Today's Politicos vs The Words and Deeds of The Founders

David McCullough is an exacting historian and a skilled writer. His biographies and accounts of significant structures and events are always absorbing. This reviewer had heard of the Johnstown Flood but knew little of the circumstances or the people involved. Somehow McCullough injects suspense into an event that occurred 125 years ago.

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2 for 1 book review, with some observations on the side.

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Isaac's Storm is about the devastating Galveston hurricane of 1900, the nascent National Weather Service ... and their spectacular and criminal incompetence.

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Lucky for most of us, the recent People’s Climate March skipped most of the world and settled in Manhattan and a few other places. There the climate change groupies performed, as they normally do, a parody of themselves.

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Erik Larson's Thunderstruck reads like a novel, but it isn't. It's a non-fiction history of the invention of wireless telegraphy and a famous murder.

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This is an extensively researched biography of a man who is too little remembered today. It’s become a cliché to say that a book reads like a novel, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Unger is a superb writer whose books have often been reviewed on this blog. Each one seems better than the last. We look forward to the next one.

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There is a difference between recognizing that there is a higher Good in the sense of the True, and the Beautiful, and denying its existence while simultaneously trying to create it without a pattern upon which to base the design.

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The Arroyo is an absorbing depiction of porous borders, the marauders who cross it with impunity and the illegals they control and sometimes rape and kill. It is superbly acted and directed. Too bad Congress cannot be required to view it.

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Arundel is an entertaining and highly informative story, and it is clear that Roberts did a lot of research. This reader learned a lot from reading it, and independently verified some of what Roberts had to say, following the trail whose origins the author thankfully included in a brief bibliography at the end of the book.

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Life is transitory, but not meaningless and without purpose. Uncovering that purpose, and recognizing the transitory nature of our time on earth, forces one to confront certain realities that the are unpleasant to a mind that has been trained brain-washed to focus only upon what it can see, touch and feel.

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