Review Meme

Colleen of Orations of OMcHodoy and Bill West of West in New England have tagged me for a meme that started at Gautami's My Own Little Reading Room.

What issues/topic interests you most--non-fiction, i.e, cooking, knitting, stitching; there are infinite topics that has nothing to do with novels?

I read a lot of history these days; especially social and political history. I also read books that focus on identity: who are we and how did we get to be who we are. And of course, I read a lot of law!

Would you like to review books concerning those [topics]?

Yes, and I have. See here and here; there will be more coming.

Would you like to be paid or do it as interest or hobby? Tell reasons for what ever you choose.

I enjoy reading and reviewing books that I do it for free; if someone offered to pay me, I wouldn't turn them down (of course, having just admitted how cheaply I work guarantees that nobody will offer to pay me!).

Would you recommend those to your friends and how?

I always make recommendations.

If you have already done something like this, link it to your post.

See above and see here.

I have the following books on my shelf right now or in Google Books' "My Library":

Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women In South Carolina, 1830-1880, by Marli F. Weiner. Perhaps these white and black women had things in common that changed the way they interacted with each other from the way each interacted with men.

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, by Cyprian Clamorgan (Julie Winch, ed.). Tell us how you really feel about your contemporaries, Mr. Clamorgan. No punches pulled here.

The Scientists, by John Gribbin. Astrophysicist Gribbin tells stories of the lives of history's greatest inventors. Highly readable; educational, and entertaining.

History of South Carolina, by Yates Snowden and Henry Gardner Cutler.

Page 161

So I've been tagged by Chery at Nordic Blue for the "161" meme. In this meme, one dislcoses the contents of the sixth sentence on page 161 of one's current read. I've read a lot lately, but when the tag came in, I was in the midst of Dudley Taylor Cornish's The Sable Arm, which tells the story of black troops in the Civil War. This 1956 work was perhaps the first serious scholarly work devoted to this topic and as one reviewer said, it's "readable, interesting, sound, with interesting insights."

My great-great-grandfather, Zeke Johnson, served from 1864 to 1866 in Company D, 18th United States Colored Troops.

The prospect of Negro troops, while not overwhelmingly popular in the North at first, provoked outrage and fear of slave rebellions in the South.

Page 161, sixth sentence:

"I shall," he [Jefferson Davis] told his Congress, "unless in your wisdom you deem some other course more expedient, deliver to the several [Confederate] State authorities all commissioned officers of the United States that may hereafter be captured by our forces . . . that they may be dealt with in accordance with the laws of those [Confederate] States providing for the punishment of criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrection."

Cornish, Dudley T., The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865, (with Forward by Herman Hattaway) (Univ. of Kansas Press, 1987)

Darius, what have you found in your local library lately?