How come autocorrect only corrects things that aren't mistakes?

IDK, padre. Maybe we should ask St. Cetherine. Isn't she the patron of autocorrect?

According to Wikipedia, MCC is Harry's fifth cousin.i

Interesting...I haven't looked it up in years, but once upon a time the "official word" was no relation at all. Then again, genealogy has gotten a lot easier (and more global) than it's ever been before. I've developed friendships with two distant relatives via My Heritage and FB in the last two years whom I'd never before known existed.

loved harry chapin's music...and his generous and compassionate heart ... another great lyricist who could tell a whole story with a song ... this one was pretty intense wonder where he got the material

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWKpblxejWE

Gee, that's a loaded question, fs.

you're soooooooooooooooo bad!

You inspired me.

Pens that don't run out of ink and cool and quiet and time to think

Gave up on the novel idea - reading "Worst. President. Ever." and finally reading "Game Change" - I can barely put "Game Change" down!

Novels:
Confederacy of Dunces
Catch-22
Love in the Ruins

Non-Fiction:
The War That Ended Peace (best book I've read on the lead-up to WWI, even though the author probably hates people like me)
The Sadness of Christ (best Lenten reading ever)

I was looking at WAR THAT ENDED PEACE a day or so ago. I'm WWII, not WWI, but I do have around 100 WWI titles, and bought 2 more this year. What do you like about it?

I've heard the name Mary Chapin Carpenter, but no songs come to mind when I hear it now. I did not spend much time in bars in the 80's (slightly too young), but spent altogether too much time in bars in the early 90's. Still can't call to mind any of her songs.

Motorhead, now, I got some songs showing up in memoryville.

It's a very thorough account of the events leading up to the war. This, to me, is far more interesting than the war itself. She delves into the personalities of the leaders and the individual cultures of the nations who were involved and I hadn't seen even a decent treatment of that before. It's also blessedly free of the typical bias that "everything bad that ever happened in the world is Germany's fault." I dislike Tuchman's work because it's so over the top on that front.

It has its flaws in that MacMillan obviously doesn't like the more anti-modern views of the times back then. She also has a bizarre habit of injecting contemporary events into the narrative, usually in order to take a shot at George W Bush. That's annoying, but it doesn't sour the rest of the book.

On a side note, I'm now reading GJ Meyer's A World Undone. His work on the Borgias is magnificent and convinced me to find more stuff from him. It was a good decision.

That's good to know, Hal. I've argued on more than one occasion that the root causes of the political drama that took up the last half of the 20th Century on into today are found in the events of WWI more than WWII, especially the willy-nilly carving up of former empires that occurred. If I had a TARDIS, I'd go to the treaty conference at Versailles and slap the whole lot of them silly.

Truthfully, I think that World War I is far more important, historically, than World War II. Everyone says that World War II 're-wrote the map of Europe' and it did, but World War II didn't fundamentally change the character or Europe in the way World War I did.

Consider: before World War I, Europe was a continent of monarchies, the only republic was France. During World War I, every monarchy either fell and became a republic after the war, or else, if it was still a monarchy after the war, the monarchy became a constitutional monarchy and has been politically irrelevant ever since.

In his history of the Papacy, British author Paul Johnson makes the point that, at the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a continent of absolute monarchs, but by the end of the 20th century, the only monarch in Europe who still had all the authority he had at the beginning of the 20th century was the Pope. When did every other monarch lose their authority? After World War I.

World War I led directly to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which was the vestige of the Byzantine empire, which had stood for more than 1,000 years. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire led directly to Ataturk's reforms, which led to the abolition of the caliphate (after nearly 1,400 years), and led to the rise of the modern Middle East, and led to the creation of the modern states of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

The caliphate, while it existed, tended to encourage a secular and moderate Islam. Without a caliphate, there was no moderating influence in Islam, and this led to Wahabbism and the rise of then violent extremism we deal with today.

And of course, there is another sense in which World War I is more important than World War II: the outcome of World War I led directly to World War II, the outcome of World War II led to a period of relative peace and stability for at least the next 70 years.

That said, the story of the actual combat in World War I is not all that interesting because the fight quickly became a stalemate, and so it was three years of war that went nowhere until the United States finally intervened and finally brought it to an end. The story of the actual combat in World War II is much more interesting because there was actual drama, victories were won, territory gained, and then regained, it's an exciting story in a way that World War I wasn't,

Yeah, your last para is sort of why I have 100 books on WWI and roughly a metric ton of books on WWII. Now on the lectern: Japanese Military Strategy In The Pacific War. Your 4th and 5th paras are related to why my wife reads more on WWI than I do.

Not sure if you're still taking suggestions. If you want to be taken far away, you may enjoy the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. Also available on audio.

If you want something closer to home, I would recommend the biographical Uncommon Friends by James Newton. Circumstances led this young man to meet and become friends with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Harvey Firestone, and Alexis Carrel. An easy-going book.

After reading "The Kite Runner", I was in line to read "Thousand Splendid Suns" when it came out.

Sadly, "Uncommon Friends" is not available on my Hoopla app right now, but, I will keep an eye out for it - sounds like my sort of read!

Sounds like "Forrest Gump: 50 Years Earlier" to me.