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Thursday, December 22, 2011
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah
Once again, we are in Omaha to celebrate the holidays with our daughter and her family. After Christmas we all fly to Orlando to meet up with our son and his family. All six grandkids together at Disney World ... won't that be grand.
My wife and I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a fantastic 2012.
Monday, December 19, 2011
The Shopkeeper #1 Bestselling Western on Amazon
The Kindle version of The Shopkeeper has moved to the Number 1 bestselling Western on Amazon for print or eBook formats. The print version of The Shopkeeper has taken the 34th position. The Shopkeeper is also 23rd bestselling Action/Adventure book and the 27th bestselling Historical. Thanks to everyone who is buying the book. It encourages me to get working on the 4th novel in the Steve Dancy Tales series.
Amazon Western Bestseller List
Sunday, December 18, 2011
5-Star Books Selects Tempest at Dawn
5-Star Books has showcased Tempest at Dawn in their Historical Novel category.
From the 5-Star Website: "How do we pick the novels featured on 5-Star Books? First, the book must have predominantly 5-Star reviews on Amazon.com. After that qualification, we look at the cover design, the number of reviews, what readers are saying in those reviews, when the book was published, and other subjective factors."
From the 5-Star Website: "How do we pick the novels featured on 5-Star Books? First, the book must have predominantly 5-Star reviews on Amazon.com. After that qualification, we look at the cover design, the number of reviews, what readers are saying in those reviews, when the book was published, and other subjective factors."
Fifty-five
men came to Philadelphia May of 1787with a congressional charter to revise the
Articles of Confederation. Instead they founded the longest lasting
republic in world history. Tempest at Dawn tells their story.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Learning About the Constitution
In order to
preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, we need to understand it.
Luckily, there are some great learning tools available to every American. These
include an online course at James Madison’s Montpelier Center for the
Constitution, the webcast series Introduction to the Constitution from
Hillsdale College, and several good books, including The Heritage Guide to theConstitution, Tempest at Dawn, and Decision in Philadelphia.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The ideal life
“Good friends, good
books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” — Mark Twain
“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.” — Vladimir Nabokov
“Thou shalt not is
soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.” — Philip Pullman
“Reading is the sole
means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin,
another’s voice, another’s soul.” — Joyce Carol Oates
“There is no friend
as loyal as a book.” – Ernest Hemingway
“I am simply a ‘book
drunkard.’ Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has
for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” — L.M. Montgomery
“It is what you read
when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help
it.” — Oscar Wilde
“Be awesome! Be a
book nut!” — Dr. Seuss
“Good books, like
good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.” —
Louisa May Alcott
“The one way of
tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”
— Gustave Flaubert
“I cannot remember
the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have
made me.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I owe everything I
am and everything I will ever be to books.” — Gary Paulsen
“Books are a
uniquely portable magic.” — Stephen King
“Picking five
favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to
lose.” — Neil Gaiman
“Reading brings us
unknown friends.” — HonorĂ© de Balzac
“When the Day of
Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their
heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to
Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have
loved reading.” — Virginia Woolf
“Our favorite book
is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our
lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most
need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They’re always
with us.” — Lloyd Alexander
“There are perhaps
no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without
having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.” — Marcel Proust
“I have always
imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges
“It was books that
taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that
connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” —
James Baldwin
“It is so
unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to
share the happiness with you.” Mark Twain
“I cannot live
without books.” — Thomas Jefferson
Monday, December 5, 2011
Books are a perfect gift.
Some
people can be hard to buy for—unless you give them a book that matches their
special interest or taste in fiction. Suddenly, your thoughtfulness becomes
part of the gift. Whether your relatives or friends are interested in the Civil
War, romance novels, Westerns, railroads, guns, cooking, collecting old comic
books, or some hobby, there's always a book around that will bring a smile to
their face.
Books
are the best entertainment value around. They provide hour after hour of
personal pleasure, and then they can be passed on to another person. I also
like that when I give a book as a gift, I can write a personal note that won't
get tossed out like last year's Christmas card.
Children's
books are great gifts. We always search for autographed storybooks for our
grandkids. A great find is when the author and the illustrator both sign the
book. We've done this for several years, so now our grandkids' bedrooms have
dedicated shelves for signed books. The icing on the cake is that we get to
read them a story from one of these books whenever we visit.
Here are
links to bestselling books in a few categories. There are many categories a click away, but you can also search for books on a specific subject.
By the
way, if you're thinking about a gift for me, I collect vintage Western books
from the first half of the twentieth century. I especially like the ones with
great illustrations on the dust cover. But if you give me one of these, do me a
favor and write your personal note on a Post-It.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn
About a month ago,
my wife and I took a road trip with some good friends through many of the
Westerns states. We visited Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South
Dakota, and Nebraska. One of the highlights was a visit to the Little
Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.
Every
time I visit a historic site, I end up buying at least one book about the
events that took place at the location. I wanted to buy only one book
about the battle because we had already visited so many sites that I was
weighing down the motorhome. The store at the National Monument had
dozens upon dozens of books on Custer, the battle, Crazy Horse, and Sitting
Bull. I spent some time going through them and ended up taking two to the
clerk for a recommendation. The two books were The Last Stand, Custer, Sitting Bull, and The Battle
of Little Bighorn, by Nathaniel Philbrick, and Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two
American Warriors, by Stephen E. Ambrose.