Justifiable European Bashing

 

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 During the last days of the Western Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages, Western Europe was threatened, and often invaded, by outsiders. First came the Huns, then the Arabs, then the Magyars, then the Vikings, then the Mongols, and then the Turks. Each in turn, they were described as ferocious warriors none could withstand. Each in turn, their hordes inflicted immense bloodshed, destruction, and suffering on a continent rendered almost defenseless by the prevailing socio-economic--political structures and the internecine struggles to which it led.

- From Pussycats: Why the Rest Keep Beating the West and What Can Be Done About It by Martin Van Creveld

The Great Feminization

 

Content Creation Major

Arizona State University now permits students to major in Content Creation; i.e. becoming an influencer.

I look forward to following the story.

In the Stack

 

Find Something Beautiful Today

 

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On My List

 

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 The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.

- From Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

Get Well Soon Packages of Books

 If you had a friend of eclectic tastes who was going to be recuperating at home for a lengthy period and who was a reader, which books would you placing in a Get Well Soon package?

My selections would include:

1. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend

2. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

3. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

4. Erasure by Percy Everett

4. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

5. Any of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries

6. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

7. Directions to Servants by Jonathan Swift

8. Shogun by James Clavell

9. Station Eleven by Emily St. John

9. City Primeval by Elmore Leonard

10. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

11. Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James

12. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

13. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

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