Gone with the Wind

Terrific 90 percent of the time. Great performances by all, though the Clark Gable character doesn't stand up to a close look, nor does the love of Tara at the end.

Still, very few dull moments and lots of exciting ones. Well worth the time.

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Puppy, Story by George Saunders

PUPPY Dysfunctional family has puppy that they need to get rid of. Mom places ad; family is coming over. Description of family. Mom: husband changed from long-haired attractive to stooped old man. Husband: talks constantly of living on a farm and doing what needs to be done, though he never lived on a farm. Conversations together: Sell and move to Arizona, get hooked on phonics for kids, buying a car wash. . . wonderful randomness. Straight-laced suburbanite comes to look at puppy. Seems like she will buy it, even though she is repelled by house. (Dog turds on carpet, filthy.) She is proud of how accepting she is until she looks out window and sees white trash's son tied by harness to a tree. Reader knows he is a menace to himself, darting across I-90, for example. Suburban mother beats hasty retreat, leaving dog to be (probably) drowned by dad who does what has to be done. Suburbanite remembers her own pathetic ch...

Napoleon 14 Amiens

"Ambassadors are essentially spies with titles." Napoleon President of Italy . . . Peace treaty with England (Amiens) in March 1802, with Turkey in June 1802 . . . flawed peace treaty with England because there was no opening up of France for trade with England, infuriating the English who thought peace would mean trade. . . tourism, though--Brits come to Paris and admire Napoleon . . . British liberals enamored . . . Napoleon "consul for life" . . . lots of unsettled territories, Switzerland being the largest . . . Industrialization much greater in England than France . . . France in 1802 is about the same as England in 1780 as a manufacturing center . . . Napoleon is basically Anglophobic, complaining of any art work that celebrates English victories being shown in Louvre . . . peace unraveling . . . by 1803 . . . War May 18, 1803! . . . Louisiana Territory sold, advantageous to both parties. France gets money; USA gets land. France avoids possible war with ...

Napoleon, mainly Egyptian campaign.

Napoleon genuinely enjoyed being with his soldiers. He was modern in that he used praise to motivate. "Severe to officers, kindly to men" was his mantra. Tremendous memory--story of asking a minor minister how his two children were doing . . . he had met the minister once, ten years earlier. . . Admiration for Andrea Doria even though his star had fallen . . . Josephine "psychotic extravagence." Bona fide intellectual . . . the attack on Egypt included scientists, geologists, poets. It resulted in a 20 volume scholarly work on all things Egypt "Denon's Description l'Egypte (last remaining handwritten copy burned in the the Arab Spring uprising in December of 2011, along with 192,000 other books in a Cairo library) . . . In Malta, Napoleon immediately reformed the government, freed political prisoners, installed street lights, postal service, hospitals . . . generally well received by intellectuals as a liberator, hated by religious conservatives and...

Carl Deuker -- Books, Movies, TV

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