Sipsey Street Irregulars: A visit to my favorite bookstore.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

A visit to my favorite bookstore.

On the rare occasions I get back to Ohio, I always stop in at The Village Bookshop in Linworth north of Columbus. This year on the way out of town headed back to Alabama with my Mom's Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket, I picked up the following:

Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans by T.R. Fehrenbach. Fehrenbach's history of the Korean War, This Kind of War, is one of my top twenty favorite books so I can't wait to delve into Lone Star. I also looked for Fehrenbach's Comanches: The History of a People, but they didn't have it. One of my favorite quotes from This Kind of War:

"Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life — but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud.”

The other titles I got for myself:

The Night of the Long Knives: Forty-Eight Hours That Changed the History of the World by Paul R. Maracin.

1938: Hitler's Gamble by Giles MacDonogh.

And Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes.

In no case did I pay more than six bucks each for any of them. THAT'S what I love about The Village Bookshop.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: Oh no! are you trying to get the bookstore shut down and harassed like the army surplus store had to endure?; December 2, 2013 at 9:13 AM
Average Moke said...: Mr. Vanderbouegh, I was able to get ( this was a few years ago) the most popular non fiction book in America during World War Two for 10 cents ?!, at one of the local second hand stores. One that was printed during the War. Used book stores have all kinds of great stuff :) http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/177-1046698-8106768?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=under%20cover%20roy%20d%20carlson; December 2, 2013 at 3:18 PM
Anonymous said...: FYI Fehrenbach died yesterday. Heard it on the local Texas news this morning.; December 2, 2013 at 5:25 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Sunday, December 1, 2013

A visit to my favorite bookstore.

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