What book are you currently reading?

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#481 Post by PHXPhlyer » Mon Sep 19, 2022 5:13 pm

^Added to my ever-lengthening list of books to read.
Fortunately it is available from my local library in ebook form. No shelling out money I don't need to spend, and equally
important, no physical storage requirements. #:-S

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#482 Post by TheGreenAnger » Sun Sep 25, 2022 4:32 pm

Just finished "Wayward Sailor" In Search Of The Real Tristan Jones by Anthony Dalton.

Tristan Jones was a self invented man, rogue, teller of tall tales, skilled yachtsman, and excellent writer of fiction. I recommend Dalton's book, in search of the enigma that was Jones, to the house.

He died in 1995, but his nautical adventure books continue to bring entertainment and escape to legions of fans worldwide. He was larger than life, perhaps the most successful sailing writer of the twentieth century. But, as Anthony Dalton's meticulously researched biography reveals, Tristan Jones was not who he said he was.

"Wayward Sailor" began as an uncomplicated tribute to a great adventurer and writer, but one line of inquiry branched to another, plunging Dalton into a three-year odyssey of his own. With the cooperation of Tristan's friends and supporters, Dalton pursued Tristan's life through correspondence, logbooks, government documents, and interviews worldwide. With each new revelation, Tristan's voyage through life seemed more and more like his greatest adventure.

His real name was Arthur Jones. He was born in Liverpool in 1929, the illegitimate son of a working-class Lancashire girl, and he grew up in orphanages with little education. Too young to see action in the World War II naval battles he would later write about so movingly, he joined the Royal Navy in 1946 and served fourteen unremarkable years.

Arthur Jones then bought an old sailboat and tried his hand at smuggling whiskey cross-Channel. In his early thirties he sailed into a Mediterranean limbo, scraping a living from charters by day and haunting the bars of Ibiza by night. When he was drunk, which was often, he could be loud and obnoxious and had the scars to prove it. He had no family, no attachments, no accomplishments.

Then came a midlife sea change. Arthur Jones looked into his future, imagined greatness, and began to claw his way to it. Having taught himself to sail, he taught himself to write. He was a natural at both. As Tristan Jones, in his midforties, he sailed out of Brazil's Mato Grosso and into a Greenwich Village apartment to write six books in three years and reinvent his past.

The Tristan Jones of his books was born in a storm at sea in 1924 on his father's tramp steamer; was torpedoed three time in epic World War II engagements; completed the first circumnavigation of Iceland; traveled farther north and farther up the Amazon River than any sailor before him; and sailed more than 400,000 miles, 180,000 of them solo. Readers loved his books and crowded his lectures and signings. He had a bard's voice and a street performer's delivery. He had more renown than he could have dreamed.

Having invented a life, Tristan Jones tried to live it. After the amputation of his left leg in 1982 he sailed more than halfway around the world. He lost his right leg in 1991 yet still returned briefly to sea. But as his body failed him, so too did his spirits. It was as if the life from which he'd bodily lifted himself were pulling him down again. He died a bitter man.

"Wayward Sailor" is the biography Tristan Jones did not want. His books were autobiographical, he said; there was no more to tell. But there was. "Wayward Sailor" is the last Tristan Jones story and the most incredible one of all: the story of a man who invented himself.

THIS BIOGRAPHY OF SAILING'S BEST-KNOWN STORYTELLER IS THE MOST INCREDIBLE TRISTAN JONES STORY OF ALL

No one really knew Tristan Jones. He lived sixty-six years and managed to keep the first forty a mystery. He told us what he wanted us to believe, and he told the tales so well that we either believed or suspended disbelief. He was another Jack London, and escaping into his briny books will always remain a singular pleasure.

Yet even Tristan's most skeptical readers will marvel at the breadth of his deceits. As revealed in this uncompromising yet admiring biography, the real Tristan Jones was both a lesser and a greater man than his invention. He rejected the hand fate dealt him and dealt himself another. Enormously creative, he was, himself, his most creative act.

""Wayward Sailor" is a thoroughly researched and absorbing account of Tristan Jones's lives--the one he created for himself, and the one he actually lived. This is a necessary book for anyone who has read Tristan Jones's stories with enjoyment or suspicion, or both."--Derek Lundy, author, "Godforsaken Sea" and "The Way of a Ship"

"I was enchanted from start to finish by Anthony Dalton's biography, in which he proves that Tristan Jones's most brilliant creation was his own fascinating life story. Jones may not have been a lovable fraud but he certainly was a brilliant one, as Dalton makes clear in this careful and generally sympathetic book."--John Rousmaniere, author, "After the Storm"; "Fastnet, Force 10"; and "The Annapolis Book of Seamanship"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Jones
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#483 Post by TheGreenAnger » Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:41 am

Arrived under deep cover yesterday so as to avoid notice by the "biblioteek minnares", whose eagle eye spotted it anyway, sitting discretely, and half covered by my prized copy of Rolls Royce "Jet Engine" and she demanded that I remove one existing book from the shelf to make way for it. I suggested that book burning might be her next initiative and that might make her more like a Nazi, which went down like a whiff of Zyklon B. =))

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#484 Post by TheGreenAnger » Tue Oct 04, 2022 11:43 am

TheGreenAnger wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:41 am
Gibson's Britain's Military Helicopters
A well illustrated book, lots of great photographs and handles the history concisely.

Chris Gibson also runs the numbers in an interesting way. Here he clearly demonstrates the improvement gained by fitting the Rolls-Royce Gnome turbine to the Westland Whirlwind thereby replacing the Alvis Leonides piston pudding stirrer that originally powered the aircraft.

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#485 Post by TheGreenAnger » Tue Oct 04, 2022 2:26 pm

I sail on like the Titanic towards my bibliophilic doom... Another day, another book. It is rumoured that one of the denizens of this establishment has his own niche in this edition of Mr Bond's excellent books.

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#486 Post by Ex-Ascot » Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:50 am

Ex-Ascot wrote:
Thu Jul 21, 2022 7:30 am
Revenge by Tom Bower. Released this morning. I have only got as far as Nutmeg going to college but it seems that most of the things she says about her school days are a load of tosh. Her father did everything he possibly could to help and pay for her ambitions.
I speed read it back then. Just taken two days over reading it again. Some very revealing things. Three months on and not a hint of legal action. It is all correct.

Also taking advantage of being up in the Delta read yet again Pat Reid's 'The Colditz Story'. Always very enlightening.
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#487 Post by llondel » Mon Oct 10, 2022 2:15 am

Ex-Ascot wrote:
Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:50 am
Also taking advantage of being up in the Delta read yet again Pat Reid's 'The Colditz Story'. Always very enlightening.
We visited Colditz about 20 yeas ago, no idea if it's still open. They tell the tale of Pat Reid coming back at some point after they'd opened the place for tourists. He got more of a tour than the standard one, including passing a particular door, where he pulled out a key, tried it in the lock and it still worked - one the PoWs had made for his escape attempt and the Germans never changed the lock.

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#488 Post by Ex-Ascot » Mon Oct 10, 2022 9:22 am

llondel wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 2:15 am
Ex-Ascot wrote:
Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:50 am
Also taking advantage of being up in the Delta read yet again Pat Reid's 'The Colditz Story'. Always very enlightening.
We visited Colditz about 20 yeas ago, no idea if it's still open. They tell the tale of Pat Reid coming back at some point after they'd opened the place for tourists. He got more of a tour than the standard one, including passing a particular door, where he pulled out a key, tried it in the lock and it still worked - one the PoWs had made for his escape attempt and the Germans never changed the lock.
Seems to be: https://www.schloss-colditz.de/en/guest ... nd-groups/
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#489 Post by Undried Plum » Mon Oct 10, 2022 4:11 pm

llondel wrote:
Mon Oct 10, 2022 2:15 am
We visited Colditz about 20 years ago, no idea if it's still open.
Yes. it is!

Visited a few year ago when cruising in my then new slightly swishy leccie car.

They've got a really good museum of actual artifacts of place/time. They have also converted the German Kommandantur side into a hotel.

Well worth a revisit.

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#490 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Oct 18, 2022 9:43 pm

The Divider : Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 / Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

"The inside story of the four years when Donald Trump went to war with Washington, from the chaotic beginning to the violent finale, told by revered journalists Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker--an ambitious and lasting history of the full Trump presidency that also contains dozens of exclusive scoops and stories from behind the scenes in the White House, from the absurd to the deadly serious."-- Provided by publisher.

Just finished. 660+ pages. #:-S
Well ordered chronology with much in depth behind the scenes info.

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#491 Post by TheGreenAnger » Tue Oct 18, 2022 10:08 pm

PHXPhlyer wrote:
Tue Oct 18, 2022 9:43 pm
The Divider : Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 / Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

"The inside story of the four years when Donald Trump went to war with Washington, from the chaotic beginning to the violent finale, told by revered journalists Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker--an ambitious and lasting history of the full Trump presidency that also contains dozens of exclusive scoops and stories from behind the scenes in the White House, from the absurd to the deadly serious."-- Provided by publisher.

Just finished. 660+ pages. #:-S
Well ordered chronology with much in depth behind the scenes info.

PP
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#492 Post by G~Man » Tue Oct 18, 2022 10:37 pm

Currently listening to this---I have read it before. I was married to an ex-Mormon, and her family are still LDS, in fact her bother and father were Bishops. We are friends to this day. I used to live in Salt Lake City up in the cove overlooking the city, and had neighbors up the road who were polygamists. The FLDS, (Fundamental Latter Day Saints), can be extremists.... I could see the Utah State Penitentiary where the Lafferty brothers were held from my house. Ron was on death row and elected firing squad but died three years ago before sentence was carried out, his brother Dan is serving life there still.

Jon Krakauer is an excellent research journalist and I would recommend any of his books.

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#493 Post by TheGreenAnger » Tue Oct 18, 2022 10:45 pm

G~Man wrote:
Tue Oct 18, 2022 10:37 pm
Jon Krakauer is an excellent research journalist and I would recommend any of his books.

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+1

He is a superb climber, writer and journalist.
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#494 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Oct 18, 2022 10:57 pm

Lived in Baja Utah for twelve years. Knew quite a few Mormons and was acquainted with a few Polig families.
After Warren Jeffs was finally caught, I followed the disassembly of his empire in Colorado City, AZ/Hilldale, UT.
What a corrupt cult!

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#495 Post by TheGreenAnger » Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:12 pm

Talking of cults! While the USA is a wonderful, if odd place, where cults have arisen, despite the checks and democratic balances that I admire...

You must read the story of Jack Parsons.

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I speak here of Scientology and its perfidious space in the rational world.;
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#496 Post by G~Man » Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:44 pm

PHXPhlyer wrote:
Tue Oct 18, 2022 10:57 pm
After Warren Jeffs was finally caught, I followed the disassembly of his empire in Colorado City, AZ/Hilldale, UT.
What a corrupt cult!
Flown over Colorado City any times....Have aerial pics somewhere. Jeffs was a monster the way he controlled his "followers". I actually read his daughters book a few months ago, another extremely insightful account of the goings on. He fathered over 60 children, and 87 wives:

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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#497 Post by TheGreenAnger » Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:55 pm

One has to ask, how this evil cult can exist in a supposedly civilized democracy?

And be, integral to its society?
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#498 Post by G~Man » Wed Oct 19, 2022 12:00 am

TheGreenAnger wrote:
Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:55 pm
One has to ask, how this evil cult can exist in a supposedly civilized democracy?
And be, integral to its society?
This is not the only evil religion cult in the world....and who determines what is evil..... but that is for another thread.

I have friends who are FLDS, but are not on the "outer fringes" which is where most of the "problems" arise.
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#499 Post by TheGreenAnger » Wed Oct 19, 2022 12:04 am

G~Man wrote:
Wed Oct 19, 2022 12:00 am
TheGreenAnger wrote:
Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:55 pm
One has to ask, how this evil cult can exist in a supposedly civilized democracy?
And be, integral to its society?
This is not the only evil religion cult in the world....and who determines what is evil..... but that is for another thread.

I have friends who are FLDS, but are not on the "outer fringes" which is where most of the "problems" arise.
For the record I care not for the religious or lunatic cultish nature of this mad world.

Give me the loneliness of pure mathematic until I die, as mad as a skunk in Pi... ;)))

"Jeez, did his ex-wife start to subsume his mind?"

For what it is worth I gave up the two core pieces of ***** in my upbringing, Judaism (my mother, via her father) and Catholicism (my mother via her mother) ... =))

I really do look forward to meeting, and perhaps sailing with you sometime dude (as long as you abide)...

TGA
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Re: What book are you currently reading?

#500 Post by PHXPhlyer » Wed Oct 19, 2022 12:31 am

G~Man wrote:
Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:44 pm
PHXPhlyer wrote:
Tue Oct 18, 2022 10:57 pm
After Warren Jeffs was finally caught, I followed the disassembly of his empire in Colorado City, AZ/Hilldale, UT.
What a corrupt cult!
Flown over Colorado City any times....Have aerial pics somewhere. Jeffs was a monster the way he controlled his "followers". I actually read his daughters book a few months ago, another extremely insightful account of the goings on. He fathered over 60 children, and 87 wives:

.51W5Zp05MNL._SL500_.jpg
Better to fly over than drive through.
A notorious speed trap.

I was not aware of her book. My library has it and it is near the top of my list.
Carolyn Jessop's book is on my shelf, not read yet.
She escaped and started an "underground railroad" to help child brides escape.
The "Lost Boys" are another sad story; teenaged boys forced out of the community so as not to compete with the older men for teen brides to add to their "harems".
As I said, I knew a few FLDS. The most prominent "family" had eight wives. After the death of the head of the family his son married his youngest "Stepmother".

PP

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