Kentucky Books

The southern states east of the Mississippi were in a territory that was for a long time under Spanish or Indian jurisdiction. By law, only persons issued passports were allowed to enter the southeastern territories, and so the passport records have the largest body of data relating to the pioneers to the Southeastern United States.

Dorothy W. Potter spent eight years doing research in the records of the War Department, the State Department, the archives of the individual states, as well as records of the Spanish and the British in West Florida. So she has assembled a complete collection of the passports and travel documents issued to individuals and families going to the Mississippi Valley area from Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Never again can genealogists complain that research in the Old South is hampered by lack of a comprehensive source book, for in this one outstanding reference work there is now a huge and invaluable body of source material at their disposal. No wonder this book was awarded the Certificate of Merit by the Tennessee Historical Commission!

"...This is one of the finest reference books we have ever seen."--Winston De Ville, Alexandria (LA) Daily Town Talk

"...Mrs. Potter has made a major contribution to genealogical research in the southern states."--Charles F. Bryan, Jr., Tennessee Historical Quarterly

"May I take a moment of your time to tell you how impressed I am with your Passports of Southeastern Pioneers. It is a model work of genealogical scholarship...."--Letter to the author from Elizabeth Shown Mills

This book was well writing, with many unknown facts on the movement of American families caming to the Southern states. It is a shame that it is out of print.

The Peace Corps in the 1960's under founding Director Sargent Shriver and later under Jack Vaughn has been well chronicled in such books as "Come as You Are" by Coates Redmond, "A Moment in History" by former Deputy Director Brent Ashabranner, "The Bold Experiment" by Gerard Rice and more recently by Cobbs Hoffman's "All you Need is Love."

Less well known is the history of the Peace Corps in the 1970's when Richard Nixon tried to dismantle the agency. Recent scholarship by Professor Hoffman has shown that Nixon's Peace Corps Director Joe Blatchford fought a rear-guard action to save the Peace Corps by supporting its merger into the ill-fated Action Corps. Director Blatchford's other contributions to the Peace Corps have never been adequately recognized, among them his "New Directions" policies to re-orient the agency.

David Searles, who served three years as the country director for the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and two years at Peace Corps headquarters as a Regional Director for North Africa, Near East, Asia, and Pacific (NANEAP) and as Deputy Director under John Dellenback, provides an insider's look at the Peace Corps as well as a revisionist history of the Peace Corps in the 70's which emphasizes the political imperatives that drove many of the decisions made.

The recounting of the Action Corps' shortcomings and problems is especially timely as history repeats itself with President George W. Bush's Executive Order in February, 2002 creating the USA Freedom Corps with the Peace Corps as one of the main components.

Highly recommended.

I enjoyed the first hand experience by Searles and his family in the Philippines. A great history lesson of those times and experiences. A wonderful account of a successful business man who took to heart the words of JFK. Ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your county. P. David Searles embraced that philosphy and volunteered and moved his entire family to a different country. A first hand account of all the adventures the family had while there. JFK would have been proud.

As the title suggests, this book covers the philosophical background behind films defined as neo-noir. Surprisingly this contains a large number of films most people wouldn't readily identity as Film Noir. Blade Runner, Memento, A Simple Plan and the works of Quentin Tarantino and the Cohen Brothers are amongst some of the movies that are analysed in depth. Many other movies are touched upon including Fight Club, Minority Report, The Bourne Identity and many others. The essays in this book give new insight into these movies and are easily readable by those without any background in philosophy. I would highly recommend it.

Neo-noir films incorporated the visual style, characterizations, and subject matter of the classic film noir of the 1940s and '50s. But this latter film genre was able to employ more advanced film techniques; and with the replacement of the moralistic Production Code with the more flexible modern ratings system, neo-noir film was able to add new dimensions of subject and visual matter. The 1974 "Chinatown" may be "the first authentic neo-noir," writes Richard Gilmore, professor of philosophy at a Minnesota college. The TV program "Miami Vice"--first program, September 1984--was set in the Great Miami area for its "cycle of decline, decay, development, and renewal (invariably followed by further repetitions of the cycle) [which] affirmed the indeterminacy and contingency of the postmodern noir," as Stevens Sanders, emeritus professor of philosophy at a Massachusetts university writes. Thirteen essays by these and other philosophy professors relate neo-noir films not only to the film noir which preceded them, but also philosophical thoughts and ethical perspectives of Sartre, Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, and others. Blade Runner, L. A. Confidential, The Onion Field, Parallax View, Dances With Wolves, and Raiders of the Lost Arc are among the films analyzed as neo-noir or which contain elements of this genre. This collection of essays is a companion of the editor Conard's "The Philosophy of Film Noir."

I came across this book by accident while looking through reviews of other Amazon reviewers. It is an interesting account of U.S. submarine S-39 covering a period from roughly early 1939 to mid-1942 when the S-39 was lost due to running aground on a reef. This is a narrative account moving between crew members, and sometimes the women they left behind, as the story moves forward.

Many of the crew members were children of the depression who joined the Navy because it furnished room, board, and clothing along with steady pay. It also furnished a chance to see the world, and service on submarines meant extra pay and a certain elite attitude. Men who qualified, usually after 6 months aboard, could wear the submariner's dolphins. The officers and men on S boats lived together elbow-to-elbow in cramped quarters and developed a certain esprit de corps. The early part of the book covers service in the Asiatic Fleet prior to the outbreak of war, and the expectations that war was on the horizon.

The S class of submarines were obsolete, and due to be replaced by the new fleet submarines, but as a previous reviewer pointed out, you have to go with what you've got. When the war started, the S-39 made its first combat patrol and sank an enemy cargo ship that was part of the force invading the Philippines. The book gives a good picture of conditions. With the Philippines being lost, the S-39 made a second patrol ending in Java, and from there a third patrol (during which it sank an enemy tanker) ending in Australia.

Operations of the submarine force moved to Brisbane, Australia, from where the S-39 made its fourth, and then its fifth patrol during which it ran aground and was destroyed. It would be nice to think that everyone survived, but the men went on to serve on other submarines, and many did not survive the war. The book was prepared by the wife of one of the survivors using extensive reference material including interviews/correspondence with other survivors. It is an interesting account of day to day events including shared hardships aboard and comradery ashore. Some men went to great lengths not to miss the boat when it sailed, or to catch up if separated.

There is a short afterward that covers the fate of a few of the individuals. Most of the individuals were in the same age group as one of my uncles who served in the Army during the war. Their ranks dwindle as the years pass.

As an additional feature, the book provides accounts of real observations of the poverty in China during that time period, the hatred that some Filipinos had for Americans, and the slavery/servitude of natives in Indonesia under Dutch rule. In one case a woman was riding in a rickshaw in China when the man pulling the rickshaw collapsed and died. Other people just ignored his body, going around him on the road, and other coolies immediately solicited the woman's business because they wanted the fare she would pay at her destination. Life was cheap.

This fine book, written by the wife of a submarine officer who served on S-39, provides a unique look at the lost world of late-1930's submarine duty in the US Navy's *Asiatic Fleet* as well as early war patrols. Tales of pre-War submarine training and Navy life and liberty in the Philippines and China set the backdrop for the story. Unlike some WWII submarine books this one includes lots of perspective from the sailors, and their wives and sweethearts, as well as the ship's officers.

In December 1941, S-39 and several other *pigboats* (a term for the already obsolete S boats used by sailors on the then-modern *fleet boats* which, themselves, came to be called pigboats by the nuclear-powered submarine generation) made the first war patrols. When it became clear the Japanese would conquer the Philippines S-39 withdrew, shooting, from the ruined Cavite Navy base near Manila: foraging for supplies among island villages, sinking two Japanese ships, suffering depth charge and bomb attacks, refitting in soon-to-be-conquered Dutch-dominated Indonesia and finally limping into Fremantle, Australia on one engine. By March 1942, S-39 had three war patrols under her belt.

A few months later, after extensive repairs and operating from Brisbane with a new skipper, S-39 makes a short breakdown plagued patrol and then, on her fifth patrol in August 1942, runs hopelessly aground off a remote island near New Guinea. Unable to re-float the stranded sub, S-39's crew scuttles the vessel and swims through dangerous stormy waves to a nearby reef to await rescue from an Australian destroyer. After some of the crew spends the night standing on a reef in water that rises above their waist during high tide, everyone makes it safely back to Australia. In an afterword we learn, sadly, that both of S-39's skippers and several other crew members we've come to know through this book perish in other submarines lost during the War.

There are useful sketch maps of each patrol. The best feature of the book may be the 57 black and white photos. Most of them are of the men whose words and actions are portrayed in the book. I found myself referring to them often as the story unfolded.

I recommend this book highly to everyone interested in naval and submarine history. It's a chance to look beyond the *big picture* of strategies and admirals to recall the importance of the day-to-day struggle to persevere and succeed even when circumstances or equipment are not ideal. Even though S-39 was not the ideal vessel to aggressively pursue the Imperial Japanese Navy in early 1942, her officers and crew lived by a code articulated, many years later, by none other than Miss Piggy: *You gotta go with whatcha got.*

Deters does a nice job in his book describing an event that is known and sort of unknown, in that Kentucky basketball fans (high school at least) knew Simon Kenton won the state tournament that year, but knew nothing of the struggle to get there, notably, the explosion that killed a student.

As with all great stories, this is a people story and Deters weaves the individual stories into the framework of the larger event, winning the state basketball tournament.

A real triumph and worth reading even if you don't care about basketball.

High school basketball is a near religion in Kentucky, and despite an impressive roster of talented teams, the Northern Kentucky area had never won a title before the Simon Kenton Pioneers brought one home following the 1980-81 season. The fact that it happened is all the more impressive when one considers that for a good portion of the school year, Simon Kenton didn't even have a school following an explosion on October 9, 1980, that claimed the life of one student, and only by providence didn't claim others. As local history goes, this one is an enjoyable read, although he would have benefitted greatly from an editor who might have cut some fat from the story to make it flow better. (Lose the hair style stuff and pay less attention to the cheerleaders.) If the movie ever gets made (like Joe B. Hall says it must,) I can't wait to see who plays Danny Mullins.

I was enthralled by this book, and literally could not put it down...the beautifully descriptive writing, the sensitivity of the real life characters, the drama in the book. The book kept me spell-bound to the end, and the last fifty pages was a novel in itself. Blew me out of the water. Writing at its best. I highly recommend it!

"The Plum Thicket" is a beautiful book. In the tradition of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," Giles takes readers on a journey through a child's innocent point of view. By the novel's end, however, that innocent view of the world has been shattered. Set in the early twentieth century in rural Arkansas, the first-person narrator is Katie Rogers, a middle-aged woman visiting the town where her grandparents lived when she was a child. Katie spent many summers at her grandparents' farm, and the entire novel is a flashback to the summer when Katie was 8 years old.

Katie is a bright, intelligent child, the daughter of rather progressive thinkers of the time. She absolutely adores her grandfather, a sweet-natured man who is a veteran of the Civil War, something that Katie is very proud of. However, Katie does not like her grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who resents anything sexual about life. (This fact is a very important part of the plot.) Also present on the Rogers farm is Aunt Maggie, whom Katie idolizes. Aunt Maggie is 30 years old and engaged to the local banker, Adam. However, Aunt Maggie is not eager to marry. She regrets never having attained her dream of being an opera singer, despite the years she spent studying voice in New York City. But Aunt Maggie is a fun, cheerful soul, despite that disappointment. Rounding out the farm are Lulie, the cook/maid of both black and white ancestry, and Choctaw, the farm hand who is three-quarters Choctaw Indian and one-quarter black. (Racial and ethnic heritage also play a role in the book's plot.)

The character that the book's climax hinges on, however, is the new physician in town, Doctor Jim. Jim is a restless, immoral soul who dreamed of being a famous concert pianist but, like Aunt Maggie, was not successful in his attempt at a musical career. Maggie and Jim share that common ground, and Maggie feels attracted to Jim, but she is also repulsed by his drinking, womanizing, and lack of respect for others.

Katie sees a lot of things during that life-changing summer, and to me it's always fascinating to read a novel told from a child's point of view. Katie muses on the differences between Lulie's black Baptist brush arbor meetings and her own family's traditional Methodist church services; her Aunt Maggie's love and respect for Adam versus her love/hate relationship with Doctor Jim; Lulie's comments about the wilder side of life; her grandmother's bitterness; her grandfather's comments about the Confederacy; and a host of other topics.

This novel was one of those books that made me sit and think after I'd read the last page. The novel was bittersweet with a heartbreaking turn of events at the end, but it's definitely an excellent work.

Forrest C. Pogue was the first historian of D-Day and documented "up-close and personal" the most gristly and significant clashes of World War II including Omaha Beach, the Huertgen Forest, Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge. He kept his notes and interviews in a series of battered journals, hoping one day to publish his own wartime observations. Many years later, Franklin D. Anderson (Forrest Pogue's nephew by marriage) transcribed those journal entries as Pogue's War: Diaries Of A WWII Combat Historian and in doing so, has made a unique and welcome contribution to the growing library of World War II eye-witness literature. As a combat historian, Pogue lived with the infantrymen and interviewed them only days after they had engaged in life-and-death battles with the enemy. The result was one of the most vivid "windows-in-time" perspectives available to World War II buffs and students of 20th Century American military history.

World War II is still turning up troves of fresh material, and here is a good example. This journal covering the European campaign from D-Day to the surrender of Germany is not only fresh but a pleasure to read. Pogue was one of the outstanding historians of World War II, author of the definitive biography of George Marshall and of The Supreme Command, an account of Eisenhowerýs leadership.

Raw diaries contain stretches of boring material, and this is no exception (ýTopete and I went to Aywaille to see 1st Division people. The 16th Regiment had moved up near Aachen to go into the line. Then went to 1st Division (rear)...ý). Fortunately, Pogue later set out to flesh out his entries into a publishable memoir, a task ninety percent accomplished at his death in 1996.

A Sorbonne graduate in history, Pogue was teaching college in Kentucky when drafted after Pearl Harbor. With its usual acumen, the army made him a clerk where his PhD skills were employed in ýcalling the roll of recruits when there was an unusual number of foreign names....ý It was early 1944 when he finally transferred to Washington to join the Army Ground Forces historical section. Readers may be surprised to learn that the U.S. army in WWII employed historians in all major commands. For their benefit, units in the field were ordered to render periodic after-action reports and preserve important documents. While the object was to learn battle lessons, the result was a flood of priceless historical material that is still being mined. This required historians to follow on the heels of combat units, interviewing participants as the fighting proceeded.

Pogue flew to England in the spring of 1944, where he spent two months experiencing the privation, attractions, and confusion of England on the eve of D-Day. Sailing in an LST to Omaha Beach, sleeping in the back of a truck piled with K-rations, (beds were reserved for infantry) he watched his units embark on D-Day plus one. Landing soon after, he spent the remainder of the war following the troops. Although rarely in as much danger as the infantry, he was almost as uncomfortable. Intermixed with gossip, combat anecdotes, and cameraderie are the authorýs frustrating struggle to keep clean and dry. Readers will learn how long he went between baths, laundry, and changes of shirt.

His miseries were interrupted by an idyllic two month in newly liberated Paris. Fluent in French and popular with former professors at the Sorbonne, he gives an entertaining picture of a city recovering from four years of oppression and poverty. Every Frenchman he visits records his opinion on the future of France, and the author adds his own. Mostly theyýre wrong, overestimating the communists and suspecting De Gaulle was a lightweight. In November 1944 he returned to the front to resume recording his struggle for personal hygiene while covering the armyýs bloody attack on the Huertgen forest followed quickly by the German Ardennes offensive, the crossing of the Rhine, and victory.

Interviewing soldiers is fun but only a small first step in writing history, Pogue explains early in the book. Battlefield testimony must be taken with a grain of salt. Soldiers paid no attention to the clock and rarely knew their location (ý...we went a couple miles to a turn in the road at a little town...ý). All fire directed at them was ýheavy.ý Asked about support on their flanks or rear, soldiers invariably considered it inadequate. ýThe average infantryman was...certain that everyone else had quit the war except his platoon.ý These insights occur regularly throughout the book and place it among the dozen or so best individual memoirs of the war. One paragraph summing up a bull session among soldiers should be committed to memory by every schoolchild. ýToo many people expect the war to settle everything... The winning of a war merely means that we avoided the disaster attendant on losing it. It does not mean that we have peace...ý
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Love him or hate him, George F. Will has a thoughtful (and more often than not, a trenchant) opinion on every aspect of American social and political life, especially on the state of American public philosophy and on the state of the nation's civility. The subtext of his generation of public philosophical pronouncements (via essays and editorials) has always been: "Hey, if you look at what we do (and not at what we say), we are not quite the people we ought to be (or thought we were), now are we?"

To many people, like me, Will's brand of "slippery" conservatism used to "grate on my nerves:" like the scratching of chalk on a blackboard. I would much prefer a clearer target on which to vent when the need arises. But then again, I think that is just the kind of reaction Will has always sought to produce and would be proudest of.

Maybe it's a measure of getting old, or an index of how fragmented our culture has finally become, or worse, of how poor editorial and opinion writing has become, but more and more I am becoming worried that I am beginning to agree with and think like, Will, and indeed rely on his always sage commentary as a last resort to keeping my dying brain alive.

As he notes in the introduction to this collection, essays can only lay out the contours of public philosophy. They are like vectors that point back to the underlying or more latent values and principles upon which a nation's character rest. It is not, nor can it "ever be" those values, principles or that national character. In short, public philosophers are only messengers; and no matter what they say, they are not the message: ultimately what the people do is the message.

The messages of these essays on the state of the nation during the late 70s and early 80s have suddenly become precious cultural heirlooms. They are pronouncements about the state of our nation at a time when things were already "going bad," but even so, then they were at least still recognizably coherent. Today, it seems that our fragmentation has no discernable outlines, no rhyme or reason. Somehow, today in the midst of emotional-based divisions, public scandals, elite deviance, disingenuous elected officials, the nation has begun to lose any sense of wholeness: its every group for himself.

These "philosophical meditations" as the author calls them, attempt to examine, to summon up and recall the sacred principles upon which the nation was built, and in doing so, Will tries to restore a sense of wholeness to a rapidly fragmenting polity. These essays show us, and the world, that even when sausage is being made in the kitchen of a still fledgling democracy, there is a larger collective meaning and national whole. I believe that when we have to look back on the 60s, 70s, and 80s as the good old days, then our nation is in trouble: Read' em and weep.

Five stars.

This is by far the best collection of George Will's work available. Will covers topics ranging from the Will children to Watergate, from marijuana to manners. For anyone like myself who was born too late to understand the 1970's, this book is a great way to gain insight into the culture and politics of that decade. As always, Will's columns are a joy to read. They provide an incisive wit and an unflappable sense of absurdity.

Snell's photographic work in this book is truly eyepopping. Every page presents a scene of beauty both in the subject and the composition. The text which accompanies each photo is well-written and insightful without being technical.

Simply a fablous coffee table book.

I don't think I have ever had a coffee table book that you couldn't put down. The photographs are gorgeous, the text is beautifully written and informative. I keep this book on the coffee table in my living room and everyone who picks it up just loves it.

Highly recommend!

I have given several as gifts and each one is gracing a prominent location in its new home!

Dubliners is an easy read, probably easier than Portrait, but these essays sprout up new layers to these stories and surprises us that the very skeleton of Joyce's structure is a story on its own. As for myself, I figured I had a finely tuned understanding of all the stories (except for Grace, as that one ran dry for me, but as I will explain in just a bit, I have formed a new respect for the story), but Rejoycing gives us a new apprehension of each one. Each story may have a point, despite how inconclusive many of the endings are, yet with the explanations given by these essays we are given a stronger context that remarks on society, modes of writing, characters affecting the narrative, etc etc.

This is really helpful for understanding Ulysses as well, as many of the essays discuss the connections between the characters appearances in both novels. The essayists discuss the interesting behaviors of characters, such as Cunningham and Bloom, and the stasis of their reappearance in Ulysses. Also, the narrative structure is examined, in that, characters, who domineer the language of the narration are shown to do so as well in Ulysses.

I may not be a Joycean scholar, but I couldn't imagine that these essays wouldn't shed a new light on Dubliners. As for students or first-timers, I'd wager this is a fantastic source for writing papers. I wish I had this last semester when I was actually assigned to read "the Dead" and Portrait of the Artist.

Your first and (never) final friend and companion to the Dubliners,

This collection of fourteen scholarly essays (plus introduction and preface) provides not only the best basis for beginning appreciation of these still revolutionary short stories, but remains solid assistance for advanced readings of these subtle, elusive, shifting tales.

The Dubliners are called the most accessible of Joyce's work, yet the first essay in this collection quickly dispels this error in judgment, as it unfolds the hidden depths and embryonic techniques which bloomed in his later work. What we see upon the surface of these tales is not trustworthy, but open to a myriad of interpretation. Joyce's clever ambiguity has provided a wide spectrum of readings of his short stories, according to the reader's sense and sensibilities, prejudices and presumptions, of which the reader herself may not be fully conscious. As with Wilde's criticism, we often see in Joyce, particularly in these sparse stories, our own image and likeness believing we are reading as the author wrote. This collection of commentary well relieves us of this accident of parallax.

Please review these commentaries for a brilliant glimpse at Joyce's early writings and his tentative trial of narrative techniques later so maturely elaborated in Ulysses. Even a long time reader of Joyce learns much from this collection of essays, as the work of Joyce always holds more to reveal, and these studies are excellent in opening for us further dimensions in this deceptively complex early tales.

Highly recommended for beginning and advanced readers of Joyce, most recent, valuable and substantial of any commentary upon this collection of tales, and indicator of further study.