From My Bookshelves

[Danik 2016]

Here are some links for buying used books on line:
alibris: https://www.alibris.com

Bookfinder:https://www.bookfinder.com

Bookfinder shows the prices in the currency of one´s country

[Dreamwoven]

Thanks, Danik. I know of Alibris, Adlibris and Bokus.com, but BookFinder is a new one to me.

[Danik 2016]

I have found and bought several older academic works with the help of Bookfinder.

[Dreamwoven]

That's promising!

[Dreamwoven]

My Jewish aunt, Joci, took me to central Europe several times to visit relatives. We went by couchette whose seats could easily be converted into a sleeping area of 3 beds, one above the other, on each side. We went first of all to Vienna, which was the departure point for Central Europe. From there we took a train to Bratislava to visit my father's relatives, making room for visits to Prague, and less often to Budapest, Hungary (to visit my maternal relatives). Hungary and Czechoslovakia were then communist countries.

As a result I have three books by a Viennese author who really loved Vienna: Frederic Morton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Morton. the first three books on his list (Thunder Twilight in the Serbian assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, A Nervous Splendour, where the heir to the throne commits suicide, and The Rothschilds: a family portrait).

Frederic Moreton lived in New York and in his 91st year travelled back to his beloved Vienna. He fled Europe, returning to Vienna in 2015, where he died. My Fascination with Vienna was greatly enhanced by the writing of this remarkable author. Forever Street is also one of his books, in novel form, depicting life in a Viennese street. One day I may buy myself a copy.

[Dreamwoven]

There is much more to all this. My jewish father was born a sickly child, to the woman his father was married to. He only knew Hungarian because he was a Slovak, which at the time was part of Czechoslovakia. His mother died in childbirth, and so my paternal grandfather quickly wed a woman in milk, who became my father's mother. She disliked my father. He was born in the early 20th Century with scarlet fever - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_fever - which led to him having a weak heart. It meant that when he was called up the Austro-Hungarian Government turned him down for military service. Just as well, given the horrendous fatality rate in the trenches. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visegr%C3%A1d_Group.

My father heard the two women who were cycling near the place where he was working in the fields, talking Hungarian to each other, and so they met. He use to listen to the New Year concert from Vienna, and I listened with him.

So the books by Frederic Morton threw new light for me on the Habsburg Empire, in addition to having travelled there with my father's maternal sister in my early teens.

[Dreamwoven]

Some useful references:

The Visegrad Group is a pressure group in the EU. It has strong views on minimising immigrants from outside Europe. It is rarely mentioned in the bourgeois press, at least in Sweden. Now I wonder if the new Austrian Government will join them, we will no doubt see soon enough. Admiral Horthy acted as Regent in the event that the Hungarian Crown of St Stephen had a claimant to this part of the Dual Monarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miklós_Horthy - none appeared but Horthy strove to act in unison with the principle of a Regent. He thereby preserved much that was positive, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dohány_Street_Synagogue.

[Dreamwoven]

There is much more to all this. My jewish father was born a sickly child, to the woman his father was married to. He only knew Hungarian because he was a Slovak, which at the time was part of Czechoslovakia. His mother died in childbirth, and so my paternal grandfather quickly wed a woman in milk, who became my father's mother. She disliked my father. He was born in the early 20th Century with scarlet fever - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_fever - which led to him having a weak heart. It meant that when he was called up the Austro-Hungarian Government turned him down for military service. Just as well, given the horrendous fatality rate in the trenches.

My father heard the two women who were cycling near the place where he was working in the fields, talking Hungarian to each other, and so they met. He use to listen to the New Year concert from Vienna, and I listened with him.

So the books by Frederic Morton threw new light for me on the Habsburg Empire, in addition to having travelled there with my father's maternal sister in my early teens.

Mothers-in-law had a difficult relationship with their children-in-law who are not their biological children. This was common in the 1930s but is now all but forgotten. The 1930s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_W...fs_(1937_film) deals with this very well, especially where the mother-in-law dislikes the daughter-in-law who is named Cinderella, indicating her lowly household chores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_(1950_film). These tend to be romanticised and play down the lowly status of the daughter-in-law, as well as the reasons for it.

[Dreamwoven]

I have many books on or about Aberdeen in Scotland where I lived for the last 5 years of the 1960s. But this one is a favourite: Written by an architect, Edward Meldrum and filled with his own hand-drawn sketches of major landmarks in Aberdeen, quite a few long gone in rebuilding in the city. Aberdeen of Old (second edition, 1987). This has much building that is called Scottish Baronial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotti...l_architecture.

Here are the first two verses of a poem called "Vandalism" by A. M. Davidson. I dread to think how the language will be preserved not!

"O fat hiv ye deen t' my ain native toun,
for A'm fairly lost noo fan I stravaig aroon
and look for the streets far I played a wee loon,
O fat hiv ye deen t' my ain native toun?

Far's Strawberry Bank? Far's the auld Wallace Tour?
Fat's come owre the Denburn, ablow and abeen?
An, dammit, ye've flitted oor Tarnty Ha',
rugged up the New Market and muckt up the Green."

[Dreamwoven]

Three books - all in the same series of Penguin Books - by John Prebble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P...Sword_Trilogy- sit on my bookshelves but are not often read. The Fire and Sword Trilogy cover the years when the Scottish Highlands were stripped of its population and left bare and desolate, sheep replacing the people. I read them again very recently and it still makes me angry. At the time I was a postgraduate student at Aberdeen university in the late 1960s. Prebble had migrated to Canada and met several Scots who had been evicted to make way for sheep-runs, and he learned a lot about the sacrifices they made at home and emigrating to Canada. I can recommend the series for anyone interested in Scottish history.

[Dreamwoven]

Three books - all in the same series of Penguin Books - by John Prebble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P...Sword_Trilogy- sit on my bookshelves but are not often read. The Fire and Sword Trilogy cover the years when the Scottish Highlands were stripped of its population and left bare and desolate, sheep replacing the people. I read them again very recently and it still makes me angry. At the time I was a postgraduate student at Aberdeen university in the late 1960s. Prebble had migrated to Canada and met several Scots who had been evicted to make way for sheep-runs, and he learned a lot about the sacrifices they made at home and emigrating to Canada. I can recommend the series for anyone interested in Scottish history.

[Dreamwoven]

The fire and sword trilogy got a lot of its inspiration from talking to Canadians who were transported - often against their wills - to the New World.

[Dreamwoven]

I have a large selection of books about Aberdeen. One of them, The Trial of Patrick Sellar. The Tragedy of Highland Evictions (1962, Routledge and Kegan Paul) starts with an Introduction by Eric Linklater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Linklater. He is scathingly critical of the debasement of Highland fashions. It begins as follows:

"The most incongruous spectacle, and one of the most popular, in contemporary Scotland during the tourist season is the competitive prancing of little girls in a travesty of Gaelic costume on wooden platforms as Highland Gatherings. The dress they wear - kilt and doublet and patterned hose, decorated with frills and laces and small tin medals - is a garish parody of male attire, and the airs to which they dance are the pipe-tunes of a people to whom war was a natural exercise and dancing the social display of a martial spirit. Most of these girls come from Lowland towns, whose inhabitants until fairly recently, hated, feared, and avoided their Highland neighbours, and finally defeated them. To those who see the history of Scotland as something more than a noisy charade, the appearance of the dancing children is lubricous and their performance vulgar; but by the majority, not only of foreign visitors but of their fellow Scots, they are often applauded. And in the applause there is a strange discordance." (p. xi)

[Dreamwoven]

The Visegrad Group now has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visegrád_Group

[Dreamwoven]

Another of my books is written by Ian Carter. It is a history of Farm Life in Northeast Scotland (1840-1914) and subtitled "The poor man's country". At the time he was a colleague of mine at Kings College, Aberdeen. As a result he became Professor of Sociology at Auckland University, New Zealand. He is still there today, though now Professor Emeritus and like me long retired. He is the only case of a researcher who used the brilliant historical records in Kings College's unique collection of history books, and statistical and photographic records. I send him my best regards on the other side of the world. He did something that I only dreamed of, admiring the John Prebble "Fire and Sword Trilogy" that we all read those many decades ago...