Documented Life

I read this mostly because I'm researching the South Dakota of my great-grandparents Jacob K. Smith and Emma Kate (Day) Smith, who immigrated to Mitchell, in the Dakota Territories, in about 1880, just four years after Custer's last stand at the Little Bighorn, 472 miles to the west of Mitchell. I'm not very interested in battle history, but I found the details of clothing, relationships, army culture and the incidental representations of 19th century life to be interesting windows on the world of my great-grandparents. They were married October 9, 1876 in Eldora Iowa, just three and a half months after Custer's force was destroyed on June 25, 1876. By 1880 the Dakotas were open to settlement and they were among the first settlers in Mitchell. The book itself tells the battle story in a matter-of-fact and interesting way, but it is easy to forget as one reads it and finds oneself sympathizing with how Custer may have been betrayed by his fellow soldiers that the whole lot of them were on a vicious genocidal mission to destroy and imprison an entire nation. If these genocidal American "Nazis" had succeeded on that June day in 1876 women and children would have had their heads bashed open on the rocks. Instead, just this once, the "Jews" (l'havdil) beat them back. The genocide was postponed, although not for long. The picture is further confused by the fact that there were so many native "scouts" helping to track down other Native Americans and enabling the army to kill them. While their presence highlights the "multi-cultural" nature of the frontier and the army and the social complexity of the frontier space, in the end these army Indians were cooperating in the genocide against other tribes of their broader "people." Then, upon all of that, I must consider the fact that my own ancestors, Jacob and Emma, and their parents and grandparents had each moved into the lands opened by genocide and built their lives there. These genocides were committed for people just like them, and they took full advantage, and yet were able to do so with relatively little personal involvement (although one ancestor, third great-grandfather Joshua Bland did, possibly, participate in the Blackhawk war in 1830.) For three generations Joshua Bland and his spouse, their daughter Mary Ann Bland Smith and her husband Samuel Smith, and their son Jacob K. Smith and his spouse Emma Kate (Day) Smith, advanced into Illinois (1833), into Iowa (1841) and into Dakota (1880) in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing operations. They were not the soldiers(except perhaps Joshua Bland, although in his late 40s he is unlikely to have been a frontline soldier), but the families for whom the soldiers drove the Indians out, and onto the reservations. Some of their memoirs even speak of childhood memories of "wigwams in the trees." The Native Americans were still around in their world but depleted and defeated, ghost people who were no longer much of a threat. Custer's story at Little Bighorn is the story of one bad day in the life of a not terribly competent but competent enough military machine that carved out the liebensroom that made my ancestor's lives possible. Sitting Bull's story at Little Bighorn is the story of one good day in a long and painful defeat. All of that, in turn is the karma that comes down to me through my mother and more broadly to the United States as a whole. It is interesting to think whether such karma is localized in place and localized in persons, or whether somehow all parts of the United States and all people in it now share it equally.

February 2, 2010

Any student of public health knows the story of John Snow, and how his removal of the Broad Street pump handle ended the London cholera epidemic, but this book tells the most interesting version of the story that I've read. Johnson writes a great detective story and historical essay on the birth of the modern city, the scientific approach to reality, the importance of sewers and microbes, and the future of humanity. This is a "Multnomah County Everybody Reads" book.

January 16 2010

Brown seeks to connect Viking sagas with the archeological evidence in Vineland (L'Anse aux Meadows), Greenland, Iceland and Norway. She explores the reasons she is drawn to do so, and the difficulties in making any definitive conclusions about how this literature touches the outlines of sod houses and scattered artifacts we see now. Norse and Viking history from about 900 to 1300 are explicated, including the coming of Christianity. Brown also calls into question, through the experts she cites, Jared Diamond's interesting thesis about the reasons for the demise of the Greenland settlements, questioning whether the Vikings and their descendants were really so unwilling to consume fish as Diamond claims. Gudrid and her fellow Viking women emerge in the telling in all their glorious and ribald strength.

January 9 2009

Prostitutes, thugs, white supremacists, pornographers, anarchists - what a wonderful world! Hey, life is dark, so would you have your journalism any other way?

January 4 2010

My son, age 12, was very happy when I picked up this hard cover comic book at the dinner table and begin to read it aloud and then silently. I was a little taken aback by some of the content, mild teen sexuality, references to prostitutes and impalements and the like. But I suppose it is all within reason for a 7th grader, and he hears much more at school. Then also, the theme of the series, the evil parents whose children must reject them to find their own path, certainly subverts some agendas of mine. While I subscribe to the importance of the psychodrama of adolescent self-definition and differentiation and welcome literature that enables my son to work it all out, it also makes me feel a sense of loss for what I have failed to teach, by example or didactically about traditional Jewish studies. How can his bar mitzvah studies or Jewish life make any sense to a child living in the world described by this book? I feel alienated from my child, and sad about his Jewish education. My son already lives in this world, and I have lost him. I hope it works out well for him. The story itself is good clean fun, in the modern sense, and well illustrated, and just great as long as you don't long for something much deeper. And if you were raised on this, how would you imagine something deeper? Where could a love for Torah come from? Oh well. If I'd been serious about that I would have had to make different choices for many years before now. I certainly made my son happy by reading this, and by promising to read more in the series.

December 30, 2009

I picked this off the library shelf simply because I thought the title was brilliant. I found it very rewarding. At first I was put off by the setting - the world of Los Angeles television and movie people - my least favorite people and my least favorite city. But the looping arc of the story, with its opportunities to meditate on causation, karma, death, coincidence, adolescent rebellion and sexual discovery, and how middle aged love ebbs and flows, all proved rewarding. I particularly admire the way Johnson seems to get inside the thoughts of such a diverse group of people, across ages, professions, backgrounds, summing up each of their perspectives in few words, bringing them briefly into contact with each other and then, in many cases, discarding them, yet using each vignette to knit the whole of the story. This is a beautiful and sad book, but one that makes me happy. And what a title!

December 24 2009

The Daniel Dyer illustrated reader's companion edition (1995) in which I read this book for the first time in perhaps 35 years is more interesting than London's original story. In it, and with its photographs, we learn a great deal about the actual world of Jack London and how it may have formed the backdrop for his short novel. The story itself, while lyrical, is thoroughly annoying. Though it is my own weakness to be sure, I find the ascription of human emotions and thoughts to dogs to be unhappily absurd. But, even read as a weird amalgam of fact and metaphor, freely accepting the conceit of a conscious dog named Buck, the symbolic level is deeply misguided. London's worshipful attitude toward tooth and claw can only be described as proto-fascist. His misunderstandings of the implications of biology for human society are typical of early eugenicists, and it is not hard to trace a line from ideas such as these forward to some of the great human disasters of the 20th century. Even if intended for 14 year old boys, we can easily recognize The Call of the Wild as an early expression of the political spirit of later 20th century fascism. So, acknowledged lyricism aside, this is bad medicine, and probably worth a read because of it.

December 21 2009

Dramatic reading by my daughter, as my son, his friend and I ate our macaroni and cheese lunch.

December 20 2009

Read the opening creation story to my daughter by way of explaining how the day begins in the evening. We also davened shachrit together, after a fashion, while my son went to schule with Leora, Shabbat Hanukah.

December 19 2009

Wood's subject is the image of Franklin in his own time and in subsequent generations. The biographical narrative itself is familiar, if less detailed than others I've read, but it really ties together the different pieces and stages of Franklin's life in a useful way. Wood's contribution lies in his analysis of the changing ways in which Franklin was perceived, by others and even by himself - how did Franklin come to "represent" America? Wood's discussion of class and colonial society is also very helpful. He places Franklin in the context of his effort to rise from poverty to middling status to Gentleman of Philadelphia to Gentleman of the Empire and makes clearer to me the extent to which Franklin became truly a Crown loyalist and admirer of the British empire, an unlikely revolutionary, until just moments before 1776. He never was fully trusted by the Americans, although he retained a measure of personal popularity. The rejection of Franklin by English aristocratic political culture seems inextricably tied to the drift toward war - the personal was a mirror of the political for Franklin and England.

December 18 2009

This is the second prison narrative I've read recently (see Santos below.) Both were written by drug smugglers. Drug smuggling inherently requires a range of social, business and organizational skills, and perhaps naturally leads to memoir writing if those skills prove less than adequate to the task of evading arrest. Of the two books High is the more interesting, in part because it appears that O'Dea was somewhat more successful than Santos. But it may also be more interesting because he was luckier - he had a much longer career before his arrest, received only 10 years, and then transferred to Canada, his native country, and served substantially less than 10 years, enabling him to write freely outside of prison. Santos, arrested in his 20s and serving 25 years minimum, remains in prison until 2014 and may be constrained in what he can write about his past without potentially prolonging his time. O'Dea seems genuinely repentant, at least for his drug addiction and the harms he caused those near to him. However I caught not a whiff of moral reflection about his role in spreading cocaine about the world. While one is reading the book the story of drug running is described as the great adventure it undoubtedly was at the time, flying a DC 6 into a dirt strip in Columbia, commanding a fleet of boats and fishing trawlers, sending secret radio messages, operating a trucking company, staring down money men - a boffo adventure, albeit one that occasionally involves someone pulling a gun or getting beat up. The book interleaves memories of drug running with descriptions of life in prison after his arrest, and that is also a nice counter-point. The author's spiritual struggle to do time and transform himself in prison seems authentic. And so, in the end the author presents himself as a changed person, an addict who understands his addictive tendencies, a man starting a new family with a new wife. But it is the question of his own judgment of himself that catches me. He's proud of the business he built. I think he would say "it was only pot" (but of course before it was pot, there seemed to be a lot of coke involved too.) I don't know what to do with that. He talks of taking responsibility for his choices, but he doesn't say that these are confessions of a "former" pot smuggler. On some level, even if he is no longer in the business I get the feeling that his identity and ego have not let go of the successful enterprise that he built. The fact that pot should not be illegal, the fact that so many good people he meets in prison should not be spending 25 and 50 years in jail for nonviolent drug crimes, doesn't change the fact that he is proud of his accomplishments... as a criminal. I enjoyed the ride.

December 16 2009

Thomas Alva Edison was an antisemitic prick who palled around with Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. He also, apparently, invented the phonograph, the light bulb and half of the moving picture idea. The tangled process of invention is fairly well documented by Stross. We have to give Edison this: he enjoyed inventing and was endlessly enthusiastic about the process. He liked to play. Beyond his admirable enthusiasm and megalomaniacle self-regard, Edison's life provides a window on the 19th and early 20th century, paralleling the much more interesting and pleasurable story of Mark Twain's life that I recently completed. Like Twain, Edison was an early inhabitant of the land of superstardom, carefully cultivating and trading on his image as the Great Inventor throughout his life. Unfortunately, that image was based on his early accomplishments in the 1870s and 1880s, while his life went on to include another 50 years of failures of empathy, imagination and business, characterized consistently only by preening pig-headedness and cruelty. Edison was bailed out along the way by his best friend, the execrable Henry Ford. I didn't think much about Thomas Alva Edison before I read this book except that he had "invented the light bulb." Thanks to this book I now know a good deal more and think a good deal less of him. Good job on the light bulb Thomas, but, by the time you finally died in 1929, good riddance.

December 12 2009

This was an incredible and witty biography, illuminating the man and through him the entire 19th century. I found wonderment and amusement and new understanding. Ron Powers is a wit who, in writing about the 19th century's great wit, does him justice. I enjoyed this book deeply. We see in it the panorama of a life richly lived. It's an unusual life, a Zelig-like tale, that continually finds Mark Twain at the center of his age. We learn that Clemmons was the original rock star, a performer. We experience his business failures and his general incompetence as a business man. Along the way, we explore writing as art and writing as commerce. We come to understand that he was not a nice man, but an angry cuss, and somehow beautiful for it. We learn that for all his opposition to religion and Christianity, it is not entirely clear that he ceased to believe in the possibility of communicating with the dead or the spirit world. (No wonder that the sister of my great grandfather Adolphus Schmidt thought she could write a Mark Twain novel, the unreadable Jap Heron, on the Ouija board - this kind of thing was just up Twain's alley.) We learn of his loves (first Laura, and then Libby, his spouse), his daughters and his friendships and are impressed somehow by his capacity to love. He seems to embody the character of the Victorian age - when we successfully imagine what made people laugh, we understand an era, and an entire lost world. I loved this book.

December 8 2009

While washing dishes last night my daughter (age 9) read me the first chapter of this book set in the time of fever and death in 1878 Memphis. I was impressed by the emotional weight of what she was reading. I knew in a general way that she could "read anything", but I was made newly aware of just what that meant. I finished it quickly after she went to sleep. This is good child fiction.

December 2 2009

The story of the Bielski brothers surely qualifies as one of the great and little known Holocaust stories. I only learned of it a few days ago when we watched the movie "Defiance" (2008). It is a tale of heroism and survival and the ordinary lives that followed extraordinary deeds. -- The relationship between the movie and the reality as represented in the book, bears comment. The movie seems very true, but not in a literal sense. Situations and actions are combined and imagined by the movie to represent in two hours the complexity of the historical reality described in this book. A few differences do make themselves clear. (1) The Bielski brothers operated largely in the framework of the Soviet partisans - you might miss that in the movie, particularly insofar as it focuses on the early period before alignment with the Soviets became unavoidable. While it is true that the Bielski brothers were first and foremost trying to save Jews and defend Jewish interests, the outward context of their activities had to appear to be Soviet in every respect. Their closest allies had little sympathy for their fight to survive as Jews, and supported them only insofar as they shared an enemy in the Germans. (2) Also, the book makes clear what the movie only hints at, that the brothers themselves were very much authoritarian commanders who brooked no dissent. These were hard men fighting a desperate battle with few resources while surounded by potential betrayers. They were rescuers of innocent life to be sure, but killers too, as warriors must be. The movie portrays the humanity beneath the hard exteriors, and I am willing to believe it does so fairly, but in the book we see the Bielski brothers and their fighting force in a harsher light. I do not doubt that their's was a necessary cruelty and that the survival of so many hundreds of civilians in their forest camps was the result of their methods. (3) The book also allows us to contemplate the mystery of certain rare human beings, such as Konstantin Koslovsky, a selfless Belorussian peasant honored as Righteous Gentile after the war, who offered assistance to the Jewish partisans for years, even as the vast majority of his countrymen helped the Nazis hunt them down. What strange miracle of character enables a man to achieve this kind of nobility when those around him lack it? (4) The final act of the Bielski story, Tuvia's killing of a Jew for insubordination on the very day the Jewish village in the forest was being disbanded, is one of the most powerful moments and it sums up the full pathos, temper and power of Tuvia Bielski, the commander. It does not significantly detract from my sympathy or admiration for the man - to have brought 1200 people through the horrors of four years of forest living and warfare only to be insulted and defied by one of them on the last day surely constitutes justifiable grounds for homicide if any exist. It may not have been right, but we can understand Tuvia Bielski's sin and must weigh it against so much good. (5) There was some controversy in Poland about whether the Bielski brothers participated in a Soviet action against Polish partisans. Whatever the truth of that matter is, the larger truth is that the Polish people, no strangers to suffering between two great powers, were happy in the main to identify Jews for the Nazis and otherwise participate in their slaughter, while the Soviets supported the Jewish partisans against the Nazis. If the Bielski brothers were aligned tactically with the Soviets and may have done bad things even to admirable Polish partisans, it seems a small matter against the abysmal picture of implacable Polish antisemitism and willing participation with the Nazis in the Holocaust. (6) The final chapter, documenting the ordinary lives that follow these extraordinary deeds, the lack of recognition and obscurity that was the lot of the Bielski brothers, is something to contemplate. -- This is a wartime Jewish tale to read and reread.

November 29 2009

Did I really just read this book about the affairs of the rich and bubble headed denizens of outer Cleveland? I can't deny it. And did I really enjoy it a whole bunch? You bet I did. You can't imagine something lighter or sillier. Bonus points for a good job anticipating Madoff! Strohmeyer does a fine job of novel writing, but leaves me feeling that I could write a book like this too. She makes it feel easy. I like an author who gives me that feeling.

November 24 2009

Sheehan captures the Vietnam war through the lens of the life and career of John Paul Vann, a sick man, a brave man, an exemplar of the American military of his era, and more. The story that Sheehan tells is mind boggling, enlightening, engaging and overwhelming. I wished the book had maps - the stories of battles and maneuvers are indecipherable unless one has the map of Vietnam etched on the inside of one's eyeballs, as Sheehan no doubt did. But this is not a book about military maneuvers so much as it is the story of mass insanity, group-think, imperial delusions, the interplay of professional and sexual appetites, graft and moral cowardice in high places, class-based insecurities and social climbing, and the predictable way in which bureaucracies reward incompetence and ruthlessly punish signs of creativity, intelligence and insight. John Paul Vann's particular insight was to grasp early in the 1960s that Ho Chi Minh's cause was the authentic nationalism of Vietnam and that the Americans could not win unless the South Vietnamese would fight and do so from a position of national legitimacy. Vann made superficial progress in the later years of the war (did he really believe the fundamentals had changed?) but the Republic of Vietnam was rotten to the core, the ARVN unable and unwilling to fight and its governing elites acting to the end as the corrupt colonial Catholic holdovers they were, and lacking all legitimacy with the people. . John Paul Vann was also a cruel and sick man, but I'll leave the detailed telling of the story of his sexual mania to the book and the speculation about whether that constitutes some kind of metaphor for the age to you. I've read books that personalized and humanized the Vietnam war such as Born on the Fourth of July, 365 Days, and Tobias Wolf's memoirs, and I've read a number of dry political and military histories, but none managed to bring together the personal and narrative dimension with the political and military context the way this one does. I was alive when the events described here occurred, but they were the barest background noise. I remember a feeling of excitement in the summers of 1968 and 1969 among medical students at Duke University (I was 9), I remember the concern of my father's students about siblings who would be drafted in the early 1970s (I was 11 and 12), I remember pictures of evacuation from South Vietnam and Nixon resigning and Ford coming in (I was 14). By the time I came to political consciousness in the mid-1970s Vann was dead and America's war was done. I missed this war, but this book is one of the creation stories of my world - these were the demigods whose fighting and whoring explain how things came to be as they are. I wonder now in 2009 whether Obama had read this tale of folly as he prepares to throw American lives away in Afghanistan. What generals are whispering in his ears that victory is just around the corner, that the Karzai government can stand on its own feet, and that American technology can make a difference?

November 18 2009

We read one woman's memories of life on an Iowa farm as a child, focusing closely on chores, routines of daily life, discipline, habits, relationships between adults and children, play, animal husbandry, vegetable gardening - the real minutiae of farm life, both in a practical and in an emotive sense. Kalish's story bears a certain relationship to my own Iowa farmer ancestors (who lived just 78 miles from Garrison in the Eldora area), but my Smith and Bland ancestors do not appear to have been as religious as Kalish's Methodist folks. Certainly Samuel Smith Jr. (my gggf) was not religious, although his wife Mary Ann Bland Smith (my gggm) seems to have been a church goer. Then also, unlike Kalish's family, the outlines we have of the Smith history involve moving off the farm and away from farming already in the Civil War era and into rural small town governance and shop keeping, while Kalish's family was still farming in the 1920s and 1930s. In the years that Kalish grew up on those farms near Garrison Iowa, my own mother was growing up as the daughter of a college educated newspaper editor who had escaped Eldora to the big city of Kansas City. So Kalish's story is not our story but her story does provide a kind of refracted image of our story as it may have been in the 1850s, when the Smith's first came to Hardin County Iowa, or as it might have been had we stayed down on the farm. The Iowa rural values and attitudes portrayed here were probably shared with my Smith and Bland ancestors, as would have been the technologies and tasks of daily living. While I didn't read every recipe and detail in this book, I read most of it and the overall picture of life is fascinating. After I was done I called up Garrison Iowa using Google Earth and peered down on the little place today, trying to imagine it in 1850 and in 1930. With Kalish's help I could see it all.

November 10 2009

It's been a long time since I gave the 15th century this much attention. Belozerskaya tells the story of Cyriacus, the man who, arguably, invented archaeology. On the way we get to journey through the Ottoman and Christian Mediterranean, witness the effort to reunite the Eastern and Roman Churches, and touch upon the economics and social mores of Renaissance scholarship. This is essentially a story of historiography, and specifically a story of historical historiography. There isn't much more interesting than that in my book.

November 6 2009

This is the second Deerfield history I've read and enjoyed recently. The focus here is on the historical New England culture from the time of Pocomtuck's first settlement through its evolution into Deerfield and on into the middle eighteenth century. The business of establishing, populating and standing on its feet an entire town is carefully documented, as are the changing patterns of ownership and residence that defined the place. In Melvoin's study we get a real glimpse of who these town folk were, what they owned, how they understood their community and their relationship to it, and just how many lashings a fornicator might receive. Deerfield, home to several of my ancestors including Godfrey Nims, Thankful Nims Munn and Benjamin Munn, reveals itself as one of the poorest and most exposed towns in New England, but also a place of relative equality and civic participation. It was the sort of place a reprobate, in trouble with the law in his youth, such as great (x7) grandfather Godfrey Nims might move to and reach by the end of his life an apparent respectability. In the process of reading my vague understandings about Puritan life were greatly enriched and deepened. The author concludes by describing the world of early 1700s Deefield as an intermediate point in the evolution from English and Puritan culture to a new American culture. Unlike Captors and Captives (below) which was truly a cross cultural and international analysis, this book is focussed primarily on the reality of the English settlers. Like Captors and Captives it was eye opening and for me truly gripping.

November 5 2009

"The redeemed captive returning to Zion : or, a faithful history of remarkable occurences in the captivity and deliverance of Mr. John Williams, minister of the gospel in Deerfield, who in the desolation which befel that plantation by an incursion of the French and Indians, was by them carried away, with his family and his neighborhood, into Canada" For further explanation see Captors and Captives, below.

November 4, 2009

I checked this out and read it because of its title. The title of this book is magnetic. I am powerless to escape the attractive force of this book's title. It is a title that sounds as if I heard it reviewed somewhere and that it received fantastic reviews (even though I don't think I did or it did.) It is a title that actually induces hallucinations of good reviews that may or may not ever have been written. This title sounds like a book that just ought to be read. And how's the reading? Well, it's a quick read, two sittings, and goes down easy. It's about a man, child of a disastrous mother and dysfunctional parental marriage, busy replicating it all in his own dysfunctional marriage with his own disastrous wife, vaguely aware that he too may be flawed, but not articulating to himself or the reader very well what those flaws may be. So it's just like life. I completely missed the "A Memoir" claim, and assumed I was reading a fiction. I'm not sure that matters one way or the other. I only woke up to the fact that this was not fiction when the characters resolve their difficulty with therapy, separate and couples, rather than violent divorce or murder. Oh. I get it. This is a story of someone's actual experience. But children, BMW lust, difficult mothers, marital challenges, dog ownership... it all felt real to me. I guess I find it hard to believe that anyone could be quite this dysfunctional, but I shouldn't feel that way, for every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way, as they say.

November 4 2009

I think this must qualify as a definitive study of the events and context of the February 29 1704 (Julian calendar) raid on Deerfield, although I must confess it is the only complete book I've read on the subject so far. The authors view the event and its times (1670s to the 1760s) from every cultural and political angle, trace the origins and fates of captors and captives, the shifting alliances of European and Indian nations, and provide a marvelous window on an historical period that had been fairly obscure to me. My own personal interest of course stems from the escape of my 6th great grandmother, Thankful Nims, age 19, from the French led raiding party. While children had their heads bashed open and men and women were taken into captivity and houses burned, she and her husband Benjamin Munn hid in a primitive cellar house that was so covered with snow that it escaped notice. Thankful and Benjamin would remove south to Springfield where my 5th great grandmother, their child Sarah Munn would be born some twenty years later, understandably less close to the frontier. The subsequent generation would settle further north in Marlboro (Marlborough) Vermont. On the whole, this branch of our ancestors was by all appearances poor New England farmers all, living in large families on or near the frontier, and typically moving in search of new land with each generation. I found Haefeli and Sweeney's history fascinating and mind expanding, and intuitively plausible as a description of the cultural and political context of my ancestors' lives. I hope, some day, as my children or grandchildren peruse this list of my long ago readings, they will take the time to discover a little bit about Thankful Nims Munn and her family and circumstances as described here. (She does not actually appear in this book, but her parents and many of her siblings are mentioned.) The stories here of the cultural relationships between the many Indian nations and the French and the English provide a sense of the fluidity and connectedness of the cultures. Among the many revelations, this book provides a sense of just how few in number were the early settlers of New England and, even more so, how few were those of New France. A raiding party of some 200 was a huge undertaking, and the Deerfield raid was a singularly successful action on the part of New France, one that was really never equaled. While it became, particularly as a result of the contemporaneous book published about it (The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion by John Williams, 1665-1729) a rallying point for New England colonialists, the military action itself seems to have marked a high water point for New France as a Continental power, with subsequent raids experiencing less success as the French project in America dwindled and then collapsed over the ensuing decades. The final chapter on historiography and the effort to define the meaning of the "Deerfield Massacre" is particularly interesting - I like to go meta. This book has gripped me for many evenings.

November 1, 2009

My old sidur from old times, avodat haboker, haboker.

November 1 2009

linkage

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Big Horn – The Last Great Battle of the American West

Four men walk into a paradise…

William Blake – Excerpt

Billy Collins – “Forgetfulness”

Actually Ironic

New Year’s Resolution – MOVE YOUR MONEY

Day in the Snow at Mount Hood

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