| Robert J. Casey 1890-1962 |
| Easter Island, Home of the Scornful Gods. ~ 1931 ~ 337 pages,
29 pages of photographs, 1 map.
Four Faces of Siva ~ 1929 ~ London: George Harrap & Company ~ The book discusses many aspects of the ancient Khmer culture. The Khmer were a group of mostly Buddhist people in Cambodia. This book talks about the religious and symbolic stories surrounding the creation and founding of their great cities in the Cambodian jungle. A definite strength of this book is that it is written like a fable. The narrative way the book is composed gives the reader a very colorful picture. The book also contains many illustrations of ancient artifacts, religious symbols, royal terraces, etc., found in the cities. The illustrations are particularly helpful in gaining a clear picture of the story. For a person who is not extremely familiar with ancient Cambodia the pictures make it fairly easy to get a firm grasp on what the author is saying. Casey's story telling places emphasis on animism, ghosts, and ancestral reverence to the tiger and the elephant. Religious beliefs and gods seemed to be very important to the Khmer people. There are many aspects of the story of the Khmer which emphasize strong religious powers.Although the book does have many strong points, Casey does sound a bit racist. When he makes reference to the people and their traditions he sometimes describes them in seemingly patronizing terms. For example, describing the conical hats worn by the local people as "lampshades" or referring to the ancient Khmer as "small-eyed people who worshipped snakes," may give the impression that his analysis is biased by racial overtones. But the information is good and useful, as long as the overtones are overlooked. Such comments seem comical, but tend to sound condescending, rather than funny.Though this book was published in 1934, which dates the maps and the illustrations and photographs. This book is ideal for someone who is looking to gain a greater knowledge of the Khmer culture in ancient Cambodia, but does not want to read dry, boring text. The narrative tone makes The Four Faces of Siva very enjoyable to read, but the reader must be careful to take the biases of the times with a grain of salt. http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/students/khmer/book.html OTHER: When We Were Both Younger ~ 1952 ~ Humorous and readable account of life and people in Chicago between the years 1890 and 1910   Battle
Below ~ 1945 ~ Stories from WWII submarine warfare which were written
in 1943 and held up by Navy censors until after the war. Hair-raising tales
of risk and survival doing battle beneath the waves.
Torpedo Junction: With the Pacific Fleet from Pearl Harbor to Midway We saw one of the most tremendous melodramas in the record of great military institutions unfold itself, scene by scene, act by act, in strict conformity to the rules of unity and plot. We saw the Navy---flattened not only by the Pearl Harbor tragedy but by the global war that grew out of it---suddenly setting out to do whatever could be done with what materials happened to lie at hand, going ahead with ever-increasing momentum, gathering up material and men as it moved and fought, out guessing Admiral Yamamoto and his talented knifemen with traditional American brilliance, striking cautiously at first, then with daring---through the Marshalls and Gilberts and Wake and Marcus to the ornate shambles of the Coral Sea. And finally, out-numbered and out-gunned, to the incredible victory of Midway." Robert J. Casey takes you along, step by step, day by day, even minute
by minute, through this great drama of recoil, recovery and counterattack,
through these breath-taking encounters that answered superbly the nervous
query "Where is the fleet?" He reached the Pacific battle scene just after
the Japs had made Pearl Harbor their "torpedo junction." He walked in on
as terrible a morning-after as the United States has ever known. His fleet
slipped in filth, the stench of burned oil was in his nostrils, knotted
iron and scrap lay all about and on Red Hill were 3500 new graves to be
avenged. Hawaii was hysterical, wondering why it hadn't been finished off
when the Japs had a chance that would never come again. For weeks it went
on, the turmoil, the rebuilding, the restless waiting. You realize suddenly
the months, perhaps years, of careful planning that preceded that Jap sneak
attack, you realize why the United States could not risk lightning retaliation.
You wait as Honolulu rebuilds and speculates with nightmarish intensity
on what's coming next. And then, at last, American action. Aboard a heavy
cruiser, with a compact task force of fighting ships and planes, Casey
watches the men of the Navy prepare for battle. Days pass. Out of the quiet
Pacific come more American forces, to converge on the Jap base of Wotje.
In a few breathless hours the Japs are smashed. Casey records the first
American score from start to finish. Things are not done so neatly and
completely at the bombing of Wake, but at Marcus, that dot on the far eastern
sea, the Navy attacks with the calm of veterans. Again, the relentless
and wearing preparation pays big dividends, as the Japs wilt under our
fire. Stories of the fighting in the Macassar Straits come in. With
Casey's cruiser you swing down toward the Coral Sea, scene of portentous
conflict. But this is only prelude to one of the greatest naval battles
of all time---Midway. With smaller forces, divided but working with deadly
co-ordination, the Americans attack unhesitatingly a great Jap concentration
bent on repeating their success at Pearl Harbor. It is an overwhelming
victory for the United States that Casey reports from the deck of his cruiser,
a victory in which no ship fires at another ship, a victory from the air
that yet is truly a naval victory. With him you live through those
harrowing hours when American planes give the Japs the licking of their
lives, sink their fighting ships, their carriers, their transports. He
believes it the beginning of the end of the war in the Pacific, a far,
far, greater blow to Japan than Pearl Harbor was to us, a grand American
"torpedo junction."
|
 Bob
Casey lived with the men of the fleet, as he lived through the
war in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, England, Africa and on the Mediterranean.
Author of twenty books, ace war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News,
who has been over more of the global war map, land and water, than any
other correspondent, he brings you the exciting, the picturesque, the amusing,
the terrible, the real story of the Pacific war. His keen, trained eye
takes in every significant detail. Daily he makes note of his impressions
while they are sharp and fresh. His sense of humor never deserts him. His
ironic laughter is not stilled by shipboard routine or by danger. His instinct
for human interest is immense and infallible. He is there with the fleet,
the fleet is doing a great job, and you are with him. |
| Agnes & Egerton Castle
Egerton Castle (1858 - 1920) |
| Rose of the World 1905 ~ Adolph Zukor made it into a motion
picture in 1916 or 1918
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009567/ Young April 1892 1928 Silent Film: http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=1&Movie=13527 Youthful Crown Prince Caryl is told he must marry the Archduchess of Saxheim; and when his father, King Stefan, refuses him a last fling in Paris, he "borrows" the crown, skips off to Paris, and pawns it. Meanwhile, at an American finishing school for girls, Archduchess Victoria is informed that she must return to Europe to marry Prince Caryl and decides to have one last week in Paris; there, on a shopping spree, she buys Caryl's crown from a jeweler. One evening she sees Caryl in a famous gambling club and falls in love with him. Prince Michael, next in succession to the throne, comes to inform the prince of the possible political complications resulting from his scandalous behavior. Discovering that Victoria has his crown, Caryl falls in love with her; she learns of his identity; but her note, revealing her own identity, is intercepted by Michael. Caryl abdicates in order to marry his American sweetheart; then, perceiving the plot, he returns to Paris, heartbroken. Following the abdication of Stefan, however, Caryl abducts Victoria, and they escape via carriage, automobile, and airplane. OTHER: The Bath Comedy ~ Frederick A. Stokes, New York 1900 The Secret Orchard. 1901 My Merry Rockhurst, Being Some Episodes in the Life of Fiscount Rochhurst, a Friend of King Charles the Second, and at One Time Constable of His Majesty's Tower of London. NY: MacMillan, 1907 ~ Wroth. Schools and Masters of Fencing by Egerton Castle  
1902 Book Ad |
 EGERTON
CASTLE: (March 12, 1858-September 16, 1920), English
novelist, was born in London to a wealthy family. His grandfather, Egerton
Smith, was the founder of the Liverpool Mercury, a leading paper in which
Castle inherited an interest. His father, Arthur Michael Castle, had in
his youth been friends with Verdi, Donizetti, Rossini, Liszt, George Sand,
Alexander Dumas, Robert Browning, and many other notable writers, artists,
and musicians; he spent the greater part of his life away from England
and made Egerton, his only son, a constant companion, taking him on walking
tours throughout Europe. "These tours," wrote William Armstrong in the
Book Buyer, were "a part of a rather Spartan system of physical training.
. . devised by his father to supplement deficiencies of the otherwise well-conceived
educational course of the Universite [de Paris]."
Castle studied at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris until 1873, then attended the University of Glasgow, spent a year at King's College in London, and was graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, where his work had been concentrated in the natural sciences. After briefly studying law at the Inner Temple, he enrolled in the military academy at Sandhurst, obtained lieutenancy in the Second West India Regiment, and later went on to serve as captain in the Royal Engineer Militia. After military service, he "turned naturally to literature," as he was quoted as saying in a New York Times interview of October 19, 1901, because he "had always been thrown with literary people, and all my training had been in that line." From 1885 to 1894 Castle wrote articles, reviews, and criticism for the Saturday Review. In 1885 he published an authoritative history of swordsmanship, Schools and Masters of Fence, and in 1891 produced his first novel, Consequences. This "study," he told the New York Times interviewer, "of the psychic experiences of a young man who returns to England after having spent his youth on the Continent" was "to some extent autobiographic, but only as regards atmosphere, not incident." Most of his later novels were written in collaboration with his wife, Agnes (Sweetman) Castle, a sister of the novelist Francis Blundell. The first of their stylish historical romances, The Pride of Jennico, the story of an English aristocrat who inherits a princedom in Moravia, was such a huge popular success that it led to others including The Bath Comedy, a tale of intrigue set in the famous watering spot, its sequel The Incomparable Bellairs, and at least one novel a year for the rest of their lives. Several of their joint efforts were dramatized; in America David Belasco produced Sweet Kitty Bellairs, based on The Bath Comedy, to wide acclaim. In his New York Times interview Castle explained his preference for romantic rather than realistic fiction. "You can't go around taking notes on life and call that literature. You must idealize life, put imagination and the heroic, blood-stirring qualities into it before it becomes literature." Of his work as a collaborator, Castle indicated in the Critic that, before beginning a novel, he needed first to establish its locale and scenery "either in old memories or in freshly sought impressions," while his wife dwelt "almost exclusively on the spring of the purely human element." Though her method might "seem antithetical to mine, strangely enough it never clashes, and our joint unravelling of tangled tales always proceeds in harmony." Although their work achieved popular success, it sometimes met with an impatient critical reception. Of The Wind's Will, the Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote, "Mr. and Mrs. Egerton Castle go plodding on. . . with the same old themes, the same old technical merits, and the same old too obvious limitations." But of John Seneschal's Margaret, published shortly after Castle's death, L. M. Field in the New York Times of November 14, 1920 wrote, "the book with which Egerton Castle has bidden us farewell is not only artistically worthy of one who loved and respected his art but contains a depth and richness of feeling far beyond that of the blithe tales preceding it." Castle died at his home in Hindhead, Surrey. Agnes Castle survived him by two years. http://cres1.lancs.ac.uk/~esarie/farnol/messages/1356.htm |
| Willa Cather 1873-1947 |
The
Professor's House 1925 G&D 702 pages
 The Professor's
House was published in 1925, only seven years after My Ántonia,
but it is set in an America that is at least a half-century removed from
its frontier past, an America that sells off its heritage while buying
up the relics of European antiquity. Its protagonist, Godfrey St. Peter,
might be an older version of Jim Burden. He is a man who grew up on the
prairie, entered academia and in his fifties has attained professional
success and what at first seems to be domestic happiness. But over the
year in which the novel's events transpire--the year that follows his family's
move to a new house and ends with his near-death in the old one he has
refused to abandon--it becomes clear that St. Peter's success is hollow,
his relations with his wife and children passionless and embittered. What
meaning remains in the professor's life lies in the past, in his relationship
with a gifted pupil who died young and whose discoveries have made St.
Peter's family wealthy--but at an awful cost. "If Outland were here tonight,"
St. Peter thinks, "he might say with Mark Antony, My fortunes have corrupted
honest men." If the tone of My Ántonia is that of the romantic pastoral,
The Professor's House is a bleaker--and at times even a savage--book. In
place of Jim Burden's rhapsodic concluding vision, we are left with St.
Peter's realization that "He had never learned to live without delight.
And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed
he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that
life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate
griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like
that. |
  Willa
Cather was born December 7, 1873, in Black Creek
Valley (Gore) Virginia, where she remained until the age of nine when she
moved with her family to Webster County, Nebraska. Having passed her earliest
years amid a settled landscape and established traditions, Cather compared
coming to Nebraska to being "thrown onto a land as bare as a piece of sheet
iron" (1913; Willa Cather in Person, ed. L. Brent Bohlke, 10). She later
reflected that two experiences of that move shaped her within: being gripped
with a passion for that "shaggy grass country" that was "the happiness
and the curse of my life" (1921: WCIP, 32), and visiting immigrant neighbors,
particularly the old women who told her stories of the home country. After
eighteen months on a ranch, her family moved into Red Cloud, a "scrappy
western town" rich with possibility for a child with an eager mind (see
"Old Mrs. Harris"). Cather remained there until in 1890, she entered the
University of Nebraska as a second year preparatory student. Her earliest
published fiction dates from this time, offering grim stories of immigrant
loneliness in a new country; as important, while a student she began her
journalistic career, working as a drama critic for the Lincoln Journal.
Following her graduation in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh, where she
worked in journalism, taught high school, took the first of many trips
to Europe, and in 1905 published "The Troll Garden," her earliest collection
of short stories. In 1906 she moved to New York, to work as editor, then
managing editor of "McClure's Magazine." While on assignment for "McClure's,"
Cather met Sarah Orne Jewett, who understood her aspirations in art and
encouraged her to withdraw from journalism and "to find your own quiet
center of life, and write from that to the world" (1908). Cather's first
novels (there were two, she said), followed: the Jamesian "Alexander's
Bridge" -- and then "O Pioneers!". In a copy for a friend, Cather wrote
of "O Pioneers!", "This was the first time I walked off on my own feet
-- everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom
I admired. In this one I hit the home pasture. During the next decade,
Cather mined that home pasture. Under various names, Webster County and
Red Cloud reappeared in "The Song of the Lark" (1915), "My Antonia" (1918),
"One of Ours" (1922), and "A Lost Lady" (1923). Gradually, however, Cather's
dismay over the results of "progress" in her Nebraska locale combined with
her desire for artistic freedom to experiment with other locales and themes.
In 1925 she explained that she did not want to become too identified with
the West, for "using one setting all the time is very like planting a field
with corn season after season. I believe in rotation of crops. If the public
ties me down to the cornfield too much I'm afraid I'll leave that scene
entirely." And leave she did, to write novels set in Michigan, the American
Southwest, and Quebec. Cather's themes, too, changed during this period,
as she turned from the passion of individuals aspiring to greatness and
began writing of compassion of ordinary people who, confronting mortality,
seek comfort in the human family. In the end, Cather returned to her earliest
memories to write again of Nebraska and, in her last book, of Virginia.
But unlike the sunny themes of her early novels drawn from childhood memories,
"Lucy Gayheart" and "Sapphira and the Slave Girl" are Gothic stories in
which dark passions break through the apparent calm of everyday lives.
For during her final years Cather felt the horror of events leading to
another world war, the pain over deaths of family and friends, and the
frustration from an inflammation of her hand that meant an inability to
write. But she also maintained old friendships and enjoyed new ones, most
importantly with the Menuhin children; and she continued to write, publishing
short stories (e.g. "The Best Years") and working on an Avignon novel that
remained unfinished at the time of her death. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage
on April 24, 1947. Cather's life is remarkable for the faith that she kept
-- to her family; her friends (she lived with Edith Lewis for thirty-eight
years); her first editor, Ferris Greenslet, at Houghton Mifflin; her publisher,
Alfred Knopf, to whom she went following "My Antonia" and with whom she
remained the rest of her life; and most of all to her art. As her biographer
James Woodress has written, she lived "a literary life," with "a single-minded
dedication to the pursuit of art" (Willa Cather: A Literary Life, xvi).
Awards came to Cather during her life time -- honorary degrees from numerous
universities, the Pulitzer Prize for "One of Ours," a medal by the American
Academy for "Death Comes for the Archbishop," and the gold medal from the
National Institute of Arts and Letters for a writer's lifetime achievement.
Following her death, her reputation has grown steadily and, in the last
fifteen years, exploded with activity, with over a hundred articles and
several books appearing each year on her. In 1990 "A Lost Lady" was included
among the Encyclopedia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World,"
and Cather is now widely recognized as a major American writer, and our
country's foremost woman writer. But more telling than such accolades,
Willa Cather's novels have never gone out of print, for her popular following
has remained strong. So the explosion of critical recognition means only
that the experts have realized what her readers have known all along --
that Willa Cather's novels and stories, in such apparently simple style,
provide companionship for a lifetime. |
| Mary Hartwell Catherwood |
Lazarre 1909 B.W. Dodge & Co ~ Black and white illustrations
throughout the book are by Andre Castaigne.
  Other
   |
 Mary
Hartwell was born in Luray, Ohio, and at the age
of nine her family moved to Milford, Illinois. Within a year of this
move her father died of pneumonia. Her mother passed away just a few months
later, orphaning Mary and her two younger siblings, Roxana and Marcus.
The children’s maternal grandfather was appointed their guardian. They
moved to Hebron, Ohio, to live with him, and attended the local public
school. When Mary was thirteen, she received her teaching certificate,
and she started teaching the following year. Catherwood taught at small
country schools until she was able to enter Granville Female College in
Ohio. She managed to put herself through the four-year course in only three
years, finishing in 1868. During this time her work began to be published,
and she was able to support herself with her writing. She married James
Steele Catherwood in December of 1877, and they moved to Oakford, Indiana.
In 1879, they moved to Indianapolis. During that time, Mrs. Catherwood
developed a friendship with James Whitcomb Riley, another influential Indiana
author. She was quite involved in literary circles in Indianapolis, and
was fairly prolific while living there. In 1882, the Catherwoods moved
to Hoopeston, Illinois, and in 1897, Mary moved to Chicago, where she lived
until her death in 1902. In an environmental context, Mary Catherwood's
works are of great importance because they provide descriptions of the
landscapes of an Indiana that once was. The drastic changes in the forest
and wetlands become apparent when reading her rich portrayals of the land
as it was a century and a half ago.
Mary Hartwell Catherwood: author, born in Luray, Ohio, 16 December, 1847. She was graduated at the Female college, Granville, Ohio, in 1868, and on 27 December, 1887, married James S. Catherwood, with whom she resides in Hoopeston, Illinois Mrs. Catherwood is the author of "Craque-o'-doom" (Philadelphia, 1881); "Rocky Fork "(Boston, 1882); " Old Caravan Days" (1884) ; " The Secrets at Roseladies" (1888) ; " The Romance of Dollard" (1889) and " The Bells of Ste. Anne" (1889). |
| George Catlin 1796-1872 |
North American Indians; Being Letters and
Notes on Their Manners, Customs, and Conditions, Written During Eight Years
Travel Amongst The Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America, 1832-1839.
2 volumes. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1926.  ~
If
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were the first white Americans to explore
the west half of the continent, from the Mississippi at St Louis to the
northwest Pacific coast, George Catlin travelled at least as many miles
on his journeys by canoe and horse from Minnesota and the Montana border
south to eastern Texas, as well as forays to the Gulf states and South
Carolina, seeking to record the Indians in paintings and journals. Taken
together, Catlin’s works constitute the first, last and only complete record
of the Plains Indians ever made at the height of their splendid culture,
so soon destroyed by traders’ liquor and disease, rapine and bayonets.
Because Catlin perceived his colourful subjects as human beings, worthy
of criticism and gentle ridicule as well as profound admiration, his people
are unromanticized and never stereotyped, neither in his paintings nor
in his prose.
See also Edward S. Curtis OTHER:
  |
  George
Catlin (1796-1872) journeyed west five times in the 1830s
to paint the Plains Indians and their way of life. Convinced that westward
expansion spelled certain disaster for native peoples, he viewed his Indian
Gallery as a way "to rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs."
Catlin was the first artist to record the Plains Indians in their own territories.
He admired them as the embodiment of the Enlightenment ideal of "natural
man," living in harmony with nature. But the more than 500 paintings in
the Indian Gallery also reveal the fateful encounter of two different cultures
in a frontier region undergoing dramatic transformation. When Catlin first
traveled west in 1830, the United States Congress had just passed the Indian
Removal Act, requiring Indians in the Southeast to resettle west of the
Mississippi River. This vast forced migration—as well as smallpox epidemics
and continuing incursions from trappers, miners, explorers, and settlers—created
pressures on Indian cultures to adapt or perish. Seeing the devastation
of many tribes, Catlin came to regard the frontier as a region of corruption.
He portrayed the nobility of these still-sovereign peoples, but he was
aware that he painted in sovereignty's twilight. By the late 1830s and
1840s, Catlin began displaying the Indian Gallery in eastern capitals and
in Europe, an advocate for the Indian way of life. Yet the challenge of
keeping his collection together and making ends meet led him to questionable
strategies. He courted audiences by presenting real Indians enacting war
dances. In effect, Catlin created the first Wild West show, with all its
compromising sensationalism and exploitation. Catlin lobbied the U.S. government
for patronage throughout his career, hoping Congress would purchase the
Indian Gallery as a legacy for future generations. Disappointed in this
goal, Catlin went bankrupt in 1852. A Philadelphia industrialist paid Catlin's
debts and acquired the Indian Gallery, and soon after Catlin's death, the
paintings were donated to the Smithsonian. Today Catlin's Indian Gallery
is recognized as a great cultural treasure, offering rare insight into
native cultures and a crucial chapter in American history. More than a
century after his death, Catlin remains the greatest portraitist of the
American Indians--and his art stands as the most realistic and memorable
record of Indian life before the age of the camera. |
From
The
Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs
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