Buy Lunesta No Prescription
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Buy Lunesta No Prescription, Up north, whenever I could get out of the store I'd go out on the desert--lots of big ranches up there--and ride after cattle. I liked it and it kept my blood running; but down here I didn't even have a store to try to get out of. I'd sit in the cafe and rechew the newspapers, Buy Lunesta in canada, and when I couldn't take it any more of that I'd go out and drive my pickup around on these desert roads, which are all straight as strings and numbered A to Z in one direction (running east to west) and 1 to 100 in the other, with every tenth one laid right along the section line; easy to find your way wherever you wanted to go, but I didn't know where that was, australia, uk, us, usa, canada, mexico, india, craiglist, ebay, paypal. After a couple of weeks I began to think, "Well, Buy Lunesta online cod, if this is heaven I've had enough of it," and I decided to go out and shop for a horse.
Max Schott has published just four slim books--barely 700 pages put together--in the space of 30 years. Even at that, he'd probably claim Pascal's shortcoming ("I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter"), Buy Lunesta No Prescription.
Though he taught for over thirty years as a member of the English faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara, rx free Lunesta, horses, not words, Purchase Lunesta online, were Schott's first love. A Santa Barbara native, as a kid he dreamed of being a cowboy. When he was able to head out on his own, order Lunesta, he headed for the high desert country, where he learned to train horses and started competing on the rodeo circuit. Where can i buy Lunesta online, He lived the life of a modern cowpoke for close to fifteen years before deciding it wasn't how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Buy Lunesta No Prescription, So he headed back to Santa Barbara, got his degrees, earned a spot on the faculty, and settled in for a life of teaching and writing.
His first book, a collection of short stories published through much of the 1970s, Up Where I Used to Live, buy Lunesta from mexico, came out from the University of Illinois Press in 1978. It was part of the Illinois Short Fiction series, Where can i order Lunesta without prescription, a noteworthy series that published some of the best short story writers of the 1970s and 1980s--Jean Thompson, Barry Targan, Kent Nelson, Andrew Fetler, Lunesta for sale, H. E. Buy no prescription Lunesta online, Francis, among others. Schott's stories drew on his experiences with horses and rodeos, but what drew me in when I first read them shortly after the book came out was his tone: spare, dry, self-effacing, a bit tired, and mildly amused at the world's foolishness, Buy Lunesta No Prescription.
Most of Schott's stories are told in the first person. His narrators come from the world of horses, Lunesta pharmacy, ranches, and large, Buy Lunesta without a prescription, sparse, dry places. Schott's diction perfectly matches his characters: simple, laconic, buy cheapest Lunesta, but with a sly grin. This is a world where the last thing a man'd want to be know as is talkative. Buy Lunesta No Prescription, Better to keep your mouth shut than to run on like a woman. Online buying Lunesta, Hell, even the women in Schott's world are careful with their words. It's a world where words are like water--something you don't waste.
This might explain why Schott has published so little, buy Lunesta online no prescription. But not why he's barely known outside a lucky circle of loyal readers. After all, he had a shot at the big time when his first novel, Murphy's Romance (1980), was adapted and filmed by Martin Ritt, Buy Lunesta No Prescription. Unfortunately for Schott, Where can i buy cheapest Lunesta online, Ritt quickly disposed with most of the story and setting and created a largely new narrative from the remnants. Ritt kept the title, which might at least have pulled in a few unsuspecting readers for Schott's book, but there was no movie tie-in reprint, Lunesta price.
Murphy's Romance grew out of "The Old Flame," one of the stories in Up Where I Used to Live. Online buy Lunesta without a prescription, The title is actually a bit of fun on Schott's part. Buy Lunesta No Prescription, Murphy Jones, a rancher retired to Pearblossom, California after some decades in eastern Oregon, briefly considers romancing Toni Wilson, a no-nonsense and very independent horse trainer, but ends up marrying her aunt Margaret instead. Though Murphy narrates the book, most of the story is about Toni's turbulent engagement and marriage to Ben Webber, a rodeo vet in his fifties, Lunesta over the counter.
Schott carried the story forward--or backwards, rather--in his second novel, Buy Lunesta no prescription, Ben. He takes us back to Ben Webber's first marriage, which was even stormier, but this time we hear the story from Max, order Lunesta from mexican pharmacy, a young man probably close to Schott's own age when he first got into the horse business. We're still in the world of horses and tough men and women. Even when Ben gets drunk and throws up, Max notes that he has enough self control to do it "all neatly, like a man who knew how." In the book, Max has to deal with the death of his mother from cancer, but fenced in by the likes of Ben and the other horse men, there's little risk of getting into anything too sentimental, Buy Lunesta No Prescription. Lunesta from canadian pharmacy, The only thing gooey in the book is a body accidentally tossed under a bronco's hooves.
All three books manage to pack a great deal into very slim packages. "Just a chip, then, where can i find Lunesta online, this little book--but gold all the way through," Kirkus Reviews wrote of Murphy's Romance, Order Lunesta online c.o.d, and the same could be said of Up Where I Used to Live and Ben. Throughout all his fiction, Schott creates remarkably rich and subtle characterizations with the slightest of strokes. Buy Lunesta No Prescription, The art is all in making it seem completely artless. If he'd lived in Japan he would probably have become a Zen master, buy generic Lunesta.
His most recent book, Keeping Warm: Essays and Stories, Buy cheap Lunesta no rx, published in 2004 by the Santa Barbara-based John Daniel and Company, collects short pieces from magazines and newspapers published over the course of the last thirty years. His most intimate piece in the book, "Diary About My Father, purchase Lunesta online no prescription," collects reflections on his father's life and Schott's relationship with him, and reveals that that same spare, Order Lunesta no prescription, understated voice heard throughout his fiction is Schott's own:
He died two years ago today. At about two in the morning, so that to us it seemed like the night of the day before--which was five years to the day after Mom died.After being ill for how long, fifty years, Buy Lunesta No Prescription. Sixty, Lunesta samples. She slipped away so easily.
A few years ago, if someone had said to me, "He behaved towards her like a saint," I would've said, or wanted to say, "Yes, but I don't like saints." But now it seems to me that the truth is much simpler. No saint, but a man in a situation not of his own making, he did as well as he could.
I think most of Schott's horsemen would be happy to have that last sentence for their epitaphs.
We might not see another book from Schott, who's now in his late seventies. But any of the ones he's already written will do as well as any could to convey his uniquely Western voice and outlook. Forget the movie of "Murphy's Romance"--do yourself a favor and find the book instead.
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August 25th, 2010
The History and Social Influence of the Potato, by Redcliffe N. Salaman
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The people were famished; to sow their usual crops, was but to invite their destruction. Every seed crop, be it oats or barley, rye or wheat, might be trampled over and ruined in a day; if it escaped that hazard, the garnered harvest might be raided or burnt overnight. The vegetable crops, cabbage and parsnip, were no less vulnerable, at best they were but auxiliary foods, and there was never much of either. It was under such conditions that the potato made its entry into Ireland. Its greedy acceptance by the people was no mere accident, for it satisfied their needs as efficiently as it symbolized their helpless destruction.... In the potato, the weary and harassed cultivator had to his hand a food which was easier to prepare than any of which he had had experience; one which would feed him, his children and his livestock, out of the same cauldron, cooked on his open hearth of burning turves. There was, I believe, a still greater advantage which it offered: the potato could both be cultivated and stored in a manner which might outwit the spirit of destruction, and the malevolence of his enemy.Weighing it at nearly 700 pages, Redcliffe Salaman's The History and Social Influence of the Potato, first published in 1949 and updated with corrections and an introduction by J. G. Hawkes in 1985, is truly, as one reviewer put it, "the Epic of the potato." Salaman, a Fellow of the Royal Society who ran a botanical research center near Cambridge for decades, put a life's worth of passion for his subject into this polymathic book. Published when Salaman was seventy-five, it was his only book intended for other than an audience of fellow scientists. Although I doubt that Salaman was aware of their work as he was writing his book, it represents one of the earliest substantial examples of the multi-dimensional approaches to history advocated by the Annales School and its proponents such as Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. Its pages examine the potato from the standpoint of many different disciplines: archaeology, botany, economics, folklore, religion, cuisine, politics, agronomy, and art--with history providing the narrative spine of his account. And I am sure that more than of the few writers who have attempted similar broad studies of narrow subjects, particularly foodstuffs--such as Mark Kurlansky's Cod
and Salt
, Dan Koeppel's Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
, and Sophie and Michael Coe's The True History of Chocolate
--have taken a lesson or two from it. Larry Zuckerman, author of The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World
, and John Reader, who published Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent
in 2009 certainly did. Indeed one reviewer of Reader's book commented that it cites Salaman "so frequently, and leans on Salaman’s research so heavily, that it is sometimes difficult to imagine why he felt the need to write his own book on the subject at all."
While, as Hawkes acknowledges in his introduction, many specific conclusions reached by Salaman in the course of his survey have been disproved by subsequent research, The History and Social Influence of the Potato remains, after sixty years, a work that surrounds its subject so comprehensively that there is no way for others to launch an assault on the subject without encountering it in one way or another.
August 22nd, 2010
Wait for Mrs. Willard, by Dorothy Langley
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After enjoying Dorothy Langley's third novel, Mr. Bremble's Buttons, I was pleased to find that her first, Wait for Mrs. Willard
is available as a free text on the Internet Archive. I quickly downloaded a copy and read it a few days ago on my Nook.
In many ways the two novels form a matched set. In Mr. Bremble's Buttons, a weak man with a rich imagination finds refuge from an unhappy marriage in fantasies that include conversations with God. In Wait for Mrs. Willard, a gentle woman searches for ways to escape her husband's stifling controls upon her life. Henry Bremble finds himself constantly on trial for his failings with his wife, Amelia, and her mother as judge and jury. Edith Willard's husband, Charles, thinks so little of her judgment that Charles refuses to allow her to keep her own library card for fear of the fines she might incur from overdue books. But Bremble does at least acknowledge that while Amelia's efforts towards her various charitable causes lacked empathy, they were usually successful. Charles Willard is nothing but a pusillanimous petty tyrant.
When he loses his job as a professor of archaeology at the start of the Depression, Charles' response is to retire to his bedroom. His self-absorbed despair gradually drains Edith's will to fight for the family:
Mrs. Willard had formed a bleak habit of making a daily definite report of the state of the larder to Charles, who groaned. It had become a dreary routine; at five o'clock in the afternoon Mrs. Willard would appear at his bedroom door and announce that there was only enough food left for six days, or five days, or four days; Charles would groan, and Mrs. Willard would go down to the kitchen to cook dinner. She did not know what her purpose was in pursuing this course; she no longer really hoped to rouse him. Her mind was like a sailing vessel becalmed for years in some impossible sea and beginning to decay.Finally, there comes a day when there is nothing left for supper and the children will go to bed hungry. While Charles hibernates in self-pity, Edith rouses herself and manages to sell an encyclopedia to an equally destitute family. It's a hauntingly memorable scene, as Edith struggles between her awareness that the family cannot afford the book and her will to see her children fed. Charles and Edith eventually manage to find jobs and maintain a household, but Charles concedes nothing to Edith's ability to keep the family afloat. Indeed, he deeply resents the short time he has to look after their two children before she returns from work. One evening, she finds him raging at them for bouncing on a bed and she resolves to take them and leave Charles for good the next day. As she walks with the children to the elevated station the next day, however, she is surprised to find them disraught: "Poor Daddy!," they wail, and her plan is soon aborted. As difficult as Charles alone is, when he combines forces with his Aunt Gertrude, who comes to live with them, the atmosphere becomes almost unbearable:
She was a firmly corseted fat woman with a paradoxically hatchetlike face surmounting a medley of graduated chins. She greeted Charles with warmth, Mrs. Willard with resignation, and the children with open dislike. Her eyes, bright, black, and penetrating, darted like roaches toward the corners of the baseboard in whatever room she entered. Mrs. Willard, a casual housekeeper, told herself with dismal conviction that within three days Aunt Gertrude would be down on her knees digging at these comers with a hairpin and displaying the results to Charles. This was a too-conservative estimate. Within twenty-four hours Mrs. Schnabel had virtually taken over the house-keeping. She lived from morning to night with a dusting cloth in her hand, and Mrs. Willard and the children were literally hounded from room to room as she urged them out of the way of her passionate cleansings.Edith suppresses her revulsion for the sake of the children, but after years of bearing with Charles' and Gertrude's judgment and belittling (compounded when her supervisor, Miss Motherhead, turns out to be a good friend of Gertrude's), her patience snaps one day and she decides to run away, taking the first bus out of Chicago. The bus is involved in a serious accident before it even reaches the city limits, though, and Charles appears at her bedside full of tender concern:
"Not only have you forced me into the dishonor of misrepresenting the facts to your employers and to my own children," continued Charles, "not only have you flouted my authority as head of the family by proposing to go on a trip without consulting me; not only have you insulted me as your husband, forgotten your duty to your home and your children, humiliated me before Aunt Gertrude, and made yourself ridiculous by flying off the handle like a half-baked schoolgirl, but you have actually been guilty of a criminal act. You took money that did not belong to you, money from our common fund, which should have been sacred to you. Do you know what that is called, my dear?" He smiled, showing his teeth. "That is called theft. Theft."Fortunately, Edith is rescued by doctor's orders that she spent two months recuperating at a small resort in the Indiana dunes. Charles confines himself to an occasion nasty letter, and she soon responds to the fresh air, hearty food, and freedom. And, most conveniently, to the care of Dr. Alec Maclane, who shows an unusual level of interest in her case. At this point, Wait for Mrs. Willard
falls into a fairly familiar formula of two wounded souls finding solace in the sanctuary of a place apart from their everyday lives (viz. the 1975 film "A Brief Vacation", among others). Edith wins the love and acceptance she has long deserved and Charles, we are left to assume, carries on with Aunt Gertrude in smug superiority until they both crawl up their rears and die.
Despite its final surrender to a predictable happy ending, Wait for Mrs. Willard is, overall, a far better-crafted and successful work than Mr. Bremble's Buttons. While it's pleasant to watch as Edith and Dr. Maclane fall in love, the story is much more interesting and entertaining in the trials and miseries of the first two-thirds of the book. Langley pulls out her best adjectives to deal with Charles, Gertrude, and other monsters such as Miss Motherhead (who, "... like some slit-lidded saurian of the wild, oozed up over the edges of her littered desk and across to some other desk, bearing disaster and swollen with punctual venom").
A masterpiece Wait for Mrs. Willard is not. A well-written, quick-reading, and enjoyable piece blending drama and comedy without overdoing either, it certainly is, and considering its going price if you download it from the Internet Archive--free--an excellent bargain.
Find a Copy
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- Find it at Amazon.co.uk: Mr. Bremble's Buttons
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Wait for Mrs. Willard, by Dorothy Langley
New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1944
August 16th, 2010
Morale, by John Baynes
[Permalink] "This book is an attempt to fill a gap," John Baynes writes in his introduction to Morale, his classic study of the 2nd Scottish Rifles in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. "In all the mass of histories, studies, memoirs, biographies and novels which have been published about the First World War little has been done to investigate the most interesting field of all--the morale of the front-line soldier."
Had Baynes attempted a sweeping study of morale in general, or even morale in combat, or even of morale in combat on the Western Front, I doubt that anyone would remember his book. But Baynes recognized early on that "the subject is too big":
I decided that I would rather stick to something small and try to get near the truth, and being a Regular serving officer in the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) I naturally chose to study my own Regiment. I decided to look at one battalion in one battle--the 2nd Battalion at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, 9 to 15 March 1915. This battalion, which always referred to itself as the 2nd Scottish Rifles and did not normally use the name Cameronians, started the battle about nine hundred strong on 9 March. Six days later it came out of action. By this time the hundred and fifty men left were commanded by the sole surviving officer, a 2nd Lieutenant.In approaching his subject, Baynes is guided by Edmund Blunden's admonition in his poem, "Victorians": "... read first, and fully shape/The diagram of life which governed them." The officers and other ranks of the 2nd Scottish Rifles, as he carefully pieces together the "diagram" of their life, are particular, not representative men. He begins by introducing us to the battalion as it stood, garrisoned on Malta, at the start of the war. It numbered about a thousand officers and men--large enough a unit to be self-sufficient by the standards of the day, small enough for there to be a strong level of familiarity among the members--fewer than thirty in total--of the officers' mess, among the NCOs--roughly fifty--and among the men in each of the four companies. The battalion was somewhat exception in that it came late for a Regular Army unit to the front, having spent some years in the relative isolation of Malta. The men averaged over five years' service. The routines of garrison life--the day in, day out grind of inspection, drill, and firing practice--was certainly monotonous and unwelcoming to the imagination, but as Baynes shows, it was remarkably effective in reinforcing the men's "bloody-mindedness":
When using the term I do not mean a surly refusal to do what is ordered but a refusal to give way to conditions which might be expected to make a man sour. It has an element of rebellion in it, of course, but the rebelling is not so much against authority as against difficult circumstances. As things get worse the man with this quality becomes more determined to stick them out.The battalion's six days in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle put its bloody mindedness to an exceptional test. After marching up to the front trenches through the night of 9-10 March, it stood, waiting, for over two hours, until the artillery fell silent and the attack began. It was a classic example of the disastrous tactic of sending hundreds of men clambering over the top:
Almost at the same moment came another noise: the whip and crack of the enemy machine-guns opening up with deadly effect. From the intensity of their fire, and its accuracy, it was clear that the shelling had not been as effective as expected. Worse than its lack of effect on the enemy was the fact that it had scarcely touched the wire. Instead of being broken up, the wire and the thick hedge looked just the same as they had before the bombardment.The attack began at 8:05 AM. By 9:30 AM, all but two officers were dead or wounded, and over thirty of the NCOs. Three hundred fifty or so of the other ranks were killed or wounded. They had managed to advance about a three hundred meters. Further assaults during the day were able to secure the German's front line of trenches, but progress stopped after that. By the afternoon of 12 March, General Haig, then commanding the First Army, issued orders to "push through regardless of loss, using reserves if required." Unfortunately, the 2nd Scottish Rifles had no reserves by then, and as Baynes remarks, "From here the story of the battle becomes a sorry tale, except for the courage, willingness, and effort of the soldiers who tried to do the impossible." On the night of 14-15 March, 2nd Lieutenant Somervail and one senior NCO led one hundred forty-three men back to their billets. Baynes completes his account of the battle and his assessment of its significance (he calls it "a failure but not a waste" in that it demonstrated the combat integrity of the British forces in the first major offensive action after the stalemate of the previous fall) by page 91 of the book. Then the most interesting material begins.
Over the next seven chapters, he focuses on the battalion and the various factors that reinforced--or undermined--its ability to remain intact, on duty, and engaged in the battle for over four days after losing over three-fourths of its men. He describes the officers, who sat roughly half-way up the social and economic hierarchy of the Regular Army. They came from upper middle class families and good schools but not great wealth. They believed in sport and maintaining existing values and social distinctions. They were not bullies or martinets, however, and the worst thing one could say of a fellow officer was that he didn't take care of his men.
The NCOs and other ranks came from poor working class areas in Glasgow and the surrounding Lanarkshire. The Army was generally considered a step up in the world:
One could almost say that for them the whole of their lives had been a conditioning for the trenches. As children they had learnt to live happily with so many of the things that made life at the front unbearable for those reared in gentler surrounding. Cold, ragged clothes, dirt, lice and fleas, bad food, hard beds, overcrowding, rats, ugly surroundings; these were nothing new to someone whose boyhood had been passed in a Glasgow slum.Duty in the Army brought order and cleanliness to his life, a healthier diet, and regular exercise. The Army--particularly in the person of his Sergeant--was interested in him: "people cared whether he wore his uniform correctly, whether he progressed in his training, and whether he was a credit to the Regiment." The Regiment, in fact, was, according to Baynes, "the quintessence of the morale of the pre-1914 Army." Discipline and drill were also significant factors. Maintaining a marksman's rating was one of the few ways in which a private could make a little more money, and hours were spent every week in "pokey drill"--loading and unloading dummy rounds to increase firing speed. Many British Army regulars achieved such a rate of fire that the Germans believed their battalions were equipped with dozens of machine guns (they averaged two guns per battalion, in fact). The strength of the class system prior to the war was another factor. The officers and men of the 2nd Scottish Rifles came from a world in which class structure and the inherent right of the more privileged to command those in the lower classes was accepted. Many writers have argued that the experience of combat on the Western Front, particularly the relentless years of futile "over the top" attacks, ultimately undermined this acceptance, leading to strikes and the rise of the Labour Party afterwards. But in the early days, when the battalion marched into its first battle, class was, Baynes argues, a greater factor in morale than religion, morals, or patriotism. Since its first publication in 1967, Morale has come to be recognized as an essential text on its subject. Although only reprinted once, in 1987, you can find it cited in numerous articles in British, American, Canadian, French, and even Israeli military journals. To use it as a guide for dealing with the morale of combat troops in other situations, though, is, I think, a mistake. One could never--should never--attempt to reproduce the factors that enabled the 2nd Scottish Rifles to remain intact through devastating losses. What makes Morale a book worth rediscovering is not its value as a source of instruction but its high merit as an attempt by one author to deeply understand his subject. Although examining the battalion's morale provided Baynes with the motivation to undertake this book, I would argue that its greatest value is in offering an exceptional example of reconstructing, in Blunden's words, "the diagram of life" which governed a particular group of men in a particular time and a particular situation. This is the kind of history that helps remind us that, as David McCullough puts it, people in that past "didn't live in the past": "They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality and you don't understand that unless you understand the culture." And for understanding the culture of the Regular British Army at the start of the First World War, I can recommend no book more highly than John Baynes' Morale.
- Find it at Amazon.com: Morale
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Morale: A Study of Men and Courage--The Second Scottish Rifles at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle 1915, by John Baynes
London: Cassell, 1967
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