Epinions Recent Reviews for mshawpyle

Citadel and Snare: In Tribute to Ed Grover: the Third Panel of a Triptych

Sun, 4 Sep 2005 17:48:46 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - I regret to note, for those not already aware of the sad news, that Ed Grover is fallen ill, having been diagnosed with lung cancer. It is time and past time that just tribute were paid. Hazlitt wrote, of Coleridge, that...

A Nightingale’s Song: Tributes in Honor of Ed Grover: the Second Panel of a Triptych

Sun, 4 Sep 2005 16:48:05 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - As you may know – and if you do not, you ought know, for it is news of dire portent – the gracious, wise, and kindly Ed Grover is fallen ill, having been diagnosed with lung cancer. For those of us facing – and...

Tristesse: A Tribute in Honor of Ed Grover: the First Panel of a Triptych

Sun, 4 Sep 2005 15:11:08 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - People may be measured by the fashion in which they break bad news to one. The news that Ed Grover is facing a more definite eviction notice from the planet, with more of a date certain on it, than are the rest of us –...

The Eagle? Or the Cross? Which Battle Cry, Which Freedom?

Mon, 5 Apr 2004 22:38:02 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - After a lengthy delay – and one that would be unconscionable were it not for the private reasons that impelled it – I finally take pen – well, keyboard – in hand and address myself to a duty: that of reviewing the new, illustrated, coffee-table-sized...

A Buryin’ at Pleasant Hill: Journeys in Deep East Texas

Sun, 12 Oct 2003 01:57:37 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - West of Henderson, Texas, in Rusk County, on the road to New London, there is an old rural cemetery: Pleasant Hill. All sorts and conditions of folk have been buried there over the past century and a half; now another has joined their ranks. I...

The Tree of Liberty

Sat, 5 Jul 2003 13:52:20 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - Journalism, said Kipling (who certainly knew whereof he spoke), is ‘history in a hurry.’ Some journ...

Crackle, Pop, &c. Fine: We Get It. (The Flipside of Kirk Read.)

Sun, 11 May 2003 14:51:21 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - Of the making of books about Lexington, and Rockbridge County, there is apparently no end. For a small town and a largish but always lightly-populated county, the area has been oddly productive of memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies.[1] If Kirk...

Duct Tape, Hell: The Care and Feeding of Your AK-47

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 16:46:13 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - As I have pointed out in reviewing the estimable Duncan Long’s work on the Ruger .22, it is a tonic experience to deal with a work on firearms that refrains from hysteria and is cleanly and elegantly written...

Tracts For Our Times, VII: Tom Sawyer at War

Mon, 21 Apr 2003 20:58:58 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - For all Texas’s claims to being sui generis, and the occasional insistence of the rest of the country that Texas, and Texans, are indeed cut from different cloth, there is a sense in which Texans are super-saturated representatives of the American...

Not A Big Tent … Just a White Sheet: Pat Buchanan’s Invisible Empire

Sun, 23 Mar 2003 01:01:40 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - The problem with The American Conservative is that it is neither.

This slickly updated Jew-baiting, Beobachter-ish rag of Patrick J. Buchanan’s is, rather, the Left’s last, best hope, and a material aid and comfort to the...

Tracts for Our Times, VI: Root- (and-Branch-) Causes

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:55:31 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - History – as I argue in my my review of John Lukacs’s Five Days in London – does not repeat itself exactly; but it does have a nasty self-referential habit.

It is a commonplace that...

A Tract for Our Times, V: Theme and Variations: Victory Over Appeasement Begins at Home

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:46:58 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - One of the few things Marx said that was even half sensible is that history replayed becomes farce.

Of course, he was mistaken in his major premiss, that all history is tragedy the first time around; and he was mistaken also in suggesting that...

Eating Rocks: Honey, Let Me Be Your Salty Dog

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 13:07:24 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - Grand history is often about the very things people most like to read about: sex, power, money, warfare, and food. Nuts-and-bolts history, though, the story of the nail that was lost (and from that loss, the consequent loss of horseshoe, horse, rider,...

Sadly, Even Disaster is Bigger Here

Sat, 8 Feb 2003 20:16:14 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - I was reminded, the other day, of the curious fact that ours may be the only office in town that has direct, personal links to two of the greatest, best-known disasters in Texas history.

On 18 March, 1937, the New London School, in the Piney...

Pathology of a Failed State: Mary Anne Weaver’s Reports from Pakistan

Mon, 16 Dec 2002 02:25:13 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - It’s tempting to regard Pakistan as being, perhaps, the key to the puzzle that the world now confronts. The only reason not to do so is, There is no key. The civilized nations, and civilized people – and peoples – regardless of...

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom For Windows, Mac: Gaming the Historian, Part II: The Mandate of Heaven

Sun, 15 Dec 2002 16:14:41 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - The Mandate of Heaven: Sierra’s Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

I noted not so very long ago, in my review of Patrician II,[1] that I was thus embarking upon a very desultory series of game reviews, which –...

Anglers, and Very Honest Men: John McPhee Goes Fishing

Wed, 4 Dec 2002 03:41:50 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - George Washington never chopped down cherry trees, tossed perfectly good money across a river (George was, in fact, a mite tight), or figured in various morality plays shewing forth GOD’s Awefull Providence in thus bleƒsing and preserving ye...

The Glare of a Thousand Suns: New Light on Teller, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer

Wed, 4 Dec 2002 01:16:07 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - There is a sense in which the main plot, the primary story arc, of the last century, was the development beyond all imagining of applied science and of technology: the tale, often the cautionary tale, of how man’s mastery of nature overmastered man...

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money: Duncan Long on the Ruger .22

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 01:56:13 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - We live in a very odd culture, an increasingly strange society. Michael Bellesiles garnered uncritical acclaim – until the wheels came off – for pandering to the beliefs of the Guns[1] Are Bad crowd. (I still say, I’d love to hear how...

A Sort of Tribune: Edmund Morgan’s Ben Franklin

Sat, 16 Nov 2002 17:10:10 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - All About the Benjamins…

I am, perhaps, of the last generation to have been expected as a matter of course to read the lives of American Heroes, growing up. Nowadays, of course, the Leftish amongst us disbelieve in the Hero...

Comin' In On Clipped Wings and Too Much Prayer

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 00:57:13 GMT
rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - I cannot begin to tell you how much I wanted to like Robert Vaughan’s To Touch the Face of God. The author’s a veteran, a prolific and perfectly competent writer, a devout Anglican, a Southerner: ‘my sort of people.’ The book is...

‘Retreat, Hell! We Just Got Here!’ - Belleau Wood and the Marine Corps Day Write-Off

Sun, 10 Nov 2002 12:14:21 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - The admirable Robert Asprey, himself a former Marine, is one of our better, if least celebrated, military historians. He is in fact a master of the narrative history, a pellucidly clear writer of great insight; his comparative obscurity must be...

Plato, Aristotle, and the Lion of Judah: A Narnian Appreciation

Sat, 2 Nov 2002 19:25:44 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - It is recorded that at a meeting of the Inklings, Tollers – J.R.R.T. Tolkien – confronted Jack Lewis over an inconsistency that pained him. In what imaginable world, he demanded, could the White Witch, fauns, hags, Talking Beasts, and Aslan...

Trailing Clouds of Glory: D-Day, the American Century, and the Granniemose Birthday Bash Write-Off

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 14:29:53 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - Retired LTC Carlo D’Este – there’s a name for an hereditary condottiere for you – the biographer of Georgie Patton and esteemed military historian, has written steadily, copiously (by the standards of a duly rigorous historian), and well,...

From the Ground, Up: Primary Sources on Freedom and Duty

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 16:12:27 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author mshawpyle - Here it is my third-year anniversary, writing for this site; and what news do we get but that Steve Ambrose has died? It is very meet and right, then, that in honor of that great, flawed, gallant man – who insisted to the last that it was the...

Epinions Recent Reviews for mshawpyle

Citadel and Snare: In Tribute to Ed Grover: the Third Panel of a Triptych

A Nightingale’s Song: Tributes in Honor of Ed Grover: the Second Panel of a Triptych

Tristesse: A Tribute in Honor of Ed Grover: the First Panel of a Triptych

The Eagle? Or the Cross? Which Battle Cry, Which Freedom?

A Buryin’ at Pleasant Hill: Journeys in Deep East Texas

The Tree of Liberty

Crackle, Pop, &c. Fine: We Get It. (The Flipside of Kirk Read.)

Duct Tape, Hell: The Care and Feeding of Your AK-47

Tracts For Our Times, VII: Tom Sawyer at War

Not A Big Tent … Just a White Sheet: Pat Buchanan’s Invisible Empire

Tracts for Our Times, VI: Root- (and-Branch-) Causes

A Tract for Our Times, V: Theme and Variations: Victory Over Appeasement Begins at Home

Eating Rocks: Honey, Let Me Be Your Salty Dog

Sadly, Even Disaster is Bigger Here

Pathology of a Failed State: Mary Anne Weaver’s Reports from Pakistan

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom For Windows, Mac: Gaming the Historian, Part II: The Mandate of Heaven

Anglers, and Very Honest Men: John McPhee Goes Fishing

The Glare of a Thousand Suns: New Light on Teller, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money: Duncan Long on the Ruger .22

A Sort of Tribune: Edmund Morgan’s Ben Franklin

Comin' In On Clipped Wings and Too Much Prayer

‘Retreat, Hell! We Just Got Here!’ - Belleau Wood and the Marine Corps Day Write-Off

Plato, Aristotle, and the Lion of Judah: A Narnian Appreciation

Trailing Clouds of Glory: D-Day, the American Century, and the Granniemose Birthday Bash Write-Off

From the Ground, Up: Primary Sources on Freedom and Duty