A real time capsule: U.S.S. Lunga Point CVE94 A Pictorial Log covering the ship's Career in the War against the Axis

 Hey Eric, wasn't your next post supposed to be for a completely different book, one on philosophy? Yeah, but I read this one instead because it was so much more interesting and it came to me in an interesting way. My grandfather recently passed away, the last of my three grandfathers. Grandpa was a hoarder, and what is more he had a lot of land in rural Wyoming, which only served to facilitate his hoarding tendency. Now it has fallen to my father to be the executor of the estate so he has been driving out there and coming back with truckloads of family heirlooms, and on the most recent trip, he also brought home this book. My family has no idea why he had it.

Very auster and serious cover on this one. 

My Grandfather didn't serve in the Second World War and as far as we know none of that side of the family served in the navy during the time. None of the names in the crew list are familiar to me. There are some pencil marks in the book to several names, but I don't know what they mean. Very mysterious.

If you can read the above or know one of the names with arrows let me know

What isn't mysterious is the purpose of the book. My dad has a book like this from his days in the navy. Ships would put together a cruise book to commemorate the voyage so people could look back on the fond memories. It is basically a yearbook for warships. In this case, it is almost exactly a year. The main part of this book runs from May 14th 1944 when the ship was commissioned, to May 14th, 1945 and commemorates the first year of the life of the U.S.S. Lunga Point, but because the war ended only a few month later there is a bit added on the end to bring the story full circle. 

U.S.S. Lunga Point was an escort carrier, a merchant ship hull with a flat top and elevators, the bare minimum needed to work as a carrier. Too slow to ride with the battlefleet and too short to launch the most modern fighters escort carriers were called expendable for a reason. They provided excellent air cover for merchant convoys or air support for landings. For most of its life that was the Lunga Points job. It was a veteran of the liberation of the Philipines, and the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was a dangerous job, and the book has great first-person accounts of being shot down on Japanese-held islands and desperate escapes, and action photos of incoming Kamikazes. The real danger comes through in these sections.

But the book is pretty light-hearted. They are mostly inside jokes though. There is a lot of references to the smoking light being lit or going out that really confused my mother. It must have been constant. Also, the section of one sentence reminders must bring a lot of chuckles to those who were there but is a bit of a mystery today. In this way it accurately represents the experience of war. It is not combat all the time, it had the light hearted moments, and the moments of just people being normal. The joy of ice cream, the private jokes, the birth of children. The men and women who fought that war were not mythically tough, they were just normal people. So I would encourage you to take a look around your house for a book like this, and get a chance to connect with the past. While the past is a foreign country, the people there are humans like you and me, and not totally alien. Next time it should be back to the usual.

I think I need an updated version: Books in World History: A Guide for Teachers and Students by W. Warren Wagar

Books in World History: A Guide for Teachers and Students by W. Warren Wagar came into my collection in the great college expansion. I was working at the college library one summer when they were downsizing the collection. They wanted to create more room for study tables, and get more people into the library. It is an interesting trend among libraries, one I originally opposed, but now I feel better about. As a result, they were getting rid of a boat load of books, and by getting rid of I mean recycle. I had the job of getting books ready by cutting the covers off and then cutting the binding up. Reader, it was hard for a book lover to destroy that many books. However, there was an out. I could take the books home with me. I cannot remember how many I took, but it was either 1 of every 5 books, or more reasonably, 1 of every 10. Now that left me with a problem. Books are pretty dense, and I have had to carry these books around ever since. 

The stark red and white really work here.

So what did I get for all the years of carrying this book from place to place, and state to state? Well, a fun little read, and I do mean little. Books in World History is only 182 pretty small pages, and it really took no time at all. This was helped by the nature of the book. The author wants to create a guide to world history to help the poor teacher that has to teach the subject. As a guide he selected a number of books that cover the whole of human history, tell you where you can get them, how much is will set you back and why you should read it. These summaries are really great, concise and engaging. The biggest problem I had was that the books I wanted to get for myself as a result were all way too expensive. He picked books that were currently being printed, so 50 years latter most of them are out of print. But there is more to the book then just these summaries.

W. Warren Wagar offers his own thoughts on teaching World History, and sadly a lot of his ideas are still relevant. World History is poorly taught, because after high school and maybe Western Civ in college every other history class you take is very specialized, so when those students go back to teach world history they are unprepared. It is an interesting conundrum, and Wagar has some interesting ideas about it, especially the idea to teach world history backwords. Unfortunatly interesting approaches to history class seem unlikely in the current teaching reality of overworked and underpaid teachers teaching standardaised classes. But it is good to dream, and Wagars ideas are worth approaching. So I would recommend reading Books in World History: A Guide for Teachers and Students by W. Warren Wagar but I would even more recommend keeping an eye out for an updated version, maybe filled with books that are presently advalible for reasonable prices. If you have a recommendation like that please let me know.

Is this the best picture of dice ever? No, no it is not

On to the next one. Shelf 2, book 13. Lucky number 13. The result is The Rationalists a collection of the writings of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I am not sure if there is an author to pick from all of these, because they all have different translators. Five books collected into one.

The philosophers of the seventeenth century had great hair.

This one should be interesting. Delving deep into seventeenth century philosophy. Unlike the last time I touched on philosophy we won't be getting it in a text book, this time its straight from the horses mouth.