Ahira's Hangar

I read Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel, author of the enjoyable history book Galileo's Daughter. In the old days of sea travel, many ships and lives were lost because sea farers could not determine their longitude. This very short history book describes some of the rather whacky attempts at doing so, along with more serious scientific attempts using astronomy, and the final solution, invented by a talented clock maker named John Harrison. Also describes how the scientific establishment tried to deny proper credit (and prize money) to Harrison.

******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

a couple of recent history reads:

Wayne Curtis ~ And A Bottle of Run: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. In this book, the author explores the history of alcohol usage in the western Hemisphere, particularly in the US. Rum was one of the first popular liquors distilled in the western hemisphere, and over the hundreds of years since it was first created (probably on the island of Barbados), it has waxed and waned in popularity many times depending on social and historical factors. The book also contains many cocktail recipes, from the early grogs and punches to today's daquiris and mojitos.

Barry Strauss ~ The Trojan War: A New History. Strauss compares the events and personalities found in the epic Iliad to today's most recent research by archaeologists, historians, and linguists on the Bronze Age in the greater Mediterranean area and on the Greeks and the Hittites. It is now thought that the Mycenean Greeks of that era were pretty much a people we would consider to be warlike barbarian pirates. Troy was a large and wealthy city which was the capital of a kingdom called Wilusa (in Greek Wilion = Illium) which was a Hittite vassal state. Many references have now been found of Troy in the Imperial Hittite archives. The war (and the experts do confirm that there was a war which ended with the destruction of Troy), was most likely over the control of trade routes. Many of the events of the Iliad are like other events in the records of the Hittites and of Egpyt of the Bronze Age, such as the duels of champions and the mutilation of the bodies of kings and/or princes killed by other kings/princes, just as Achilles is said to have mutilated the body of Hector. ******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

I have started reading Franklin and Winston : An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship by Jon Meacham. It is the story of the friendship between Churchill and FDR in the WW2 years. ******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

Could have sworn I posted in this thread...am I going mad?

Anybody seen a post by me about a bunch of historical fiction? Or was that a different thread?

--A ____________________________________

A sense of the sardonic preserves a man from believing in his own pretensions. -The Sayings Of Maud'Dib<i></i>

OH...not mad...just blind. Found the other thread.

--A ____________________________________

A sense of the sardonic preserves a man from believing in his own pretensions. -The Sayings Of Maud'Dib<i></i>

I have been giving myself a mini-tutorial on dangerous religious extremists, who can be pretty frightening people.

Jon Krakauer explores how these extremists can come to be violent in the name of God in exploring the story of some fundie Mormon brothers (excomminicated and considered abhorrant by the main Mormon church in Salt Lake City) who end up murdering an upstanding young woman and her innocent baby because one of them thought he was a prophet and thought God told him that these people had to die in his book Under the Banner of Heaven, A Story of Violent Faith. The paralels with the 9/11 terrorists who mudered innocent people because their "prophet" told them to is pretty glaring. Even one of the murderers can see it when he is interviewed by the author in prison. The author raises some interesting questions about where one person's right to freedom of religious expression ends and another person's rights begin. Also some pretty interesting questions about the nature of religion and insanity. If these people were crazy because they thought God spoke to one of them and instructed them to commit murder - where is the line in sanity and insanity when it comes to answered prayers and in religious prophesy? This case went through the court system many times on exactly the questions of sanity in extreme religious belief, as various levels of the court system struggled with questions of whether or not the defendents were sane. Really intersting and very disturbing stuff.

Charles Allen traces back the roots of the modern Muslim jihad movement to Saudi Arabia in the 1700's in his book God's Terrorists : The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad. The cult thought that they had the only answers, and that people who belonged to all other religions - including Sunni and Shia Muslims - were all wrong and should be converted or killed. The cult had two branches - one of which stayed in Arabia and the other that found fertile ground in the Indian subcontinent and was a continual pain to the British. those two branches met up and merged in recent years in Afghanistan and gave birth to the Taliban and el-Queda.


******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>

They sound very interesting Duchess.

--A ____________________________________

A sense of the sardonic preserves a man from believing in his own pretensions. -The Sayings Of Maud'Dib<i></i>

They were every interesting. I have been toying with the idea of starting some sort of zealotry/sanity discussion at the Close in the Watch, but I have decided that there is too much chance of it turning into a flame war over there. It really is an interesting topic to think about, though.

Currently reading Xenophon's The Persian Expedition. The brother of the King of Persia decides to go to war with his brother in order to sieze the throne. The brother has some 10,000 Greek mercenaries as part of his army. When the King wins the civil war, the Greeks are stranded in what would now be (eyeballing the maps) Iraq. They have to make their way on foot back to Greece, living off the land (and by buying or robbing food), passing through high mountains in the winter (with six foot snow), and constantly having to fight off hostile tribesmen. While historians doubt some of the details in the story (Xenophon wrote it down when he was an old man and things might have gotten a bit muddled in his mind - plus he quite likely exaggerated his own part) - it is still one heckuva survival/adventure story. <i></i>

Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors
by James D. Hornfischer

the story of a US naval ship with a crew of over 1100 sunk early in the Pacific conflict in WW2 and how the survivors were enslaved

Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization
by A. Leo Oppenheim

Just started it; no opinion as yet. [/i]

Can you tell me a little more about that one, Duchess? Ancient Mesopotamia--Sumer, Asshur, Akkad, Babylon--is something of a pet subject of mine.

I just finished up a history book intended for middle schoolers to review for Amazon:
Chasing Lincoln's Killers by James Swanson (he previously wrote a much more detailed book on the same subject for adults titled Manhunt). he keeps things moving quickly, and exciting enough that I think many young to middle teens would enjoy it (though is might be too easy for older teens and adults).

For pleasure I am reading Mornings on Horseback by the peerless biographer David McCullough. It tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's early years. What an odd family he came from - old New York Dutch Knickerbocker aristocracy. Princes of the City and the Earth, wealthy beyond imagining. Yet his father was as close to a living saint as anyone you could ever find (and this was not easy on his wife or his children). His mother was a Southern Belle from Georgia whose family plantation was apparently the inspiration for Tara in Gone With the Wind, and was a legendary beauty who inspired the appearance of Scarlett O'Hara. His eldest sibling was malformed (tuberculosis malformed her spine). He nearly died from asthma numerous times (stress brought it on). His younger brother had fits (not from epilepsy, but from some sort of psychological disorder). The youngest daughter was said to also be unhealthy, but what was wrong with her has not been said yet in the book. His mother suffered from stress diarrhea and other stress related diseases/health problems, especially during the war years.

His father was among the founders of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum. He built hospitals and hostels for homeless children. He was a tireless advocate for the new science of physical therapy after it helped his oldest child have a somewhat normal life. He was the one who had the idea that serving men in the military could send all or a part of their pay home to their families. He worked tirelessly on the part of serving Union soldiers, lobbying in Washington and riding countless miles across the South during the war to visit troops from New York - this despite the fact that his wife's brothers weere officers for the Confederacy. It was during the Civil War and amid family tension that his elder son started having the severe asthma attacks. When he died, his house was surrounded by an army of ragged street children, marking the passing of the only prominent man who had worked for them and cared for them (he regularly visited the hostels he built, helping to feed the children with his own hands).

At the point where I am, Theodore is at Harvard. He went there to study natural history. His father has just passed in horrifying pain from cancer, and he is devastated.

Reading Rick Atkinson's epic WW2 Liberation Trilogy, of which the first two books are out. I read An Army at Dawn, about the northern Africa campaign while camping, am now reading The Day of Battle, about the campaign in Italy. Very well researched and written, can see why these books have won so many awards. Also even handed - shows the Allied atrocities (and yes there were Allied war crimes and atrocities, though nothing to the extent of the death camps) right alongside the Nazi ones. Very much worth reading, and they cover parts of the war often ignored in the greater histories, which tend to focus on the Pacific and D-Day campaigns.