Author Archives: caltrop-admin

Real Fast Food

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I am not a great cook – I have a gourmet quality wife who loves to cook for relaxation – but for 8 months we were long-distance commuters. I lived on a very small houseboat – meaning everything had to be carried in, water was at a premium, and there was a limit to the amount of electric stuff I could use at the same time. With a 2-burner hot plate and a copy of Real Fast Food as my primary reference, I was able to cook a fair number of the recipes to produce a most impressive meal with minimal trouble.

It is by no means a health-food diet – if you don’t like butter and olive oil, this book is not for you. But if you like to make a good showing from time to time with food that tastes great and is not that expensive to prepare – reach for this book first.

Texas Mutiny: Bullets, Ballots and Boss Rule

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This easily-flowing gem by Sheila Allee started as an inquiry into Ms. Allee’s family tree and ended up as a tightly crafted tale of a local incident that illustrates the narrow space between benevolent bossism and violent, self-serving tyranny. It tells of a land that really had not changed much (other than the makes and models of the transportation) from classic Westerns to Bonnie and Clyde, and would not for another 20 years or more (see The Last Picture Show). For the naifs who never made it past Civics 101, it is just as well that the characters are real because, as is often the case, in politics the truth is far stranger than fiction. If you are a Texan interested in politics or history, then you need to buy this book. If you are an academic interested in local politics or the spoils system, you should buy this book and assign it to your classes for reading. Yet these are not the greatest strengths of the book.

It is probably not the author’s intent to broaden the story beyond its Texas setting, but if you live outside that great state then you will see that Texas as described here is only different in shades from the one-party states that litter the land to this day. One might think that tiny, green, urban, urbane Maryland in the 1990’s could not be more different from vast, dry, rural, good-ole-boy Texas in the 1900-1950 period. One would be quite wrong. My exposure to the one-party state in Maryland not a decade ago showed an entire machinery built to maintain the positions of those who had power. With legislature, executive, and judiciary integrated in a one-party web of cronyism, where would the citizen turn for redress? Maybe nobody got shot, but the Maryland Governor’s election of 1994 was ultimately resolved by a high court whose members were all appointees of the incumbent’s party and coincidentally didn’t find anything amiss about an election with overall turnout of around 45% but precincts that cast over 100% of their total registration numbers for the incumbent.

When this much of the moral fabric has been torn, how far is it to the next step? Whether it is Medieval Europe, 1948 Texas, or Russia in any period, it is a short and slippery slope from paternalistic bossism to totalitarian repression. You, the citizen, do not stand a chance in this game. Know when to fold ’em. Yes, they CAN kill you, if not physically (and don’t count on that), then legally, financially, and reputationally. And they will. The odds of an honest Captain Allee happening along to solve the crime are pretty slim, and you, as the destroyed victim, will not return from the dead anyway.

Texas Mutiny: a great read and a fine story. And, if you want a real-world example of “abuse of power”, now you can look it up.

https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Mutiny-Bullets-Ballots-Boss/dp/0972046623

The Boer War: A History From Beginning to End

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Considering the premise of the 1 – hour series, this book more than delivers. Aside from distilling a somewhat chaotic set of campaigns into a comprehensible framework, this is one of the first works I’ve read that tries to address the role of black South Africans in the conflict. Do be aware that this volume only addresses the Second Boer War, although it does provide enough synopsis of the First Boer War to understand some of the causative factors.

Celtic Mythology: A Concise Guide to the Gods, Sagas and Beliefs

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It’s impossible in a small space even to scratch the surface of Irish lore. This book is quite illuminating in laying out in understandable form the 4 major eras of pre-Christian legends. It does contain some 2 dozen of the key stories in very abbreviated form and, unusual in this short format, it contains many references (including live URL links most of which remain current) to more detailed scholarly materials on the topics.

Just Punishment

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OK, maybe David and his delightful family and staff laid a promising framework with the great accommodations and fabulous food at their Charleston Inn in Hendersonville NC. But books are a serious thing and he doesn’t know I bought a copy (until now). I was planning to take it home and give it a try but I soon found myself sneaking in a chapter here and there as our companions’ rest schedule permitted, and a satisfying finish was reached before the trip ended. The author strives somewhat for the John Grisham style, although he comes at it from the opposite end of the spectrum, and there is a bit of the first-novel tendency to use the dialog to preach instead of letting the action reveal the intended message (which in this case it would have done anyway – I knew where the story was going long before the speeches came in).  This applies also to the key relationship which simply happens, so fast as to be jarringly improbable.  Those minor carps aside, as I said from the start, once you get into it you will have a hard time putting it down, and that is criterion number one for a thriller-type book.

Payne, David R., “Just Punishment“, Page Publishing, 2016.