The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

This is the newest book from my favorite historian, David McCullough: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. I wonder if he has a chapter on Sam.

Does "Heroe" mean it's about a woman?

Thus the photo of John Wooden!

bobc33 wrote:
W, It is always (somewhat) funny to log on in the morning and see posts I made that I don't remember making. I take a full strength ambien around midnight, and any posts made after that are from when I've gotten out of bed, came downstairs and turned on the computer and checked this and other sites. Guess it is better than going for a ride in the car.

Overview on Forgotten Heroes (I left out the s)
"Historians and biographers regularly come across stories of little-known or forgotten heroes, and this book provides a chance to rescue some of the best of them. In Forgotten Heroes, thirty-five of the country's leading historians recount their favorite stories of underappreciated Americans. From Stephen Jay Gould on deaf baseball player Dummy Hoy; to William Leuchtenburg on the truth behind the legendary Johnny Appleseed; to Christine Stansell on Margaret Anderson, who published James Joyce's Ulysses; these portraits can be read equally for delight, instruction, and inspiration. Forgotten Heroes includes nearly as many women as men, and nearly as many people from before 1900 as after. It expands the traditional definition of hero to encompass not only military figures and politicians who took risks for great causes, but also educators, religious leaders, reformers, labor leaders, publishers, athletes, and even a man who started a record company. "

bobc,

Have you considered medical auto-hypnosis to help you sleep, rather than Ambien?

bob

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worcester wrote:This is the newest book from my favorite historian, David McCullough: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. I wonder if he has a chapter on Sam.

worcester,

I loved McCullough's book on John Adams. If this book is an expansion on that (and of Ben Franklin's and Thomas Jefferson's and John Jay's) time there, I would guess that Sam's chapter will be towards the end of the book. :-)

Right now, I'm on a "thriller" marathon (Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, WEB Griffin). Good mindless shoot-up-the-bad-guys-for-the-good-old-USofA stuff. I'm also listening to a tape by Andrew Weil MD and Steven Gurgevich PHD on self-healing using medical hypnosis. I don't really have much to heal at this time (a kvetch here and a kvetch there) but I see a number of other applications where this discipline might be useful. After this, I might get some tapes on "remote viewing". I'd love to hear any and all of suggestions and/or thoughts you might have on any of this. I have always found your offerings to be educational, informative and very well researched and substantiated.

I just learned my sister has Rheumatoid Arthritis. In addition to consulting closely with an MD, she is also very knowledgeable about alternative healing approaches. In fact, she's the one who sent me the tape I mentioned above. She is now staying aware from members of the Nightshade family (for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I am not referring to a restraining order against a Mafia famillia).

bob

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Worcester and others,

I'll be particularly interested in what McCullough has to say about the publishing of Ulysses. Apparently he claims it was published by Anderson in her inspired literary magazine, The Little Review. And she did, in fact, publish 13 chapters of Ulysses in her magazine, most American copies of which appear to have been burned at the border on obscenity grounds by the U.S. Post Office Department.

But I have to believe Anderson might not even have heard about the book had it not been for the original publishing job Sylvia Beach accomplished from her Paris bookshop named Shakespeare & Company. For several of Joyce's struggling years, Sylvia was mother confessor, financial support system, literary mentor and frequent landlord for James Joyce. Sylvia (like Anderson later on) developed a fierce appreciation of what Joyce was attempting to accomplish with Unlysees. When no one else would touch the book, she personally typed the manuscript (nearly going blind in the process) and published it while going into hock to do so.

While Anderson's later attempts at bringing excerpts from the book to the U.S. were pretty much thwarted by the U.S. Postal Service, Sylvia responded to a similar fate of her entire book by inventing an ingenious, albeit deliberate, way of getting the book into the U.S. She hired a man in Canadat to make countless trips across the border to the U.S., while carrying copies of Ulysses in his pants.

An interesting postscript is that, even when Joyce became rich from the proceeds of books like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, he never shared any of that wealth with Sylvia, who lived hand-to-mouth practically throughout her life as what historian Hugh Ford termed, "probably the best-known woman in Paris...certainly one of the important figures in contemporary letters...America's single most important literary outpost in Europe.

Perhaps I'm not giving Anderson enough credit, which is why I look forward to reading McCullough's "take." But he's potentially treading on hallowed ground if he's giving short shrift to one of my heroes. He might as well say Sam Jones was a choker, Frank Sinatra couldn't carry a tune, E.B. Write couldn't string together three words, Mel Blanc was a dour stiff, or Oscar Levant had wooden fingers.

No, McCullough would never have a chapter on me. But my wife and I devote much of a chapter in our Paris book (now carried by the current incarnation of Shakespeare and Company) to Sylvia Beach. In fact, our book is dedicated to Sylvia and two more contemporary owners of Shakespeare and Company as "spiritual shepherds of the literary flock in the City of Enlightenment."

For more background on Sylvia and Margaret, http://tinyurl.com/2v255qd

Sam

Sam, Don't worry. Thanks to you, I will always give Sylvia Beach the credit she deserves in promoting Joyce's career.

McCullough did not write "Forgotten Heroes" and I don't know if he even touches on Joyce, Sylvia, and Anderson in his book...there was SO much to cover, he said in yesterday's C Span show. It took him 10 years to write because there was just so much there.

Did you know that Samuel B. Morse was a great painter first - his Lafayette hangs in the Library of Congress - and while studying art in Paris he mingled with French scientists who inspired him to invent the telegraph?

Or that Roebling's son went to Paris to study the French technique of building caissons so he and his father could construct the Brooklyn Bridge, another testament to the French architectural influence in NYC, besides the Statue of Liberty?
I think McCullough started the Greater Journey with all the material he uncovered writing his John Adams masterpiece.

Bob, McCullough is my favorite contemporary American historian. Truman, John Adams, and 1776 were all simply scrumptious. What feasts for any ravenous intellect. I haven't started Greater Journey yet because - quite coincidentally - I too have been on an an American Thriller Marathon. First I read all of Tom Clancy's stuff, the WEB Griffin, the all of Brad Thor, and now I'm on my fifth Vince Flynn Matt Rapp novel. I too love that "Good mindless shoot-up-the-bad-guys-for-the-good-old-USofA stuff."

They're a welcome break from my more serious endeavors, writing books on Chinese medicine. I got a green light from China's largest medical publisher - the People's Medical Publishing House - who plan to print my Acupuncture Works - the Proof and to translate it into 6 languages! They have also invited me to do 3 more books. So I'm both thrilled and busy with that stuff - an inferior but adequate replacement for watching Celtics games.

Worcester, Mitch Rapp has entertained us on tape on several trips to Florida. Very very cool!

But nothing's as cool as getting your works translated into six languages. Heartiest congratulations. It proves that good things can happen to good people.

Sam

Thanks Sam, but I'm wondering how many people actually speak Urdu and Uighur.

worcester wrote:Sam, Don't worry. Thanks to you, I will always give Sylvia Beach the credit she deserves in promoting Joyce's career.

McCullough did not write "Forgotten Heroes" and I don't know if he even touches on Joyce, Sylvia, and Anderson in his book...there was SO much to cover, he said in yesterday's C Span show. It took him 10 years to write because there was just so much there.

Did you know that Samuel B. Morse was a great painter first - his Lafayette hangs in the Library of Congress - and while studying art in Paris he mingled with French scientists who inspired him to invent the telegraph?

Or that Roebling's son went to Paris to study the French technique of building caissons so he and his father could construct the Brooklyn Bridge, another testament to the French architectural influence in NYC, besides the Statue of Liberty?
I think McCullough started the Greater Journey with all the material he uncovered writing his John Adams masterpiece.

Bob, McCullough is my favorite contemporary American historian. Truman, John Adams, and 1776 were all simply scrumptious. What feasts for any ravenous intellect. I haven't started Greater Journey yet because - quite coincidentally - I too have been on an an American Thriller Marathon. First I read all of Tom Clancy's stuff, the WEB Griffin, the all of Brad Thor, and now I'm on my fifth Vince Flynn Matt Rapp novel. I too love that "Good mindless shoot-up-the-bad-guys-for-the-good-old-USofA stuff."

They're a welcome break from my more serious endeavors, writing books on Chinese medicine. I got a green light from China's largest medical publisher - the People's Medical Publishing House - who plan to print my Acupuncture Works - the Proof and to translate it into 6 languages! They have also invited me to do 3 more books. So I'm both thrilled and busy with that stuff - an inferior but adequate replacement for watching Celtics games.

worcester,

I read Clancy's most recent also. I have become increasingly dissillusioned with him because I've seen a pattern that I also just saw in a Clive Cussler book. What they do is they "co-author" a book with someone else. What I see, when I read those books and compare them to prior books which were not co-authored, is that the writing is inferior and the style is slightly off. Add to this the Netforce and Op-Center series by Clancy where he openly admits someone else writes it (e.g. Tom Clancy's Op-Center, written by Steve Pieczenik) and I'm starting to smell a fraud. Put Clancy's name in big letters while someone else does the hard and time-consuming part of actually writing. I didn't read Clancy just for his characters, like Jack Ryan, I read him because I liked his writing style.

I think I've read every Mitch Rapp book, except for the most recent. I just read Brad Thor's most recent. I think I'm coming close to petering out on WEB Griffin (I just finished The Outlaws, and it's getting less and less realistic every second as the plots slide degree by degree more out-of-true in order to maintain the original cast and premises).

Congratulations on your publishing success. Who reads Urdu and Uighur? Well, presumably practicioners of Chinese medicine. To be honest, I'd be a lot more surprised if they translated it into french or spanish than Urdu and Uighur, given the longstanding bias towards western medicine France and Spain (and Latin America) have vs the asian influence in Pakistan and that the Uighur people live in China (not that they're all that happy about that right now). The Chinese, quite intelligently, aren't trying to convert The Great Unwashed, they're planning to plant your seeds in ground that is already at least somewhat fertile. I have some books on acupuncture and Moxibustion. Maybe if I can drag myself away from the "shoot'em up" genre, I'll pull them down off the shelf and try expanding my mind in a way that might actually help me.

bob

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Actually Bob, I was joking about Urdu and Uighur. They'll be in English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew. I mentioned Uighur because I had one of the juiciest romantic experiences of my life with a 27 year old Uighurian woman in 2000. I'd gone to Beijing for a medical conference and met her there. She was an MD with a Ph.D. in genetics and spoke English, Arabic, and Chinese; but being Muslim, she had chaperones who watched her every interaction with a man. She'd sneak out of her hotel to spend the nights with me and confessed that she was desperate to find someone decent to marry. Like all native Uighurians (she was from Urumqi) she hated the Chinese and would never marry one. However the Uighurian Muslim males were mostly sheepherders or super suppressive macho men who hid their women under a rock. Although she was a knockout in every way and had the strongest, most perfect body I've ever held and a brilliant mind, I was five months off my divorce and told her it was too soon and on too short notice to consider it. Since then I received one romantic letter from her and although I've tried writing her many times, I never get a reply. I'm thinking she either married a goatherder or my letters have been intercepted by her Muslim minders. An interesting passage. I'm thinking that if I go to China as part of this publishing gambit I'll try to reconnect again. Who knows. Maybe she'll want an autographed copy.