Samuel Eliot Morison

I believe it was when I was in Junior High that friend of our family gave me a copy of Samuel Eliot Morison's book Admiral of the Ocean Sea:  a Life of  Christopher Columbus.   That was my introduction to the writings of Dr. Morison, who, unbeknownst to me when I was a teenage boy, was …

CALL 999!

It's no secret I like to read mysteries!  I used to work with someone who introduced me to that genre of fiction about forty years ago.  I am one of those readers who have three or four, or maybe more books going at a time.  I read non-fiction for the most part in my living room, …

BOOKS AND MORE BOOKS

This, I believe, is the 50th blog in this series, so I thought I would review, to the best of my memory, some of books I have read over my lifetime.  I have always had books at home.  Being I was a history major in undergraduate and graduate school (not counting MSLS degree) and history …

Murder Mysteries Set on Trains

Before the advent of automobile and air travel, railroads were the way travel long distances.  As early as the mid-1860s, both coasts in the United States were joined by rail.  By the 1930s, railway travel brought cities closer together both in America and Europe and had a certain romance to it.  At the same time …

Sir John Keegan

British historian John Keegan and I were almost contemporaries.  Although he was four years older than me, both of us were boys living in a Britain troubled by war in the early 1940s; he in England, I in Scotland.  Keegan told interviewer Brian Lamb a few years ago he chose military history  to study because he …

CHURCHILL II, 1939-1965

When Winston Churchill became the First Lord of the Admiralty for the second time in 1939, he ended his decade exile from government.   Then Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister on May 10, 1940 and Winston Churchill assumed that office.   Soon afterwards he addressed the British people and later the House of Commons.  He …

Churchill I, 1874-1939

Fifty years ago last January, Great Britain lost one its greatest leaders.  Winston Spencer Churchill had been Prime Minister twice, once during World War II in the reign of George VI and then under George VI again, until king’s death in 1952 ;  then  under Queen  Elizabeth II, as she started her long reign.  In …

Gallipoli Campaign

The Gallipoli campaign was a side bar in 1915, the second year of the First World War .  Gallipoli is a peninsula in northwest Turkey on the west side of a waterway leading from the Black Sea past Istanbul (it was called Constantinople in 1915) to the Adriatic Sea.   Because Russia was fighting on the side the …

JCOC: The Jim Casada Outdoor Collection

Most of the adult book collection at the Marianna Black Library in Bryson City is housed in the main reading room, but if you step to the right, go through the opening framed by the flags into the room that houses the reference collection, you will find the Jim Casada Outdoor Collection (JCOC).   Casada …

Georgiana, Maisie, and Amory: Detectives All

Most of my blogs in this series have been about non-fiction books, but occasionally I write about fiction, most often mysteries. I have lately discovered a mystery sub-genre that is set in 1920s or 1930s Great Britain and features  lone female detectives.   Two different examples of this genre are Rhys  Bowen's series of "Royal Spyness" novels …