Adding to the Book Pile
I grew up reading Mike Royko and the earlier part of my childhood was spent in the kind of gritty Chicago neighborhood of aspiring middle-class bungalows, dingy corner taverns and 16 inch softball leagues in Ed Kelly-run parks of the people who frequently populated Royko’s columns. I have read Boss several times and it is a classic tale of the world of big city Democratic Machine rough and tumble politics as much as The Last Hurrah.
The Chicago Tribune, is a mere shadow of the great and independent newspaper that hired Mike Royko as a columnist after his career at the long defunct Chicago Daily News and The Chicago Sun-Times, which Royko quit the day it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch. Had Royko lived to see the Trib purchased by the exceedingly nasty Sam Zell, he’d have quit there as well.
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carl:
September 5th, 2013 at 4:27 pm
Regarding the Toffler’s suggestion that mass conscription started with the industrial revolution, the Romans essentially conscripted en masse. That was long before the cotton gin.
I just read Operation Typhoon by Stahel which was a very good book. One of his main points was that the professional German officer corps, especially very high ranks, was not very good at some the less dashing parts of war fighting like intel and logistics, less dashing but vitally important. This failing vitiated their superiority in other things, or more than vitiated it. They weren’t all that good at really knowing their enemies nor themselves.