Northern Kentucky University Books

This was the first book I read about the Camino and it remains, more than a decade and 40 similar texts later, still one of the very best such. If one is to read a single straightforward journal account I can think of no better introduction to the subject.

For my recent compilation of pilgrimage quotations ("Ultreia! Onward! Progress of the Pilgrim") I read all 40 or so contemporary English journal accounts available about the various routes. Stanton's is clearly within the first grouping of 8 or so best such books (i.e. largely those written by established authors and/or academics). And Stanton is immensely quotable; indeed, with 20 such abstracted for my review volume Ultreia!, the Road of Stars to Santiago was the single most quoted text of all.

When I bought this book I wasn't sure what to expect. I'd already purchased a couple of pilgrim guides but was hungry for more readable material. This isn't a pilgrim guide but rather a sort of journal of the author's experiences on the Way of St. James.

For anyone interested in the Camino, hiking or just a well written yarn that's hard to put down, I give "Road of Stars to Santiago" two thumbs up!

This is a fascinating book, and will appeal both to those who love travel tales and those on a spiritual quest. No self-described holy man, the author is frank about doubting his faith and his ambivalence in making the pilgrimage. Yet you see throughout the book how the journey emptied then replinished him He draws vivid word pictures about the sights, smells and characters that he encounters. If you have a desire to drop out of the hustle and bustle of life to learn to listen to the great, glorious creation around you and the Creator above, then this book will make your feet itch to begin your personal pilgrimage. I enjoyed this book thoroughly, and was enriched by the reading. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

This book is powerful in its simplicity. Stanton's journey is mundane, but from the people he meets and the sites he visits, we learn much about life and travel.Books on the pilgrimage are plenty now, but I would recommend this one for the everyday traveler taking the path.

This is a great book and is a very useful guide to the pilgrimage. It is hard to find, and Amazon is doing a great service in trying to provide it for pilgrims. However extracts from the book with very useful information can be found at the Telegraph Online London web site in the TRAVEL section. Look search under Yahoo for Telegraph Online and then Browse the many pages and articles on the pilgrimage found under the travel section. The book is fully reviewed in the newspapers's travel pages, the site has many useful useful facts about the pilgrimage including a FAQ

This is a nicely done overview of Northern Kentucky University's first 30+ years as an institution of higher learning. Since the school is so young, all of the pictures are contemporary and show the school and surrounding since its inception. One of my favorite images is an aerial view of the freshly cleared land from the intersection of US 27 and Nunn Drive. In the distance, Nunn hall is visible, but little else. In the foreground the Hiland Motel is still standing, and though the land has been cleared, nothing stands on the site of the eventual Thriftway store. This is a great series of books for anyone interested in local history.

Civil War Historian Stephen D. Engle has written the first ever biography of Major General Don Carlos Buell, who was, during one year of the war at least, one of the top Union generals. This fact alone entitles Buell to a biography, the author reasons, as far less important generals, North as well as South, have been the subject of exhaustive biographies, while Buell has been strangely neglected.

Stephen Engle's treatment of the life and work of Don Carlos Buell is a welcome addition to Civil War scholarship. In the crucial year 1862, when the Confederacy had actually stood a chance of winning its independence, Buell held important commands.
It was Buell's timely arrival which helped turn the battle of Shiloh into a Union victory and later it was Buell's army that turned back Bragg's invasion of Kentucky at Perryville.

Dr. Engle must have written the book with some modicum of sympathy for its subject but he is not uncritical of Buell, indeed his is a fair and even-handed account of Buell's life and service. Engle writes in an engaging style and he offers sound explanations for, and interpretations of the generals actions and of his failures to act.
After finishing I did understand Buell and his role in the war far better than I did before. I did, however, not like Don Carlos Buell any better. From what I knew of him before I read Engle's book Buell had a difficult personality: he was a grim, humorless, bad-tempered, touchy prig. The book confirmed this.

When in May/June 1864 General William Tecumseh Sherman, the newly appointed head of the Department of the Mississippi, and in command of the bulk of Union forces in the Western Theatre, organized the great army with which he was going to take Atlanta, he cast about for experienced commanders. He let it be known to Buell that he wanted Buell to command one of his corps.

One would think that Buell would jump at the chance! By that time Buell had been relieved of his last command for some 18 months and been subjected to a humiliating investigation by a Military Commission into his handling of the battle of Perryville.
What did Buell do: he declined the offer, stating sourly that he considered it a degradation to serve under Sherman and Thomas, whom he both outranked!
Furthermore, as a former Army commander, it would be impossible for him to step down to a mere corps!

Unbelievable! When offered the opportunity to serve his country and to retrieve his reputation, he turned it down on reasons of silly matters as precedence, protocol, rank and on stupid misbegotten vanity and pride... This episode completely sums up this man for me. What a pettifogging, cantankerous, despicable martinet!!
Well, as an organizer/Quarter-master/commissary Buell was all right I suppose but I'd say that this was is about the sum of his military talent.
What officer in disgrace would refuse such a chance of an active field command?

There is a factual error in the book. W. B. Carter was the brother of Samuel P. Carter, not the cousin.

Stephen Engle's biography on Don Carlos Buell is an excellent look at one of the more important and overlooked Union generals. Engle did not tackle an easy subject. There were a number of reasons that Buell had to wait a century after his death for a biographer. While Buell was an important figure in the war, he did not leave a number of papers and, with the exception of the botched Perryville campaign, he never commanded the army during a major battle. While he played an important part at Shiloh and Corinth, Buell's roles remained secondary. Engle reveals Buell to have been a very self confident and contained man who simply had no charisma and, with his disdain of volunteers, he remained a leader who simply could not and would not connect with his troops. Add Buell's conservative politics to the mix and one can see why the Lincoln administration grew frustrated with Buell and sacked him towards the end of 1862. Engle appreciates Buell's strengths as a commander. Buell was an excellent organizer and disciplinarian but his conservative politics and lack of aggression ensured his removal. Buell comes off as the McClellan of the West and one is not surprised to see they were friends (so much so that Buell was tempted to write a biography of Little Mac after the war). While aware of Buell's failings, Engle also provides an interesting account of his subject's role at Shiloh and offers a good deal of insight on the frustrating and often bewildering Union campaigns against Corinth and East Tennessee. While Engle provides a solid account of Buell's rise in the old army, his account of Buell's postwar life seems a bit rushed but, with Buell having been a private man, Engle may have simply not had the material to flesh out this last part. Engle's account of Buell's court of inquiry is interesting but could have been drawn out, especially in light of the Porter case at the same time and other political developments. Still, Civil War scholars will find this book to be of great use as they try to grasp with why the Union did not win an early victory. Engle offers one of the best Civil War biographies of recent times on a mostly untouched subject.

There are few army commanders from the Civil War that have lacked a full biographical treatment, and up to the present, that gap was nowhere greater than with Major General Don Carlos Buell, who commanded the Army of the Ohio for approximately one year. During that time, he was at the head of the forces that captured Nashville, fought at Shiloh, commanded a wing on the advance to Corinth, and participated in Braxton Bragg's Kentucky invasion that ended with the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862.

If one could have polled Abraham Lincoln in early 1862 insofar as which of his army commanders had the greatest "slows," the President might well have been hard-pressed with choosing between eastern commander George B. McClellan and Buell. Indeed, the two (McClellan and Buell) were linked in a common bond of friendship, mutual respect, and a belief in the pursuit of a limited war. Charged with the task of developing a campaign to satisfy Lincoln's desire to "free" eastern Tennessee Unionists from Confederate rule, Buell simply would not, or could not, engage in a campaign with risks he felt were too great. Finally, as his forces ponderously closed in on Chattanooga, Confederate leader Braxton Bragg stole the initiative from Buell, and engaged in a bizarre race back into Kentucky, with the Ohio River city of Louisville the seeming prize. After the seemingly incomprehensible draw at the Battle of Perryville, Buell allowed Bragg to escape back across the Cumberland Mountains, and finally Lincoln and the Washington Administration had had enough. Buell was relieved of command, never to serve in a United States uniform in the field again.

Were there a sizeable cache of Buell war-time correspondence, as for instance, exists for McClellan, the job of Buell's biographer would doubtless been much easier. But Buell rarely expressed himself to others, including subordinates. Much of the interpretation, therefore, was left to Stephen Engle from the official documents and records left as a result of the war. Even so, Engle paints a realistic picture of this Union enigma, and places Buell in the overall context of Federal strategy and Army politics. It would have been nice, for example, to understand Buell's thoughts on slavery, since (his wife was a Southerner, and brought slaves to the marriage) he owned slaves prior to, and during the war. Since Tennessee military governor Andrew Johnson, and Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton accused Buell of being a Rebel sympathizer, such understanding would have gone far to help place Buell's beliefs in the treatment of civilians and civilian property while he commanded in Johnston's state. But without such a written record, it was up to Engle to draw conclusions on his own.

Part of the problem in understanding Buell rests with the fact that to do so, one must come to grips with his two major foils - friend George B. McClellan, and nemesis Henry W. Halleck. And here, Engle does a very nice job of bringing in these two other men, and positioning Buell within the context of the three men's goals and ambitions (in Buell's case, it was more one of no ambitions versus the lofty ambitions of the other two). Here, perhaps, is the strength of the work, and Engle well balances this very disparate trio.

The Don Carlos Buell that emerges in this work is a man sometimes incomprehensible for his attitudes and actions, but at least understandable for his consistency in those very attributes. Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising of All (a line written by Federal General John Pope, of all people) is a must read for anyone interested in the early history of the western theater, and the man that figured so prominently in it

A great biography on the life and military service of Don Carlos Buell. Engle takes the reader on an in-depth journey into Buell's early life and up through his service in the Western Theater of the Civil War. It covers with careful detail the military actions of Buell, including his taking and occupation of Nashville, Tennessee in 1862. After finishing this extremely well-written, well-thoughtout book, one can see the importance that Buell had on American history. I highly recommend this biography to anyone interested in the Civil War. It does not disappoint. A great read from start to finish.

There are many books on Halloween (including another by Jack Santino), but this book is unique in presenting a look at how very old customs have persisted amid the social turmoil and political unrest of Northern Ireland. Since Santino is an American folklorist, one would expect an outsider's view of Halloween. Instead, having lived in Northern Ireland for an extended period and formed working relationships with folklorists there, Santino offers a view of a cultural phenomenon that is both sympathetic and objective. His insights are worth considering. Perhaps the only drawback to this volume is its lack of historical perspective or comparison with other Celtic cultures. Despite this, the present volume is a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in Halloween itself or Celtic cultural remains.

I read this well-written book with great interest but with ever-increasing irritation with its partiality and pro-German bias. For a "generic social scientist" such as myself, the flawed methodology of this work is troublesome. For starters, most of citations come from German or German-friendly sources. And remember that we are talking about early XXth century, when political correctness was unheard of and contradicting stereotypes were served by all propagandas and repeated with forceful conviction.

A few examples: Blanke sheepishly repeats silly opinions such as Lloyd George's about Poland that "has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history" (p. 19). The statue of the British prime minister is supposed to add weight to the statement. Well, Poland, and later Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, survived in good political health from X-th to late XVII-th century. It was relatively more peaceful and tolerant that the vast majority of European countries. The coincidence of many factors, including bad voting rule, too much democracy that weakened governability and the unfortunate rise of strong authoritarian neighbors lead to the disaster of the XVIII century, and its partition. Incidentally, during that time many Central-European states fell as they were incorporated by the power- and land-hungry empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary.

In his own words Blanke writes (p. 19) that "The [Polish] Sejm approved the treaty [giving substantial protection to minorities] by a vote of 286 to 41 but the majority was motivated more by Realpolitik rather than by the conviction that the approval was justified or necessary." In this sentence, one can find a negative judgment of the Polish parliament - even though it actually overwhelmingly approved quite a modern piece of legislation! - given with no reference or factual basis whatsoever. On earlier pages, Blanke criticizes Polish historians for considering German minority's position as "relatively privileged" (p. 6). One doesn't have to take a stance on the Polish record on minority protection to see the partiality of such a statement. Later we learn that the Polish minority in Germany did not enjoy comparable protection since no law similar to the Polish one was enacted in Germany. Well, IMHO, the combination of both facts supports the claims of relatively good protection.

Now about obvious methodological problems. Blanke repeatedly makes a mistake that sociologists call the "omitted variable" problem when, for instance, he compares the economic standing of Poles and Germans, and forgets about different social structures. A historian doesn't have a license for making such mistakes only because he writes narratives instead of analyzing hard data! He seems to poorly understand the difficult matter of property-rights re-assignment after a period of 123-year long submission of one nation to another. This a subject that economists and political scientists call "transitional justice." Obviously, there are no easy solutions here but the problem should be at least acknowledged! He seems to be puzzled with moderately harsh treatment of those Germans who manifested their support for the Soviet Red Army invading Poland in 1920 (falling clearly under a definition of treason). Again, one doesn't have to take a stance here - it is enough to resort to common knowledge facts of how Germans during WW2 in Poland or other Eastern-Central European countries treated manifestations of support for the enemy. The default and obvious punishment was death.

And so on, and so on. It is surprising how many similar errors and partial judgments Blanke managed to gather in a single book. Read it with caution and, if you know little about those turbulent times, jointly with a more balanced work.

It is common knowledge that Germans were very dissatisfied with the terms of the treaty of Versailles after World War I, and that Germany's attack on Poland began the World War II in Europe. But not many know of the Versailles treaty's impact on Germany's eastern frontiers, and what the long-term historical background was for Hitler's invasion and the vicious occupation policies in Poland. Blanke's book is an important addition to our understanding of both issues.

To understand why German-Polish relations became so poisonous, one must look back into the 19th century (Blanke covers this earlier period in another book). The eastern borderlands of Germany (most of which belonged to Poland until the late 18th century) had a mixed German and Polish population, and Polish nationalists agitated to maintain ethnic separatism there in the hope of one day restoring the Polish state which had disappeared from the map of Europe in 1815. Germany tried to combat this resistance to assimilation with harsh and discriminatory methods that only alienated the Poles further.

After its defeat in World War I, Germany lost very important and very large chunks of territory that were claimed as Polish: Pomerania (the area around Gdansk/Danzig, called the Polish Corridor, which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany), Poznan, and the coal-rich and heavily industrialized Upper Silesia. The new Polish government enacted policies determined to drive the German minority out of Poland so as to remove a potential fifth column; and besides, the well-to-do Germans owned a great deal of property which could be taken away and re-distributed. To achieve a German-free Poland, every form of chicanery and harassment was commplace, with occasional resort to outright violence. Poland's minortiy policies generated more complaints to the League of Nations than those of any other country, not just from Germans but from the far more numerous Ukranians as well.

It goes without saying that nothing could justify Germany's ferocious, genocidal treatment of Poland in World War II, and Blanke's book is neither an attempt to revive old quarrels, nor a pro-German polemic. It is, however, a useful aid in developing a judicious understanding of the tumultuous inter-war period.

It is common knowledge that Germans were very dissatisfied with the terms of the treaty of Versailles after World War I, and that Germany's attack on Poland began the World War II in Europe. But not many know of the Versailles treaty's impact on Germany's eastern frontiers, and what the long-term historical background was for Hitler's invasion and the vicious occupation policies in Poland. Blanke's book is an important addition to our understanding of both issues. To understand why German-Polish relations became so poisonous, one must look back into the 19th century (Blanke covers this earlier period in another book). The eastern borderlands of Germany (most of which belonged to Poland until the late 18th century) had a mixed German and Polish population, and Polish nationalists agitated to maintain ethnic separatism there in the hope of one day restoring the Polish state which had disappeared from the map of Europe in 1815. Germany tried to combat this resistance to assimilation with heavy-handed and often discriminatory methods that only alienated the Poles further. After its defeat in World War I, Germany lost very important and very large chunks of territory that were claimed as Polish: Pomerania (the area around Gdansk/Danzig, called the Polish Corridor, which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany), Poznan, and the coal-rich and heavily industrialized Upper Silesia. The new Polish government enacted policies determined to drive the German minority out of Poland so as to remove a potential fifth column; and besides, the well-to-do Germans owned a great deal of property which could be taken away and re-distributed. To achieve a German-free Poland, every form of chicanery and harassment was commplace, with occasional resort to outright violence. Poland's minortiy policies generated more complaints to the League of Nations than those of any other country, not just from Germans but from the far more numerous Ukranians as well. It goes without saying that nothing could justify Germany's ferocious, genocidal treatment of Poland in World War II, and Blanke's book is neither an attempt to revive old quarrels, nor a pro-German polemic. It is, however, a useful aid in developing a judicious understanding of the tumultuous inter-war period.