Puttering in the Study

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria - Justin Pollard & Howard Reid

I ran across this book in a bookstore in Marfa, Texas last month and decided it would be a useful background for our trip to Egypt last week.  I frantically read the book the first week of our trip, and got it finished two days before we reached Alexandria.  It was a very useful background on what happened in Alexandria, although a bit thin on the city itself.  The map of Alexandria (undated) in the back was very helpful, but I thought the book should have had a great deal of illustrations and diagrams, and with the sole exception of the map, it had none.  Again, good background on notable people who had some connection with Alexandria, but needed pictures to tell the full story.

On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul - Jason Goodwin

I ran across this book the other day on Amazon, and the idea - traveling on foot from Gdansk to Istanbul in the early 1990's, as Eastern Europe started life after Communism - sounded intriguing.  Plus I knew Goodwin from his Lords of the Horizons book about the Ottoman Empire.  I was shocked to learn that he is precisely my age, which meant that while I was enduring Practice Court at Baylor he was skylarking through Eastern Europe on foot.  Weenie.
Seriously, the hardships of walking three thousand miles apparently didn't make much of an impression on him, as he was interested in what there was to see and experience on the way.  Personally, I was highly uncomfortable with the whole concept of spending months on the road on foot, and you have to wonder about a couple that think not washing their hair for four months is a positive development.  But the writing is good, although a bit opaque as he uses what I think is a little slang, and doesn't always explain who people are when they enter the story.  But he is a master of the colorful vignette, and it was interesting seeing how his writing style started in this, his second book.

Essex Class carriers - Andrew Faltum

Just finished )finally) this 1996 book about Essex class carriers.  Coincidentally, it was released in 1996, the same year as my book Essex Class Carriers in action.  It's taken me a while to get around to it, probably in part because I was afraid I'm find mistakes in mine!

I found it to be a very good book - a good overview of how a carrier works, of the battles the ships fought in, and a excellent source of reference information on the class (the appendices are outstanding).  There were many little tidbits I didn't know.  The combat history bounces between large issues and detail quite a bit, but usually with a good reason.  One thing I particularly liked was the way this book made clear that the carriers didn't just walk all over the Japanese in 1944 - the Japanese planes fought back, and the carriers spent a lot of time actively destroying targets, and losing planes and taking damage the entire time.  That they were able to succeed had a lot to do with their numbers - only massed as they were were they able to provide sufficient fighter cover as the war progressed to keep the fleet intact.  Even with better ships and planes, they were still not able to defeat the Japanese by as much as I'd thought.

The book does have one defect, however, and that is poor photographic coverage of the class.  It does have many very good pictures, but they are reproduced so small that they're difficult to learn anything from - and a substantial number are clustered together late in the book so there is one of each ship, but taken at no particular point in the ship's history.  That the pictures are not large isn't unusual, but it is extremely annoying to see all the white space around the photos. 

But this is a very good book, and a useful part of the library of anyone wanting to know more about the Essex class.

Cosmic Voyage - Movie Night #4

I got this at the McDonald Observatory gift shop Thursday night, thinking the boys might like it as it has planets and everything, and declared this morning a "movie night" so we'd watch it.  It was okay, I suppose, but it really just focused on elements of everything, from quarks to atoms to molecules to DNA to cells, and on the macro scale planets, solar system, galaxies, and the universe.  It didn't really take you on a tour of the solar system as I'd hoped, which I think the boys could have understood.

Study Trees

One of my favorite things about fall is watching the trees change color - especially the trees I have been planting.  This picture is of my favorite two pets trees, which I keep outside the study where I can see them as I type this.  The short one on the left that is just turning yellow at the top is my tulip poplar (liriodendron tulipifera), which I got through Historic Trees of America.  It is from a tree at Franklin D. Roosevelt's home at Hyde Park, but was also a favorite of Thomas Jefferson's at Monticello.  I bought it and planted it at the old house in the spring of 2001 (where it did not do well in the shade), and transplanted it outside the study of the new house in the spring of 2004.  This year is the first year it had been able to stand by itself, but it really liked getting its wrap taken off this spring, and has done very well this year.

The big red tree on the right is a red maple I bought - also by mail - and planted in March of 2002, a little over two years before we moved in. I planted a lot of deciduous trees in the borders out at the land, but none have taken off like this one.  It was nearly buried in a huge pile of topsoil when the building site was scraped clean, and when I noticed it in 2004 it had already shot up from about three feet to about eight or nine.  It's now not quite twenty - yet still only four years in its current location.

West Texas trip - McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis State Park & Marfa

This past weekend I toured the McDonald observatory facilities in the Davis Mountains in West Texas during a State Bar executive committee meeting.  We had a brief tour of the big telescope (see picture left) then after dinner had a "Star Party" where we looked at the Moon, a star cluster, and a nebula at the visitor's center.

We had our meetings in the Indian Lodge at Davis Mountains State Park the next day.  (See the mountain behind it?  We climbed that after dark Friday night - I'll post pics from the top later). 

The next day after our meetings we travelled to Marfa, where we toured the Chinati art museum at the old Fort Russell cavalry base, then the Donald Judd home, then Building 98 (the old officer's club on the base, which is being restored), then had a very nice cowboys-style dinner at the home of Dick & Janie DeGuerin.  After the aforementioned late night climb of the nearest peak, it was back home via Midland, Dallas and Shreveport Saturday morning.

Overall a really enjoyable trip, not to mention the work we got done at the meeting itself.

Alone in the Dark

I got this used at Blockbuster because the theme - ancient civilization and an unnamed horror - sounded good, sort of like a Lovecraft spinoff.  The opening credits scared me bad enough that I promptly took it off the big screen in the movie room and put it on the smallest TV in house (study) and proceeded to watch it with the lights on.

I shouldn't have bothered - it was a forgettable movie, and it wasn't till watching the "making of" documentary that I found out it was a spinoff of a video game.  It wasn't particularly bad - it just never really seemed to decide which was it wanted to scare you, and never developed the back story that it promised.