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“…Not everything has remained the same since Orwell’s day, however. He says that anyone ought to be able to make a go of a second-hand bookshop, but this is no longer the case. Such bookshops are declining fast in number – recently I was in a coastal town in England that a decade ago had ten of them, and now the last of them was about to close in a week’s time.
Two developments have led to the decline of the second-hand bookshop. The first, of course, is the internet. The internet is both wonderful and terrible. For instance, it enables patients to learn a lot about their own diseases, and if they are discriminating, sometimes even to save their own lives. But medical information, or opinion, on the internet has probably already killed far more people than it has saved: the fact that Thabo Mbeki, the recently deposed President of South Africa, found a site on the internet while browsing that convinced him that AIDS was not caused by a virus, and that therefore treatment of HIV with drugs was harmful, resulted in untold premature loss of life that it will take many years for the internet to balance by lives it has saved.
With regard to books, the internet is a wonderful instrument for finding a book that you particularly need or want: if, for example (and for some obscure reason), you are searching for the 1490 edition of Pietro D’Abano’s Tractatus de Venenis, then you can find it on a site that claims to list 110,000,000 books. Suffice it to say that you could spend several lifetimes scouring the bookshops of the world in the old-fashioned way without finding it.
But the pleasure of second-hand bookshops is not only in finding what you want: it is in leafing through many volumes and alighting upon something that you never knew existed, that fascinates you and therefore widens your horizons in a completely unanticipated way, helping you to make the most unexpected connections.
According to the owner of a bookshop that I have now been patronising for forty years (and who seemed to me to be of the older generation when I first met him, but now seems, mysteriously, to be precisely the same age as I), browsing in the fashion and for the purpose that I have just described is a thing of the past. Young people do not do it any more, as they still did when he started his life in the trade. Instead, they have a purely instrumental or utilitarian attitude to bookshops: they come in, ask whether he has such and such a title, and if he does not they leave at once, usually with visible disgruntlement: for what is the point of a bookshop that does not have the very title that they want here and now?…”
Autobiography by Robert Graves, published in 1929 and revised in 1957. It is considered a classic of the disillusioned postwar generation. Divided into anecdotal scenes and satiric episodes, Good-Bye to All That is infused with a dark humor. It chronicles the author’s experiences as a student at Charterhouse School in London and as a teenaged soldier in France during World War I, where he sustained severe wounds in combat. His memoir continues after the war with descriptions of his life in Wales, at Oxford University, and in Egypt.
“I have read a number of different accounts of aviators in the First World War, but the world that Cecil Lewis unveils in Sagittarius Rising is unlike any other I have previously read about … What makes this book so special is not only Cecil Lewis’s story, but the way in which he shares his life experiences. He writes so eloquently, painting an amazingly detailed picture with his words … If I had to pick the one book that I could own on the personal accounts of aviators from the First World War, this book would be it … [Lewis’s] ability to captivate your imagination with his words makes for a book that is very difficult to put down once you start reading it.”
For the first time in trade paperback, the book in which one of the most celebrated biographer/historians of our time looks back at his own early life and gives us a remarkable account of World War II in the Pacific, of what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and, most of all, what it felt like to one who underwent all but the ultimate of its experiences.
In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation.
An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division–3d Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic.
Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill–and came to love–his fellow man.
George MacDonald Fraser—beloved for his series of Flashman historical novels—offers an action-packed memoir of his experiences in Burma during World War II. Fraser was only 19 when he arrived there in the war’s final year, and he offers a first-hand glimpse at the camaraderie, danger, and satisfactions of service. A substantial Epilogue, occasioned by the 50th anniversary of VJ-Day in 1995, adds poignancy to a volume that eminent military historian John Keegan described as “one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War.”
The Soviets called him the Black Devil and offered 10,000 rubles for the head of the “boy” who was so successful in opposing them. His friends called him “Bubi.”
He continued his one-man war and in June 1944, with 259 kills, he finally passed the legendary Walter Nowotny to become Germany’s top ace. As the war was ending he refused transfer to the west, preferring to stay with JG-52. Captured by the Americans, on May 8, 1945, the Blond Knight was turned over to the Soviets, who couldn’t believe that in 30 months this “boy” had 352 confirmed kills [by counting standards tougher than the US or RAF], and his JG-52 squadron had 11,000 aerial victories! Hartmann was never shot down and never wounded during the war. Although while fighting against the Americans he downed 6 P-51 Mustangs while flying his antiquated Messerschmidt Bf-109. He was then engaged by 8 Mustangs who were unable to shoot him down and he was forced to bail out after he had run out of ammunition and fuel. While hanging in his parachute he expected to be shot by the American pilots, but they only flew by him and waved. He said that his greatest achievement was that he never lost a wingman.
But Soviet captivity was only the beginning of Erich Hartmann’s story, and the authors do an excellent job of documenting his ten and a half years of illegal imprisonment. The NKVD used every trick and method to break the young veteran and his comrades. After five years they changed his status to “war criminal,” depriving him of even minimal rights. When he refused to engage in slave labor he was thrown into solitary confinement. Red thugs tied him to a chair to force-feed him. When his half-starved comrades saw this, they instantly revolted, seized the slave-labor prison and its commander, and freed Hartmann.
Hailed as the most important novel to emerge from the Vietnam War, Fields of Fire launched a spectacular writing career for James Webb in 1978. A much-decorated former marine who fought and was wounded in Vietnam, Webb tells the story of a platoon of tough, young marines enduring the tropical hell of Southeast Asian jungles while facing an invisible enemy–in a war no one understands. It is a powerful work that brilliantly expresses the basic ambiguity of war: the repulsion of war’s destruction contrasted with the grisly attraction of war as the ultimate test of survival.
The global war on terrorism has spawned some excellent combat narratives—mostly by journalists. Warriors, like Marine Corps officer Fick, bring a different and essential perspective to the story. A classics major at Dartmouth, Fick joined the Marines in 1998 because he “wanted to go on a great adventure… to do something so hard that no one could ever talk shit to me.” Thus begins his odyssey through the grueling regimen of Marine training and wartime deployments—an odyssey that he recounts in vivid detail in this candid and fast-paced memoir. Fick was first deployed to Afghanistan, where he saw little combat, but his Operation [Iraqi] Freedom unit, the elite 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, helped spearhead the invasion of Iraq and “battled through every town on Highway 7″ from Nasiriyah to al Kut. (Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright’s provocative Generation Kill is based on his travels with Fick’s unit.) Like the best combat memoirs, Fick’s focuses on the men doing the fighting and avoids hyperbole and sensationalism. He does not shrink from the truth—however personal or unpleasant. “I was aware enough,” he admits after a firefight, “to be concerned that I was starting to enjoy it.”
The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh
“…The Wittgensteins, ensconced in their grand Winter Palace in fin-de-siècle Vienna, were hardly a model family. The father, Karl , was a brutal autocrat as well as a high-class crook. He was an engineer by vocation, and his son Ludwig would later do some original work in aeronautics at Manchester University. A fabulously wealthy steel magnate, Karl rigged prices, bleeding his workers dry and doing much the same to his timorous wife Leopoldine. She once lay awake all night, agonised by an ugly wound in her foot but terrified of moving an inch in case she disturbed her irascible husband. She was an emotionally frigid mother and a neurotically dutiful wife, from whom all traces of individual personality had been violently erased.
The family was a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders. Leopoldine was afflicted by terrible leg pains and eventually went blind. Her children had their problems too. Helene was plagued by stomach cramps; Gretl was beset by heart palpitations and sought advice from Sigmund Freud about her sexual frigidity; Hermine and Jerome both had dodgy fingers; Paul suffered from bouts of madness; and little Ludwig was scarcely the most well balanced of souls. Almost all the males of the family were seized from time to time by bouts of uncontrollable fury that bordered on insanity.
Behind Karl the prosperous bourgeois lay a madder, more reckless man. He ran away from home at 17, boarded a ship bound for New York and joined a minstrel band. Before making his pile in Vienna he was a restaurant violinist, a night watchman, a steersman on a canal boat, and taught the tenor horn in an orphanage. Despite being one of the premier families of the Austro-Hungarian empire, most of the Wittgensteins were spiritual outlaws and adventurers. They combined the aristocrat’s cavalier disdain for convention with the underdog’s suspicion of authority….”
Review
Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial “dead white men,” are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?
A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.
by P.J. O’Rourke
“…It’s not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren’t so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.
People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)…”
“…In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion. Democracy–be it howsoever conservative–is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.
The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living. We consider people–with a few obvious exceptions–to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.
If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani…”
The following is a quote from an article on the English actress Kirsten Scott Thomas published in The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Australia:
“…It’s a reasonable point – her first film of any critical consequence was 1988’s A Handful Of Dust, in which she played E.M. Forster’s ice-queen Brenda Last, another unhappy wife who leaves her husband for, in this case, Rupert Graves…”
What!? They think that A Handful of Dust was written by E. M. Forster? Are there editors at the Morning Herald? Do they own an encyclopedia? Have a library card? Can they Google? One could always watch the DVD and read the credits… This is in a major Australian newspaper…I give up…
Anthony Powell and his wife Lady Violet Powell, born Violet Georgiana Pakenham, third daughter of Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford and Lady Mary Julia Child Villiers (daughter of Victor Child-Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey), was a writer and critic.
“…Female promiscuity, particularly as it bears on the male psyche, is a major preoccupation throughout the series. From this volume alone, consider Nick’s gruesome encounter with Bob Duport, the ex-husband of his ex-lover Jean, and the morbid fashion in which they both scratch over the indignities of Jean’s other conquests. Look at poor Moreland, “dazed and unhappy” – reeling, one might say – having been dropped by Matilda for the perverted plutocrat Donners. We are among men, glancing across a gulf at the cryptic machinations of women while we patch up our comrades.
This seems pretty well undeniable to me, though I’d be interested to hear a dissenting view. All the same, I would like to offer a couple of points in mitigation. Firstly, everyone in the Dance is an inscrutable oddball, the men and the women equally. Nearly everyone is seen as if from the wrong end of the telescope; nearly everyone appears as a type, a grotesque of some sort. Think of all the men who remind Nick of tailor’s dummies, or of the recurring imagery of automatism. What gives Powell’s characters life, I submit, is his knack for making them talk off the page at you in some unmistakable voice. His women certainly have these…”
Gentlemen, ironically, even in toady’s era of the common man (and woman) where slob rules, the first thing a woman will do upon meeting you is to look down (farther down you perv) and check the state of your shoes. This is true. So it would behoove you to have clean and well-shined shoes upon your feet if you want her to think about anything above your ankles. Men will also notice a good shine, but never admit it. So toss your Crocs, flip flops and beastly ubiquitous athletic shoes into the dustbin and buy yourself a quality pair of Goodyear Welted leather shoes (but nevah the ones with the square pilgrim toes. Do you hear?). Ask about socks while you’re at it.
There is no easier and cheaper way to improve your overall appearance than a good shine. And if you live in a city or regularly pass through airports, there is just no reason for you not to take advantage of the professional shoe shine. Almost anywhere in the United States a shine will cost you from $3 to $5, yes that’s it, 5 bucks for a professional shoe shine and possibly a chance to finally get a date with a girl you don’t have to inflate. It’s even $3 in NYC for God’s sake, what are you waiting for? I personally married a Countess because I was sporting an incredibly wicked shine on my whole cuts. I do not lie (except to women). This coup has allowed me to continue my habit of being well-shod, well-groomed, well polished and well-soused. This too is within your grasp for a measly finsky.
Even if, like me, you prefer to shine your own shoes, and possess the requisite skill and knowledge, (and if you have not yet done so, this is something you should learn) it is still a worthwhile investment to use the shine when it is available. Of course, every Catholic school boy worth his salt, learns the value of a mirror like shine early on. Especially when he is regularly surrounded by lots of girls in plaid skirts. So these chaps have an advantage, true, but it’s never too late.
Good stands are everywhere in every city and major airport. Use them. The St. Louis airport is famous for it’s shoe shine stands, and when I pass through I always drop off shoes to be shined with my favorite shoe shine man and pick them up on the way back. Most shoe shine stands have drop off service, which is usually same day if you need it fast.
A good shine tells the world that you care about your appearance (at least long enough to get a date, right?) and puts forth the effort required to look presentable and professional. You will be amazed at how much this one detail will improve your appearance and your whole outlook on life. It will make you feel better just to know that all the women in the world no longer think of you as a big slob. Well, at least they will know that at the very least you shine your shoes. Now if they can only get you stop with the effeminate body sprays and hair gels. Worth the investment of a little time and an Abe don’t you think?
Ever wondered why the floors in our terraced houses are different heights? Or what the landscape round where you live looked like before it was built on? And did you know you can date a building by its window sills? A Lust for Window Sills tells us why and how. Harry Mount takes us on an engrossing tour of the nation’s architecture, exploring the quirks, foibles and tiny details that make our buildings unique, and revealing the fascinating stories and anecdotes behind them along the way. We see every historic building style in Britain in one hour’s walk across London, from the Norman apse of St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, via Gothic in Holborn, Sir Christopher Wren in the City and the Knights Templar at Temple. A trip up the M4 reveals some of our greatest country houses, while a visit to Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill is a journey back to the Bronze Age. This book is a lively, entertaining and affectionate portrait of our history and the Britain we live in today.
The delectable Veronica Lake
The diminutive actress (4′11″) with the peek-a-boo hair style worked in Hollywood because she was the only actress shorter than Alan Ladd. For many years she could be seen about town on the arm of Sir Basil Seal. While having the reputation in Hollywood of being “hard to work with” which is an euphemism for “complete bitch”, Sir Basil says that they always got along swimmingly. When Sir Basil was in London Joan Greenwood was on it, of course. Was on his arm…I know what you were thinking…For shame, people, for shame.
