Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Sheddhead and others are marching for peace, tonight. She has asked us to light a candle in remembrance of all who have died or been injured and in hopes of peace. Kudos to all who are marching or have marched, today. My candles are lit.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
And this diary to go with our marchers:
A Short Diary About "John Adams"
by Crashing Vor
http://www.dailykos.com/...
This week, I began reading The Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey thanks to jlms qkw who gave a short review and reminded me I had the story sitting in my pile of to-be-read books. I am on page 92.
It starts with the story of Mary Miller who was a slave in New Orleans and who several people in the German community identified as being a German immigrant. Then, it went into some background of the hard times in the world after the explosions of volcanoes in 1812, 1814 and 1815 blocked the sun and brought winter weather to summer.
Suddenly, on pages 21 and 22, I find myself reading about the area and time of two sets of my ancestors.
Nowhere was the weather as bad as in the middle and lower Rhine. It was the worst of times. After a decade of ravaging wars, reserves of food were thin...
For three seasons the crops had failed and the people in Alsace, Wurtemberg, and Baden feared that, unless the summer of 1816 brought a bountiful harvest, there wouldn’t be enough food to see them through the winter...
Then, one afternoon in May, thick black clouds rolled down the valleys. They remained for a month, and every day it rained, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in a soft drizzle, and at times accompanied by hail and sleet, but never letting up. Fields on the sides of hills turned to mud and slid down into the farmlands below...
When finally in June, the clouds lifted, a peculiar haze hung in the air and each evening an orange-red sunset lit the horizon...The sun was pale, and in the evenings the temperature dropped below the freezing point. On cold mornings the villagers looked in horror at the apricot, pear and peach trees, which should have been bearing fruit, shimmering with icicles...
they replanted...but hopes of a late harvest were dashed when, in the third week of August, swirling winds brought weather colder and more tempestuous than the oldest inhabitants could remember. Potatoes, parsnips, and carrots became rotten in the ground, and beans were nipped away by frosts...
Winter approached...Bakers without flour made loaves from oats and potatoes. When even that ran out, they saw no reason to light their ovens at all.
I looked at my family's timeline. My great, great-grandfather Sebastian Samuel S. came from Baden. He was born in 1793. In 1816, he would have been 23 years old. He came to the US in 1836.
In Seppois-le-Bas, Alsace, (also called Niedersept, OberAlsace), my great, great grandmother Agatha who would marry Sebastian (his fifth wife and her second husband) was born in February of 1817. How did she survive that winter? Did her parents bring her to America in 1826 as her uncle Maurice did his family?
She was the sixth child of ten, one of whom had died in infancy. If they came in 1826, there would have been eight children on board the ship under the age of 18, and Agatha would have been 9 years old. I don’t have dates for the tenth child who may have been born in America. We know that Agatha’s first son of her first husband was born in American in 1839 so she was here by then, for sure.
A gentleman on the net had the birthdates of the children with their names in French and I had the death dates of the same people with their names in German.
Because of John Bailey, I suddenly had a light bulb go off in my head and a better understanding of the life of some of my ancestors and why they may have come to America.
My great-grandma, who married Samuel and Agatha’s son, came in 1873 from Prussia when she was six and soon after the Franco- Prussian War. Is it a wonder that I don’t like war?
Luckily, my people were not sold as Redemptioners to pay for their voyage by being enslaved. I had heard of people in the early life of the colonies coming over as indentured servants and working for a period of time to pay for their passage, but nothing like the numbers quoted in The Lost Slave Girl for 1816, 17.
So what does this all have to do with reading books, tonight? I have been thinking of many things that this story brought out that still has meaning, today. I have been reading environmental and war diaries this week at DKos.
I know there are many good books out and more that are coming that raise our consciousness and help us understand what the world was like or could be like though we cannot go back in time or forward into the future. With the help of diligent writers, we can also partially understand our own times.
What have you been reading that has illuminated something about our present problems or opened your mind or amazed you?
Do you read books about the lives of your ancestors or is it too painful? One thing that I have always believed is that our immigrant ancestors were very courageous people. One ancestor on my mother’s side may have had two little ones die on shipboard as she came to Michigan during the Civil War.
These diaries also go along with my topic, tonight.
Monday Cemetery Blogging and NOLA Kossacks
by YatPundit
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Wednesday Streetcar Blogging and NOLA Kossacks Open Thread
by YatPundit
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Owen Parry has written a series of fiction mystery stories set during the Civil War and it is made plain that the immigrants often began to fight for their new country the minute they got here. His hero is Major Abel Jones who is Welsh. His six books are listed below.
Faded Coat of Blue
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Publishers Weekly
A colorful, scrupulous and unassuming sleuth named Abel Jones is the protagonist of this solid historical thriller set during the opening months of the Civil War. When a crusading abolitionist is found murdered in 1861 in a Union encampment near Washington, Jones, a convalescing casualty of First Manassas, presently assigned to desk duty, is tapped by the Union's newest general, George B. McClellan, to discover the killer and bring him to justice.
Although Jones is the most modest of men--a teetotaling Welsh immigrant, a Methodist and stout moralist--he's a veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the century, as a former solider in Britain's Indian army...
1999 Cahners Business Information
Shadows of Glory
Call Each River Jordan
Honor’s Kingdom
Bold Sons of Erin
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
... A wandering beauty who may be mad, a priest with an unbearable secret, revolutionary assassins, and a genuine Irish hero, Meagher of the Sword, are but a few of the vivid characters who rise full-blooded from these pages. At once swift of pace and poetic, ablaze with suspense and rich with insights into the human heart, Bold Sons of Erin continues Owen Parry's tradition of bringing America's past to life with unrivaled storytelling ability, extraordinary historical accuracy, and a disarming sense of our common humanity.
Rebels of Babylon
Another interesting book that begins with a young man leaving home in search of a new life is The Golden Ocean by Patrick O’Brian. It is a prequel to his later books and the movie Master and Commander.
The theme tonight is immigrants, pioneers and courageous people who have tried to make a better life for themselves and their families. What are your favorite examples? I have very much enjoyed Frank McCourt's books:
Angela’s Ashes
‘Tis
Teacher Man
plf515 has a wonderful book diary on Fridays early and all day.
sarahnity’s list of DKos authors:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Other diaries worth a look.
Poetry break: Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998)
by Belvedere Come Here Boy
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Some Poems for the Night Owls and Early Birds
by Yosef 52
http://www.dailykos.com/...
CD Break: Writers, Why Do We Write?
by StrangeAnimals
http://www.dailykos.com/...
... the categorical imperative and the acting politician. . .
by teacherken
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Winter Soldier
by jimstaro
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Myth, Romance and War
by justiceputnam
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Writing Letters To The Editor
by StrangeAnimals
http://www.dailykos.com/...
A Conversation with A.J. Rossmiller
by SusanG
http://www.dailykos.com/...
wiki about Ralph Ellison
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
wiki about Isabel Allende
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The poll can never list all the choices so please list yours in comments. I still have a list of 800 books that you all recommended that I haven't read, yet, so I know you will mention some good ones.
What recent book will last a hundred years? You may ask what is "recent"? The last 50 years, maybe? Ellison goes back to the early fifties as does East of Eden by Steinbeck...so maybe 60 years?
I didn't include To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee because everyone will choose that one.