I've launched into the 3-volume "The Civil War: A Narrative" by Shelby Foote.

And now I have finished.  It's a fascinating work.  

3,000 pages!  Over a million words!  It was long.  The ending reminded me of The Lord of the Rings, in that he went on and on, even after the war was over.  

It covered the entire war, all the battles, major and minor, the generals and the politicians.  It was very well-written.  It was very even-handed.  I learned a lot about the Confederacy, and especially Jefferson Davis.  The part about Lincoln's assassination was very sad.  The book followed him for a whole day, all the people he saw, all the things he said and did, what happened at Ford's Theater and afterward.  The book also followed the life of Jefferson Davis after the war until his death.  

In the words of Abraham Lincoln, "What has occurred in this case, must ever recur in similar cases. Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged."

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The Energy Bus.

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"What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie? I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky. The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing; Rush in and die, dogs - I was a man before I was a king."

I have started a new book on a random recommendation: The Road Not Taken by Max Boot. It is a biography of Edward Lansdale with a focus on how the course of the Vietnam War may have changed if more of the US leadership has followed Lansdale's lead.
Boot is a hell of a writer. I'm learning a lot. I'm not sure if I'll be convinced of his conclusion though.

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My fellow southpaw Mark Brunell will probably always be my favorite Jaguar.

I'm now going through a book by the man who won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year. The book is called Why Nations Fail and it was written about 10 years ago. It's very accessible but also very repetitive. But it's been reassuring.

His thesis is that political institutions are either "inclusive" or "absolute" while economic institutions are either "pluralistic" or "extractive". "Pluralistic" or "inclusive" is when lots of people have a little bit of power or wealth. Property rights are respected, and random people with good ideas have a shot at getting to the highest level, because there is room at the top, no one has a monopoly on anything. "Absolute" is when the same people stay in charge no matter what and "extractive" is when ordinary people don't have real choice about how to earn their living and the only people who can get rich are the people who are already rich or at least politically connected.

His thesis is that you will rarely find mismatches - if a political system is inclusive, the economic system will be pluralistic. And if a political system is absolute, its economics will be extractive. Further, and this is the reassuring part, he says that when they are matched, if you try to change one, the other will resist. An inclusive political system will resist rich people's efforts to make the economic system extractive, and a pluralistic economic system will resist a President's effort to make the political system more absolute.

I hope he's right!

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My fellow southpaw Mark Brunell will probably always be my favorite Jaguar.

A biography of Wernher von Braun.

Well, I'm trying. I need to dedicate more time to it.

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The Struggle and the Triumph by Lech Walesa

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A biography of Wernher von Braun.

Well, I'm trying. I need to dedicate more time to it.

lawdy this is me, I can start a book and it will take years to finish just because I have so many other things clamoring for my eyeballs.

I blame you all for making this message board so very enthralling. Stop it.

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I have started a new book on a random recommendation: The Road Not Taken by Max Boot.  It is a biography of Edward Lansdale with a focus on how the course of the Vietnam War may have changed if more of the US leadership has followed Lansdale's lead.
Boot is a hell of a writer.  I'm learning a lot. I'm not sure if I'll be convinced of his conclusion though.

Early on, the book seemed to be heading towards a "we could have won Vietnam if we listened to Lansdale" conclusion, but that's not where it landed.  It landed on "Vietnam was doomed from the start, but Lansdale's influences helped later US intervention in places like Nicaragua and Iraq go better than Vietnam did.". And I think that's true. It made JFK and RFK look like real doofuses and blamed most everything on them. Don't know if that's true. It's probably true, at least with regard to Vietnam.

Troubling part - if Lansdale were alive today, he would be pro-Israel, but he would say that Israel's current war in Gaza is doomed to fail.

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My fellow southpaw Mark Brunell will probably always be my favorite Jaguar.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter. I just started it last night so I can't say if it's a great book but chapters 1-6 are really good so far. It's based on true events from the author's own family.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3026...lucky-ones

It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe will become inescapable and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety.

From the author:

My first book, We Were the Lucky Ones, was inspired by a family reunion in 2000 that opened my eyes to the astounding, untold wartime stories of my grandfather, his parents and his siblings. In 2008, I set off to research and record this piece of my ancestry and a decade later, We Were the Lucky Ones was born. The book has been published in over twenty languages and has been adapted for television by Hulu as an eight-part limited series.

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