Last Chance Specials

What have I been doing since retiring ?

Reading, reading, reading, and more reading, combined with quite a bit of TV, mostly CSpan, interwoven with CNN, which is awful, and my daily diet of PBS evening news.

Last year I discovered Library thing and added my collection of books, but keep buying and reading and learning all the things I did not learn the previous 75 years. Yes, SEVENTY-FIVE.

My most recent acquisitions and reads from a great thrift store in Atlanta, Last Chance, are Angola in the Front Line by Wolfers and Bergerol and A Distant Mirror the Calamitous 14th Century by that master, Barbar W. Tuchman. Then I hastened to check out review in Library thing. What do they have in common ? Governments make no sense, war especially makes no sense, and both deal with war. A lot of war. Of course I did not live through medieval times, but I was alive and well with access to the media in the years 1975 through 1982, covered by the book on Angola, and to the extent I thought about it, if I did at all, I bought the Kissinger Cold War pitch. Of course Russia was egging the Cubans on, of course, when in fact Fidel entertained first president Neto after being turned down by Kennedy. Neto's life before becoming first leader of Angola followed closely the patterns of Mao and Ho.