I DISCOVERED THE CIVIL WAR in 1958 while in the eleventh grade of high school at Towson, Maryland. I suspect that the schools there danced around the subject for fear of offending their constituencies. Generally, the city of Baltimore was largely populated with the descendants of German immigrants who had earned passage to America by fighting for the Union, and the children of African slaves who had fled north after being freed from plantations in the deep south. The Maryland countryside surrounding Baltimore was largely populated by the descendants of rebels. Remember, Maryland was a slave-owning plantation state until the war ended, home of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, both born into slavery on Maryland plantations. Any teacher who dared broach the subject was bound to run afoul of someone's sensibilities.

I was well familiar with the Revolutionary War. We had studied it a great length. And, as someone who shared a birthday with George Washington, I was born to study him. However, as a sailor, most of my attention went to John Paul Jones and the naval engagements that ultimately decided the outcome of the Revolution. (Huh? Sorry, that's another story.)

Of course, when I discovered the Civil War, my attention went to the nautical side of it. I began with a nine-volume dissertation on The Naval Engagement of the Civil War. I made models of the Monitor and Virginia (no, not the Merrimack) to illustrate my class project about that famous battle.

One of my greatest surprises came when I discovered that the founding editor of my favorite magazine, American Heritage, Bruce Catton, was writing some of the best stories about the Civil War. Catton wasn't an academic historian. He was a journalist. He had grown up listening to aging veterans telling stories of the Civil War and that's how he wrote it, as a story. Too many (almost all) academics “teach” history. They make it a dull and tiresome thing full of dates and places and other mundane details that murder any interest a student might have. Fortunately, I am self-taught and my interest in history only grew, especially when it was nurtured by storytellers of Catton's caliber. 

It's interesting to compare Catton's work with that of Jeff Shaara. Shaara also tells stories, vastly interesting stories, including several good ones about the Civil War. However, he used fiction to help illuminate the personalities while Catton limited himself to documented fact. I suppose that is what makes Catton's achievements so much more remarkable.

If you can read just three of Catton's twenty-one books, let me point you in the right direction: The Coming Fury, Gettysburg: The Final Fury, and A Stillness at Appomattox. Don't just read them to learn history. Read them to learn a good story.

The most recent issue of American Heritage, and sadly, possibly one of its last, contains a tribute to Bruce Catton, wherein they say, “Catton almost always wrote about the Civil War with a sense of the epic.” I can only add that it is a great shame that he never taught educators how to teach history properly, as a good story – our story.

What is wrong with us? Why do we react to every problem, every crisis with the same plaintive cry: Government ought to do something! President Obama was elected under the banner of “Yes, We can!” Well, it must be clear by now that “We” (the government) can't, which is why John Stossel proposes a new rallying cry: “No They Can't!” His new book No They Can't explores our perverse nature to hand off problems to a government despite the fact that it has never once proven that collective action can solve our nation's problems.

Like many of us who are reborn small “L” libertarians, John abandoned liberal and conservative, right- and left-wing, ideologies as well as Republican and Democrat politics, when he was “mugged by reality.” Unfortunately, the vast majority of people have their pockets “picked” by government without ever suspecting the true culprits. Whenever their favorite leaders fail them, they are distracted by propaganda assuring them that “it's the other guys fault.” No, actually it's our own fault for putting our faith in people who pretend to by wiser but, in truth, do not have sufficient knowledge to make all of our choices for us. Furthermore, if they make mistakes (which invariably they do) they are not held accountable for them. Again, it's the other guys fault, it's the other party's fault, it's the other ideology's fault.

I highly recommend that you spend a few hours with John's book. Preferably, a few days. Give yourself time to absorb what he is saying. Discuss it with friends and family. Okay, maybe not family. No one in a family likes someone who insists on making them uncomfortable talking about politics. Just go annoy a few friends. They expect it.

Don't expect No They Can't to answer all your questions. Be careful reading it. John doesn't get everything right. Indeed, I was somewhat disappointed in the video of the interview with John on Uncommon Knowledge, that he wasn't prepared to respond to Alan Greenspan's error.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of... banks... [was] such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders... That the loan officers of those institutions knew more about the risks than... even our best regulators. A critical pillar... to free markets did break down... that shocked me... I still do not fully understand why it happened.”

– Alan Greenspan testifying before Congress, 2008

What doesn't Greenspan understand? Clearly, that “critical pillar” collapsed because it was undermined by government incursion into the housing market. The government promised to shield the banks from loss by subsidizing risky investments for political gain. What brought the economy to its knees was the fact that the government made good on its promise by covering the losses with borrowed money - trillions of borrowed cash. Inasmuch as that money was not based on real value, consumer confidence – and business confidence, too – fell and the economy ground to a halt. Even the most unaware consumer intuits that government spending is a poor substitute for real wealth generation.

I suppose this is where the author and I disagree. The theme that binds his book together is that intuition is leading Americans astray. That intuition inspires them to respond to every problem and crisis by saying “The government ought to do something!” I believe they have been programmed to say this even though their intuition tells them it is wrong.

Take a look for yourself. Read No They Can't and tell me who you agree with, the author or me. Despite this one point, I believe that John is “spot on” in the rest of his book.

I CANNOT IMAGINE living the life of a spy. No, not James Bond. A real spy. From what I know of it, spy craft is a life without trust. A life full of doubt. A life lived on the edge with little reward at the end of the day. It is the spawning ground of ulcers for anyone who survives long enough to grow them.

My Uncle Bill was a spy. He was a pilot in the United States Army Air Corps before America's entry into World War II. In those days, officers read the obituaries just to see what opportunities for advancement in rank were opening up. If a general died, a colonel could hope to be promoted to fill the spot. Then a major could advance to colonel, and a captain could advance to major. At the bottom of the heap were a scad of lieutenants scrambling for that one captaincy. The prospects for career advancement were not bright unless the nation went to war.

Unfortunately for ambitious young officers like Bill, the prospects for America going to war weren't bright. It seemed that there was little sympathy for Europe and its wars, not in America. Roosevelt had been reelected President on the promise to keep us out of it. But, the writing was on the wall after Germany occupied France and the movers and shakers in Washington secretly formed the Office of Strategic Services to begin compiling intelligence data that the Department of War would need to manage the Armed Forces effectively if the United States became embroiled in it. Bill was one of the eager young pilots they recruited to begin flying photo reconnaissance missions over Europe. Stationed in England, he flew regular missions that earned him combat pay that he sent home to have his sister invest in War Bonds.

If captured, Bill would have been executed as a spy. Inasmuch as the United States had not declared war, he flew as a civilian. Yes, they could have “lent” him to the British and he could have flown in their uniform, but that would have given them operational control over his missions, and access to the product of his spying. It is hard to imagine the strain he must have felt on every flight in an unarmed, unmarked airplane flying over an active war zone. I am certain that there must be a really good story in his service, but it is lost to the ages now. He is gone and he left nothing behind to memorialize his activities.

Today's spies are nothing like Bill. Most are bureaucrats, members of the Central Intelligence Agency that replaced the OSS. Not only did they replace the OSS, but also the individual spy activities of the branches of the Armed Services. President Truman swept the OSS out of existence with the stroke of a pen in 1945. He attempted to do the same with the spies of the armed services in 1947 when he signed the National Security Act. However, the armed services distrusted the bureaucrats and kept their own programs alive for more than a decade following the birth of the CIA. However, in the end, they had to defer to the CIA as Cold War expenses ate up their budgets and Congress wouldn't fund duplicate spy services.

As Operations Officer at the Strategic Communications Center for the Headquarters, United States Army Pacific in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was able to monitor intelligence reports and assessments as they traversed my facility. It gave me some insight into the problems of sifting through the minutiae that operatives filed and analysts sifted through to glean a gem here and there that might give them insight into secret plans and activities. In later years, a larger portion of that information began to come from high-flying satellites and electronic monitoring stations. However, there was always need for feet on the ground to collect vital information.

During the 1950s and 1960s, many of those feet belonged to U.S. Army scouts and U.S. Marines. Concurrently, pilots of the U.S. Air Force flew spy planes over restricted areas and U.S. Navy ships and submarines observed and reported enemy concentrations and movements in the global chess match being played by the Free World and the Soviet Union. I touched on this subject in my novel, Rebels on the Mountain, in which a U.S. Army Ranger who has spent several years slipping in and out of Eastern Europe and the western reaches of the Soviet Union, is sent to Cuba to decipher the convoluted relationships between American businessmen, mafioso, and diplomats that had been driving U.S.-Cuban relations into a quagmire.

Another author with even greater credentials than mine illuminated modern spy craft in an exciting story set in Iran, Satan's Spy. The author, André Le Gallo, has crafted a tale that is as thrilling as any told by Ian Fleming, but far more believable. Whereas my novel hints at the problems created for spies by self-serving politicians in the U.S. Congress, Le Gallo rips into them with a vengeance.

In Satan's Spy, Steve Church, an independent operative who we met in Caliphate, is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Iran to retrieve information about the Islamic Bomb, information that is vital to the policy makers in Washington who are attempting to decide how to respond to the prospect of a nuclear device in the hands of an unstable Middle Eastern government. Inasmuch as any citizen of the Great Satan, America, would be viewed with great suspicion, Steve enters the country under the guise of a Canadian businessman seeking to sell his companies services.

His lover, Kella, another familiar face from the Caliphate, accompanies him as his backup. Theirs is a tenuous relationship. Steve isn't certain of where he stands with Kella even though she voluntarily involves herself in this dangerous mission. Men are such fools, even the most daring of us.

Steve's task is to make contact with XYSentinel, an asset recruited a few years earlier by Steve's father, himself a former CIA operative. Dealing with an asset who might renege on his “deal” at any moment only adds to the sense of danger that Steve faces working in a hostile nation whose leaders would happily torture and kill him after making a public spectacle of his capture.

The author is able to inject a great sense of reality into the milieu of the story. His narrative is liberally spiced with first hand observations of the people and place. He himself had served there during some of the most turbulent times in Iranian-American relations. His plot progresses rapidly and logically to its thrilling conclusion. His characters are three dimensional. Most importantly, Steve's adversary is no bumbling radical fool. He is cunning, intelligent, and resourceful. He commands a cadre of willing and able cohorts who will quickly pounce on any sign of Steve's presence within their nation's borders and ferret him out quickly and efficiently. Indeed, these are men who will extend their reach to any corner of the world wherever they can inflict pain and suffering on any citizen of the Great Satan, especially its spies.

Interestingly, this book had one other quality that greatly appealed to me. It's not only entertaining, but also informative. I felt that I was learning real and valuable information about a country and a part of the world that is at best worrisome in these troubled times. This is why I could classify it as a must read. Together with Rebels on the Mountain, you may learn a great deal as well as be entertained.

THERE WEREN'T SO MANY intellectuals in times past as there are now. Roosevelt had his “Brain Trust.” Woodrow Wilson had the enigmatically named group of intellectuals, “The Inquiry.” John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson depended on the “Whiz Kids” for advice. However, no President has relied nearly as heavily on intellectuals as the current President, Barack Obama. Only about twenty percent of his cabinet and closest advisers have any significant practical experience. Indeed, he is the first President who himself may be labeled as an “intellectual.”

What is an “intellectual?” Of all the definitions I have heard, I like best the one promulgated by Professor Thomas Sowell in his book, Intellectuals and Society. He refers to “intellectuals” as “...an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas – writers, academics, and the like.”

The central theme of Professor Sowell's book is the appalling record of intellectuals, especially those of the twentieth century. “Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies where people were free to say 'whatever they wished.' Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all had their admirers and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented by despotic regimes that preceded them.”

Is Professor Sowell attempting to scare us with the notion that President Obama may one day begin murdering Americans? Of course not. Indeed, his book isn't about President Obama. It's a scholarly look at the nature of intellectuals and intellectualism.

However, he has helped me understand the source of the ideology that drives this Administration and its political allies in Congress. He has helped me understand how they could cling to an ideology that has endowed us with unprecedented debt and a web of stifling regulations that prevent us from producing enough wealth to hope that we could ever repay it. He has helped me understand how seemingly intelligent men and women – possibly the most intelligent among us – could ignore the damage they're doing and insist on doing even more.

It's a concept that I've touched on many times in my life and in this blog. Just last Sunday I wrote humorously comparing economists with weather girls. (See Opinion) The weather girls, obviously selected for assets well south of their brains, regularly outperform the economists. In the coming weeks, I will be blogging about my experiences in Vietnam and you'll learn that my closest encounter with real danger was inspired by the complete lack of common sense exhibited by a Harvard graduate. Therein lies the question that has nagged at me so many decades: Why do such intelligent people lack common sense?

In response to that question, Professor Sowell quotes George Orwell who said that “...some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

If you read Professor Sowell's book you will learn that the schools who are graduating these intellectuals have become like religious institutions wherein intelligentsia believe that their ideas are good and worthy simply because they all share them. They have dropped any requirement to prove the worth or validity of their ideas through empirical evidence. He cites numerous examples as proof of this thesis.

Once you understand this concept it is easy to see how these politicians can incite class warfare for the sake of some obscure concept of fairness. A former Marxist himself, Professor Sowell admits that he too fell victim to the fundamental misconception that “...'labor', the physical handling of the materials and instruments of production, is the real source of wealth.” He surrendered that belief because it is not empirically true. 

Professor Sowell's book is surprisingly readable, even by the layman. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the true nature of the problems now confronting our nation and the world. People who dismiss our current leaders because of race, political affiliation, or ideology, are not only missing the point, but also demonstrating their own prejudices and lack of common sense. The problem is with our leaders' lack of practical knowledge of America and its rise to preeminence through free markets and limited government. Unfortunately, it is a lack in a significant portion of our population as well, and we are not going to turn things around until we begin testing the ideas that our leaders propose to insure through empirical evidence, that they will work.

IMAGINE SATAN AS the naughty brother of Archangels Michael and Gabriel, a rapscallion sent away from Heaven for a celestial day or two when one of the lesser angels tattles on him and he incurs God's displeasure over some sarcastic observation he made concerning one of the Lord's works. While flapping around space, enjoying a reprieve from the cacophony of countless souls singing praises to the Lord, all out of tune, he visits Earth and writes a series of letters to his brothers telling him of the madhouse it has become. Thus, begins Mark Twain's Letters From The Earth. 

Letters From The Earth is a collection of essays and sketches that Twain worked on during the later years of his life, and hid away from his wife. Olivia “Livy” Langdon Clemens was the child of staunch New England Congregationalists. Her family included one of the leading evangelists of the time. I can only imagine that Livy felt uncomfortable when her famous husband went on a rant about Christian hypocrisy, such as is evidenced in this book, and I believe that Twain felt guilty for causing his wife grief. He truly loved her.

To be fair, most of today's Christians shouldn't take offense. They too should enjoy the humor in this book. It lampoons a literalistic interpretation of the Bible that is not commonly practiced these days. However, there are those who still do, and who probably will be offended. Sorry 'bout that.

The Letters were retrieved from storage by Bernard DeVoto, an editor who had been hired by Twain's survivors, probably looking to earn a little from his unpublished work. DeVoto put them in order and added them to other essays of an irreligious nature: The Diary of Adam, The Diary of Eve, and others. Twain's daughter, Clara Clemens, then the executor, put the kibosh on the project. Some have speculated that she worried that Twain would roast in hell if they were published (that is, if he wasn't already there for having just conceived of them).

Henry Nash Smith finally convinced Clara to release the Letters in 1960 arguing that her father's work belonged to the ages. Clara relented in part because the Soviets were claiming that her father's work was being suppressed by the capitalists. The first time I read them was when I picked up a copy of the Saturday Evening Post magazine that I found on a boat owned by a member of the Baltimore Yacht Club during their summer cruise on the Chesapeake Bay. The Letters had been serialized by the Post and I had to find the rest as soon as I returned home.

Yes, that was only the first time I read the Letters. I've read them many times since. Even though I have bought countless copies of them, and given away many, I now have a copy permanently stored on my Kindle. I'll be able to survive even the most tiresome queue at the DMV without complaint. However, there is a danger in reading this collection in a public place. Someone may send for the men with butterfly nets from the laughing academy to retrieve me from the floor where I end up every time laughing hysterically.

IF YOU HAVE been following this blog for any time – since late February this year – you'll know that I've been cooking for almost sixty years. (See Ship's Cook) I've been preparing a wide variety of dishes in that time including Eastern European, Italian, French, English, and Mexican. I have gone so far as to create my own recipes and been temped to write a cookbook: Cooking in a 19” Cast Iron Skillet. Sounds yummy, doesn't it? But writing a cookbook is no simple chore, especially for someone like me who tends to eyeball ingredients rather than measure them. And, the end result is always changing. To me, that's part of the adventure of cooking. It's always good and it's always different. Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well for the cookbook user. When I decided to try my hand at Chinese cuisine, I shopped carefully for the best cookbook on the subject. That's when I discovered Eileen Yin-Fei Lo.

Inasmuch as I was not blessed to be raised by a Chinese mom, I purchased Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's book, Chinese Kitchen.
 It seemed the best of her books to begin with because Chinese Kitchen is not just a book of recipes. It is an encyclopedia of, well, the Chinese kitchen. It begins with the cultural heritage as well as the ingredients founds in the Chinese larder and the tools including the two principle ones, the wok and the cleaver. This is essential information for anyone who has never shopped for a good wok or who wouldn't recognize a fresh bok choi if one were thrown in their face.

Armed with Eileen's expert advice, I purchased my wok from a distributor in San Francisco that imported them from China. It wasn't the sort of thing that I would have selected if I hadn't read her book first. Who would have guessed that those hammer marks were important? They help hold the food on the sides away from the hot oil while other ingredients are cooking in the center.

Anyone who takes their food seriously knows that the best dishes require the best ingredients. The best ingredients for Chinese cuisine are found at Chinese markets. A winning smile, an engaging personality, and a pretty face go along way to encouraging the proprietors and customers to help you select the best. Having none of these qualities, I had to rely on Eileen's instructions. 

My first results surprised me. I didn't achieve the kind of food that I had expected, like the food that I had purchased at Chinese restaurants and take out joints. This was authentic, really good Chinese food! Seriously good. 

To be honest, even well written cookbooks can't help some people. I had a married friend in law school whose wife couldn't boil water. (Sorry, I know that's a platitude, but it was literally true in her case.) I tried to help. I gave her the a copy of the Culinary Institute of America cookbook and strict instructions to use only those recipes that I helped her with. Her first attempt to strike off on her own almost ended the young marriage.

These days, there are several websites that provide excellent recipes. My favorites include 

• All Recipes Recipes are ranked by user's ratings and users post modifications they're used to adjust them to their own taste. Registered website users can bookmark their favorite recipes for future reference.
  
• America's Test Kitchen Well-tested recipes as well as great comparisons of kitchen tools and equipment to help you get the most for your dollar. Also features episodes of their television programming providing you with step-by-step demonstrations.
  
• Food Network The companion website to the cable television Food Network featuring some of America's favorite chef's, their recipes, and video presentations. 
  
• National Institute of Health I found this website by accident while searching for a recipe to prepare one of my wife's favorite dishes: Chicken Marsala. Unfortunately, it is loaded with cholesterol and calories. However, the NIH version is a healthful alternative as are all their recipes. Check it out, especially if you are on a special diet to loose weight, reduce cholesterol, or for diabetes.
  

However, I never found a website for Chinese cuisine that served me better than Chinese Kitchen, and it is one of the few cookbooks that I have kept.

THINK OF YOUR favorite ghosts from literature. Dicken's A Christmas Carol fairly leaps to my mind, not because it's the best, but rather my favorite. On reflection, I may prefer the ghost of Hamlet's father from Shakespeare's play.  

Interestingly, the ghosts of Hamlet's father and Scrooge's partner are walking earth for much the same reason: Unresolved issues - a murder, a mean-spirited life. I'm willing to bet that's a fairly common motivation among ghosts. It's one that has been exploited in recent television serials. Jennifer Love Hewitt helped spirits deal with their unresolved issues and cross to “the other side” weekly in Ghost Whisperer (2009 – 2010). More recently, the BBC production of Being Human features a ghost, Annie, that has helped others find that “doorway to the light” after first fixing the mess that it left behind in life.

Forgive the distraction but did you notice what I did there, in that last sentence of the previous paragraph? I referred to the Annie as “that” and “it.” Seems rather impersonal, don't you think? Does a ghost deserve mention using more “human-oriented” pronouns? We better leave that discussion for another posting.

Andrews St. Aubin, the protagonist in a Place of Skulls by Caleb Pirtle, is followed by a ghost with unresolved issues. However, we're never quite sure whose issues they are: St. Aubin's or the ghost's. St. Aubins, a mystery unto himself, is sent without a clue to solve mysteries. He must find a murderer somewhere amid the population of Arizona with no more than the identity of the victim. Additionally, he must locate a religious artifact that the victim was carrying even though no one has a clue as to what it might have been. Amazingly, Pirtle crafts a tale which makes solution of these problems believable.

Along the way, you will fall into other plots involving drugs, drug lords, desperate peasants acting as drug mules, and even more desperate American officials breaking the law to defeat the law-breakers.

As with all of Pirtle's writing, the prose fairly sings. The metaphors give substance to the people, places, and events. The dialog leaves you with the feeling that you were a party to the conversations. The exposition graces the pages without ever obscuring the plot. All in all, a good story, well told.

As you follow Andrews St Aubin through the danger infested streets of cities and the even deadlier sands of the desert, you will wonder what its issues are and how they involve St Aubin. Be patient. The answer may come or it may not, at the end.

Now, you have a piece of unfinished business that needs your attention. Click here so you can begin reading Place of Skulls. 

WINSTON CHURCHILL FAMOUSLY said that “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” I'm not sure if he was being facetious, but I have to wonder what he might have said had he survived long enough to experience discussion threads on the Internet.  

• After reading the reviews of this book and the responses, I feel like I have something to add, even though I have not read the book.
  
• Thank you for calling the author on the carpet regarding his White bashing. That is getting old. I suspected that would be present in this book when I hefted it at Barnes and Noble and saw the author's name - "Diamond."
  
• Yes, and it's almost humorous how many people are oblivious to that, Deckard. Like sheep.
  
• Wow, a German spouting anti-semetism [sic]. The cliches are endless around here.
  
• German, anti-Semite, anti-whatever...the point is that this book is CLEARLY written with an anti-white bias and is far from taking into account ALL factors which contribute to one civilization dominating over another. And I AM Jewish, 100%, for your information.
  

As you must have guessed by now, this discussion thread pertains to the review of a book on Amazon. It is but a small portion that includes 1,283 reviews and countless comments. Doesn't it just make you want more? The book or the discussion thread? I don't know, take your pick. They're both fascinating. Obviously, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, the subject of this diatribe had inspired the passions, not only of the people who read the book, but also the people who read the reviews.

Did you know that there was this much drama going on in nonfiction? That's right! Dr. Jared Diamond, PhD, the author, is a respected professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. His academic achievements include awards of the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. Guns, Germs, and Steel earned his a Pulitzer Prize. And yet, countless people are willing to rake him over the coals publicly for what? Expounding on the effects of geography, environment, and demographics on the rise and fall of civilizations.

I can see your eyes rolling up until nothing but white appears and you're feeling faint. Don't leave me here. He made this really interesting and readable. He begins with Yali's question, a question that you might have asked yourself if you lived in a place and time that wasn't blessed with the treasures of civilization. Yali lived on New Guinea where all manufactured goods arrived on cargo ships. His people had neither the resources nor the expertise to make anything for themselves. Thus, they referred to all such goods as “cargo.” Yali wondered why do some people have “cargo” and others, like his people, do not.

If Yali's question doesn't get you wondering, you may as well stop reading here. It's not going to get any better, unless you wonder why people with no appreciable knowledge of history, science, or mathematics would even attempt to criticize an academic tome. That's my question.

The truth that Dr. Diamond discovered that the uneven distribution throughout the world of plants and animals capable of being domesticated, as well as the uneven distribution of raw resources such as coal and iron ore, had a significant impact on the uneven success of civilizations around the world.

Despite some observations interspersed throughout the aforementioned discussion thread, Dr. Diamond also allows that other factors such as culture and politics had significant effects. However, no one study can include them all.

Now, some people will read this far and still not be inspired to read Guns, Germs, and Steel. However, if your curiosity has been piqued, I cannot recommend a better beginning for your adventure in learning than this book.

The rest of you can go back to ranting on discussion threads. This is a major election year and there will be plenty of opportunities for you to rant, and ranting doesn't require knowledge, just an opinion.

Read Jack's novel, Rebels on the Mountain, the tale of Nick Andrews, an Army spy, who has Fidel Castro in his sights but no orders to pull the trigger. The mafia as well as the American business community in Cuba will pay a fortune for Castro's assassination, but Nick has his career to consider, his friends to protect, and a romance to sort out in the chaos of a revolution.   

WE'RE ALL HEROES of our own stories and, thank God, heroes don't have to be heroic all the time. We don't even have to be heroes most of the time. Indeed, many people are branded as heroes for just one act. As Christina Carson observes in her novel, Suffer the Little Children, no one is keeping score. We're all just supposed to be striving to do the right thing, if only once. 

Christina's hero, Anne, strives to do the right thing by her child and fails until she is almost killed by a rampant grizzly attack. She was already on the right path to reconciling with her child before she stumbled upon the bear, but it was her brush with death that spurred her to take the final step and risk all to bare her soul before her progeny.

Does this tale resolve itself in a tearful reunion? I can't say. That is for you to find out. I can only warn you that these stories do not always end happily. Mine didn't. I have been estranged from my first born son for more than twenty years. Unfortunately for him, he cannot let go of the anger that separates us. I suppose this is why I connected with Suffer the Little Children on such a primal level. I hoped for the best as I turned the pages just as I've hoped for the best as I've lived my life without my son.

Like Anne in Christina's novel, life has allowed me to touch on the lives of other children, some my own and some not, and somehow I've been a better father for them. Sure, I've stumbled just as Christina's hero did, but not so fatally as I had before.

As I read this novel I thought of the advice so many have given me as a writer, “write what you know,” which has left me wondering, how does this author know so much. Her descriptions of the northern forests are spot on. Her narrative is full of actual woodlore. And, her description of the grizzly attack is painfully believable.

No, I have never been attacked by a grizzly, but I have read accounts of them written by real witnesses. My favorite comes from the diaries of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Those fearless explorers laughed at the indians and considered them cowardly for opening admitting their fear of grizzlies. However, on their first encounter, those brave frontiersmen hoisted their skirts and fled in terror when pursued by such a monster that was undeterred by several large caliber bullets that had punctured its lungs.

Suffer the Little Children is not a novel to be put aside lightly once begun. Nor will readers dismiss it from their minds when it is finished. It will linger and tease their souls with questions and challenges in the middle of the night. Parents especially will wonder, did I do the right thing? Did my children suffer? Do I need forgiveness? From my child? From myself?

Read Jack's novel, Rebels on the Mountain, the tale of Nick Andrews, an Army spy, who has Fidel Castro in his sights but no orders to pull the trigger. The mafia as well as the American business community in Cuba will pay a fortune for Castro's assassination, but Nick has his career to consider, his friends to protect, and a romance to sort out in the chaos of a revolution.   

THIS IS YOUR LIFE, which aired on television from 1952 to 1961, entertained audiences with biographies of popular figures from entertainment, sports, or politics. The host, Ralph Edwards, introduced friends and acquaintances from the celebrity's past to share anecdotes that illuminated their lives. Almost invariably, there was at least one teacher who had the greatest impact on their education. If that program was still in production and I were somehow the featured guest, there would be no teacher to step forward with a fond memory. 

I was never a good student. Teachers regretted ever finding my name on their class rolls. I asked too many questions. I never challenged their lessons lightly. I came armed with facts and research as well as common sense observations. I believe that I spent far more time in the library than they ever had.

Thus, when academic historians began attacking Gavin Menzies for his assertion that the Chinese had explored the world long before the representatives of Western Civilization, I was prepared to jump into the fray. I began by reading his two books, 1421: The Year That China Discovered America, and 1434: The Year That A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. The titles alone are enough to boil the blood in any academic historian, and I wasn't impressed by their assertions that Menzies had it all wrong simply because he lacked the academic chops to be making such assertions.

To begin with, there is plenty of evidence that many peoples had touched America's shores long before Columbus got here. Interestingly, I discovered much of the information about these earlier explorers in a grammar school text book published in 1814. It spoke of Roman legionnaires armor found in burial caves in Tennessee and a tribe of blue-eyed, blond-haired native Americans living in the Mississippi region who were descended from Welshmen. Thus I am not surprised that my teachers in the 1950s believed that evidence of Norsemen visiting North American shores before Columbus's voyage was a new discovery. They were typically clueless.

Now, these same academicians are indignant when Menzies suggests that the Chinese might also have visited. I have read one website where such a historian has debunked all of Menzies's claims by stating emphatically that “they just aren't true.” Well, they must not be if he says so.

The truth is that Menzies states honestly in his work that some of his conclusions are conjecture and that further study is needed. Would that the academicians were so honest. However, they have a lot riding on their reputations and they are reacting exactly as I expect based on my earlier experiences with them.   

Why does Columbus get the credit? The answer is simple. Time and again, history has been written by the victors. The Europeans never faced any competition for the conquest of the New World because the Chinese withdrew from the contest long before the Europeans arrived. The rise of Confucianism changed the political climate in China, and the emperor dismantled his fleet. The Spaniards and Portuguese then divided the lands between them. The French, English, and Dutch later stole them.

Gavin Menzies looked past political history and studied the evidence as a sailor would. He examined the charts and applied his knowledge of seafaring as he had learned and practiced it as a serving officer in the British Navy. As a fellow sailor, I saw the common sense in his train of thought and believe that his hypotheses deserve further study, and that the dismissal of his work by academic historians is far more suspect than his writings. 

Read Jack's novel, Rebels on the Mountain, the tale of Nick Andrews, an Army spy, who has Fidel Castro in his sights but no orders to pull the trigger. The mafia as well as the American business community in Cuba will pay a fortune for Castro's assassination, but Nick has his career to consider, his friends to protect, and a romance to sort out in the chaos of a revolution.