|
Tell me what you're reading or the last book you read.
I just read a children's book to my daughter yesterday. So yes, tell me about yours.
I just got a couple books from the library yesterday and I have a few books I need to read. I can barely read anything political anymore with all that is going on even though my predilection anytime I go into the bookstore is for current events and biographies. For a while now I've just been reading about correspondence from famous people, mostly so I will feel like the letters I write to my friends aren't so trite.
-Chesapeake Rumrunners
When Prohibition was the law, Chesapeake Bay was a smuggler's paradise. Rogues of all types transported boatloads of forbidden liquor in the days when America experimented with forced, and unforeseeable, temperance. In a style reminiscent of the era it describes, Eric Mills brings to life the world of mobster and preacher, rumrunner and revenue man, moonshine and "real McCoy." It was a whiskey-soaked age that was supposed to be dry. Prohibition may have been the law of the land, but the Chesapeake Bay country was awash in illegal alcohol. The marshes were teeming with hidden stills, and bootleg liquor was smuggled throughout the waterways and adjoining countryside by daring men in fast boats and faster cars. Chesapeake Rumrunners of the Roaring Twenties is a saga of people--watermen and steamer captains, mob racketeers and "legitimate" businessmen--all of them wanting part of the action. In the maze of bay waters, boats played a key role in that action, many disguised as workboats but built for speed and the ability to outmaneuver the law. On the other side, Billy Sunday and an army of temperance crusaders campaigned tirelessly to encourage Prohibition, while federal agents and Coast Guardsmen shared the impossible task of enforcing it. Using a mix of news reports, government records, and local lore, the author has written a fascinating account of a memorable chapter in Chesapeake history.
https://www.amazon.com/Chesapeake-Rumrunners-Roaring-Twenties-Mills/dp/0870335189
and:
Owning the Earth:
Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history by the most creative and simultaneously destructive cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land.
Spreading from both shores of the north Atlantic, it laid waste to traditional communal civilizations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government. By contrast, as Linklater demonstrates, other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility. The history and evolution of this concept is a fascinating chapter in the history of civilization, offering unexpected insights about how various forms of democracy and capitalism developed, as well as a revealing analysis of a future where the Earth must sustain nine billion lives. Owning the Earth presents a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet and the history behind it.
https://www.amazon.com/Owning-Earth-Transforming-History-Ownership/dp/1620402912
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
General Discussion
