Archives

Birthdays Commemorated by Me and by Others

Dec1

There were lots of great authors’ birthdays this week that I just couldn’t get around to memorializing.

C.S. Lewis, b. 11/29/1898.
Louisa May Alcott, b. 11/29/1832 Her best books are Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom, by the way IMHO.
Madeleine L’Engle, 11/29/1918 I really should have blogged about this one. I really like Madeleine L’engle, especially her books The Love Letters (out of print) and A Severed Wasp. I’m planning on reading A Wrinkle in Time to the children as soon as we finish Johnny Tremain
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), b. 11/30/1835
Winston Churchill, b. 11/30/1874.
Jonathan Swift, b. 11/30/1667 Swift should be recognized for writing the essay A Modest Proposal in which he proposes that the poor of Ireland eat their excess children so as to put an end to their poverty. Unfortunately, I am told that some college students who read this proposal in these benighted times do not understand that it is satire and that JS was not seriously advocating the wholesale slaughter of infants for the convenience and enrichment of their parents.
L.M. Montgomery, b. 11/30/1874 Montgomery, of course, wrote the beloved Anne of Green Gables and seven more Anne books in addition to three books about another heroine, Emily of New Moon and various and sundry other books–all of which are favorites among the females around here. Eldest Daughter tried to get her dad to read Anne of Green Gables, but he never quite got into it.
Finally, for today, the author is one of my three favorite mystery writers. (The other two are Dame Agatha and Dorothy Sayers.) I think he’s the best American mystery writer, creator of that dynamic duo, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Nero is a 300+ pound genius, and Archie is his legman. Nero is a great detective, but he needs Archie to run errands since The Big Man seldom leaves his brownstone in New York City. The thirty-one Nero Wolfe novels and the multiple short stories are just pure fun–no socially redeeming value at all. If you’ve never read any of these books, I’d suggest you start with Prisoner’s Base or The Mother Hunt, a couple of my favorites.

Today is Rudyard Kipling’s birthday,

Dec30

Today is Rudyard Kipling‘s birthday, b. 1835, d. 1936. This quotation seems appropriate to our times:

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.
Ballad of East and West.

I’m still reading Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. So far, my favorite quotation from GoA is this:

A question that Wilson asked of Foch during his second visit in January 1910, evoked an answer which expressed in one sentence the problem with the alliance with England, as the French saw it.
“What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assitance to you?” Wilson asked.
Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier–and we will see to it that he is killed.”

This might be a good strategy to use with regard to the French and Germans in Iraq. Unfortunately, “honor” is a rather quaint term these days, and avenging one’s countryman is out of fashion. If a single French or German soldier were killed in Iraq, I have a feeling that the French or the Germans would do two things: (1) run as fast and far as they could and (2) blame the Americans for not having provided enough security.