E.B. Stuart.

2 comments about Soldiering: Observations from Korea, Vietnam, and Safe Places.

1. The profession of arms is a strange one. t simply asks that you be willing to go out and fight for your life with another man doing the same thing. And both of you are doing it for home, country and other nebulous things that are very hard to define. In recent times the opinion of the public has not held soldiers in high regard. I remember the stories of Chelsea Clinton insulting soldiers in the White House.
   
   Henry Gole was a career Army officer. He served in Korea, VietNam and in lots of peacetime positions. Along the way he got a Ph.D. and retired as a Colonel. Why, he asks himself. It was the men with whom he served. A most enjoyable book, especially at this time while so much of the Army is in Iraq.
   
   I'm reminded of the Kipling poem 'Tommy:'
   
   Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy how's yer soul?"
   But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.
   
   Thank you Col. Gole.



2. Colonel Gole's latest work, "Soldiering" is an absolute delight to read. This book is full of humor and wit as the pages unfold to show us a contemporary life spent in service to ones country. Gole cleverly traces an historical thread of events through the medium of what he calls "zeitgiest"..a picture of what's happening in the big world and in his own world at that particular time. Of course, adventure courses in the veins of any career soldier, and the author provides the reader with ample exposure to heart pounding moments and violent death from his own experience as a snuffy in Korea and as a Special Forces officer in Vietnam. His vignettes which spring from a life in the Army will bring back fond memories for all who have served..and it will kindle in those who haven't a wish that they did.

2 comments about Warrior: ...By Choice ...by Chance.

1. Jack was my battalion S-2 sergeant. His narrative of events describe the frustration & problems faced by units poorly prepared for fighting an enemy we couldn''t understand. It's a must read for the untrained as well as the professional soldier.



2. At seventeen Jack leads a rifle squad and, later, a rifle platoon in some of the worst figting in the Southwest Pacific Area. You will marvel at extra ordinary events. You will experience his grief as comrades and companions are wounded, killed and lost to the Japanese, Korean and Chinese enemy.
   Then you will rejoice with him in his successes, in the deep friendships that come his way; and for a loving, praying girl he marries, and a Savior he knows. His brief stay as a POW to the Chinese will wrench your heart.

3 comments about John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography (Southern Biography).

1. Prof. Niven's book fails on a number of counts, but mainly on that of familiarity with the sources of Calhoun's political thought. For example, in describing Calhoun's indebtedness to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Niven says that neither document contemplated action by an individual state. To correct this impression, one need only consult Jefferson's draft of the Kentucky Resolutions; how anyone who had even read this five-page document could see it as anything other than a threat to interfere with enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Acts within the boundaries of Kentucky is beyond me. The book is full of similiar evidence of Niven's failure to acquaint himself with even the most basic sources. Try Bartlett's Calhoun biography, instead.



2. John Niven, professor emeritus of American History at the Claremont Graduate School, has shed new light on a statesman that history has long viewed as just another inconsistent headstrong Southerner, John C. Calhoun. Niven convinces the reader that this prominent politician of the antebellum south was much more consistent and levelheaded in both his public and private lives than his typical portrayal as a protean, stubborn hot-head from South Carolina would suggest. A lifelong advocate of the South, John C. Calhoun served as a member of Congress at the time of the War of 1812, secretary of war under James Monroe, vice president with John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, secretary of state under John Tyler, and then as a senator from South Carolina until he died in 1850. The key to Niven's success in bringing to life to this "cast iron man" is drawing on Calhoun's personal life and experiences in order to gain persuasive insight into the motives and stances of his political career. (back cover) Instead of telling the classic tale of Calhoun's shift from nationalism, during the War of 1812 and the tariff of 1816, to sectionalism and states' rights in later years, on the issues of the protective tariff and slavery, Niven convincingly exerts the original contention that Calhoun had always stood behind individual liberty and states rights. In Calhoun's view, as supported by his own papers, his apparent nationalistic support of the war and the tariff of 1816 was actually an effort to "provide for the common defense and to utilize the resources of all to strengthen the states as individual entities." (p. 127) When national policies began to benefit northern states at the expense of his home, the South, is when his states' rights sentiment began to manifest itself as sectionalism. The weakness of Niven's otherwise masterful biography is that "as a northerner, born and bred in New York and Connecticut," Niven is never able to completely shake his own predisposition against slavery and present Calhoun's feelings on the issue as being valid views with their own arsenal of support. (p. xv) Although he obviously attempts to be completely objective, Niven's own views show through in his portrayal of the slavery problem as Calhoun's resistance against the antislavery movement as opposed to the antislavery movement threatening Calhoun's southern way of life and ingrained teachings. John Niven's somewhat unconventional view of the career and motives of one of the leading spokesmen for the Old South, John C. Calhoun, is convincingly and understandably expressed in this original biography. He succeeds in depicting Calhoun as a very consistent man with a humanity and complexity entirely devoted to the preservation of the South.



3. In his opening remarks John Niven makes the promise that he would not undertake psychoanalysis of John C.Calhoun, Much to his credit, he is true to his word. What Niven has delivered is an eminently readable and straightforward account of South Carolina's greatest political figure. We forget all that he did: senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and vice president, in a distinguished career that began in the early days of Madison's presidency and concluded during the Taylor-Fillmore administration, a span of nearly four decades.

   Niven's disclaimer, however, is telling. There is a tendency to use Calhoun's career as a sort of national inkblot. For constitutional scholars and ideologues of many stripes Calhoun's writings survive as either the last great stand of states rights or as a subversive manifesto for the tragic secession that would follow. For politicians and observers of human behavior, Calhoun is either the consummate patriot or his own worst enemy.

   From the data Niven provides, it can be said that while Calhoun may have been eccentric, he was not crazy. Everyone born in primitive eighteenth century America survived with a history, and Calhoun, born in 1782, was no exception. His family and his colony shared a history of terrible suffering at the hands of the British [those were Calhoun's people slaughtered in Mel Gibson's "The Patriot."] Calhoun himself was orphaned as a young teen and appears to have spent a studious but lonely existence until he studied law at Yale under the famous Timothy Dwight.

   Calhoun arrived home with his diploma just in time to ride a wave of strong Carolina resistance against the Virginia-New York axis that seemed to control presidential elections. This handsome, passionate, articulate favorite son soon found himself elected to Congress where he naturally became a leading advocate of war against the hated British. On June 18, 1812, Calhoun and other hawks got their war, but the thoughtful Calhoun quickly ascertained that the United States was woefully unprepared. Calhoun regretted his impetuousness, and nothing would absolve his guilt for this nasty war.

   Calhoun would do penance for his sins by serving as Secretary of War under Monroe. Niven commends him for an outstanding tenure during which Calhoun reformed the army's purchasing policies, developed stronger defense outposts in the west, and crafted an almost enlightened Indian policy. An ambitious man, Calhoun not unreasonably expected his War Department success to catapult him toward bigger and better things.

   But here one of the major themes of the book emerges: Calhoun was an unlucky politician. It was his bad fortune to reach his prime concurrently with an unusually large class of outstanding statesmen: Henry Clay, William Crawford, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren, to name a few. While he could console himself with the role of "everybody's favorite second" in the 1824 election, that convoluted contest left him tainted goods in the eyes of many, and an outsider in the Adams cabinet to boot.

   Calhoun reluctantly threw his lot with Jackson in 1828, but by this date the South Carolinian was having long thoughts about his home region. Cotton prices were low, and protective tariffs seemed to him to exact a crushingly heavy toll from southern growers like himself. And although he shared some of Clay's enthusiasms for internal improvements, most notably transportation systems for the inner reaches of the Carolinas, Calhoun became increasingly suspicious and hostile of the federal government, dubious about its ability and will to protect slavery and Calhoun's idyllic picture of the agricultural southern life. A highly sensitive man, he internalized what he saw as the political treachery of Clay, Van Buren, and especially Crawford, who raised Calhoun-baiting to an art form, for reasons never precisely spelled out.

   Calhoun began to write prodigiously on the subject of states rights and federal encroachments. As Niven observes, his writings were alternately brilliant and contradictory. Potboiler states rights speeches and pamphlets were common in America as the young nation sorted itself out. But how far could a politician really go on the matter of a state's autonomy? Until the Jackson era there seemed to have been a gentleman's agreement that the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions represented the boundary of political good taste. Calhoun crossed that line in his defense of nullification, increasingly preoccupied by perceived threats to his beloved South Carolina, In doing so Calhoun lost his national political base and a sense of the national pulse. No longer viable as even a regional candidate for the presidency, he assisted President Tyler by his skillful negotiating with Great Britain on the Oregon border question. But he objected to the Mexican War, not on humanitarian grounds but because he feared the socioeconomic consequences of the acquisition of Mexican territory, i.e., new free soil states. He was correct in his assessment that the consequences of the Mexican War would bring political turmoil to the United States. He had few horses to trade on the floor of congress as the Wilmot Proviso was debated, but his style till the end was magnificent.

   From Niven's account it is fair to say that Calhoun was never a universally recognized spokesman for the South during his own lifetime. The Richmond Junto despised him. Unionists were still a majority in the South at the time of his death in 1850. Moderate southern businessmen even in his home state found his philosophy antiquated and at times deleterious to their state's economy. Many found him unbearably pedantic. Only later, as the nation polarized, would his political philosophy become a revered creed for those who dared to think the unthinkable.

   Niven's work is a fine presentation for the casual reader and a more than adequate primer for those eager to delve into the mind and works of the consummate antebellum apostle of states' rights.

5 comments about Literature or Life.

1. Jorge Semprun was born in Spain and while studying philosophy in Paris, he was arrested. Accused of being member of the resistance, he was sent to Buchenwald where he spent 18 months before the camp was liberated. "Literature or Life" is his account of what it meant to survive Buchenwald, from the perspective of a highly intellectual mind. It represents a desperate search for understandiing the horrors of Evil, using philosophy and literature as reasoning tools, as well as psychological justification for survival. It is literature of the "living dead!"



2. In this elegant piece of literary philosophy, Semprun treats readers to an extraordinarily rich remembrance of two years in Buchenwald. This work is shot through with memories of his life before, during and after the war and references to many of the thinkers and writers he has known. Passages as delicate as lace adorn chapters sound as bedrock. You could do much worse than to build a set of Holocaust readings on this foundation.

   One aspect making this an especially vibrant Holocaust testimony is that Semprun is not Jewish. While he approaches the subject of Jewish suffering with sympathy, gravity and deep respect, his reminiscences are framed by a lifetime of learning and an important non-Jewish perspective. Readers taste the suffering Semprun has experienced through continuing memories and glimpse what must have driven celebrated Jewish survivors like Paul Celan, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski to suicide.

   Another laudable feature is Semprun's sure knowledge that in politics, as in everything, there is such a thing as paramount Evil, to which philosophers like Heidegger contributed. Deep thinking alone does not, according to his view, constitute righteousness. Semprun elegantly examines ends and means as well as thought processes, dramatically dismissing the moral relativism common among intellectuals these days.

   Despite the difficult subject matter, I found this work highly educational--and eminently hopeful and uplifting. Alyssa A. Lappen




3. Jorge Semprún is one of the many survivors of the Holocaust who has left his memoirs written to the later generations. But what makes him different is the fact that he did not wrote just what he saw or lived: he wanted us readers to know the feelings, the thoughts and the worries that accompanied and still accompany a Buchenwald prisoner as well. Their words are not hateful to the Germans, nor show pity or regret towards the writer himself or his former fellows. Semprún does not analyze tha causes or the consecuences of his experience, he seems more to go through them once again, but from a diferent point of view: that of the free men. From there, he tries to explain things; not in a very reasonable or settled order, but simply as they come to his mind. The structure of the book reminds that of our own memories: fragmented, realistic, or perhaps a little more distant as time goes by; uncomplete. That lack of organisation makes the book even more sincere and pure, while still keeping a beautiful prose to tell the most amazing horrors.
   A must for anyone who is interested in the Holocaust and its survivors, who are fading silently as time goes on.



4. Jorge Semprun spent two years in a concentration camp, Buchenwald. He was a known writer before and continued to be a writer afterwards. In this reflection on his life experience he reveals himself to be first of all a true human being , the Yiddish word is 'mensch' and it applies to him though he is not Jewish. Semprun's meditation on the meaning of his writing and the meaning of his life is a moving one, and a unique one. He is an original person with a way of thinking and understanding things of his own. Who reads this book will get to know a mind and a human being of unique distinction.



5. Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun
   
   This is a great book. Like Semprun's previous book on World War II, "What a Beautiful Sunday," this one uses his experience in Nazi concentration camps to tell a quite remarkable story (and stories within stories within stories), but also as a jumping-off place for wide-ranging musing about life, and art, and the dependency of each on the other (hence the apt title).
   
   The book circles around the liberation of Buchenwald and the first few weeks afterwards, with extended forays into his experiences there, previous experiences with the French underground as a student at the Sorbonne, and with a lot of discussion of writers and philosophers along the way.
   
   He starts by addressing the question of whether an experience like being in Buchenwald can be truly and fully addressed in literature - he says yes, certainly, given enough skill and commitment by the writer. Finding readers who are capable of comprehending and believing what is written is the problem. I think we have a good writer/reader match here, because I find Semprun to be startling in his clarity, illuminating, riveting and very funny from time to time (a sense of humor and absurdity that obviously served him well, and those that leaned on him for support well, too).
   
   There is a bizarrely funny scene at the opening of the book, for example, when three British soldiers, brand new to the scene in Buchenwald walked up to him, and he was so happy to see them ("I felt more like laughing, gamboling in the woods, running from tree to tree") that he tried to engage them in what was, for him, normal conversation ("Say, I bet you fellas are noticing how quiet it is here - it's the birds! The smell of the crematory has driven them off, so the usual racket you hear in the forest just ain't happening here!") - Meanwhile these soldiers are staring at him in open-mouthed horror, as if he was a talking corpse, some kind of zombie... It takes Semprun a few minutes to figure out what the problem is here, and he decides, on reflection, that their perception is correct - that he and his comrades, the survivors, are a sort of zombie, that they hadn't really avoided death - that death and what he calls "radical evil" were so pervasive in the camp that nobody there survived in the usual sense - and he said that for the rest of his life, much of it as a younger man spent continuing to put himself in danger as a revolutionary fighter of various kinds, he felt an odd sort of invulnerability - an assumption that he would not be killed or even caught because he'd already been there, and somehow been given a pass to return to finish his business here.
   
   One of his extended side trips is a discussion of Heidegger, of whom he says, in part, "Of course, there was a certain fascination - sometimes mixed with irritation - with the philosopher's language. With that abounding obtuseness through which one has to hack one's way, cutting clearings without ever reaching a definitive clarity. A never-ending labor of intellectual decipherment that becomes absorbing through its very incompletion."
   
   It seems clear to me that Semprun used his experience with Heidegger partially as a guide in his own development as a thinker and writer, because, again - he writes with exceptional clarity, and no matter how far afield his musings range, he never loses the thread or the point of a remarkable and essential story in the process.

2 comments about Who Was Who In The Napoleonic Wars.

1. Haythornthwaite's 'Naploleonic Source Book' contains a small biographical section which I had always wished to see expanded. This is it! I have been able to find entries for even the most obscure bit-part players. The author has even given spaces for significant historians and artists of the period (not necessarily living during that period either!) I think this is an imaginative and necessary inclusion. Readers interested in the War of 1812 will not, I think, be disappointed, as there is a generous spread of entries for participants from both sides of that conflict.



2. A handy reference, of the "whos" of the French Revolution and Napoleonic eras, I find myself reaching for again and again. A must companion for Haythornthwaite's Napoleonic Encyclopedia, or for your library in general.

No comments about Moon Princess, The: Memories of the Shan States.

1 comments about Private Presley: The Missing Years - Elvis in Germany/Book and Cd.

1. Oh my, where to begin ! : )
   I just opened my still shrinkwrapped book of Private Presley today (had bought it years before, put it in a SAFE place and FORGOT about it, till now..that is (could kick myself.) It is a gorgeous, wonderful, funny and endearing little number with loads of great pics with a still relaxed Elvis in all his youthful GLORY! : )
   Any Elvis fan should have one, and now ..I do ! : )
   If anyone can still find a copy of this ( I am NOT selling mine, thankyouverymuch! ) BUY IT..it is worth every penny! The CD is wonderful..playful Elvis talking and singing spontaneously..well almost spontaneously LOL : ) Not that stiff stuff on American TV,Radio..no, no..just Elvis as we would all have probably seen him in our ..er..living rooms?? Oh, Yeah !!..Riiight! LOL : )
   But certainly the way we have WANTED to see and hear him!
   I wish people luck in finding this gem. Actually, there should just be another printing, I cannot believe that there are not more than just 100,000 fans of Elvis out there screaming for this book! : )
   Tracks include: I Gotta Woman, Tweedle Dee,Maybellene,That's All Right Mama, Blue Moon of Kentucky (my personal fave),There's Good Rockin' Tonight, Baby Let's Play house and those great interviews & just talkin' : )
   This book makes up for all those tell-all books out there that were unkind to Elvis! He was, after all, just a human, and probably wouldv'e love to live like one, given the chance. In Germany he had a freedom he would never experience here. As well, he never got back there, either.
   Anyway, great tribute to the greatest guy...Elvis Presley! : )
   If that Parker guy wouldv'e been smarter, he wouldv'e given Elvis some slack to just live a little, they both would have been better off and Elvis might still be alive !
   Bottom line..Buy it if you can find it! Nothing comes close to this book! : )