What Chicago Boyz Readers Are Reading (July 2015)

5 thoughts on “What Chicago Boyz Readers Are Reading (July 2015)”

1. The title “Cougar Attacks” was click-bait but it was not what I was expecting.

2. I don’t know about cougar attacks but a treed cougar can be interesting.

3. Just finished “Wagons West” by British historian Frank McLynn. Very good history of wagon trains to the West Coast. Surprising, to me, is that this period only lasted 20 years (1840-1860) with, of course, the Gold Rush, in the middle. McLynn only concentrates on the pre-Gold Rush years though. I’m always afraid these days that a history will be one of the “deconstruction” types but this was an even handed account.

4. I’m reading “1815: The Waterloo Campaign,” which is actually more than I wanted to know. He has all the Prussian units and their histories. There is a huge literature on that battle.

   I’m also rereading Stephen Hayes book, “Cheney.” I read it a few years ago. What a contrast with our present administration.

5. I just finished reading, for the second time, Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau. Geologist and artist Ron Blakey chronicles the evolutionary construction, uplift, then erosion and canyon cutting on the Colorado Plateau during the last 500 million years. He does this using carefully constructed maps, each an as seen from space view, of the plateau region as it transforms from accreted island arcs, deep sea bed, Sahara like desert, tropical seascape, Amazon style rain forest, the largest desert dunefield on Earth, back to tropical inland sea, then lifted high in the air, dried, heavily eroded and cut by the Colorado River.

   Most fascinating is that each map is correlated to actual geological evidence for what existed on the plateau in a particular spot at that moment in time. From that data things like position of the globe, climates, and local environments are carefully reconstructed. If you can imagine how much work would go into just one of those maps, imagine 70 of them and accompanying text.

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