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Rebecca Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4635
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| Posted: 13 January 2024 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | 1
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I'll admit I thought at one time that "it couldn't happen here". Now I know it can happen anywhere. :^(
Prairie Fires mentions a place my great-grandmothers' family lived; Lake Benton Minnesota. The Ingalls stayed there before heading further west to Dakota Territory and Charles worked there for a railroad. We have one old photo of some of my great-grandmothers' family with Lake Benton written on the back and a date of 1878. Her part of the family would join them from Wisconsin where she was born (just above Chicago IL). She married a man from Manitoba Canada much later and they homesteaded in Saskatchewan where my grandmother and four sisters and two brothers were born. I had the job a few times of minding my great-grandmother (you would never say babysitting). I had known here earlier having her own small house with chickens further up Vancouver Island near one of my great-aunts (her daughter), her neighbours there kept rabbits and I think were Porteguese. She came to live with my grandparents full time when keeping her small house got too much. I heard her stories about a school horse in Minnesota they would ride and the bad winters and hard water. My mother wishes she had listened more or even recorded her stories. Her great motto was "It's a good life if you don't weaken". DeSmet, the Dakota town the Ingalls helped found, was roughly parallel in latitude to Lake Benton. Walnut Grove MN, further east and particularly famous from the tv series, was not much like portrayed there from the sounds of it in this book.
On Youtube there are videos from a couple of guys who dig up deposits of old bottles around these areas, usually where stores and latrines once were. Lots of medicinal and liquor flasks, sometimes bottles from laundry related items for 'bluing'. Any paper labels are mostly long gone. The videos end with photos of the most prized of the bottles shown having been cleaned of all muck.
I'll add The Children's Blizzard to my list to seek out down the road. I have a book on the much later 'Hunger Winter' in the waning days of occupied Holland my father lived through to keep it company.
Watching a PBS show on people escaping North Korea I wondered about all the people who are so occupied with celebrity news magazines and 'reality' tv shows of masked singers and house flipping they can't make time for these too real programs and books. They are part of 'it happening here' whether they ever will realize it or not. They don't want to hear about or discuss anything that might be depressing, and often also won't vote for any of those awful politicians to blame for it all. I think God becomes a last resort when you feel totally powerless and a kind of hopeless apathy has set in. Thus we have Polio and even Leprosy making a comeback and anti-LGBTQ 'opinions' flourishing both because "God never makes mistakes". Freakier weather events probably are interpreted as divine communication reinforcing their situation.
Learn from the past or there might not be a tomorrow. Those things called books (even comic books ala Jack Jackson's stories set in 1800s Texas) are the best way there I find.
Edited by Rebecca Jansen on 13 January 2024 at 5:29pm
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Jonathan Kaye
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 September 2008
Posts: 123
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| Posted: 30 January 2024 at 3:47am | IP Logged | 2
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RECURSION and DARK MATTER, a couple of very clever sci-fi thriller/suspense novels by Blake Crouch. Thoroughly enjoyed them!
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William Costello
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 30 August 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 755
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| Posted: 31 January 2024 at 12:40am | IP Logged | 3
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NORSE MYTHOLOGY - Neil Gaiman
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Brian Floyd
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Joined: 07 July 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 8654
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| Posted: 31 January 2024 at 4:11am | IP Logged | 4
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THE RISE OF THE SHADOW, by Will Murray.
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James Best
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Joined: 02 March 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 896
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| Posted: 01 February 2024 at 5:35am | IP Logged | 5
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THE LETTER WRITER by Dan Fesperman, a stand alone mystery novel published back in 2018 and set in New York City in early 1942 as the loyalty of the city's huge immigrant population comes under scrutiny as the war in Europe expands.
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Brian Floyd
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Joined: 07 July 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 8654
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| Posted: 06 February 2024 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | 6
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The Rise Of The Shadow, by Will Murray. Its about the pulp/radio character, who is one of my favorites.
After that, most likely I Will Find You, by Joe Kenda. We've been marathoning his show Homicide Hunter on ID, via Philo since we don't have cable anymore.
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Robert Bradley
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Joined: 20 September 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 4887
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| Posted: 06 February 2024 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | 7
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THE FOOTBALL 100: THE STORY OF THE GREATEST PLAYERS IN NFL HISTORY by Mike Sando, Dan Pompei and The Athletic NFL Staff.
Although not quite as good as THE BASEBALL 100 by Joe Posnanski, it's still an entertaining read. I have a few minor quibbles with their rankings (Jim Brown is #1 for me, and I think Larry Fitzgerald is a glaring ommission), but generally speaking they do a pretty good job in thee rankings.
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Craig Earl
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Joined: 13 July 2019
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1408
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| Posted: 05 May 2024 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | 8
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I'm a third of the way through THE BOOK OF QUINT by Ryan Dacko, which is a sequel/prequel to JAWS (the book starts in the modern age and then takes us back to Quint's USS Indianapolis experience).
Interestingly, it's a sequel/prequel to the JAWS movie rather than Peter Benchley's novel, which is obvious from Matt Hooper's (Richard Dreyfuss' screen character) appearance in the first few pages.
As a card-carrying fan of the movie, it's compelling enough, although Dacko's prose has weak spots which occasionally pull you out of the moment. There is also another novel, QUINT, on my to-read pile, which I understand is more of a first-person tale from the salty sea dog himself. I'll get to that one eventually.
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Brian Floyd
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| Posted: 05 May 2024 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | 9
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EYES OF THE SHADOW, by Maxwell Grant (Walter B. Gibson)
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Rebecca Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4635
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| Posted: 05 May 2024 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | 10
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A biography of silent-screen star Mabel Normand by Timothy Dean Lefler, 2nd Edition... and also a much lighter-weight one for Olive Thomas the Ziegfeld Girl become flickers star who drank poison in Paris in 1920 (said to be husband Jack Pickford's topical Syphilis prescription).
The Normand book does go into the unsolved William Desmond Taylor murder but overall it doesn't take over like I've heard it does in other books. There is a fair bit also on her tuberculosis which claimed her life. The Thomas one by Antoine du Varennes is about half or more photos. I remember seeing a Vargas painting of her long ago and only knew she had died very young.
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Rebecca Jansen
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Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4635
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| Posted: 05 May 2024 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | 11
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Craig: Please tell us Quint wasn't stalked by a specific shark since the USS Indianapolis sinking.
That is one of the most horrific stories of WWII... was it part of his background in the original Jaws book or film? If so I somehow forgot that detail. They had the beach billboard from the film on the Universal Studios tour in 1979... it did some kind of quick turn when I wasn't looking to magically show a graffiti-ed version.
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Craig Earl
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Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1408
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| Posted: 05 May 2024 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | 12
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Craig: Please tell us Quint wasn't stalked by a specific shark since the USS Indianapolis sinking.
------------
Thankfully not, Rebecca.
Quint's monologue in the movie tells of him being stranded at sea in that disaster (it was not mentioned in the original novel). The author of the new book dug deep while researching the event, merging it with what Robert Shaw revealed in that amazing scene. The sharks doing the damage in THE BOOK OF QUINT mirrored what the sailors had to deal with in real life: Oceanic Whitetips and Tigers.
For me, Quint's monologue is one of the highlights of the film.
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