I woke up after 5 hours of sleep thinking about going to movie 2001 Space Odyssey when I was in college 30 years before that millennial milestone was depicted. It was 50 years ago that I saw the movie and 19 years past 2001. Of course humanity is still stuck on Earth and there is more ot it than ever. As if I needed reminding of that in these days of social distancing I got one from the PBS show American Experience last night. It was about the Iowa boy Norman Borlaug and his legacy of creating enough food for us to double the world’s population while crowding out the rest of the Earth’s biome from our most productive land.
Corona virus may set us back growth-wise by a percent or two especially when it scythes through the developing world’s shanty towns where social distancing is largely impossible.
With only humans to feast upon some new bug or virus will come along that is even more virulent, maybe a new Black Death. I finished the Norm Cantor book on that subject before bed. Somehow, despite that, I still managed 5 good hours of sleep.
My pre-get-out-of-bed thoughts turned to presidents and a book I began 4 years ago on Presidents Madison and Monroe. Anticipating my completion of the Cantor book I brought it, “Founding Rivals,” to my bedside table just in case I woke up in the night. I only have another 110 pages left to read and I will finish it off soon to add to my reading list. The book is by author Chris DeRose.
As I switched from space to history I tried to remember if another favorite book of mine hadn’t also been written by Author DeRose. I googled his name and the book title I was searching for eluded Google. So, I typed in the following searche words for Lincoln democrat: Lincoln books presidents.
A whole slew of posts popped up and I was enchanted to read old posts covering that vast sweep of subjects. There were posts from 2006 all the way to 2020. On the 18th post on the list I finally found mention of the book by DeRose. It’s “The Presidents War.”
You get a pretty good sample of me in the posts conjured up by those three magic words.
