No comments about Manuel Castells (Key Contemporary Thinkers).

No comments about Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism.

2 comments about Lady De Lancey at Waterloo: A Story of Duty and Devotion.

1. This is one of the best stories avaialable about Waterloo and its aftermath and it is from the wife of one of the officers in the battle. It is the true story of Madalene DeLancey's Week at Waterloo and I am forever indebted to David Miller who found this incredibly hard to find book and added footnotes and narrative detail to what was a very thin story.
   
   Madalene was encouraged to write this story much later - and so it is done from memory rather than diaries and letters, but the detail is extraodinary. It was shown to Charles Dickens who wept over it. Her writing is very moving. It lacks deliberate pathos and yet it is so moving. She had married only a few months prior to battle of Waterloo and her husband had been called to serve at the last minute, they arrived in Belgium just days before the battle began and her husband was immediately swept into the organisation.
   
   The army was called up on the 15th and marched to Ligny and Quatrebras where the first battles took place. Back in the town no one knew what was happening, the dithering, the panic, the rumours, the deserters galloping through town are all revealed in her narrative.
   
   The most gut-wrenching part is when she finds out her husband has been injured - she hears numerous stories rumours and half-confirmed details until she finally tracks him down, injured near the battlefield. She then must nurse him.
   
   I find myself crying even as I write this review. The story had such an enormous impact. Miller has done a fantastic job of providing detail to throw light on it, without detracting from its power.
   
   One of the best books I have read 5 stars +
   
   A Woodley



2. Lord and Lady DeLancey married shortly before the Battle of Waterloo. While others were dancing at the Duchess of Richmond's ball on the eve of the battle, the DeLanceys remained in their hotel, hopefully in each other's arms. Once the trumpets are sounded, calling for all officers to return to their regiments, Lord DeLancey leaves his bride believing that she will make for the port of Ostend to return to England while he moves toward the front to face the reconstituted armies of Napoleon. But her gut tells her to turn back, which was a good thing, because she shortly received word that her husband was grievously wounded and was in a cottage near the battlefield. Lady DeLancey immediately went to her husband and stayed with him until he died three days later. This is a remarkable story, but even more so when you learn that the bride was only about 20 years old. Her ability to stay calm under such circumstances when armed men were walking outside her door and no one knew who had won the battle is a profile in courage. Most of the book is Lady DeLancey's own writings on what happened near Waterloo.

1 comments about Willis Carto and the American Far Right.

1. 'Prof.' George Michael (not the sleazy singer
   from back in the '80's) doesn't know the difference
   between the Political Middle (Populism) and the
   right, so leave it to him to use dopey 'Slick
   Willie' Carto to clear that up, eh? Think again.
   
   (1) True Fact - It was the late Jason B. Matthews
   that started the 'Legion for Survival of Freedom'
   in 1952, not Willis Carto who was fired by future
   John Birch Society starter Robert Welch, who first
   started another organization.
   
   True Fact (2) Willis Carto neither started Liberty
   Lobby, nor...
   
   (True Fact) (3) The Institute for Historical Review.
   The IHR was started by the late David McCalden and
   the late Lewis Furr on Dec. 11th, 1978. And Liberty
   Lobby was started on July 17th, 1955 by the late
   Col. Curtis B. Dall, former son-in-law to FDR [born
   1899] and Dr. Martin A. Larson [born 1897]. Carto
   hastled in there in early 1956 and became Treasurer
   and showed the oldsters how to stretch them buck$.
   
   Fact #4 - Jean Edison Farrell was NOT the neice of
   Populist Inventor Thomas Edison.
   
   Fact #5 - She never intended to leave Carto, per se
   any monie$ - She wanted the money to go to further
   the IHR/LSF's work in fighting the rapidly forming
   New World Order. Carto embezzled the monie$ and used
   them to line his, Henri Fischer's and his nutty wife's
   pockets and to try to sell the IHR to Lawrence Patterson,
   the Clearwater 'Church' [read CULT] of Scientology, et, al.
   
   Fact #6 - Tom Valentine, the great Populist-Libertarian
   short-wave Radio host of Radio Free America, True Health,
   The Midas Report, originator of the Power Hour, et, al
   was the driving force behind reactivating the Populist
   Party, not Carto, who only embezzled more monie$ from
   them and was fired by the rightful Party Executives.
   
   Fact #7 - Carto and his chief jew-batier, the half jewi$h
   Bernard Piper, have kiped monie$ from many Christian, Pat-
   riot, Revisionist Organizations ans individuals for years.
   Well, P.T. Barnum was right, "there's one born every minute!"

4 comments about Franco (Life&Times).

1. centinela de occidente, el unico que vencio a los extintos rojos en el campo de batalla...



2. It's hard to find a work about Franco without politics in it. Yet, there's the book. You can really appreciate who was Franco, and then develop an idea on your own. Books that help thinking- that's my favourite in history, especially when I know little about the topic.



3. Left facts that would interfere with the opologetic view of history out. No historian would try as hard to excuse Franco's crimes and leave much of the truth to the imagination of the reader.Much research, that should have been included was left out, for whatever reasons. There are other books much more definitive of what Franco really was.



4. This was an excellent, if very brief, introduction to the life of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. Streeter describes his subject in a relatively objective manner, giving us the positive and negative aspects of Franco's personality and his actions from his childhood up to his death. For instance, despite his slight frame and bookish nature, Franco was a fearless and effective soldier as a young man. He also had the capability to be quite clever at times. On the other hand, he comes across as somewhat politically inept and out of touch with reality. Then there is his capacity for cruelty. He could be very sentimental about abstract things yet coolly indifferent to the deaths of his own people, including his own brother. He seems like a typical dictator in this regard.
   
   I have to disagree with the reviewer who condemns the book for leaving out facts and being "apologetic" for Franco. For one, this is an intentionally concise biography (135 pages) not an exhaustive tome; therefore it is impossible to fit every little fact and detail into it. Secondly, the author is hardly an apologist for Franco. He is OBJECTIVE, as all historians should be, but he has no problem pointing out that Franco could be very cruel and used terror to meet his ends. In fact, I think it would be difficult to read this book and come away with a positive view of the dictator. He is portrayed as a cold, arrogant, tyrant whose main concern was the preservation of his own power. He was clearly an authoritarian man of the right, but it wouldn't be accurate to describe him as either a fascist or a monarchist. His government was made up of both of these factions, but he seems to have done just enough to appease each of them without really aligning himself with one or the other. His main concern seems to have been strictly power and the preservation of Spain as a traditional Catholic state.
   
   As for Franco's relations with the Axis powers; Streeter argues that although Franco supported the Axis in principle, he simply had very little to offer them after the devastating Civil War. He actually sent a list of extraordinary demands (military aid, colonial territory, etc.) to Hitler, to which, in return, he would enter the war on the Axis side. For his part, Hitler decided that Spain's potential contributions were not nearly enough to warrant these demands, and thus rejected them. With that said, Franco seems to have cleverly played both sides of the fence (he accepted aid from the allies) as his ultimate priority was strictly the preservation of Spain, as well as his own power. In fact, Hitler and Mussolini both had low opinions of him, the former even calling him a coward and a "Latin charlatan."
   
   All in all, this is a great biography of the man for anyone who doesn't want to slog through a massive tome. The book is very aesthetically pleasing as well. It is sleek, compact, has glossy pages and many pictures. Four stars.

No comments about Telling Political Lives: The Rhetorical Autobiographies of Women Leaders in the United States (Lexington Studies in Political Communication).

No comments about Wife of...: An Irreverent Account of Life In Washington (Goodread Biographies).

1 comments about Chips from the Chopping Block: More Tales from Alaska's Bush Rat Governor.

1. Chips From The Chopping Block: More Tales From Alaska's Bush Rat Governor is a frank, straightforward memoir written as a postscript to the autobiography of former Alaskan governor Jay Hammond. Filled with frank, candid, unvarnished honesty and a with wit, humor, and keen feeling for the Alaskan soil, wilderness, cities, and people, Chips from the Chopping Block is very hearty autobiographical and observational entertainment and highly recommended reading.

No comments about Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series: Volume 17: (1 November 1951-31 March 1952).

2 comments about The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (Penguin Classics).

1. This is the most important testament to a now largely forgotten tragedy of American politics. Sacco and Vanzetti were essentially convicted and executed for being unpatriotic foreigners, regardless of the crime they were accused of [for which no specific evidence was presented against them]. They waited for seven years in prison before their execution, during which time they wrote these letters. Their English, though it improved through the years, was never fully accomplished. But the results are extraordinary. The letters express ideas about life, society, faith, politics and human feelings, and the often clumsy and misused language actually makes the expression more lucid and more beautiful. The path of trial, appeal and final sentencing runs through clearly, and as the end approaches the letters are inexpressibly heartbreaking, as when Sacco asks his wife to tell his daughter "that I love her so much, and again, so much." This book has been in and out of print since the late 1920's, and is often unavailable in libraries because patrons steal it. It is a blessing that Penguin has brought it back.



2. Polenberg of Cornell University The introduction to The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (Penguin Books 1997) by Professor Richard Polenberg is richly informative. The publication is timely and useful. Readers must ask whether these letters offer a clue to the moral character of convicted murderers Sacco and Vanzetti. John Nicholas Beffel, radical journalist who roomed with chief defense counsel Fred Moore during the Dedham trial, declared in “The New Republic,” December 29, 1920, that Vanzetti was a “philosophical anarchist.” In “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti” (March 1927), Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter called Vanzetti “a dreamy fish peddler” (p. 101). Bruce Bliven, “managing editor of the liberal New Republic” (a phrase from American National Biography), wrote of Sacco and Vanzetti: “Their faith is philosophical anarchism.” See TNR: June 22, 1927, p. 121. When an unknown reviewer in the April 1929 issue of the anarchist journal “The Road to Freedom” argued that Upton Sinclair’s novel “Boston” was the work of an unfit historian, Sinclair replied angrily in the June issue: “It is a fact that Sacco was a ‘Militant Anarchist.’” Anarchist editor Hippolyte Havel agreed. In the August 1929 issue of “Lantern” Walter Lippmann wrote: “By every test that I know of for judging character, these are the letters [The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti] of innocent men.” Note: The brackets are by Lippmann Frederick Allen (Only Yesterday, 1931) said Vanzetti was “clearly a remarkable man--an intellectual of noble character, a philosophical anarchist of a type which it seemed impossible to associate with a pay-roll murder.” Alfred Jules Ayer, Professor of Logic at Oxford, reviewing Francis Russell’s 1962 book on Sacco and Vanzetti, wrote: “Both men were active anarchists of an idealistic kind.” Ayer said the letters of Vanzetti revealed “a man of great swetnesss and nobility of character.” See New Statesman: 5 July 1963. Sacco-Vanzetti scholars who met at the Boston Public Library on October 26 and 27, 1979, reminded readers that time is a great corrective. Professor Nunzio Pernicone, on the second conference day said: “ . . . these men [Sacco and Vanzetti] were not philosophical anarchists; they were genuine, militant revolutionaries.” See “Sacco-Vanzetti: Developments and Reconsiderations--1979,” the 1982 publication by Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston. In “Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background,” a 1991 publication by Princeton University Press, Professor Paul Avrich wrote: “Both [Sacco and Vanzetti] were ultra-militants, . . .” See p. 161 for Avrich’s citation to Sinclair’s letters that acknowledge the militancy of Sacco and Vanzetti. On page xxxix of his Introduction, Polenberg calls Edmund M. Morgan a historian. In fact, Morgan is called Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University on the back cover of the 1978 reprint of “The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti,” that 1948 book by Joughin and Morgan that Tom O’Connorr said had educated a generation of college students and professors. Polenberg’s assertion (p. xxxix) that Joughin and Morgan, . . .believed Sacco and Vanzetti innocent, . . .” must be severely qualified. Morgan said Ehrmann’s book, “The Untried Case: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the Morelli Gang,” failed to convince him that the Morelli gang, not Sacco and Vanzetti, had committed the crime at South Braintree. Morgan also said that if Sacco and Vanzetti “were alive today [1934] and were to be tried again, . . . and if a verdict were returned, it could not be set aside as contrary to the weight of evidence, at least against Sacco.” See Harvard Law Review, January 1934. Morgan has more telling concessions in the book he and Joughin published in 1948. On pp. 55-56 he calls Vanzetti’s Plymouth trial fair, the verdict just. On p. 46 Morgan writes: “ . . . this cross-examination, taken alone,

   tends strongly to show that a group of Italians had framed an alibi for Vanzetti and had coached this bright youngster [Beltrado Brini] to tell his story with details which would tie in with the incidents related by other witnesses.” On pages 48-49 Morgan says Vanzetti’s statements on the Plymouth trial are suspect. A handbook on the two disputed trials is “Kill Now, Talk Forever: Debating Sacco and Vanzetti,” an ebook by 1stBooks Library. Soft cover issue will be available before the end of summer....