Reading List

After much longer than it should have taken me to read, I finally finished Anne Applebaum's book on the Iron Curtain. 

I read the last 100+ pages enroute to and from Minnesota last week. The book was tragic and sad, and the hopelessness and helplessness experienced in Eastern Europe was so dire. And it made me angry that the West just abandoned the lands beyond the Iron Curtain, and American just surrendered them away. One of my most memorable undergraduate papers was one on the Czech Spring, and those protesters who lost their lives should still be mourned. Just like in Hungary in 1956.  Those voices of protest never really died, but they were confined to whispers behind closed doors. What patriots were men like Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa. Where are those leaders today, I wonder? It made me appreciate John Paul II all the more, as Applebaum had detailed the myriad number of ways that the Catholic Church was stifled by the Soviets. What a hero he was! (And how utterly ridiculous he was not honored with a Nobel Peace Prize, and Barack Obama was! Ludicrous!)

Next on my agenda, besides continuing with my Hemingway tales, is Amity Shlaes' new book on Calvin Coolidge. George Will previews the book, including one anecdote that failed to make it in the new volumn:

When President and Mrs. Coolidge were being given simultaneous but separate tours of a chicken farm, Grace asked her guide whether the rooster copulated more than once a day. “Dozens of times,” she was told. “Tell that to the president,” she said. When told, Coolidge asked, “Same hen every time?” When the guide said, “A different one each time,” the president said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”