Travelin' man

I'm reading Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir as I fly to Dallas and it's interesting. He's talking mainly about becoming a bookseller and the people he's dealt with along the way, many of whom I knew from my years at Heritage Book Shop. He even references Ben and Lou Weinstein, saying the shop is closed. They actually downsized, drastically, in mid 2007, while this book came out a year later.

I like McMurtry's style of writing; very casual and calm. I also enjoy his slight discussions about books he's read, making me interested in reading some of them, myself. But one point really caught me. He's talking about reading literature dealing with the first and second world wars and notes that the first world war ended a civilization. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of it, and some books he's read detail that as it's happening, written by people who can see it. And the British, French and Belgian empires were also falling apart.

That fascinates me. But what's best is when he mentions the quarrels Churchill has with Stalin during the war. Stalin's comment was, effectively, History will judge which of us is right. To which Churchill is reputed to have replied, "Yes, and I'll write the history." Which he did. It feeds into my comments, before, that history is written by the winners. 

I think I have a copy of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August but haven't read it. I'll need to check on that, because now I want to. I'm getting a sense that we're undergoing a seismic shift in the world, right now, what with Russia's war on the West being waged online and through propaganda, not just her terrorism of Ukraine, and Western leaders are not really paying attention.

Cyberpunk lives. William Gibson rules.