Napoleon, Crimea and Detective Fiction

Hi All,

The boys were off school today because of a city-wide teacher training day at the University of Agder. Bill headed out with Walter to find a movie at the public library to show during Walter's birthday party. He brought back Buster Keaton's The General, Harry Potter Og Fangen Fra Azkaban, and Tintin I Haisjøen. Which would you choose? I'm a bit anxious about having an apartment filled with Norwegian nine-year old boys who speak little English.

I took Mark down to the University where he made his way to the different school-publishing/activity tables. Whittling, we discovered, is a favorite activity for kids in school. At the Norwegian history booth a nice fellow gave him a book in Norwegian on Norwegian history and a poster of Oscar Wergeland's 1885 painting "Eidsvold 1814," showing the signing of the Norwegian constitution in 1814.

While Mark went to the library, I went to my office to read Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies,(1932) the first detective novel written by an African American. Fisher was a physician in Harlem who died as the result of x-ray exposure from experiments he performed. Next it's onto Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon--all context for George Schuyler's detective fiction in the Courier.

Mark met me in my office and had a nice conversation with Peter Young, a British professor of Victorian studies, who has been teaching at the University since 1969! When I mentioned that Mark and Walter were interested in Napoleon's battles at Trafalgar and Waterloo, he suggested that Mark read more about the battle of Borodino. Mark asked where Borodino was and Peter responded that it was in Russia, and that Napoleon had left thousands of his troops there to starve. Lithuania had a few years ago, in fact, found the remains of several thousand of Napoleon's troops, and we saw some of the remnants of their uniforms in the National History Museum in Vilnius. In any event, Peter then gave Mark a book on the Crimean War and explained that it was the first war to be photographed. Florence Nightingale served there and her work marks the beginning of modern nursing. Mark happily accepted the book and started reading. I was touched by Peter's kindness.