No comments about Benjamin Harrison: Centennial President (First Men America's Presidents Series).

4 comments about FDR: The New Deal Years 1933-1937.

1. I bought this book on a flyer in 1987, read it once and put it on the shelf. During a televised Clinton address from the Oval Office, I noticed on the credenza behind him "FDR: The New Deal Years" in its distinctive silver and red jacket. Well, if its good enough for the White House...so I read it again, and now understand why it stood on the President's desk. It's an outstanding work of narrative history. Volume one was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, but this is clearly the next best in Davis's monumental five volumes on FDR and his times. It is a lively depiction of the New Deal and its famous characters, including Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins, the Brain Trust, Eleanor and Sara Delano all orbiting around the Sun King FDR. It is also an excellent analysis of how outright revolution was avoided and our capitalist system preserved in the darkest hours. But most of all it is an enjoyably facinating portrait of the man who everyone wanted to be near but almost no one, not even Eleanor, really knew.



2. This really is a remarkable book and outstanding contribution to FDR scholarship. All of the books in this series are probably the best books on the life and times of Franklin Roosevelt, but I think this is one is the best.

   In this, the second volume in the series Davis explores just how much of the early stages of FDR's presidency owed to his career as governor, how his concerns as governor of the state of New York were later transfered from Albany to Washington. Concerns with conservation and the power monopolies in these years were later to serve as the springboard for a number of New Deal initiatives.

   Anyone wishing to learn more about the greatest president of the 20th century should look no further than this series of books by Mr. Davis. Sadly, Mr. Davis did not live to bring the series to its logical conclusion in 1945. Had he done so, this would be the definative study of FDR. As things are, it is likely to be the best biography for many years to come, despite some problems with vol. 4 and its premature conclusion.




3. Some people claim that Arthur Schlesinger wrote the definative history of the New Deal and FDR back in the 1950s. These same people probably are unfamiliar with this wonderful book by Kenneth Davis.

   This is not just a history of the period of 1933-37, but an extended mediatation on how we are a nation are going to respond to the changes brought about by industrialization.

   Do not be put off by this last statement because Davis is an excellent writer, historian and philosopher. The best part of this book deals with how social security came to be shaped in the form that it finally was. How all manner of elements came together for the legislation to be written. It is just remarkable.

   Davis is evenhanded in this book and in the series as a whole. He identifies FDR's triumphs but at the same time is willing to be critical when he feels the actions warrent it.

   Davis and his series have been recognized repeatedly although I believe that they probably were not given the praise that this series deserved. They are simply the best thing to be written on FDR by a historian.




4. Life was hard here at home for most people in the 1930s, but most especially those who depended on the land for food and sustenance. His New Deal ruined the farming industry and now we are indepbted to other countries for the majority of our food, soon to be medicines also. Huey Long would have made every man a 'King' in his own home, but that was not to be. We have no kings in the USA, only politicians.
   
   TVA was developed in the Thirties with all the many dams built in Tennessee and Alabama to harnass the wild Tennessee River. I wish he had picked the Mississippi and left Tennessee along. I was born at the forks of the rivers where the Tennessee began, and that is not such a good heritage. TVA is still run by the government, but it has seen its time. It is obsolete. Like Johnson's Grand Illusion, Roosevelt's New Deal was just a political ploy to win the election.
   
   We all know that the Great Depression started in 1932. In August, 1934, Utah became t he 36th state to ratify the 21st amendment, ending Prohibition. Made Jack happy, though he hadn't been born for 20 more years. In July, 1934, the bank robber Dillinger was gunned down by government men as he leaves a Chicago theater -- betrayed by a woman in red, whom he trusted. Just proves you can't trust those women who like to show off. Bonnie and Clyde had been killed a couple of weeks previously. Why didn't they come on to Knoxville and catch Billy the Kid was he escaped across the Gay Street bridge? In September, 1934, the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma sent lots of people moving from that hell hole to California where the dreamers and schemers had congregated. They crossed the deserts not for the Gold Rush this time but for jobs and money to pay the exorbinant prices for vegetables and meats they were not allowed to grow on their own anymore, delcation of the U.S. Government, which is still in effect today in some areas.
   
   Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (due to the assassination of Huey Long of Louisiana on September 8, 1935 -- exactly 71 years ago) took effect. FDR was the first American president who did not think in terms of this country being a place set apart from the rest of the world. He had the foresight to see the future of Europe, and especially England (with the help of Churchill), as being closely tied to the future of the USA. According to Mr. Vaughan in 'Hard Times,' there were many isolationists in Congress and the Senate who would, if they could, separate the globe into two halves.
   
   The number one box office draw for 1934 in Hollywood films was Will Rogers, followed closely by Clark Gable; on down the list of major stars were Mae West and Joan Crawford. It was a grand place back then. In 1936, Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His plays included "Anna Christie" and "Desire Under the Elms," both were later made into wonderful movies.
   
   In 1938, Orson Welles played his radio stunt reading H. G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds.' ONe local radio station here plays it every Halloween night as that is when the great Orson scared this country to death almost. June 4, 1940, Hell is Dunkirk. Roosevelt was just the president we needed to work with Winston Churchill of England whose parentage was half American. However, it took Truman to have the bomb dropped to stop the war.

2 comments about Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth.

1. Sandy MacGillivray's in depth analysis of the life and times of pioneer Cretan archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans was a pure joy to read. The author's own experiences as a professional in the field on Crete add great weight to his arguments as he finds himself coping the Evans' legacy on a daily basis. I really got the sense that the author knew Evans, both the man and the scholar, through close attention to and extensive research on the amply available primary sources. This is a wonderfully scholarly, yet very readable and highly interesting book to both the professional archaeologist and interested armchair amateur.



2. Minotaur by Joseph MacGillivray
   
   This book presents itself as a readable biography of one the great Archaeologists, Sir Arthur Evans, instead of a thoughtful biography the book is really a prolonged attack on Evans (and 19th century archaeology) by an author of dubious credentials and makes for extremely painful reading.
   
   The book is tolerable journalism when its sticks to the factual events, but it is so filled with hostility towards Evans, that the reader is quickly bogged down in a long winded and poorly researched series of ad hominen attacks and innuendo of wrong doing that the thrill of Crete and Minos is completely buried.
   
   The central claim of this bad book is that Evans created Minoan archaeology and did not discover anything. The attacks are unrelenting. The author claims variously : Evans is unscientific and concerned only with objects, stole antquities, horded valuable linear B scripts, was a repressed homosexual, took too much credit for his finds and harmed nearly all of his colleagues, was shrewd and calculating to excess in his business dealings, was a racist because his disliked Turks and personally favored European and Greek religion and culture, was a spoiled wealthly aristocrat of no ability but gifted merely by birth and social standing- who also ate very well, etc etc etc
   
   That the author has issues with Evans is an understatement and parrying all of his attacks (most of which are the authors own unsubstantiated suspicions or irelevant details) is a waste of time.
   
   Evans- the gentlemen and scholar who devoted his 90 years of life to classics, beauty in art and history, who spent his fortune to dig Knossos and who developed new theories of myth and civilization: in short a person whose name will be recalled as long as history-minded Western man is revered- is not present in this book. This book is the product of a modern academic archaeology resentful of its romantic past, that prefers digging with toothbrushes, hates coin collectors, believes antiquities dealers are evil and wishes that British, Germans and French had left everything in the ground for them to sniff about with white gloves and a microscope.
   
   
   That the author is an academic feather-weight is evident in the opening pages, where he attempts to work out his own crude thesis: Evans was not an archaeologist but a myth maker motivated by sexual demons. His analysis is so bad, reading his turns of phrase are like chewing on sand: "Archaeologists are the progenitors as well as the midwives at the birthing process we call excavation." Ugly writing quickly leads to bad analysis such as this delphic prose: " ...we must start with Evans himself, the product of his genes and his life experiences." These experiences include the alleged homosexuality of Evans which the author tries to awkwardly weave into his book perhaps hoping to increase sales, but he cannot find much and we are left with a few sentences of inane writing worthy only of a freshman trying to impress a bored teaching assistant. He writes that he suspects Evans was driven to pursue his career because of the "repressed 'beastliness' of his homosexuality..." His efforts degenerate further a few hundred pages later with innuendo about a young man Evans adopted and his association with Baden Powell and the Boy Scout movement.
   
   The author has no wit and his style wears the reader down. He makes no effort in the biography to educate the reader about the civilization of Crete and takes the excitement of the past away completely. I know of no other book on archaeology that deadens its subject matter to such a degree. The author is all over the place with his own insipid thoughts and at times contradicts his own thin analysis.
   
   For example the author continually harps on the fact that Evan's sister titled her biography of him, "Time and Chance". The author writes "Nothing could be further from what I believe about how Evans discovered Knossos..."(p.6) In his effort to bring Evans down from his perch the author continually paints Evans as simply a digger with money. At the end of his book, the author returns to this theme: "Arthur Evans did not stumble upon Knossos by some happy circumstance. He set his mind on acquiring the rights to a well-documented site.... he secured the expertise he lacked in the person of a site foreman, architects, and conservators..." (p.308) Ok this attack may work in hindsight, but on page 175 the author himself writes: "they all faced the risk that within a few hours they might have removed only a thin layer of eroded soil and exposed a solid rock outcropping scattered with worthless pot shards... Evans might learn that he had chased off the other suitors only to find the bride barren of promise and her dowry worthless. These are the risks excavators take." Which is it? Did Evans simply walk in and dig up what everyone knew was there or did chance play a role and did he finally locate the fabled city of Knossos after three and a half millenium? Clearly this writer is a moron.
   
   A good graduate student should set things right and demolish MacGillivray's shoddy research on Evans, a student of history with a sense of the classical- not one inspired while waiting to use public tennis courts in Manhattan as MacGillivray says he was. Surely some inspiration can still be found in the stones of ruined cities, a brilliant gemstone or winds of the Mediterranean.
   
   The author, in writing this extended effort to libel the dead, succeeds only in diminishing our native appreciation of history, and our myths. That is the end point of modernity.

2 comments about Durruti in the Spanish Revolution.

1. This book, EXTENSIVELY researched with meticulous detail, reads like a novel. It is exiting, dramatic, thought provoking, and at times, tear jerking. The author does an amazing job of helping the reader understand not only Durruti's devotion to the anarchist cause within Spain and abroad, but places this man's dangerous life in the context of Spain's history. The great deal of research done is this title should not go wasted: read it, it's worth your time and you will be glad that you did!



2. Abel Paz's biography of Buenaventura Durruti is probably the best work ever written about the life of the famous Spanish anarcho-syndicalist militant. And I say this because I have read a few. One possible problem will be for people who already have a good understanding of Spanish culture, history and politics and especially the Spanish Civil War period already. I say this because Paz diverts from Durruti's life story often with lengthy digressions about the politics and history of Spain and Europe during this period, (1880-1938), and which some might find tedious or overly detailed, especially if they already are familiar with them. However, the newbie reader will find these facts and insights invaluable for understanding the context of Durruti's life, actions, and politics, if they are not.
   
   It is very clear that Paz greatly admires Durruti and so he puts everything he does in the very best possible light, and which is okay, since there doesn't seem to be that many "bad" (as in evil) things that Durruti did. And even when Durruti did make errors in judgment or mistakes, unlike many of his contemporaries in the anti-Fascist movement, that's all they amounted to; errors and mistakes. Durruti never initiated purges, massacres, torture, or resorted to terrorism, as some others on the Republican side did.
   
   Durruti was a true militant however, (and a hard-core one at that), who committed robberies to obtain funds, attempted to assassinate the Spanish monarch Alphonso XIII, and was arrested and imprisoned both in Spain and France for possession of arms and explosives. Durruti's time in prison never broke him either, no matter how badly his conditions of confinement were. The details Paz gives of Durruti's frequent jailings are quite revealing about Durruti's strength of character and his commitment to his cause.
   
   Paz covers the range of conspiracy theories of how Durruti met his end and he seems to feel that the two best explanations are that Durruti was hit by a stray bullet from his own side (i.e., "friendly fire") or more darkly, was deliberately assassinated by a Soviet intelligence operative. The details Paz provides about this are very interesting and there is easily enough plausible evidence for either conclusion. But Paz leaves it up to the reader to decide for themselves. Just as with the JFK assassination, it'll be discussed endlessly by those who wonder if Durruti's end was just his fate or a conspiracy to eliminate him.
   
   I recommend this book to those interested in the life of Buenaventura Durriti, the Spanish Civil War and or anarcho-syndicalism.

No comments about Southern Hero: Matthew Calbraith Butler, Confederate General, Hampton Redshirt, and U.S. Senator.

5 comments about Billy Carter: A Journey Through the Shadows.

1. I could not put this book down, I think Tuesday's With Morrie was the last book I was so touched by. What a wonderful and revealing portrait of a complex and interesting man. I suppose because I grew up in the South I so related to this book...a wonderful tribute to a father I always say the most we can hope for our children forgive us... Buddy seems to have been able to do just that...a loving tribute not only to Billy but Sybil as well.



2. This is one of the best books I have ever read. Buddy Carter writes with a style that is poignant, funny and very touching. This tale of pain and forgiveness touched my soul and I will recommend it to everyone. Buddy Carter is quite a writer and I am sure BOTH of his parents are quite proud of the way he brought forth this wonderful family story.



3. This is a magnificent book. It is often painful and yet also very funny. Buddy Carter's relationship with his father is reminicent of the struggle many children go through for approval, while striving for independence. I am buying copies of this wonderful story for family and friends. Buddy has not only told his story...he has told the father/son story of many, including me. This is a must read!



4. I only thought I had heard about Billy Carter. This is a wonderful book, written by a sensitive, loving son of a famous man. Buddy Carter is a thoughtful, intellegent author who gives an unvarnished account of his battle with and affection for his dad. I recommend this book to all of us who struggle to understand our relationship with our parents. Buddy Carter and his book are a gift.



5. Excellent book. Very well written and a pleasure to read. I hope Buddy Carter will take the time to write more about his historic family. This individual has a real talent!

5 comments about The Privacy War: One Congressman, J. Edgar Hoover and the Fight for the Fourth Amendment.

1. Ron Felber's book "The Privacy War" is well-written and well-reseached. Though it is controversial in many of its conclusions serious students of U.S. history should read it as well as every day citizens concerned about the future of their country.



2. Wow. A great read. And very relevant to today's world.



3. Neil Gallagher was a star in the world of politics who whose career was ruined by vicious men who turned the U.S. government into an 'evil empire'. Could this happen again? Is America the great country it seems to be or something else? It is every citizens job to insist that our country live up to the high ideals it was founded upon.



4. Living now under the "Patriot" Act, with more addendums to it being planned, it is important for citizens and Congressional representatives to revisit recent history. Under the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI regularly engaged in wire-tapping and secret taping via parabolic microphones. Catching mobsters, right? No, blackmailing members of Congress, destroying careers of public servants, and taking revenge on anyone who opposed the bureau's interests.

   How did they do it? By planting false information in respectable journals such as Life magazine, paying off members or organized crime for deeds done, and planting evidence to implicate innocent people. This is the story of New Jersey Congressman Neil Gallagher and his nightmarish encounters with Hoover and others in the American intelligence business. Gallagher championed privacy after learning of a young girl being forced to take a lie detector test for a low level administrative job. As Gallagher continued to delve into breaches of privacy over the years, he was astonished to discover massive deceptions carried out by the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI.

   In one such case, approximately 300,000 children ranging in age from 6 to 12 were given psychotic drugs such as Ritalin without the consent of their parents in a study to determine which drug was the most effective in behavior modification. It was discovered that the U.S. Army was quietly shipping canisters of dangerous chemical weapons by train through such heavily populated areas as Philadelphia. Once at port they were loaded on WWII Liberty ships, taken 250 miles out to sea, and sunk into the depths. Congress and the public were totally in the dark.

   Of course the nefarious Roy Cohn showed up in Gallagher's life, at first as a friendly, knowledgeable Washington insider, later threatening the successful Congressman with warnings from Hoover. Hoover went out of his way to terrorize Gallagher and his family. FBI agents ransacked their home while they were on vacation, interrogated his daughters while they were in college, and stormed into their home threatening his family at gunpoint. Author Ron Felber does not draw any conclusions, but allows the words of Gallagher and others to cast doubt on the veracity of the Warren Commission report.

   Felber conducted extensive interviews with Gallagher, cited newspaper accounts, and obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act in assembling his book. He uses the convention of jumping between time periods to provide background information on the current storyline. It is a technique that can be distracting, but Felber does a remarkable job. In light of the events of today, Felber's book is very relevant and a call to remember that in the past government institutions have acted against government officials and private citizens irresponsibly and maliciously.

   Invasion of privacy in our current environment has the potential to rise to dangerous, even outrageous, levels. Government secrecy and deception are enemies of democracy. As Albert Einstein said:

   "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."




5. The biography of Neil Gallagher, one of the most promising young members of Congress in the 1960s whose rise to power unraveled as later years revealed links to the mob and J. Edgar Hoover's war against privacy makes for an engrossing story of not just one politician's rise and fall, but the underlying power struggles, politics and influences which led to pressures against Fourth Amendment rights. A revealing blend of biography and political history.

4 comments about I Shall Live: Surviving Against All Odds 1939-1945.

1. I read this book a few years ago and was deeply impressed with the story. The author's voice is wry and humorous despite the incredibly dark experience he has endured. It's really a holocaust experience with a twist in that the ironic way that Henry Orenstein survives is key to what makes the story special. This book is well worth a read, especially considering the passing of the generation of people who suffered through those horrific times.



2. i had to read this book for an english project. at first i didnt really know if it look good until i started really reading it. Henry Orenstein lead a very interesing life so it was a good book



3. A possibly biased review because I am related to Henry Orenstein, but I'll do my best to be honest:
   I love the book! A couple years ago, I read it for a social studies project. I found out a lot about my family while learning about the horror of reality of that era. I believe Henry Orenstein must have been incredibly brave and clever to escape 5 Nazi camps without any serious injury or disease. I'm proud to say that he is still living today.



4. This is a well written personal history of a terrifying time most of us can only imagine. Mr. Orenstein does an amazing job of telling us chronologically what happened to him and those closest to him. What amazed me throughout was the deep vein of hope that was palpable no matter how bad things seemed to be. Perhaps Mr. Orenstein, his family and friends were not always optimistic about their chances but they seemed to remain faithful to one another, their beliefs and their undying faith that the evil that was pervasive during WWII would be beaten down eventually.
   
   I have a deep love of WWII history that was sparked by works of Stephen Ambrose and has crossed over to numerous authors and survivor's stories since. Mr. Orenstein has made his daily life much more visible than some have by focusing on how he dealt with life day in and day out.
   
   To all of the survivors of war, bless you and be strong. Tell your story!

No comments about Radical Tories (Goodread Biographies).

No comments about War, Presidents and Public Opinion.