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#Post#: 244076--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: kkt Date: March 31, 2024, 9:14 pm
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The Wager, by David Grann. True history of HMS Wager's voyage
into the Pacific in 1740-1742, intended to disrupt Spanish navy
and commercial interests there as Britain and Spain's war was
heating up again. As far as I've read they're only about 9
months in and it's already been a hell of a voyage. Big strain
getting the ships ready for sea, with many shortages of
materials and men. Scraping the bottom of the barrel for
prisoners, pensioners at one point deemed to ill for active
service, and patients in hospitals to man the ships. The Wager
was part of a squadron of 7 ships - 5 warships, counting the
Wager as a warship, plus two supply ships to top off the
warships just before they reached South America. Typhus spread
like wildfire through all the ships of the squadron and killed
some. They restocked and sent home the supply ships and headed
for Cape Horn. Cape Horn lived up to its reputation as a horror
for sailing ships. Almost went aground pushed east by currents
and winds, fought the wind and currents for weeks. Lost their
mizzenmast! snapped off completely just above the deck. At
this point scurvy hit. This was prior to learning that limes
could prevent scurvy. Scurvy was a horrible death that I will
not describe in detail, and Grann says scurvy killed more
sailors than accidents, enemy action, shipwrecks, and all other
diseases put together. Between the typhus and scurvy, night
shifts on the Wager that had 200 sailors on watch were making do
with six. So many deaths some days that they didn't even do
individual funerals. They jury-rigged a replacement for the
mizzenmast, not nearly as good but allowed them to travel fast
enough to steer at least, but they were still way too slow to
keep up with the rest of the squadron and eventually they lost
sight of each other. The squadron didn't wait but trusted the
Wager would make it to the planned rendezvous.
That's as far as I've read. Later on, according to the blurb,
the ship is wrecked and two separate parties of survivors head
out - one toward the planned rendezvous with the rest of the
squadron and another heading back to Brazil and regular sailings
back to Europe. There was a mutiny and one group was apparently
loyalists to the captain and the other not, but it's ambiguous
at this point which was which.
Interesting story, well-researched and well-written.
#Post#: 251638--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: MidwestmikkiJ Date: May 10, 2024, 6:32 pm
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My book club just read The Giver of Stars by Jojo Mays.
It’s historical fiction using the real depression era Packhorse
Librarians of Kentucky as the basis. I knew nothing about that
so was intrigued.
The book was considered good to very good by the group. Not
great literature and somewhat melodramatic in places but an
interesting story about women in a conservative place pushing
boundaries. A couple of us were thinking as we read it that the
imminent arrival of WWII was going to change things even more.
#Post#: 251644--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: kkt Date: May 10, 2024, 8:26 pm
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Beverly Cleary's memoir, A Girl from Yamhill. She points out
the bits of her life that became inspiration for Romona and
other characters - the teacher talking to another teacher who
called Beverly a "nuisance" where she could hear, her street in
Portland where she lived.
#Post#: 252063--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: Lurknomore Date: May 14, 2024, 9:10 am
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Madness, by Antonia Hylton. Well written and researched book
about a horrific segregated asylum in Maryland, named
Crownsville, built in 1911, thankfully closed in 2004. Unable to
finish as I’m a wimp. I knew it would be heavy but felt I should
bear witness, but in the end I just couldn’t.
#Post#: 252155--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: Thetis099 Date: May 14, 2024, 3:08 pm
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I haven't read his latest yet, and it is next on my reading
list:
"This Is Your Mind on Plants"
Michael Pollan
HTML https://michaelpollan.com/books/this-is-your-mind-on-plants/
#Post#: 253453--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: Lurknomore Date: May 23, 2024, 7:56 pm
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John Hay* ( corrected author name. I’d put “ Robert Hays” actor,
previously! 🙄 ) was a well known naturalist who lived in
Cape Cod.
He’s written many short books, and this one is about 140 pages:
A Beginners Faith in Things Unseen.
I’m astounded. No words do it justice. It’s absolutely
beautiful.
#Post#: 253462--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: kkt Date: May 23, 2024, 10:47 pm
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Memoirs by Beverly Cleary, the children's book author.
A Girl from Yamhill covers her family history as Oregon pioneers
and her early childhood on a farm near Yamhill, and older
childhood in Portland. The farm was not doing well, they
weren't getting prices enough to pay their expenses hardly. She
loved the sights of nature all around, and accepted the constant
chores to do, but did like that there were a lot more kids to
play with in the city. Her dad loved working outdoors, and in
the depression the best job he could find was being in charge of
the bank vault in the basement of a bank, so not only was he
indoors there wasn't even a window, and all were sad for him.
I just started My Own Two Feet, which continues where A Girl
from Yamhill left off: Beverly is getting on the Greyhound bus
to Los Angeles. Oregon has no community colleges. Beverly was
admitted to Reed College, but it was quite out of reach
financially, plus she'd be living at home and taking a long bus
ride to campus, and what she really wanted was to make her own
decisions about dating and other things free of her mom looking
over her shoulder. California had community colleges which were
free, even for recent arrivals from elsewhere! And she had a
cousin who generously offered to let her live with them while
she went to college.
#Post#: 253834--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: LabPartner Date: May 25, 2024, 4:21 pm
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I just ordered this:
Lynne Olson’s “Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist
Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples From Destruction”
Here's what Jennifer Rubin had to say:
[quote]French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches Noblecourt is
not a household name, at least in the United States. But she was
a groundbreaking figure in France in museumship, in archaeology
and in international art preservation. Fortunately, there is a
magnificent biography of her extraordinary life.
Lynne Olson’s “Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist
Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples From Destruction” traces
Desroches Noblecourt’s life and career over most of the 20th
century. Born at the cusp of World War I, Desroches Noblecourt
fortunately had parents who cultivated her interests and did not
restrict her ambition. As a young girl, she became transfixed by
Egypt’s rich historical and cultural heritage. She set out to
pursue her passion with tenacity, humility and a penchant for
hard work.
Olson follows Desroches Noblecourt’s career, beginning as a
brilliant student who found her way to an unpaid spot at the
Louvre, where she learned at the feet of giants in a field where
women were nonexistent. During the Nazi occupation, Desroches
Noblecourt courageously participated in the resistance and
helped hide the Louvre’s treasures. Before and after the war,
she traveled to Egypt for digs, and she made groundbreaking
discoveries. She also plowed new ground, exploring for the first
time the lives of ordinary Egyptians and exploding common (but
wrong) assumptions about their civilization.
But it was Desroches Noblecourt’s work beginning in the 1950s
that made her into a legendary figure in the art world. She was
instrumental in rescuing a batch of ancient Nubian temples that
otherwise would have been submerged underwater by construction
of the Aswân Dam. The project represented a diplomatic
achievement (requiring her to negotiate with Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the French, the Americans and the United
Nations, among others) as well as a mind-blowing feat of
engineering. The rescue effort required crews to cut up,
disassemble and then reassemble stone structures, including
massive statues several millennia old that were carved into a
cliff. Nothing of the sort had ever been attempted, needless to
say.
To accomplish this masterstroke, Desroches Noblecourt had to
maneuver around Cold War politics, the Suez Crisis, an array of
combustible personalities and UNESCO’s funding woes. Plus, she
needed to create an international team to pull it all off.
As you enjoy Desroches Noblecourt’s main story, you will also
run across: a less-well-known chapter in Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis’s life, an amusing episode in the rivalry between
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, and the
emergence of blockbuster art exhibits, which came to dominate
the modern museum experience. It is quite a fascinating read,
accessible for those who know plenty and those who know next to
nothing about Egyptology, archaeology or Cold War cultural
fights. It left me awestruck: What a woman, what a life![/quote]
#Post#: 261940--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: muskrat Date: July 13, 2024, 8:24 pm
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fyi: NYT 100 Best Books of 21st Century
i only skimmed, and seems I've only read five on the list. i'll
have to take a closer to see what good ones i've missed.
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7E0.x6mL.mt6QjvLEwhJF&smid=url-share
#Post#: 261958--------------------------------------------------
Re: What are you reading?
By: MidwestmikkiJ Date: July 13, 2024, 10:51 pm
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[quote author=muskrat link=topic=68.msg261940#msg261940
date=1720920275]
fyi: NYT 100 Best Books of 21st Century
i only skimmed, and seems I've only read five on the list. i'll
have to take a closer to see what good ones i've missed.
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7E0.x6mL.mt6QjvLEwhJF&smid=url-share
[/quote]
I’ve read 4. I thought there’d be more.
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