Blogzuola

 "All great love affairs end in tragedy." So wrote Ernest Hemingway, a 19-year-old volunteer ambulance driver wounded in  Italy  and recuperating at a Red Cross hospital in  Milan  in 1918. The young Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse seven years his senior. Although she was passionately in love with him and they had planned to marry, Agnes later wrote to end their relationship. To assuage the hurt, Hemingway fictionalized the affair in his 1929 novel  A Farewell to Arms , in which Catherine Barkley, the beautiful young nurse, dies. A similar tragic love affair was played out on Croton's  Mt.   Airy . One of the lovers was revolutionary editor and lecturer Max Eastman, whose political odyssey from radical to conservative was recounted recently in these pages. The other was Florence Deshon, a young stage and screen actress of breathtaking beauty, considered by many to be the most alluring woman in...

“Wherever he saw a hole he always wanted to know the depth of it. To him this was important.”    Jules Verne –  ‘ Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ It wasn’t all that long ago, certainly within my lifetime, that people were sent to carry out hard labour in salt mines as a punishment.  They probably still are.  The Soviets especially liked compelling people to go deep underground (usually in Siberia) to mine the precious commodity but today things have changed and we were actually paying for the privilege. The hotel clerk tried to persuade me to book a personal taxi tour but at forty zlotys more each (£10) this seemed an unnecessary expense so I booked the regular tour instead.  This meant that to begin with there was a couple of shuttle bus journeys to reach the final rendezvous point across the river Vistula on the western side of the town where we separated into two groups, one for the Nazi concentration camp tour to Auschwitz and the ...

“Since its first known eruption 16.5 million years ago, it (Yellowstone) has blown up about a hundred times….The last eruption was a thousand times as that of Mount St. Helens (in 1980), the one before that was 280 times as big and the one before that was so big that no one knows how big it was”   Bill Bryson -  ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ My previous post about the Icelandic Geysers reminded me of my visit to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming USA in 1995 and the spectacle of an ever higher tower of boiling water and steam than the one that we had seen today. Yellowstone was designated as a National Park in 1872 when President Ulysses S Grant signed a new law ordering ‘ the tract of land lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to be set apart as a public park’  and in so doing it became the first National Park in the USA and indeed the world. The park is sensationally beautiful with stately snow capped peaks, lush meadows with lazy...

In the 100th issue of its quarterly, peer-reviewed journal, HerbalGram , the nonprofit American Botanical Council published a feature that may change the course of research on an approximately 500-year-old, illuminated text known as the Voynich Manuscript. Written in a curious language that is yet un-deciphered, the enigma of the Voynich has puzzled scholars and mystery enthusiasts since its 1912 discovery by Polish book collector Wilfrid M. Voynich. This manuscript, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, has elicited enormous interest, resulting in numerous books and Internet sites with no conclusive resolution on the manuscript’s origin. Even the US National Security Agency has taken an interest in its cryptic contents, and doctoral theses have been written on attempts to decipher the language of the Voynich Manuscript. HerbalGram ‘s feature article by Arthur O. Tucker, PhD, and Rexford H. Talbert, titled “ A Preliminary Analysis of th...

Today’s official topic is  TOP TEN WORLDS I’D NEVER WANT TO LIVE IN.  Instead of crafting a list featuring every dystopian novel I’ve ever read, I decided instead to focus on a real-life dystopia: World War II and Nazi Germany. While Hitler was orating on the dominance of his country and the Aryan Race, his fascist regime sought to eliminate anyone and everyone who he deigned impure. Nazi Germany, and the surrounding European countries, was not a pleasant place for anyone in the late 1930s and 1940s, and even the ethnic Germans had to live under fear and shortages.  Europe in World War II is a world I am glad I never lived in,  so I have focused on books from this era for this week’s TTT (I’ve read a lot of WWII books this year). [heartbreaking.] Links go to my reviews of each. 1.  The Boy in the Striped Pajamas   by John Boyne The German son of the Auschwitz Commandant befriends a Jewish prisoner in the camp. 2.  The Book Thief   by Mark...

The election of Pope Francis back in March of 2013 gave us insight into the process of how new popes are chosen. The Pope is elected through a process in which the College of Cardinals vote by secret ballot for the man they believe would best do the job and a candidate must receive a 2/3rds majority vote to be elected Pope.  Throughout this process the cardinals are sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, literally locked in and forbidden from leaving until a new Pope is chosen (unless in the case of emergency).  The tradition of the Conclave goes back to the Middle Ages when political infighting led to the longest Papal election in the history of the Catholic Church. On the 29th of November 1268 Pope Clement IV died, leaving the office of the Papacy empty.  The Cardinals convened in Viterbo, Italy, then the home of the Papal seat.  At the time there were no codified rules for how the pope was to be elected, Cardinals just kind of showed up, debated a little, and cast ...

“Bones of the Hills,” by Conn Iggulden  (540p) Bones of the Hills  is the third and final novel in Conn Iggulden’s trilogy of the life of Genghis Khan and the formation of the Mongol Empire. Depicting the  conquest of Central Asia  and the war against the Khwarezm-Shah Empire, it also tells the story of Genghis’ later life as Great Khan and the looming succession crisis facing the Mongols once Genghis is gone between his three ambitious sons. After the conquest of Yenking (see  Lords of the Bow   here ),  Genghis Khan  had sent his three eldest sons Jochi, Chagatai and Ogedai on scouting and conquering missions to lands far from the ancestral Mongol homeland to practice and hone their skills.  Jochi  had travelled to Russia under the tutelage of  Tsubodai ,  Ogedai had ventured south in pursuit of the Chinese Emperor to Kaifeng with his uncle Khasar , while  Chagati  had accompanied Jelme to Goryeo (modern Korea)...