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Race is discussed in Chapter 2.
Class is discussed in Chapter 3.
Although Prestige Classes are in Chapter 11 and NPC Classes are in Chapter 14.
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Reading an ARC I got last month (librarian perks): Black Moon Rising by DJ MacHale. It's middle grade fiction and I'm skimming so I can review & booktalk it. I thought I was getting into familiar "Carrie"-esque territory but now its taken a turn towards "Hocus Pocus" which appeals to me way less because I am getting tired of girls-with-magical-powers = witches. Still it's fast-paced and some of the more obvious plot twists will still be new and fresh to the 11 to 13 crowd. I'd probably recommend it over the Goosebumps books they're always reading.
Reading an ARC I got last month (librarian perks): Black Moon Rising by DJ MacHale. It's middle grade fiction and I'm skimming so I can review & booktalk it. I thought I was getting into familiar "Carrie"-esque territory but now its taken a turn towards "Hocus Pocus" which appeals to me way less because I am getting tired of girls-with-magical-powers = witches. Still it's fast-paced and some of the more obvious plot twists will still be new and fresh to the 11 to 13 crowd. I'd probably recommend it over the Goosebumps books they're always reading.
I'm beginning to really appreciate the power librarians have when it comes to influencing our youth. Just recommending books can lead to a cascade of events resulting in major consequences. There are so many books, and such little time, that the tiny percentage of publications you do get to read are so precious.
Finished Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. The account of the caning is excellent and Sumner's extended convalescence is handled well, though I suspect that diagnosing him with PTSD didn't come across as sympathetic in 1960 as it does now. The last chapter is thirty pages of David Donald realizing he decided to end the book in 1860 and hurrying through.
It is an uncharitable take on Sumner, which gets really annoying toward the end. Donald's also also really bad at introducing you to supporting cast members. Most are just names, even when they're obscure Massachusetts figures who never had national stature. It doesn't seem to matter much how important they are to Sumner's life or career either.
Not sure I understand. Of course race and class aren't the same thing. I can't think of a single Marxist who argues they are.
On Marxist thinkers I'm happy to defer to you. :)
I have in mind FB friends who have basically argued themselves to the point of class-exclusive analysis months ago and have been tedious about it since. Boring argument about otherwise interesting stuff. Much drama. One was rude to the friend rereading Black Marxism, which is part of what put it on my radar. There's a little spite involved, but I'm genuinely (also: generally) curious and I still have the recent lynching stuff in my head that's heavy on DuBois. Will probably be both reinforced and help orient me work for the book.
You can say race is a form of class and be mostly right, but it's also not simply synonymous with socioeconomic class.
This is outside your specific area of focus, but you might find it an interesting diversion to look into how race was viewed during the colonial period in South America -- instead of a simple black/white divide, you have a tripartite scheme in which nearly everyone has some proportion of Native American, African, and European (Hispanic) ancestry.
You can say race is a form of class and be mostly right, but it's also not simply synonymous with socioeconomic class.This is outside your specific area of focus, but you might find it an interesting diversion to look into how race was viewed during the colonial period in South America -- instead of a simple black/white divide, you have a tripartite scheme in which nearly everyone has some proportion of Native American, African, and European (Hispanic) ancestry.
I've read a (very) little about that. The comparative is interesting because the US has a uniquely rigid color line, but the Lower South still ends up with a small "brown" class of free blacks. Some of that is Louisiana, but the other big locus is Charleston and the French diaspora there is small and late. Either way Native American descent is not an option because of the genocide and steadfastness with which white Americans refuse to recognize the existence of first nations.
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I have in mind FB friends who have basically argued themselves to the point of class-exclusive analysis months ago and have been tedious about it since. Boring argument about otherwise interesting stuff. Much drama. One was rude to the friend rereading Black Marxism, which is part of what put it on my radar. There's a little spite involved, but I'm genuinely (also: generally) curious and I still have the recent lynching stuff in my head that's heavy on DuBois. Will probably be both reinforced and help orient me work for the book.
*cough* Will Shetterly *cough*
However, Shetterly is also not a bad author. I recommend Cats Have No Lord; it's obvious that Shetterly was part of the circle of Minneapolis F/SF authors that included Brust.
Either way Native American descent is not an option because of the genocide and steadfastness with which white Americans refuse to recognize the existence of first nations.
I found this article interesting. It's about Washington's changing views on Native Americans and describes the total failure of his attempt to delineate separate nations and land areas for the new United States and the existing Iroquis League of Nations.
Either way Native American descent is not an option because of the genocide and steadfastness with which white Americans refuse to recognize the existence of first nations.I found this article interesting. It's about Washington's changing views on Native Americans and describes the total failure of his attempt to delineate separate nations and land areas for the new United States and the existing Iroquis League of Nations.
That is interesting. I'm aware of similar problems with regard to trying to restrict slavery on the frontier, this time with the whites ready to declare for Spain, but no one in the Washington administration wanted to actually have that fight. Mainly though it reminds me of a case of slave smuggling I looked into a few months back.
The United States Constitution absolutely forbade any law to prohibit the importation of slaves to the nation from abroad until January 1, 1808. In a deceptive (because the law was watered down incredibly before passage) show of near unanimity never matched on a slavery vote, and at Thomas Jefferson's urging, the Congress passed a law on March of 1807 to go into effect that very day and prevent the further introduction of slaves from abroad. The law looked in particular to slaves taken straight from Africa, but applied to any slave importation whatsoever.
That was easy to legislate, but much harder to enforce. For a good portion of the time, the United States lacked both the interest and ability. A unified strategy to find and prosecute violators was never articulated and the people on the ground who would have to police the situation were just the people least inclined to do so, usually. Maybe you could get a conviction in Massachusetts or Connecticut (but probably not Rhode Island), but you'll have to look for a good while to find a jury willing to do the job in South Carolina. The story often stops there, but there's a whole half century of legal and diplomatic wrangling about keeping slave imports from the US, letting some in, tweaking the laws, and arranging different ways to enforce them. For a good portion of this time, Old Glory is a flag of convenience to preserve slavers who would otherwise be liable for search and seizure by the Royal Navy which actually did take the job seriously. For the most part, smugglers are never caught. When they are caught, they usually get away with minimal to no punishment. This is the story of one of the latter.
I learned of David Brydie Mitchell's case from Don Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic, but he only gives it a casual mention and a footnote:
The most notable scandal ivolved David B. Mitchell, a former governor of Georgia serving as a federal Indian agent, who was accused of complicity in the illegal importation of about a hundred Africans from Amelia Island in 1817. Attorney General William Wirt, after investigating the charges, concluded that Mitchell had "prostituted his power...from mercenary motives. President James Monroe removed him from office. [Fehrenbacher, 152]
The Sources
Fehrenbacher leaves it there, citing DuBois' book on suppressing the trade and Wirt's original report. I chased down both references. DuBois basically says the same thing as Fehrenbacher does and has the same citation back to Wirt's report to Monroe, which is in American State Papers, Class X: Miscellaneous, Volume II (pages 957-975) because the Senate asked for a copy. The Internet Archive's PDF respects the original page numbers, praise Clio.
The report is a bit of a mess, which Wirt himself admits. He complains of having to sort through upwards of seventy documents. Some were sworn testimony, some not, some hearsay, many contradicting others. I found a single journal article on the affair, which sheds a little additional light. Shingleton looked at the same documents that Wirt did, so far as I can tell, but the meat of his paper is in wrestling it into a more readable narrative that he then uses to argue "see, sometimes slave smugglers got caught." He's useful in that he makes clear military involvement that is more ambiguous with Wirt.
The Story
David Brydie Mitchell was the Scottish-born governor of Georgia, serving his third term when James Monroe appointed him Indian agent to the Creek Nation. Mitchell looked at his governor's salary, $2,000, the Indian agent's salary, $2,000, and chose between them on the highest principle: Indian agents served at the pleasure of the president during good behavior but governors had to face re-election. He went with the tenure track job. (The last guy in this post held it from Washington's administration onward.) I have some conflicting sources on when Mitchell's tenure begins. He ceased being Governor on March 4, 1817, but his appointment dates to November 4. From context, it looks like he was serving as agent-designate or acting agent during the summer.
The Creek Agency is on the Flint River, a bit to the south of where the Walking Dead shoots. There's a historical marker. In 1817, this is off the beaten path. Before Mitchell went himself, he sent his son William and another guy, a Captain John St. Thomas, ahead to plant him some corn. (Thomas is "a relation by affinity," which I think means lived with Mitchell and was possibly related by marriage too.) These three are unhelpfully referred to by their titles in the Wirt report, as often as not. Mitchell pere is General Mitchell, Mitchell fils Captain Mitchell, and then Thomas is another captain. Thomas seems to have a commission in the US Army, but the others are Georgia militia.
Mitchell has some dealings with William Bowen, who is an agent of the Savannah and Augusta mercantile firm of Erwin, Groce, & Co. During the summer of 1817, he pays Bowen $10,000 to supply the Creeks with unspecified goods. Bowen delivered those goods to the Creeks at Fort Hawkins around July. That same summer, witnesses report conversations with Mitchell about importing slaves.
MAJOR JOHN LOVING states a conversation which he had with General Mitchell, to this effect: Loving informed the agent that he (Loving) was desirous of making a purchase of Africans at Amelia Island, or elsewhere, within the Floridas, provided the same could be done safely and legally. Upon these points the agent's opinion was requested; and he was further asked whether he would allow Africans to be introduced through the Indian country. The reply of the agent was, that he had been thinking of such a purchase himself, and that Loving might bring any Africans whom he might purchase through the Indian country, with safety, *to the agency, where he* (the agent) *would protect them.* Loving having stated that he expected to make his residence at Fort Hawkins, the agent suggested that the negroes might be removed, if Loving wished it, to the reserve, where he (Mitchell) thought they might be disposed of to advantage.
Fort Hawkins is a nearby military post, incidentally.
After that they got into the nuts and bolts of planning a route, which Loving took notes on. Loving later lost the notes -thanks, jerk- but remembered that it would take him from Amelia Island -Spanish territory in St. Mary's river, right on the Georgia border- through Creek territory, and up to the Agency. This conversation took place in July of 1817, the same time that Bowen was transacting business.
We also have the word of a Thomas S. Woodward that soon after Mitchell's appointment (which could be November or could mean in the summer, I can't tell which) that a Colonel John Howard who asked him if he could go to Amelia and buy some slaves to import. Woodward refused because 1) It's illegal under US and Georgia law and 2) he doesn't have that kind of money.
Colonel Howard replied, that if the witness would go to that country, for that purpose, General D.B. Mitchell would furnish him with money, and draw a certain part of the profits, and that the negroes, if purchased, could be brought up through the Creek nation, by way of the agency, undiscovered, and then be disposed of to the best advantage
And in August, a Christian Breithaupt had a visit from one Jared E. Groce, the Groce of Erwin, Groce, & Co. Groce gave him an attaboy on a land purchase he'd transacted and told him that he knew a better way to make bank with a much quicker turnaround. Groce himself was tapped out, but together they could make a tidy sum. Breithaupt asked how and Groce hemmed and hawed a bit before getting down to it:
"Do you know what is carrying on in Amelia Island?"
Breithaupt got it and objected that the scheme would break the law and put them in personal danger. Groce said he a plan, but broke off when someone else came up to them and might overhear.
Let's roll back to July for a moment. That's the month that Loving gets the news he can smuggle slaves into the country with Mitchell turning a blind eye. It's also the month Bowen sells off his $10,000 of goods to the Creeks. Once he finished that off, he went to visit South Carolina, where he had friends, and passed through Augusta on the way. Augusta is home to Andrew Erwin, an Erwin of Erwin, Groce, & Co. Then he's at Savannah where he meets James Erwin, another Erwin of the aforementioned. He learns you can make a lot of money trading at Amelia Island and gets $25,000 from James to buy sugar and coffee.
Bowen went down to Florida and damned if sugar and coffee were just too gosh-darned high. He's all set to go home, but he misses his ship "accidentally". Damn the luck. While he's waiting for another boat, a ship full of slaves arrives at Amelia, 110 in the hold of a pirate named Aury. Bowen has that sugar and coffee money just burning a hole in his pocket, so he's "induced to change the subject of his speculation" and buys the people. The purchase takes place on October 18.
Bowen doesn't want to move all those people then and there, so he picks out the sixty or so best of the lot, boards the rest, and sets out by an Indian trail from St. Augustine to the Flint River. Bowen says he intended to go to West Florida, but got worried about the security of his human property. He strikes off into the wild and gets to about sixty miles south of the Agency before hitting the Flint. There he gets news of the Seminole War and is scared all over again. Also he ran low on food. So he just has to go to the Creek Agency, where he arrives in the first week of December
having travelled, by chance, over the exact route which Loving states General Mitchell to have indicated to him
You can believe Bowen's lying or you can believe the men he hired to help him move the slaves. They understood themselves as engaged to move Bowen's slaves to the Creek Agency, which they did. On arrival at the agency, where per Bowen's story no one should have expected them, they built housing for the slaves on Mitchell's land and set them to work.
Mitchell wasn't in residence at the time, but came through on December 8. He spent the night and chatted with Bowen about the slaves. Bowen's raw nerves seem not to have been unsettled by that talk; he went back to Amelia in the company of a few other guys including a Creek named Tobler, to get the rest. Before leaving, he gave five of the people to James Long for his part in helping with their transport.
On the second trip, Bowen takes forty-two people upriver on the St. Mary's and calls at Drummond's Landing, on the Florida side. He sells four slaves to Captain Drummmond there, then sent the rest along with Tobler and a white associate, John Oliphant. Tobler went to the Creek Agency with a letter for Mitchell (full text on pages 961-2)
I have got the balance of the stock that I had left on Amelia, (say forty-two,) and am just starting them under the care of Tobler. I believe I am narrowly watched, but think I have evaded discovery as yet. The risk of getting this lot through, I believe to be more -considerably more- than the first. A party was made up for the purpose of following me and Long, three days after we left St. Mary’s river. Mr. Clark, the collector, was at his mills, and some persons lodged information that they were gone up the river, and had crossed; he offered half to the inhabitants in that neighborhood to detect us.
Bowen had reason to fret now. He left Amelia the second time on December 21. Two days later, the Army and Navy moved in and took the island. A close call like that might get a nervous man out of the business, but Bowen must have been too nervous to change plans now. He heard that some of the slaves being held on the island got moved to the mainland in time and would still be for sale. Still more good news:
The channel through which Africans could be had being obstructed, they will rise considerably.
He wanted to go again, but just that moment Bowen was tapped out. It was also a shame that Captain Thomas hadn't come, because he would have made out really well.
Tobler went to the Creek Agency with more than Bowen's letter for Mitchell. He also had a fake bill of sale that declared the slaves his, bought legally in Georgia on December 4. Bowen claimed that he just had business he needed to attend to elsewhere in Georgia, but it looks like he set Tobler up as a fall guy if anything went down. Were the slaves actually his (Tobler's) property, then Bowen acted awfully weird when two white men passed the group and then met him at Drummond's. They told Bowen that the slaves would probably run into General Glascock's army. Bowen asked them to go back, catch up, and redirect the shipment to safety at the agency in exchange for their pick of a slave each for the trouble.
But that's illegal! General Mitchell would catch them! Bowen assured both men that he and Mitchell saw eye to eye. Everything would be fine. Wirt doesn't say if they took the deal or not. My count of the slaves has a few missing from the final disbursement and those could include the slaves the two witnesses selected. Either way, the second group arrived in January.
In between the two arrivals, Mitchell came through the Agency again. He had been in Creek country for a meeting and returned in the company of General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, US Army. Gaines had responsibility for surveying tribal boundaries. Both men saw the first party of slaves. Gaines thought all these slaves of unclear ownership damned suspicious and asked Mitchell about them. Mitchell said something to the effect that they had best soon be moved out or he would have to take official notice and report them.
Long took the warning, however dubiously sincere, and moved his five slaves off to Mississippi. Bowen did not. However seriously (not at all) Mitchell meant what he told Gaines, the general didn't buy it. He dispatched a Captain G.W. Melvin to keep a look out and be sure the slaves didn't get moved unless it was by someone in proper authority. By then the second group has joined the first at the Agency. Melvin gets there all of a day before Jared Groce arrives and takes 40-50 people off toward Alabama. Melvin asked Mitchell about that and Mitchell said that Groce had a bond to take the slaves out of the country.
Some time after Gaines became suspicious, but probably before the second shipment arrives at the Agency, a Gideon Morgan of Tennessee passes through the Agency. He calls on behalf of Andrew Erwin, asking if any of those slaves he's heard about are something he's got a financial stake in thanks to his son. If he did -Andrew seems to be legitimately out of the loop- then he wanted those slaves removed to somewhere safe or sold ASAP. To prove his authority he has a letter to Mitchell declaring he came concerned with Fort Hawkins and the Alabama territory business. If he needed anything from Mitchell, Mitchell should provide it at once and bill the firm
We will accept his drafts at any sight for any sum he may think proper to draw on us for.
That's a blank check. Out of the loop or not, Andrew Erwin must have suspected something and wanted it done with quickly. That he's willing to write such a thing for Mitchell suggests that he's got pretty strong suspicions and maybe wants to keep having them, but without getting any kind of legally accountable knowledge. Morgan encountered Gaines on the way to the agency and asked him for a passport through Cherokee territory. (A route which would probably not get him to Alabama, where the letter from Erwin would put him.) Just to get him home to Tennessee, you know? Gaines was suspicious and sent him to Mitchell rather than write the pass himself.
By this point, Mitchell is writing his superiors with the story that he didn't know anything about any of this and he's just holding the slaves to be sure they're not sold or until they can be exported, the latter of which he has to do under Georgia law. Georgia law reserves that authority to the governor alone, which Mitchell knows full well he's not, but maybe it holds up if you don't look too close. After that Mitchell is still willing to give the slaves to Morgan, but it doesn't appear that they then changed hands. Afterwards we have the group who leave in Groce's possession.
While the slaves are at the agency, the interested parties claim their shares. Mitchell's human property are marked with yellow cloth in the hair for the first shipment and red string around the wrist for the second. Damned odd for a guy who is just holding them in temporary custody. You could pass off his expenses in feeding and housing them under that rubric, but there's no reason he should mark some of them and not others unless they're to be split up. He also took some pains to keep them all separate from the slaves he held legally.
Mitchell's official story does have him get suspicious. He says he accused Bowen of importing, but Bowen produced that fake bill of sale and Mitchell declared himself satisfied. He might not buy it entirely, but he couldn't prove that Bowen imported the slaves instead of someone else so what's a guy to do? Anyway, it would be easy enough to slip the slaves out of the country and then bring them back in somewhere like Alabama where high demand would keep prying eyes away. From the Creek Agency, coincidentally, you got to Alabama by going through Creek territory.
Mitchell's official explanation for himself doesn't reference the markings, of course, and omits the second shipment entirely. If not for Gaines setting a watch on the Agency, it might have gone by unnoticed. Or maybe not, because subtlety doesn't seem to have entered Mitchell's vocabulary. While all of this is going on, Mitchell accosts a General McIntosh and a federal marshal named Doyle asking if they would like to buy some slaves...which he otherwise asserts are someone else's property. They're game if Mitchell will execute the deeds himself, in his own name. Mitchell refuses, but says Bowen would do that for them.
At this point, two men named McIntosh come in. They're brothers and the report isn't always clear on which is which. I'm not sure that Wirt realized they were different men. McQueen McIntosh (great name) is surveyor and inspector at Darien, GA. His brother William is the port's collector. They've caught wind of this and move in with the intent to seize the contraband slaves. They arrive and meet up with Melvin, who has just been reinforced by some soldiers who had come with orders for all of them to help the McIntoshes.
This is February 3. Mitchell pere is absent from the agency, but Mitchell fils is present. The McIntosh party missed Groce and his forty slaves leaving by four days. Melvin clues them in and they take off after him. He's on the road to Alabama, twenty miles out. They come up and ask Groce who owns these slaves. Groce says he does. They say Groce is under arrest. Everyone turns around and heads back for the Agency.
McIntosh (one or both) hired a guy named Langham to escort and help them in their job. He "perfidiously hurried on to the agency" and warned Captain Mitchell that he'd best hide all those illegal slaves. Hide them he did, taking them off into the woods under the cover of dark. Melvin tipped him off again and McIntosh finds fifteen slaves hidden in huts in the woods. It's freezing that night, so they let the slaves stay indoors. McIntosh goes and tells Mitchell that they're seized. Mitchell shrugs it off as entirely proper. The next morning the slaves tell McIntosh that there's fifteen more of them in the woods who he didn't find. So he goes and gets those people too. They tried to run, but had no luck. That's thirty slaves in McIntosh's custody, plus the forty-odd Groce had. Once he's got all of those, Mitchell volunteers that he has eleven kids elsewhere that probably ought be given up as well. Then he follows along after McIntosh and tries to give him two or three more that he missed. McIntosh doesn't oblige.
I have no idea what to make of that. Maybe Mitchell was trying to do a clean break and show good faith?
This is all pretty damning by itself, but when the elder Mitchell left the agency for a while he asked William Moore, the blacksmith there, to fix his desk. It's either that or the younger Mitchell asked the blacksmith to find letters pertaining to Alexander Arbuthnot in his father's correspondence. Andrew Jackson executed Arbuthnot on the questionable grounds that he was a British agent. He would have been in Mitchell's papers because he'd done business with the Creeks. Either way, Moore found the correspondence with Bowen, including a letter about how to shut Groce up, and forwarded it to John Clark, who later became governor of Georgia.
Clark looked into it and seems to have gathered most of the statements Wirt draws on. He confronted Bowen in person with the Drummond's Landing letter. Bowen told him -I am not making this up- that he would deny the letter was his own except that his handwriting was so well known. All of the investigation plays out over a few years, but eventually Monroe decides it's sufficient and orders Mitchell's dismissal. John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, writes his pink slip. He would spend some time in the next years attacking Gaines for interfering with him and trying to rehabilitate his reputation.
Which leaves the slaves. Wirt puts them at about a hundred, but Shingleton gives 110 as a hard figure. Of those, McQueen McIntosh delivers 88 to his brother. There's a separate note that groups of 32 and 59 eventually end up in state of Georgia hands, which brings the total accounted for to 91. The slaves Long got as part of his share, allocated before things heated up, would be another five. If the two guys who warned Bowen about the second shipment claimed their slaves, we might have 98. The remainder seem to have vanished. I suspect Mitchell and/or Bowen made a few private sales that didn't show up in the record. After some delay to comply with a mandatory period of public notice, Georgia sold the slaves for $34,736.18. The expense of housing them with people about Milledgeville in the interim and other liabilities brought that down to $27,571.82. Bowen sued to have the slaves restored to his ownership. The court ruled against him.
Yeah, the parallels are quite close. I'm starting to sympathize a bit more with the people who wanted a stronger central government, early on.
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Reading an ARC I got last month (librarian perks): Black Moon Rising by DJ MacHale. It's middle grade fiction and I'm skimming so I can review & booktalk it. I thought I was getting into familiar "Carrie"-esque territory but now its taken a turn towards "Hocus Pocus" which appeals to me way less because I am getting tired of girls-with-magical-powers = witches. Still it's fast-paced and some of the more obvious plot twists will still be new and fresh to the 11 to 13 crowd. I'd probably recommend it over the Goosebumps books they're always reading.I'm beginning to really appreciate the power librarians have when it comes to influencing our youth. Just recommending books can lead to a cascade of events resulting in major consequences. There are so many books, and such little time, that the tiny percentage of publications you do get to read are so precious.
Thanks Smilo! I tend to look at it more negatively, as in so-many-books,too-little-time, and it can get frustrating when my list of go-tos just leaves a patron cold; so I don't always appreciate that each recommendation could be precious. I try to see it from the patron's POV.and try to conjure up my inner child. But it doesn't always work.
Yeah, the parallels are quite close. I'm starting to sympathize a bit more with the people who wanted a stronger central government, early on.
Madison would be cheering, appalled (~1790-1799), and cheering (1800 onward) again. :) We all have instrumental views on government power when you get right down to it. Even a sour old Tory like Gordon Wood thinks so, though I can't seem to find the editorial just now.
I'm currently reading the second of the Two Percent Power Trilogy.
It's humorous series about a group of odd young superheroes figuring out their power and dealing with threat in their city. The name of the series is based on one of the primary characters, Patrick. He doesn't have a superhero name yet because there's not many good choices for a lactokinetic.
That's right, his superpower is controlling milk. He can't do anything with other fluids. Just Milk.
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I'm currently beginning The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois. I have Booker T. Washington waiting with Up From Slavery after that. Maybe Samnell is rubbing off on me... :)
I'm currently reading the second of the Two Percent Power Trilogy.
It's humorous series about a group of odd young superheroes figuring out their power and dealing with threat in their city. The name of the series is based on one of the primary characters, Patrick. He doesn't have a superhero name yet because there's not many good choices for a lactokinetic.
That's right, his superpower is controlling milk. He can't do anything with other fluids. Just Milk.
I saw a TV show that had an evil lactokinetic. It seemed really weak at first, but he got devious. Was it the Misfits?
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Thanks Smilo! I tend to look at it more negatively, as in so-many-books,too-little-time, and it can get frustrating when my list of go-tos just leaves a patron cold; so I don't always appreciate that each recommendation could be precious. I try to see it from the patron's POV.and try to conjure up my inner child. But it doesn't always work.Reading an ARC I got last month (librarian perks): Black Moon Rising by DJ MacHale. It's middle grade fiction and I'm skimming so I can review & booktalk it. I thought I was getting into familiar "Carrie"-esque territory but now its taken a turn towards "Hocus Pocus" which appeals to me way less because I am getting tired of girls-with-magical-powers = witches. Still it's fast-paced and some of the more obvious plot twists will still be new and fresh to the 11 to 13 crowd. I'd probably recommend it over the Goosebumps books they're always reading.I'm beginning to really appreciate the power librarians have when it comes to influencing our youth. Just recommending books can lead to a cascade of events resulting in major consequences. There are so many books, and such little time, that the tiny percentage of publications you do get to read are so precious.
I got my 9 year-old niece the first couple Lumberjane books, and she really liked them, re-reads them, and gets her friends to read them. So I feel influential. :-)
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I'm currently beginning The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois. I have Booker T. Washington waiting with Up From Slavery after that. Maybe Samnell is rubbing off on me... :)
Sorry about the friction burns, but you know you like it.
Have never read either, but Black Reconstruction is probably the next Reconstruction book I read when I get back to the subject. Related: I'll be part of a slavery AMA on Reddit's AskHistorians this coming Friday.
Finished reading Volume 1 and 2 of the Kingkiller Chronicles on the recommendation of a poster here. I enjoyed the first book. The second I had more trouble with. At one point the main character is sent to track down bandits. The author seemed to take forever to finish that particular point. Other than that I enjoyed and recommend both.
Now Im starting the Skystone by Jack Whyte.
Related: I'll be part of a slavery AMA on Reddit's AskHistorians this coming Friday.
La Principessa's Guatemalan Anarcho-Syndicalist Playwright Friend (recently returned to New England and now in the DSA) asked me to be on his podcast to speak on Bacon's Rebellion, but I declined. Flattering as it was, I told him that I could do a pretty good Drunk History take on the subject but I couldn't imagine anything I'd say would be up to snuff.
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I'm currently beginning The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois. I have Booker T. Washington waiting with Up From Slavery after that. Maybe Samnell is rubbing off on me... :)
Booker T Washington kind of frustrated me because there is so much subtext that doesn't get said in his 19th century style - the racism and discrimination that I want to see called out for what it is. But that could be just me having read up a bit on Reconstruction, particularly Jim Crow, and not buying into the Horatio Alger spin he puts on his story. It certainly worked for his audience but not for me. But I may try UFS again someday; it could have been the wrong time for me to try it.
Related: I'll be part of a slavery AMA on Reddit's AskHistorians this coming Friday.La Principessa's Guatemalan Anarcho-Syndicalist Playwright Friend (recently returned to New England and now in the DSA) asked me to be on his podcast to speak on Bacon's Rebellion, but I declined. Flattering as it was, I told him that I could do a pretty good Drunk History take on the subject but I couldn't imagine anything I'd say would be up to snuff.
Cool. ...and I couldn't do Bacon's Rebellion either. :) It's an important inflection point all the way back to Edmund Morgan, but I think the consensus now is that he wants it to do more work than it really can.
Booker T Washington kind of frustrated me because there is so much subtext that doesn't get said in his 19th century style - the racism and discrimination that I want to see called out for what it is. But that could be just me having read up a bit on Reconstruction, particularly Jim Crow, and not buying into the Horatio Alger spin he puts on his story. It certainly worked for his audience but not for me. But I may try UFS again someday; it could have been the wrong time for me to try it.
Washington was reluctant to even have Tuskeegee track and count lynchings on the grounds it was political. He certainly wasn't blind to the real problems, but I find it extremely hard to be sympathetic to him. Washington's trying to do his best and probably has a realistic appreciation of how far he can hope to get in the South during the nadir. I still see him as a guy, understandably, much more concerned in practice with keeping people alive than really advancing their other interests.
You'd see more calling out and fireworks with Frederick Douglass, though Douglass is so flowery that it can be a bit much.
Currently reading The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, and the Blue Rose RPG (AGE edition; I backed the Kickstarter).
Both are excellent, but I occasionally find myself wishing that I had a small book to carry with me--Snow Queen is a thick trade paperback (as is Da Vinci for Dummies, which I still need to finish), and Blue Rose is the size of the PF CRB...
...I occasionally find myself wishing that I had a small book to carry with me...
Yeah, whenever the book I'm currently reading is too big to fit in my pocket, I also keep handy a small book that WILL fit, for those situations when I have to go places where I might be kept waiting for a long time.
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I was a big fan of Joan Vinge way back when. It always used to tick me off when the reviews would say stuff like "Wife of Hugo Award-Winning SciFi Author Vernor Vinge" -- I was always thinking, "Seriously?! She earned her own Hugo award; she sure as hell doesn't need some publisher trying to pimp her off her ex-husband's!"
EDIT: That was 20-30 years ago. Typing this post, I just realized it still makes me mad.
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...I occasionally find myself wishing that I had a small book to carry with me...Yeah, whenever the book I'm currently reading is too big to fit in my pocket, I also keep handy a small book that WILL fit, for those situations when I have to go places where I might be kept waiting for a long time.
Get a kindle you grognards :)
I'm working my way through the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, and wondering why it took me so long to find them.
That is iNterspersed with whatever catches my eye in the library, which means rereading The Handmaid's Tale today.
I just finished Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, which was really good, but it only had five POV characters! WTF? It was still really good. Can't wait for the sequel to get delivered to my friendly local library branch.
I just started Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding, and apparently, the crew of the Ketty Jay is an even more inept crew of scoundrels than the crew of the Serenity. At least the Serenity crew profited from the little wobbly-headed doll caper!
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I'm working my way through the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, and wondering why it took me so long to find them.
That is iNterspersed with whatever catches my eye in the library, which means rereading The Handmaid's Tale today.
I used to own some of the books in that series but they got moldy and I had to throw them out. : (
'Dr. Chuck Tingle's Complete Guide to the Void'
And, when I can be bothered to take it on the bus, since it's flippin' heavy, 'Capital in the 21st Century' by Thomas Piketty.
A day behind on Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. I took one off to read a chapter about the antebellum mail controversy.
Honestly, I needed the day off. Robinson oscillates between just barely within the range of my tolerance for dense jargon that looks more than a little like scholarly preening, and just over the edge into the category of "writers who strive heroically to not be worth reading". Individually a sentence or paragraph of this would be fine, but it gets tedious. I suspect most of it isn't meant to actually be read and you're really supposed to scan topic sentences then come back if something interests you...but Robinson was writing in the early Eighties and at least postmodernism-adjacent, so there's a decent chance he was just running an obscurantist con game and useful ideas are basically incidental.
Which is annoying because when he writes in something approaching plain English, I usually agree with him. The main thing I'm worried about how is that he seems to be pushing some Afrocentrism and isn't sure if "African" is an imposed category (which it is) or representative of some meaningful continental generalization about pre-Atlantic world culture (which is b!*$%%*@ and he should know better).
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Further into Jhereg and now I am convinced Brust must have been a gamer. A whole section about how much assassinations and revivification spells cost? How could any non-gamer reader even wrap their head around this book? I don't know.
Anyway, it's fun; can't wait til the proletarian revolution in Teckla.
Meanwhile, I looked in my public library's interlibrary loan system and they have a copy of Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution so I stopped reading it on the house Chromebook and am eagerly awaiting its arrival so I can get up to speed on the events in Wuhan after the Shanghai Massacre.
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Finished "Babylon's Ashes" (The Expanse #6, by James S.A Corey) and hopped back in to book 10 of the Repairman Jack series, "Harbingers".
It is unfortunate and perhaps unfair to Babylon's Ashes that I read it relatively shortly after reading Downbelow Station. Both are books about a major war between the factions of a fractured human race that reached the breaking point of the old order and couldn't manage a more elegant way to construct a new order than stumbling into it, bleeding and desperate, almost dying on the way there.
Even if the books have similar ideas, Downbelow Station shows the many qualities that Babylon's Ashes regrettably lacks. Most of the shortcomings are in an oversimplification of humans and politics - Babylon's Ashes starts with the aftermath of the greatest mass murder in human history (a death toll in the the tens of billions) that may just lead to the extinction of the entire human race. However, somehow, the characters in the book aren't nearly as shook up about it as would seem plausible. They treat it basically like a normal act of war - and are very rational and willing to work with each other to just end the armed conflict as quickly as possible. There's never a real filling of mutual anger, of the sides hating and fearing other other, of there being an actual real unbridgeable cultural difference between Belters and Earthers/Martians. One character who was complicit in the attack is presented as good because she turns sides in an attempt to save as many belters as possible - but she never once seems to have any regrets of her part in the killing of billions of innocents, and her motives are never to repent for her crimes but simply a change in tactics to help her own people, which rang false to me.
On top of that, there's the villains themselves - the free navy, which was never a true threat to the combined armies of the inner planet, lead by Marco, who can't really claim much more than charisma as his schtick. We already know from the previous book that Marco is a buffoon, a distraction that a much more serious threat is using to divert attention from some actually important stuff that's going on. Now, I understand that this is very much a deliberate choice the authors made, that Marco is intentionally supposed to be just the dumb idiot who might just tip humanity over the edge of extinction despite all odds. It makes the exhuastion and frustration the good guys feel more understandable - "how is this clown causing so much trouble?" as he drags on a conflict when what humanity needs is to call quits to mutual violence for a while in order to get things back in order. This is different and interesting in a way, but isn't well written enough to be as exciting as the alternative (of an actual menacing villain).
In all, I like the themes and ideas of Babylon's Ashes, and in the one or two actual action scenes it had it was rather exciting, but most of the book is surprisingly dull, and - it pains me to say - the writing is at fault. The very real sense of political tension that made Downbelow Station work is lacking here, the villain is mishandled, the pacing is wrong...
Hopefully, the series gets back to adventurous space shenanigans with a political backdrop in the next books, since this is what it does best.
Finished "Babylon's Ashes" (The Expanse #6, by James S.A Corey) and hopped back in to book 10 of the Repairman Jack series, "Harbingers".
** spoiler omitted **...
Have you read their Han Solo & Chewbacca buddy comedy?
Because you should.
:-D
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Finished "Babylon's Ashes" (The Expanse #6, by James S.A Corey) and hopped back in to book 10 of the Repairman Jack series, "Harbingers".
** spoiler omitted **...
Have you read their Han Solo & Chewbacca buddy comedy?
Because you should.
:-D
I'm torn between my love of James S.A Corey and my reluctance to read official Star Wars fan fiction...
It's worth it just to hear Han's responses to Chewie's untranslated dialogue.
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'Heiro's Journey' by Sterling E. Lanier. I liked it a lot.
Ok, I give. I put up Black Marxism to read something meant for human eyes. I will finish it after, but I really need an extended break. My copy of Clement Eaton's The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South came in so he wins. It's an expanded 1964 edition of a 1940 work and it shows. There's a slightly testy note at the front about how he's chosen to capitalize 'Negro' in conformance when the new practice. He's also clearly of the school that believes there was no (or very little) mind of the South after 1830.
So far it's pretty good. Dry, but interesting. I got it for his chapter on the mail controversy, but I'm really picking up a lot well before that. He advances the argument that as politics became more democratic, the old elites took up the banner of censorship to control mass opinion. I think that may be superficially true, but he's basically repeating their assumption that poor people can't be trusted to think for themselves and I don't buy that at all. There's an important difference between stating that as an elite motive and presenting it as a basic fact which Eaton either doesn't appreciate or rejects.
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Further into Jhereg and now I am convinced Brust must have been a gamer. A whole section about how much assassinations and revivification spells cost? How could any non-gamer reader even wrap their head around this book? I don't know.
Anyway, it's fun; can't wait til the proletarian revolution in Teckla.
Meanwhile, I looked in my public library's interlibrary loan system and they have a copy of Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution so I stopped reading it on the house Chromebook and am eagerly awaiting its arrival so I can get up to speed on the events in Wuhan after the Shanghai Massacre.
He was a gamer, yeah. AIUI, a lot of the background for the books comes out of a campaign run by Adrian Charles Morgan--see the old Dragon interview with Brust HERE.
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Finished Harbingers (Repairman Jack #10, F. Paul Wilson) and am waffling between finishing Joe Abercrombie's Shattered Sea trilogy with Half a War, or reading his standalone "Best Served Cold" at the urging of a brother, who claims it is the best book evah.
I'm really looking forward to getting to the final stretch of the Adversary cycle and see where Wilson is taking this story. The buildup has been long and interesting in its own right, but I'm all primed to get to some payoff.
Wasted a free NYT article on this, so I might as well link it:
Ghosts, Warring Gods and the Apocalypse: The Best of New Science Fiction and Fantasy
am waffling between finishing Joe Abercrombie's Shattered Sea trilogy with Half a War, or reading his standalone "Best Served Cold" at the urging of a brother, who claims it is the best book evah.
** spoiler omitted **
Both are good, and both do that thing where they take minor characters from one book and make them the POVs of this book, with former POVs in the background for zest.
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Wasted a free NYT article on this, so I might as well link it:
Ghosts, Warring Gods and the Apocalypse: The Best of New Science Fiction and Fantasy
"Unimaginatively named 'MegaCorps'?"
Given the long history of MegaCorps as a concept in science fiction, isn't that a lot like complaining about an author calling robots "Robots" at this point?
Like Davia D, I'm working on Convergence. Mospheira isn't really economically developed enough to sport any MegaCorps, but there are robots in the series, and Cherryh just calls them robots. I don't know, the other morning I was making myself an omelet and, after slicing a mushroom into 6 pieces, I cut one of the slices in half because 7 is kaibu and 6 is a very tricky number. Look, whatever, it's not like I'm over on the Shejidan forum posting about Atevi pizza. Those people are nerds; I just like to keep my numbers in good order.
Rapidly breezed through a collection of Hap & Leonard stories by Joe Lansdale, and am now about halfway through his Edge of Dark Water - a sort of 1960s East Texas Huckleberry Finn story. The Thicket is next.