Kentucky Books

This is an enjoyable walk down memory land for anyone acquainted with rural America in the 1920s...or anyone who yearns for a simpler world. Catherine draws loving and respectful pictures about a time that is so very different from our current stressful situation. A gentle book ...rather like a cup of hot cocoa and a friend when you're feeling lonesome.

This book is a fine, easy read. Catherine's ability to describe an era so that I can recall vividly the feel of it is outstanding. This is the type of book that tells it like it was, and could be an eye-opener for those born into the post-WWII era.

This book does not have a plot as such, but rather describes in vivid, real terms what it was like to live in the early days of the automobile: lacking indoor plumbing, cooking your own meals alongside the road when traveling, etc.

As a registered nurse who is interested in nursing history and
fascinating medical cases, I bought this book with the expectation that the author would not only detail how she accomplished all her noteworthy achievements, but also tell in interesting clinical detail about the cases she treated. Instead, she details at great length the names of people she knew, and where she traveled, and the "administrative" aspects of her career, while covering very little of actual patient cases. The clinical stories are far between, and you must slog through "who was her favorite accountant" for the nursing service, to get to the touching story of how she helped a boy with a congenital heart condition through a flood on a makeshift raft to float downstream to the hospital. She had a fabulously interesting life, and did a great work, and I admire her, I would only suggest that she should have focused on the actual patients in her stories, and left out every little single detail of how the paperwork was done, whom she talked to at the bank, who she had supper with on June 12, 1920, etc, etc. It could have been a much more interestingly written memoir. But still a story very worthy of being told written by a great woman.

A woman surrounded by wealth, widely traveled, followed her "calling" to come to the poorest, most remote area of Kentucky to establish the Frontier Nursing Service in the 1920's. She, almost singlehandly, established a hospital in Hyden, Ky, started a Midwifery School (still very active) and provided, with her nurses, medical and midwifery service on horseback - later jeeps - to several counties in southeast Kentucky.

It is my intent to present this message to those who might be interested in bringing about the long needed story of this woman's life and contributions in a full length motion picture.

They've overcome one of the double binds that confront women leaders. Jamieson examines five double binds or Catch-22's that can block women from success and reveals through personal stories and scholarly research how these double binds can be overcome. Any woman who wants to be a leader needs to begin by understanding what these binds are and how to confront them. As Jamieson says, "the double bind is a strategy perennially used by those with power against those without." Whether you call a bind a "double standard," "a no-win situation," or a "self-fulfilling prophecy," understanding the "binds that tie," can help any woman better position herself for success.

Most books written by senior commanders are little more than either self-glorifying tomes, or books that deflect blame from themselves for things gone wrong. Bruce Palmer has written a book that does niether. He doesn't concentrate on the grunt level, but rather looks at the strategic level of operations in Vietnam. Palmer served as Army deputy at MACV, and later as Army Vice Chief of Staff, and therefore had a good overall picture of what was going on during the war. His book sheds light on policies that proved misguided, but also discusses some of the sucesses we had. He manages to do this without getting bogged down in the morality of the war or whether or not we should have been there in the first place. His book is a much better look at the subject than Harry Summers book On Strategy. As an army officer, I'm suprised his book isn't on the recommended reading list put out by the Chief of Staff

Stanley Harrold's well-written work is an important contribution to antislavery historiography. Taking to task those historians who see antislavery as primarily a movement to reform Northern society, Harrold demonstrates that Northern and Southern abolitionists were active in the South up until the Civil War. Furthermore, Harrold makes a convincing case that the very real abolitionist presence in the Upper South was a "precipitative cause of secession and the Civil War." For Harrold, the Southern response to the abolitionist threat was neither irrational or exaggerated. I commend Harrold's work to any student of antislavery or the antebellum South.

In 1835 the debate about slavery was the main issue in American Christianity. Slaveholders in the predominately confessing Baptist South claimed that Christians were allowed to hold slaves. Reformers in the South, along with many church leaders in England and in the North, claimed that Christians had the duty to fight for the emancipation of the slaves.

Those who believed slavery was biblical repeatedly used the same arguments. These are necessary to understand, because it is in the context of these arguments that the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky made their appeal to end slavery. People claimed that the New Testament teaches Christians how to care for their slaves and admonishes slaves to be obedient to their masters, but nowhere commands Christians to release their slaves. They said that Christians (Eph. 5) and even pastors (Philemon) owned slaves, and nowhere do any of the apostles, much less Christ himself, imply they should be freed. Moreover, the freedmen in the United States were in more desperate poverty than the slaves were, so it was more humane to keep them enslaved.

The Synod of Kentucky replied to these arguments very convincingly. Indeed, their reply was so convincing that one Baptist pastor received it, was convicted by it, and then moved his slaves to Ohio (introduction, iv). They wrote that there is no New Testament Greek word to describe the kind of slaves that existed in the United States. Instead, there was a word to describe a domestic servant, and a word to describe a prisoner of war. To denounce these would not make sense. Instead, the New Testament denounces the practice of slavery without using the word. This is very beneficial, because words tend to change meaning over time. The New Testament commands that believers love their neighbors as themselves, that they treat their slaves fairly, and that they give the workman their due. So while the gladiatorial games were not denounced by name, neither was slavery. Instead, the sin that they represent is denounced, and the Christian should respond. Moreover, to claim that slaves are better off in captivity is to miss the point of obedience, and to lie to your conscience about your true motives. This quote captures the flavor of the argument: "We are conscious that we are violating the whole spirit as well as letter of this precept (the golden rule), when, for our own trifling pecuniary gain, we keep a whole race sunk in ignorance and pain" (p. 152).

This document is significant because it refutes the common misconception that Christians stood idly by as the majority of churchgoers profited from treacherous sin. Through its rhetoric the reader also discovers the arguments those in favor of slavery were using to justify their position. This document is a call for Christians to work to stop slavery, and I can only assume that it does not invasion boycotts and picketing, but instead war and bloodshed. While clearly a social gospel is non-existent, this document illustrates a unique time in American history where I believe Christians were justified in social activism. This treatise points a picture of a church going culture that embraces slavery. Even pastors had slaves. In this situation, and considering the gravity of the sin, the members of the invisible church had an obligation to contend for the faith, and to show even the nonbeleiving world that true Christianity did not endorse this. I used to live in Kumasi, Ghana, one of the largest sources for American Slaves. I was always asked how Christians could justify standing by during the slave trade. This synod illustrates that true Christians did not.

This is the only full-lengthy study of Alexander Gumberg. It covers 1917-33, key years where Gumberg went from a poor Russian immigrant living in L.A. and NYC to a wealthy and powerful trade agent between the Soviet government and U.S. business and government figures. In the process he became a close confident of John Dewey and a host of American liberals, as well as Trotsky and Lenin. Libbey's account is extremely sympathetic and dismisses the idea that Gumberg was a spy working for the Soviets. Instead, Libbey depicts him as a man who truly is looking out for the interests of both nations that he loves.

My great aunt dated Gumberg for a time and I have about 20 letters he wrote to her from 1911-17 (the years immediately proceeding this book). Clearly, like my aunt and all of her closest friends and relatives, Gumberg was a Communist who held great hope in the Russian Revolution and the possibilities of Marxism spreading through Europe and the U.S.

Gumberg was supposedly born in 1887 (though my letters indicate 1888) in Elizavetgrad / Yelisabetgrad, Ukraine (like my great grandfather) to a rabbi. In 1903, at age 15, he emigrated to NYC. By 1908 he was a licensed pharmacist (also like my great, great-grandfather). He moved back to Russia in 1917 and began the career that would earn him a fortune before his early death in 1939.

Libbey states that Gumberg's English skills limited him in his pharmacist career in the 1910s, but the letters I have show a man with a flawless command of the language and perfect spelling. His wit and brilliance are compeling, though his constrant struggles with melancholy and anger are exhausting.

Anyway, this is a concise (180pp.) and very interesting read. It is not only an interesting biographical study, but it also provides a nice window into developing Soviet-American relations in the early years of the Soviets. Libbey writes from a liberal, sympathetic perspective.

I thought this book would be an examination of how Hitch had handled various Victorian issues, esp. sexual repression and upper-class elitism. Actually, that's not what the book is about at all. Cohen is interested only in the switch from what she calls a "subjective narrative" -- literary fiction of the Victorian age -- to film narrative of the modern era. She claims literary fiction in the 1800s had developed a female-centered subjectivity and that cinema came along to "re-orient" the public to a male-focused sensibility. She hammers this over and over again throughout her book, and spends way too much time examining gender roles, until you could swear there was nothing else that mattered about Hitchcock's films. Of course, this is always the problem with any tightly-focused scholarly analysis ("When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"); so it's not terribly objectionable, and fortunately the book does have quite a number of interesting insights, esp. about Hitch's relationship with his daughter and the roles he cast her in as those roles reflect the development of their father-daughter dynamic. While I disagree with much of what Cohen says, I found her book a catalyst to some very interesting thinking about Hitch. In particular, she has quite a fascinating perspective on his last films, which are often viewed as failures; she thinks they're just exericses in post-modernism. Whatever you think about the book, I continue to be amazed at how many people feel compelled to ransack Hitchcock's work; it's as though no serious film fan has any choice but to address what he did. This book is another interesting step in the process. . . .

This book should be a fun and instructive read for anyone living in Louisville, Cincinnati, or river towns in between (like Rabbit Hatch, Kentucky). Old postcards going back to the early 1900's are used to show, for example the Roebling bridge, when the Ohio was low enough to show the foundations. In Cincinnati, I was also fascinated with the inclines. As a Louisville resident, the cards showing the unloading of boats with horse drawn wagons, and excursion vessels unloading passengers were most interesting. Perhaps the highlights are the steamship pictures, with info on side-wheelers, steam stacks, that band under bridges, and races and disasters. I wish color plates would have included the hand colored Kraemer post cards, and I would have enjoying reading more of the messages on the cards.

A very good overview of American gothic writers, with chapters about Poe, Hawthorne as well as Washington Irving and Charles Brockden Brown. Well written and captivating, it also deals with the influence European gothic writings had on the developing American culture. A pity it is out of print as I'd buy it instantly.