Skip to main content

Washington weekend meander

By

Robert: While we wait for Gintaras' return, here's an area to discuss your thoughts about the new Washington biography. I've also linked the NY Times review in the title above.

Comments

  1. avrdsOctober 30, 2010 at 4:47 PM

    Another view of Washington and biography:

    http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/09/27/100927crat_atlarge_lepore?currentPage=all

    ReplyDelete
  2. robertwhelanOctober 30, 2010 at 11:38 PM

    I've read numerous biographies of Washington, but no one volume biography can come close to this one. It is a superlative piece of work giving a panoramic view of the man ang going into copiosly noted details I never read before. This makes GW genuinley human and appropriatley flawed--at last we find out that he genuinley smiled snd laughed and that he wasn't sickenly boring. This is Pultzer material. I spent 25 days plowing througgh 825 pages of text and enjoyed it all. Read it--it'll change your views on him and enrich your views on those around him. My eyes preclude me fromreading the New Yorker review--I trust it was favorable. Let me know.

    ReplyDelete
  3. robertwhelanOctober 30, 2010 at 11:42 PM

    I overdid it today finishing the book...so I'll wait and post more tomorrow... 30 pages on a Kindle is not a bad rate for me---the print in the book is small. With regular print I'm good for 40 to 50 pages daily on a Kindle

    ReplyDelete
  4. avrdsOctober 31, 2010 at 3:32 PM

    Thanks, Robert. Look forward to your additional comments. I have such a strong picture of Washington that it will be interesting to read what Chernow has to say about him. I will definitely read the book.

    ReplyDelete
  5. robertwhelanOctober 31, 2010 at 11:24 PM

    What will probably impress you are the new approaches he has to Washington's personality and behaviors. He does no fawn over the man, nor does he demonize him. He explains him--makes him human--points out his positive, his negatives and his obsnate side.Sometime the General could be an overbearing pain in the ass--and at other times a forgiving soul and a leader who would never order his men to do something he wouldn't do. He suffered as much as his men during the war--yet never lost sight that he was an aristocrat who had to be treated better than others--a democratic man he was not--but admitable he was, in every sense of the word.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  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...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''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
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
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...
123 comments
Read more