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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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A pioneer in the genre of "Psychological" Ghost stories, whereupon allowance is made for both the narrator as well as uncanny origins. Floridly written, it takes a while for the mind to shape itself to the meander of her prose, but worth it, references to classical literature and art abound, Gothic tales evoking the ruins and landscapes of Italy.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian - Paul Radin
Life, ways, acculturation, and the peyote cult
A slender read, written by an anonymous Winnebego Indian living in the Minneapolis region of the US in the mid-late 1800's. Curious, by western standards rather devoid of descriptions and more of a "these are the facts of my life and my tribe...". Of interest were the notes on the belief in reincarnation, the traditional roles of men and women, traditional knowledge, the narrators doubts regarding initiation and the great earth-spirit, the traditional native idea that to hoard up items you didn't use reflected a poverty of spirit, and that - unless you were actively using them, items were there for communal use - (a sound principle, I might add), there was the emphasis on dying in battle - a heroes death for the warrior clan - rather mirrors the idea of certain extremist Islamic groups.
All and all interesting - always interesting to have keys to the thoughts of long extinct others, and rare enough that we can get it from their own lips. And good to read, if only in that it overturns a lot of the romanticism we've built up over the first nations.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Found, a Bonanza of books on all things Rod, at thrift store. My absent twin must have thrown in the towel.
Anyways, a lot of good winter reading waiting for the snow to go...
Note, having already read 2 - how many old shoot-outs and outlaws were apprehended without injury by the RCMP. The history of the region is interesting, to say the least. Nowadays few people survive any sort of encounter with the police - once upon a time it was expected.
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An imaginative recounting of Saint-Exupery's (author of "The Little Prince) time flying the mail over Europe and Africa. Landing on high plateaus and finding them scattered in meteorites, purchasing freedom for a Moroccan Slave, the disappeared customs of the Africans and Arabians, to the Spanish Civil war, he writes lyrically and humanely upon a world that has largely the disappeared.
It inspires me to search out the places he references, my satellite view can be little different than his own...
ruins in the desert...
more, blown over with sand.
In the end - after this book, he flew off and disappeared. And it's hard not to wonder if his life was not imitating his art, the airman in the Little Prince having flown clear to another planet...
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I'm enjoying this. Otto Neubert was an Archaeologist/Egyptologist who was with Howard Carter when he opened the Tomb of Tutankhamun.
He's good with his history - and, with almost 4,000 years of "civilized" history, (how many Pharaohs?) there's a lot to explore. And it rivals - surpasses - anything in the wildest Indiana Jones movie. Subterranean crypts filled with the bodies of hundreds of slaves murdered to protect the hiding place of the tombs, the vast necropolises for cats, crocodiles, herons, you name it, the culture of almost perpetual grave-robbing, the empire was cannibalizing it's dead shortly after they were hidden in the ground, and have been doing so for thousands of years...
I could go on. It's not a great book, but it captures something of the flavor of what Egypt once was, and the thrill of discovery that continues to this day...