I just finished reading a book titled STRATA, by Laura Poppick. I don’t remember what tempted me to pick it up, and I still can’t understand why I did. Anytime it takes me two weeks to read a book with 241 pages, it tells me something. The something, is that technical works in fields like geology and anthropology are outside my sphere of interest. The first half dealt with how the earth became oxygenated over a period of billions of years. The final chapters finally struck a chord with me in that they covered catastrophic events that caused mass extinctions, and developments that led to the appearance of man. I most liked the final discussion on global warming and what happens. It confirmed my own theory that warming that takes millions of years to happen will occur no matter how much fossil fuel we burn.
Another thing I was able to learn is that Earth is a living thing and it often has hic-cups that move mountains, and releases gas much like we do. I also learned to appreciate the people who dedicate their lives to studying planet Earth. They are genuinely different but dedicated people.
It has been a long time since I last wrote a book review, mainly because writing one seems like a lot of work. I still read four books a month, except when I come across a whopper of 900-plus pages. In those rare instances, I count the one book as three. The last one I read was “A Column of Fire” by Ken Follet. This guy never writes anything shorter than 900 pages. He must be writing in his sleep. Follet has an impressive list of titles to his credit and most of them are hits; all of them historical. When he is not writing he is reading in the ancient stacks of medieval libraries to collect facts.
The last time I visited the library to find books, I came across a title that made me pull it off the shelf and put it in my book bag. “The Sunflower House” appealed to my garden instinct but surprised me. Written by Adriana Allegri, the only horticultural element in this book is in the title. The story takes place in WW II, during which I was born. The storyline is about a Nazi scheme to increase the population. They had the Hitler Youth movement for young men which was designed to make boys into little Hitlers, and Heinrich Himler dreamed up another wicked scheme to include girls. Himler chose unmarried girls who passed background checks to insure they were in no way Jewish.
The goal was to house and to indoctrinate girls into believing that their lives were dedicated to Hitler. The idea was to populate the country with pure blooded Aryan citizens. To accomplish his goal, the Sunflower House hosted parties to which only the finest blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan blooded soldiers from the SS Corps were invited. Nature took its course and many girls became pregnant after these parties. The children born were cared for by trained nurses and eventually given up for adoption to certified Aryan parents. Kids who did not make the cut were elevated to the third floor. If the third floor kids continued along the path of ill-treated spoiled brats, they were shipped to the laboratories of Heinrich Himler for God knows what. The program was so popular that several more homes were established all around Europe and many thousand children were added to Hitler’s dream. The girls at Sunflower House received medals for their participation. Bearing five kids earned a silver medal, six received gold, and eight received platinum.
The fictional portion of the story involves a nurse and an SS officer. Both of them are one-quarter Jewish, but no one knows it but them. Secretly, they save kids by smuggling them out of the country.
I just completed reading a book titled The Paris Girl. No, it is not about a fashion model or a perfume. This story is about a nineteen-year-old girl and her eighteen-year-old brother who formed a resistance group to outwit the Nazis during WWII. The story is genuine and written by the daughter of Andree Griotteray. The story takes place between 1939 and 1944 and depicts an idyllic life in France before and the horrors after the Nazi invasion until the Americans liberated France.
Aside from being a good narrative about her operations as a member of her brother Alaine’s resistance group, Orion, it describes living under the occupation of the Nazis. Life was not easy, but yet it was not terrible either. The Germans kept Paris untouched so they would have a playground to enjoy life as they plundered the rest of Europe. In the process of enjoying life, they used the French people as their slaves and treated them as such. The Nazis treated women differently, provided of course, that the women cooperated with them.
I found myself absorbed in this story because there is an element of intrigue when Andree transports messages from France to Spain. In one such vignette, Andree must transport gold coins from the Orion headquarters in South France back to Paris. The money would be used to pay for information. To avoid the Nazis from finding the coins if she is searched, she ingeniously sews the coins into a girdle and wears them to Paris. Andree continues her social life with boys throughout the war to avoid detection, but she avoids dating German soldiers.
The author relies heavily on Andree’s diaries, which she kept throughout her life. I give this story four stars.
Taylor Downing’s “The Army That Never Was” is a well-written book about how the British used deception to defeat Hitler’s army. By creating a fake army and then releasing information about it to double agents, Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Montgomery were able to pull a series of fast ones on Hitler and his boys. I found this story interesting, and it kept me reading. Maybe it is because I remember so much about WWII from newspaper accounts and Pathe newsreels. The facts seemed to be revealing. I was only six years old at the time and could barely read anything beyond Dick and Jane primers, but somehow I began following the war through the pictures posted in our daily newspaper the Sun Times.
Back in the day, many of us got our information by going to the Saturday Matinees and saw episodes of battles shown in the newsreels. The featured Western films did little to inform us of the wars. They did, however, show us many shooting matches between the good guys and the bad guys of the open range. Compared to today’s you tube videos of battle the nineteen forties newsreel’s were tame. They were, however, effective in communicating messages about war. When I began reading this book, it triggered flashbacks of my childhood memories.
A new piece of history that I learned was that Eisenhower had to fire Patton several times during the war. Evidently, Patton had issues with soldiers who he thought did not fight. While visiting injured troops in hospitals he encountered soldiers who were not physically injured and wound up slapping them and accused them of being cowards. Another time he exhibited his hatred for jews while fighting against the Nazis who were slaughtering jews. Eisenhower regretted disciplining him, but had to do so. The commander also regarded Patton as one of the best generals in the army. After firing him the first time, Eisenhower put Patton in charge of the army that never was and Patton performed admirably.
Since 2006, Americans have bought over 105 million cars. However, since Covid, sales have dropped to one-third of what they were in 2006. The average number of vehicles per year is over six million. I assume that they are all still on the road and working. My numbers will be low because a significant number of used vehicles are still running and will run for many years to come. We have over four million miles of roads; at times, we experience gridlock and wish we had more. The point I am making is that there are over 25 cars per mile on every road in the country. At first that sounds like a low number, but my guess is that twenty years ago we only had 12 cars per mile. As the years progress and the reliability of cars is improved, more and more of them will strike out and be on the roads.
As a personal observation, as I walk around the neighborhood, I see an increase in the number of cars people park in front of their homes. In one example, I have seen one house with two cars in the garage and four more on the driveway. As families grow, so does their need for transport grow. It is not unusual for families with several high-school-age kids to provide a car for each. Several cars in a family lighten the burden of transporting them to sporting and club events by providing each child with his own transportation appliance. They do the same with cell phones using the argument that the parent wants the child to report his extracurricular activities. What this does is create a new “rush hour.” There was always the morning and the evening rush, now we have the mid-afternoon rush created by teachers and students leaving school. The traffic never seems to end or lighten.
I recently read a book titled City Limits, Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways.‘
The author argued that while we approve of cities widening their roads and adding capacity to allow traffic to flow more smoothly through the town, this only works for a short time. As more people become aware of the faster ride home, they flock to the new road, which becomes jammed as severely as the old one did. On top of that, the area of property taken to make the wide road displaces people and fosters more homelessness. Ultimately, the argument heads toward the need for more public transportation.
One of my recollections of boyhood concerns public transport. In the early fifties, Chicago had a large, well-run public transport system. We were only two blocks from a trolley stop, and walking to the stop was never a problem. As a young boy, I could hop on the trolley, drop my nickel into the box, and ask for a transfer. The transfer was good for several hours; with it, I could traverse the city from north to south and east to west.
The trolleys took their power from overhead electrical wires, thus avoiding any pollution. The trolleys called Red Rockets were painted red and yellow. Most had entry at the front next to the motorman, and longer trolleys had an additional portal two-thirds the way back, often supervised by a second conductor. As time progressed and we evolved the trolleys were replaced by the Green Hornets. They were the same functionally, but were faster, had more comfortable seats, and more hand holds for people that had to stand. I recall reading about a couple of horrible trolley collisions with vehicles and fires which caused many deaths. The cry for safer transport evolved into another type of vehicle that did not use tracks. The idea was that these bus like vehicles could avoid collisions easier because they were not restricted to the tracks. They were, however powered by electricity routed through the same overhead wires. Another leap in evolution came when the electric driven buses were replaced by diesel powered ones. The ugly, overhead wires were stripped from the routes and replaced by the black smoke of the diesels. All along, the price of a ride kept growing and the number of busses running were diminished to the point where it was faster to walk to where you were going. It was certainly faster to drive. After WWII the availability of personal cars boomed and the need for public transport kept shrinking. It has never disappeared but the practicality of running a system in 2024 like the one we had in 1945 is severely limited.
The future of public transportation will evolve into self-driving electric modules that come to your home and drive you to your destination. The highways will be rebuilt to become transport paths with electrical pickups that the modules will use for power. Traffic will be computer-monitored and controlled.
Although drone technology sounds great, they will not be practical for commuting. Imagine as many drones in the air headed for the same place as there are cars today.
I will never live long enough to see that evolution in service. Instead, I will live constantly complaining about awful traffic and over-crowded roads.
