Let me know if you come across anything about my grandparents.
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
What are you reading Chapter 4
- Thread starter slobake
- Start date
Let me know if you come across anything about my grandparents.
My Sister was recently told by a DAR chapter that one of our relatives fought in the Revolutionary War, and another came over on the Mayflower. Either a nice recruitment ploy or the Mayflower folks were desperate for someone to scrub the deck or a little comedy relief.
But the book on migration is very revealing. The practice of forced migration, restricting emigration & immigration and population as a resource of the state seems to keep repeating.
My wife got this many years ago but I've never read it.
We have a friend who's family did come over on the Mayflower. She has a framed copy of the passenger manifest, too.
Family legend on my mom's side is that our first ancestor's throat was slit in England, but he survived the passage and landed in Virginia. Can't recall if it was the 16 or 1700s.
My wife and I were reading Good Omens together last year (I have already read it on my own). We got about halfway through but had to stop because some family stuff came up. We just picked it back up and I must say some of that dialogue is tough to read out loud, lol.
A friend of mine is at Mount Athos today and posted pictures of the monasteries. Very cool!
Just wrapping up Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco. Whew. Not impressed as a lover of his fiction, but the premise is that this is a collection of off the cuff, mini-articles of opinion scraped from a pile of published material is not lost on me. Context is key and this was a random pull. A nice change from my usual fare, but not what I had hoped for. Of note, I grabbed my copy from the local library and was happy to read text from a printed volume rather than a random computer screen. Libarry good.
Nice. The film's spectacular. Love the labyrinthine library
The DVD also has extras that are well worth exploring.
Digging into Labryinths by Jorges Luis Borges this evening with rain and thunder busy outside. I have not read any of his work to date, but knowing that Eco was inspired by him is encouraging. I read the forward and introduction last night in preparation for tonight's main course and was inspired by the brief bio. It is good to know that there is more to read.
Kim Gordon - Girl in a Band: A Memoir
As an Amazon Associate, TalkBass may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via links on this site.
Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n Roll - Peter Guralnick
"How one man discovered Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley, and how his tiny label Sun Records of Memphis revolutionized the world"
Long book. Very interesting story. Well written and for how long it is never bogs down. Just a ton of information.
"How one man discovered Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley, and how his tiny label Sun Records of Memphis revolutionized the world"
Long book. Very interesting story. Well written and for how long it is never bogs down. Just a ton of information.
re-reading the Sun Sword series by Michelle West. it's fantasy - long, grim and has some complex characters. i really enjoy this series as i prefer characters that are fleshed out in fantasy that isn't romance-focused and doesn't rely heavily on the magic aspect.
I'm about halfway through Invalid Link Removed, by Anna Keay. It's about the decade or so between the beheading of Charles I of England in 1649 to the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. I've always known some of the bare bones of the era: Parliament won a civil war with the king and beheaded him, Oliver Cromwell became a military dictator, he killed a lot of people in Ireland and banned Christmas (the parliamentarian side being Puritans), then he died and it all fell apart and they brought the monarchy back.
What I like about Keay's book is two things. One, she shows just how much more chaotic and interesting it was than those bare bones. There was a lot of controversy over killing the king, a lot of uncertainty over where things would go next, a lot of different people with different ideas and agendas. I'm familiar with the British conservative tradition that insists the English Civil War was not really a revolution, but parliament simply protecting the ancient rights of Englishmen from an overweening monarchy. But it's clear that for a LOT of Brits, it absolutely WAS a revolution and some were genuinely trying to radically reinvent society.
The other is that Keay tackles this complexity by using an interweaving set of biographical sketches, which bring out the colorful characters of individual people at the time. It isn't a bio-per-chapter or anything so rigid, but she brings individuals in and out of the spotlight as she goes along. Right now I'm on Anna Tidwell, an unmarried Puritan woman who falls into trances and gets messages from God, generally with socially and politically radical instructions. Before that it was a guy named Nedham, a pioneering writer and newspaper publisher (the newspaper format was created in the Civil War) who cheerily flipped sides repeatedly, writing witty propaganda for whoever served his purposes at the moment. There was the formidable Countess of Derby, who commanded the defense of her lands against parliamentarian armies in the war herself, and then tried to run the Isle of Man as an independent Royalist refuge while her husband was held captive.
All in all, a cracking good read and very illuminating.
What I like about Keay's book is two things. One, she shows just how much more chaotic and interesting it was than those bare bones. There was a lot of controversy over killing the king, a lot of uncertainty over where things would go next, a lot of different people with different ideas and agendas. I'm familiar with the British conservative tradition that insists the English Civil War was not really a revolution, but parliament simply protecting the ancient rights of Englishmen from an overweening monarchy. But it's clear that for a LOT of Brits, it absolutely WAS a revolution and some were genuinely trying to radically reinvent society.
The other is that Keay tackles this complexity by using an interweaving set of biographical sketches, which bring out the colorful characters of individual people at the time. It isn't a bio-per-chapter or anything so rigid, but she brings individuals in and out of the spotlight as she goes along. Right now I'm on Anna Tidwell, an unmarried Puritan woman who falls into trances and gets messages from God, generally with socially and politically radical instructions. Before that it was a guy named Nedham, a pioneering writer and newspaper publisher (the newspaper format was created in the Civil War) who cheerily flipped sides repeatedly, writing witty propaganda for whoever served his purposes at the moment. There was the formidable Countess of Derby, who commanded the defense of her lands against parliamentarian armies in the war herself, and then tried to run the Isle of Man as an independent Royalist refuge while her husband was held captive.
All in all, a cracking good read and very illuminating.
I'm finishing the second book of Thomas Cale's Trilogy, after "The left hand of God"
Epic is the word. The third book will be ordered soon.
Epic is the word. The third book will be ordered soon.
