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Showing posts from August, 2018

The Kingdom Files (book series) - Who was Esther? and Who was David? by Matt Koceich

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These books are intended to teach kids about various biblical characters.  I read the ones on David and Esther.  The books are made up of various "files" for kids to investigate the particular characters in any of the given books. Starting out with a "Fact file", which gives a few facts about the person you are looking into, including a tiny timeline with about three events selected.  Next comes the "Action File", giving a summary of the person's life, along with various illustrations.  Lastly comes the "Power File" which gives you some ideas of what you can learn from the life of the person you are studying, and also provides you with memory verses from various books of the Bible. I'm sorry to say that I was disappointed with these books. First of all, they seem more like books for kids younger than 8, not 8-12. The biographies skip too much, it doesn't mention that Jonathan's father tried to kill Jonathan when Jonathan d

Old Hickory: The 30th Division - The top rated American Infantry Division in Europe in World War II - by Robert W. Baumer

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Originally I was looking for a biography that would tell about General William K. Harrison, as I had learned some things about him and wanted to know more.  There is no biography that I could find that was in print about him, but I came across this recently published book about the division he was assistant commander of, "Old Hickory: the 30th Division by Robert W. Baumer This account of the 30th division was interesting in and of itself.   These guys were quite tough, and determined.   Made up of National Guards, they remained vigilant with their duties even when, in preparation for them to be trained to join the fight, higher ups demanded that their national guard commanders be replaced with regular army commanders. They were not a part of the first wave of D-Day, they were in a following wave some days later, but they were a big part of Operation Cobra, which was to break through further into France. Before I read this book, I had never really considered the probl