Musings of a Snickerdoodle

The Art of Beatrix Potter is a very nice collection of her art.  It is quite a large book, rather like one for the coffee table.  Divided into five sections, each section deals with significant places where much of her art was produced and inspired. It gives you a pretty good idea of her life by means of commentary on her art and  of photographs that were taken of her, her family and various places where she lived and visited. I'll mention right away that it seemed a bit disjointed.  It didn't quite seem to follow much of a sequential order, it just sort of bounced around the timeline of Potter's life.  But the point of the book isn't to give you a biography of Potter, but to introduce you to her artistic skill, and I believe it does a good job in this. There are drawings and paintings of landscapes, of houses,  rooms inside of houses, and of various creatures, many of which were studied by her for her children's books: rabbits, frogs, ladybirds ...

Alvin York: A New Biography of the Hero of the Argonne by Douglas V. Mastriano is a very interesting account of the life of this man, of what happened on the battlefield in World War 1 that elevated York, a former pacifist, to fame.  Alvin York was born into what became a large family, the third of eleven children (the family lived in a one room cabin on a farm by the way!).  His two older brothers where married and had farms of their own when his father died and so York became the head of the family.  After this, despite having been born into a Christian family, York went downhill morally and became a heavy drinker and a gambler, and of course, associated with bad people.  He acknowledged that his sins started small and then these things became controllers of his life.  Change came when York became a Christian and actively put away and resisted his old habits, he truly became a "new creation", a new person.  When war broke out between the United...