Cliff Davis > Recent Status Updates

Enjoying this. ldeas so far: Create a balance of various insects in your garden, for its optimal health. Use water (a pond or even a bucket), a Sandy spot, etc, to maximize diversity.

Which could have imagined, that the peaceful, quaint Amish culture was born in a world of savage persecution -- that their Anabaptist ancestors suffered torture and death from both Catholic and Protestant authorities? Just one of many things I am learning from this book.

Understanding why this book is so cherished -- timeless in its wisdom!

I am truly enjoying this groundbreaking book -- surely took courage to write, in her day!

Hard to see any justification for Edward's war against the French, this so-called Hundred Years War.

Props to Queen Isabella, (not to be confused with the other, later Isabella who financed that Columbus guy). She had the courage to challenge her own husband, King Edward II, who apparently was bad news for England, on behalf of their young son, Edward III, who would be a much better monarch. And she won.

Am hooked already.

I don't think we can approach this book expecting it to read like something Twain or Dickens would have written about their boyhood. Eire gives the key on p. 87: Hispanic culture is not linear or bound by logic: all is illusion and can be lost. So, jarring as it may be to Western readers, we can expect this book to eschew chronology, to jump suddenly into stream of consciousness. Very much Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"It is evident that Gen. Custer has not been entirely successful." -- Lt. McClerland, 1876.

"As Comes-In-Sights stood waiting for death, his sister, Buffalo Calf Robe Woman, broke through on a fast horse. He jumped up behind her and was carried off to safety. In tribute to her bravery, the Cheyenne name for the battle (of the Rosebud Valley) became "Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.

The theme of this book, treating on the long and tortured relationship of Christianity with Judaism, is that none of the tragedy HAD to happen. Over and over again, other roads were available, but not taken.

Perhaps nowhere do the bells of "it could have been," ring more sadly than in Iberia -- today's Spain and Portugal -- where, for a time, "it was." There's even a name for that moment in time: Convivençiá.