Category: History

Civil War / Lincoln Library Reorganization

Dad’s wall of Civl War / Lincoln books.
This is my corner. Some of these sets are really tough to find, others are very common, like the gray Time/Life Civl War (but what a great set!)

Just finished re-organizing Dad’s Civil War / Lincoln wall of books. There were eighty doubles! (Sold them on Marketplace) This is a difficult job to do without stopping to read a nice book, making this take longer than it should take. They were all mixed up before I got to’em!

Also nice, I found three books that I’d been looking for online or had to pass on in stores… we had them the entire time! Even better, all of these books are now in my spreadsheet, so we won’t be accidentally buying the same book, which happens a lot due to forgetfulness, or re-published volumes with different covers, and in some cases, altered titles.

The corner shelves are all mine, and contain some really hard-to-find sets. This area is a mix of American Indian, World War II, Vietnam, Ancient Egypt, Old West, Civil War, English, and general history. Great books, a nice area to hang out in.

122725 • Thrift Store Finds

To Crown The Waves and Soldiers of Destruction are books that are not common at thrifts, so I was fortunate to get them. The Napoleon book was under a dollar, and the Lions of the West is a great topic, the heroes and villains of westward expansion.

The DVD In Enemy Hands is a submariner war movie I’ve never even heard of, it is amazing that I even pulled it off the shelf as the name is so generic.

The Brahms Symphony by Claudio Abbado is the the second I have by this conductor. It is difficult to pick this kind of title out of all the common ones that look just like it.

An Old Book About Nimitz

I like all kinds of books, new ones, old ones, deluxe leather-bound, guilded-paged editions, beat-up paperbacks, clean-cut pages or deckle-edged pages. I have a soft spot for beat-up books even though they are inanimate objects.

In this case, there are grease or oil stains on the cover and pages and, putting on my detective hat, this probably means that some mechanic was reading this at some point. Because the book was published in the 1970s, I would guess that maybe someone who was actually in the war fixing things, who would be interested in Nimitz enough to read about him. Most people couldn’t care less about Nimitz regardless as to whether they should. Apparently he was important enough to name the current class of aircraft carriers after, so, maybe he was a big deal.

There were other books at the thrift where I bought this that were also beat-up quite a bit, complete with spider-webs and caked-on dust on top of the books (that happens a lot, where someone passes away and the family had to grab all of the ‘worthless’ books and haul them to the thrift.)

So, that’s my guess. I’ll never know. But I’m reading it now with the idea that a former vet read it before me and did so for a reason.

Gripen vs F-35 for Canada

I was reading the comments from another video on this topic, and it was all Canadians who were against anything from the U.S., all insisting on the 40-year old Gripen to replace their aged F-18 Hornets. A perfect example of patriotic bias against logic and the numbers. This video clearly spells out why the Gripen is a terrible idea for Canada going forward. In addition, this should have been decided years ago, but Canada’s governments have continually kicked this can down the road while almost every other NATO country has determined the F-35 was the best option going forward, including other far-north countries that also operate in extremely cold conditions.