The Gun Counter

I finished A Splendid Savage, which was a biography of Frederick R. Burnham.

Death's Head trilogy by David Gunn.
It's ok.

Trying to finish the Repairman Jack books also.

Langenator wrote:Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood. Book II of the Oxford history of the United States. Covers the period from the Constitution to the end of the War of 1812. Wood is the author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, so it's not a bunch of SJW whining.

I read The Radicalism of the American Revolution. He's good, I'll look up Empire of Liberty.

Revolutionary Characters is another good one by Gordon Wood.

Just finished Middlemarch, and am about 180 pages into Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak is no Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but once you get past the first 60 or so pages it gets pretty good.

MiddleAgedKen wrote: but once you get past the first 60 or so pages it gets pretty good.

A lot of older books seem to be that way.

I'm on Thoreau's Cape Cod. Kind of an interesting step back in time.

Finished Lucifer's Hammer yesterday. In the middle of a book on how to survive storms on a small boat in big oceans.

Windy Wilson wrote:

Langenator wrote:Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood. Book II of the Oxford history of the United States. Covers the period from the Constitution to the end of the War of 1812. Wood is the author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, so it's not a bunch of SJW whining.

I read The Radicalism of the American Revolution. He's good, I'll look up Empire of Liberty.

It's the third book of the Oxford American history that I've read. The other two I've read so far are The Glorious Cause (about the Revolution) by Middlekauf and Battle Cry of Freedom (Civil War) by James MacPherson (the dean of American Civil War historians).

Battle Cry is particularly good. I credit MacPherson with planting the idea in my skull that the annexation of Texas did more than any other single event to massively accelerate the coming of the Civil War.

-the annexation itself was shady, and somewhat dubious from a Constitutional legal point of view. (It was not done by treaty, which would have required a 2/3 vote in the Senate, which they weren't going to get, because there were enough free state votes to block it. It was done instead by simple majority in a joint resolution of Congress.)
-Northern (free) states opposed annexation and admission of Texas to the Union.
-Annexation of Texas led quickly and directly to the Mexican War, which was also greatly opposed in the free states
-the Mexican War resulted in the acquisition of even more land
-it was the question of how to handle all of this land, plus the still unorganized parts of the Louisiana Purchase specifically, whether slavery could/should be banned or allowed in the Territories (and thus, the character of the eventual states from the territories thus organized, and thus, the future balance of power in the Federal government between slave states and non-slave states.) that ultimately led to the explosion.

(The central plank of the Republican party platform in 1856 and 1860 was barring any further expansion of slavery into the territories, not removing it where it already existed. The South, especially the Deep South states, viewed this as the next thing to a death threat.)

Netpackrat wrote:Finished Lucifer's Hammer yesterday. In the middle of a book on how to survive storms on a small boat in big oceans.

Thuktun_Flishithy over on Spacebattles.com is doing a merged Footfall and Worldwar story called Worldfall..

Among the highlights:
A Chinese serial killer of lizards.
"Ow Guns"
M1A5 Abrams, which i contributed the nickname "Thumpers"( an internet cookie for those who recognize the reference. )
"Ghostcraft"
And over course, everybody's favorite "small men with big knives", Gurkhas (the Race, which didn't have a word for "demon", now use "Gurkha" )
Battleships - the Missouri goes down fighting. The Constitution even gets in a few symbolic licks..

In short, two alien species run into a 21st century Earth, that knew they were coming, and promptly go into a full war footing..

Its done as a series of interviews post war by somebody writing a book.

I guess I would have to know what Footfall and Worldwar are to fully get the gist of that.

Netpackrat wrote:I guess I would have to know what Footfall and Worldwar are to fully get the gist of that.

Footfall by Niven and Pournelle

Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove