BOOK REVIEWS
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on March 13, 2018. My favorite line in John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley is, “Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” The same could be said of writer Read more
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on January 27th, 2018. As mentioned in an earlier post here, I have been reading some of the classic Adventure novels that I did not read as a boy or young man. These are books that I Read more
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on October 23, 2012. Frontier moves… like a receding wave that leaves smooth, unbroken sand behind. In American history that wave receded west across the continent and then turned north to the Alaskan frontier. All places Read more
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In the joint at the corner I had coffee and eggs and looked at the papers. One of them was the tabloid I had telephoned the day before. When I picked it up, I felt a sudden, lunging fear. But there was no banner headline. I got brave and turned to the inside. (cf. Dewey, Read more
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Joe drank two cups of coffee. It was hot and strong, the way it always tasted best to him. He sat back in his chair, his fingers toying first with his spoon, then drumming noiselessly on the table. But he couldn’t sit still very long, and he arose, rinsed his cup and left it standing Read more
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Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. Indeed, I only know of three: Sherlock Holmes(Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Freeman Wills Crofts), and Father Brown (Chesterton). The job of the detective is to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one. Since the murderer who caused their disjunction is the aesthetically defiant individual, his opponent, Read more
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on June 23, 2020. Last week after finishing In Dubious Battle, I continued my Steinbeck-binge by getting The Wayward Bus. Like Cannery Row and In Dubious Battle, this was another book I had first read 45 years Read more
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I found Big John and Doc on a small flagstone patio that opened off the kitchen. They were seated at a large glass topped, wrought iron table and there was a huge pot of coffee on a hot plate at Big John’s elbow. The view from the patio was of the tumbled mountain range north Read more
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