Skip to main content

Happy Belated Anniversary


I hadn't realized we had been going at it for over one year now.  Our anniversary was May 5.  We started with Team of Rivals, and have logged over 240 posts and countless comments since then.  Thanks very much for all of your participation!

Comments

  1. Been a great year. Thanks to everyone!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Gintaras and everyone who has participated here.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Let them eat Cake!,Oh wait wrong revolution.It has been nice to come here and see civil discourse without the wackos and agenda bringers that took over Elba.Avrds I still haven't heard anything from HBC on the Apache book and it seems to be absent from the flyer this month.There is a shortage of it for some reason.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Let them eat Cake! Oh wait wrong revolution....." Yes that was the Reagan revolution!

    But as for the revolution here, people here love, read, and discuss books. Now that's revolutionary! What a great service Gintaras has done for us all.

    As for Summer Moon, it must be a best seller after that rave review. Probably sold more than the publishers anticipated. Might want to try Amazon, where it's only $16 (even they have some sort of a delay, though):

    http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591052/

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well I had already ordered from HBC online and was two days later they informed me of delay.Of course I meant to say Comanche book.Don't know where the Apache came from.My bad.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yes, it is great to have an outlet where you can learn, have fun, and exchange ideas without the usual @#$#@ that goes on in right wing forums. The one sad thing is that Bob W cannot participate because of his illness. Like you, I wish him a full and quick recovery. Let's hope we can all participate in this informative venue for a long time to come.

    :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. "The Team of Rivals" discussion has had me on the lookout for other related books. I'm now reading Eric Foner's "Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution: 1863-1877." It isn't a new publication by any means, but it's very good.

    ReplyDelete
  8. That's an amazing book. As far as I know, it is still considered the gold standard on that topic. Foner is another one of my heroes.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The Foner book is excellent. I would also recommend WEB Dubois' classic text on Reconstruction in the South, which was a prime source for Foner.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...