Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Busting Heads in Pre-War America
There are few things as repugnant as the Mob. Except maybe Nazis. It kind of makes sense that Jewish mobsters once took an opportunity to improve their image by punching Nazis.
“Gangsters vs Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America,” by Michael Benson relates the story of one of the strangest campaigns of the 1930s and 40s. It shows how the Jewish community in the United States organized to fight the German-American Bund and other fascist groups in the United States in the years prior to American entry into World War II. They did it by enlisting the assistance of Jewish Gangsters.
As Benson points out, in mid-century America organized crime was big, especially in immigrant communities. They formed in every community with a large, poor immigrant population. The most famous was the Italian Mafia, but there were Irish, Polish, Hispanic, and Jewish mobs, too. They were a product of poverty and desperation.
Cal Yarborough was a farmer. A widower and old, he was living alone on his farm. While he was in the hospital, his children used their power-of-attorney to sell the farm and settle him at Sun City, a Central Texas retirement community.
What is the dividing line between East and West? Where does the Western World end and the Orient begin?
Take a typical college-aged man from the Midwest in today’s America. Give him the ambition to slay dragons and become a knight errant. It is unrealistic, but it is his dream. Then let him discover magic really works. He slays a fire-breathing dragon (with his mom’s Volvo), and is invited to join Knight Watch, an organization dedicated to protecting ordinary Americans from intrusions by supernatural enemies
Poetry is the oldest of the language arts. It predated literacy. Its cadence, rhythm, and rhyme allowed complex things to be remembered. When literacy emerged, the earliest literature recorded was poetry. Today prose has displaced poetry from primacy, yet poems remain important.
Paul Springer grew up in New Jersey during the 1920s and 1930s. A smart kid, he graduated high school at 16 in 1934 and worked at a bank. In 1937 he won a full scholarship at Ivy League Yale. Paul wanted adventure. He wanted to travel.
Paris of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a second home to Russia’s nobility. Until the start of the First World War, they retreated to Paris to have fun. Some liked it so much that until the war started they abandoned Russia almost entirely, remaining in Paris year-round.
Time travel stories are almost as old as science fiction. One of H. G. Wells’s earliest involved time travel. So is combat SF.
Abe Allard and C. S. Duffy are private investigators in Chicago. Not the glamorous investigators of movies and novels, or even noir detectives of mysteries. They do research for lawyers, background checks for corporations, and track unfaithful spouses.
What makes things stick together? Why is that useful and when is it a problem? Where does friction occur and how do you reduce it? Why are some things slippery and others not?
Sandip Mathur was born in India. He became a doctor there with specialist training in London, England and Houston, Texas. In Houston, he and his wife realized they loved Texas. They wanted to stay. He needed a Permanent Resident Card, the green card permitting an alien to legally remain and work in the United States. To get one he agreed to practice medicine three years in an underserved rural community.
Illarion Glaskov is a miller’s son in a small farming village in the far north of Kolakolvia. It is so remote the Czar’s tax collectors have not visited it for years, and the Empire has forgotten to levy conscripts from it. That suits Glaskov. He would be the one drafted. He would as soon marry his fiancé Hana, raise a family and run the family mill.
James Hornfischer exploded on the naval history scene in 2005 with his book “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.” It was an account of the Battle off Samar when a collection of destroyers, destroyer escorts, and escort carriers fought Japan’s main surface battle force to a standstill. Over the next dozen years he wrote four more books, three focused on the Pacific War. All were excellent. In 2021 he died.
Most people have trouble with numbers. They easily visualize up to twelve. Once beyond 100 numbers kind of blur together. There is a difference between a one in 500 chance of something happening and a one in a million chance, but most people do not really understand it. Or the difference between a million and a billion.
At the beginning of World War I, John R. Muir was a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He was also an avid yachtsman.
Augustus StJohn Thislewood III is the scion of an industrial barony in the planet Azure (a barony in terms of influence rather than actual nobility). Briz is an orphan, a young petty criminal who lives by her wits.
Bill Yenne has been writing aviation history for half a century. Sometimes groundbreaking, his books is always informative and entertaining
Julia Fairchild is a physician in a small southern Washington State town. She has long-term family roots in Parkview, a town of 38,000 built around the local pulp and paper mill. An internist at the local hospital, Julia has a hobby: solving mysteries.