Presently Reading, and wat to get.........

The current economic crisis we now find ourselves in are a reminder that we are not invincible. No matter how high we climb as a nation, we should always remember that it takes just one slip to fall. We have had many slips in the past few years. But the troubles we now have aren't our first big stumble. The stock market crash of 1929 put millions out of work, huge sums of money seemed to just disappear, and the entire world spiraled into a terrible depression. Sound familiar? We can only hope that the situation we are in doesn't get so bad, even though it doesn't look promising. But one thing hard times does is to force people to try a little harder to get the job done. The Depression demanded a lot of our leaders at that time, and some met the task, and the demands, head on. The foremost of these leaders was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many of his contemporaries thought him to be shallow, not up to the task at hand, and somewhat inexperienced, even though he was governor of New York prior to his election as president. I believe he proved his critics wrong, and surprised his surporters with his decision making and leadership abilities. There is a familiar ring to this as well, as we have just elected a president many believe to be too inexperienced, and an unproven leader as well. I pray that he steps up to the plate as FDR did.
Conrad Black has written an excellent book about FDR titled "Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom". He has gone into the most minute detail about FDR's upbringing, education, early career in politics and business, his polio affliction and recovery, and his career as governor and president. It is a big book, nearly 1300 pages, but so far (I'm about half way through ) it is worth the struggle. Much has been written about FDR, but this is the most information about him I have seen in one volume. Conrad Black does a good job of being objective. There is no hero worship here. He gives a good deal of the dirt, but he is fair, and treats his subject with the respect he deserves. The good with the bad.
Abook that was just released in September 2008 that I want to get is "The Forever War", by David Filkins. It is a first person account of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with some history of the Afghan-Soviet war and Al-Qaeda thrown in. I heard the book reviewed and the author interveiwed on NPR a couple of weeks ago. I thik it will be a good read.

The Whole Universe, Ours to Enjoy

I love to read. Always have, since I could read. God bless my mother. She is 80 years young, turns 81 in July. She was born in a then remote area of Rabun County in 1928, to a mostly uneducated sharecropper father and a mother so busy with, at that time 7 other children. Three more followed my mother into this world, giving her 10 siblings, 8 girls and 2 boys. Hermother died of cancer when she was 13, in 1941, and the task of raising the three youngest fell on her, as her older siblings were leaving home, the boys to war in Europe for one, the Pacific theater for the other, and the girls on to boarding school or marriage. Life for them was mostly work, taking care of the house and helping in the fields, growing corn for sale and livestock, and a kitchen garden to survive on. This left my mother very little time for education or recreational reading, but when she married and had children of her own ( 2, my older brother and myself) she recognised the need for books and education, to help her children break the cycle of poverty that she had grown up in, and to expose us to a great big, remarkable world that she knew precious little about. My father cared little for education or family life, and was gone by the time I was 2 years old, again leaving my mother to provide for small children, and new her aging father as well, all on the income of a low skill job in a textile plant. But through all the hardship and sacrifice, she still found a way to make sure we had a houseful of books, and encouraged, no, made us study and keep up our homework. As a result of her foresight my brother and I both are avid readers. I'll always be grateful to Mother for this. Through books the world has indeed been opened up to me. I've had high adventure on the high seas, fought battles on the steppes of nepal, flown missions to far away planets, and multitudes of other experiences attainable to most of us only in the pages of books. As I've grown older my interest have evolved from fiction to history, biography, and the study of life on earth, but my passion for reading itself has not waned. Even though the subject matter I follow is historical in nature, it is no less fascinating, and the adventures no less exhilirating. If anything the events I now read of are even more fantastic than the fictional stories of my youth, for they were actually lived, people really experienced them. Imagine the wide-eyed wonder of Marco polo as he travelled through the East, the thrill that Lewis and Clark must have felt as they pushed across the western frontiers of this great continent, seeing places and wonders and peoples totally unseen before by European eyes. We are all able to relive these wonders and events through the historical record, in books, journals, and diaries of those who were there. Thanks, my dear Mother, for giving me all this wonder!