I wasn’t all that impressed with Dundee — but stayed here one night as a jumping off point for nearby St Andrews.
With the decline of traditional industry (raw wool, whaling, shipbuilding, etc.), a £1 billion master plan to regenerate Dundee Waterfront is expected to last for a 30-year period between 2001 and 2031.
In 2015 The Wall Street Journal ranked Dundee at number 5 on its “Worldwide Hot Destinations” list for 2018.
… I’m not sure why.
To me it felt a small city in decline. Many shops vacant.
There are some grand historic buildings.
On the other hand, tourist pedestrian streets downtown are great. And it has excellent train and bus connections.
My highlight was climbing up to the Dundee Law, the highest point in the city. A large war memorial at its summit.
I was laughing out loud every 2nd page. It’s been compared with Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.
I downloaded because I was in Scotland, en route to St. Andrews.
Tom Coyne is the editor of quarterly, The Golfer’s Journal.
In 2010 he published A Course Called Ireland, where he WALKED around the perimeter of the Republic and Northern Ireland, without the use of any transportation, playing the courses en route: 36 courses, 648 holes, over 2,000,000 yards.
Reluctantly — urged by his drunken best friend — he wroteA Course Called Scotland, 111 courses in the home of golf.
Tom chose mostly LINKS courses, hoping to learn the secret of golf in Scotland.
Courses in Scotland were originally set-up on the worst coastal land — no good for farming. Golfers shared the space with sheep and rabbits that kept the foliage down.
He did include some links courses in England and Wales, as well.
The 4th book in the Gideon series is best yet. In fact, each seems better than the last.
This thriller reminded me of the film Alien. It could be categorized science fiction.
Gideon’s Sword
Gideon’s Corpse
The Lost Island
Beyond the Ice Limit
The Pharaoh Key
[Warning: BEYOND THE ICE LIMIT is the sequel to THE ICE LIMIT.
While BEYOND is a stand-alone novel, we want to warn potential readers that the copy below contains serious spoilers for THE ICE LIMIT, for those who wish to read that book first.]
That thing is growing again. We must destroy it. The time to act is now …
With these words begins Gideon Crew’s latest, most dangerous, most high-stakes assignment yet. Failure will mean nothing short of the end of humankind on earth.
Five years ago, the mysterious and inscrutable head of Effective Engineering Solutions, Eli Glinn, led a mission to recover a gigantic meteorite–the largest ever discovered–from a remote island off the coast of South America.
The mission ended in disaster when their ship, the Rolvaag, foundered in a vicious storm in the Antarctic Sea and broke apart, sinking—along with its unique cargo—to the ocean floor. One hundred and eight crew members perished, and Eli Glinn was left paralyzed.
But this was not all. The tragedy revealed something truly terrifying: the meteorite they tried to retrieve was not, in fact, simply a rock. Instead, it was a complex organism from the deep reaches of space.
Now, that organism has implanted itself in the sea bed two miles below the surface—and it is growing. If it is not destroyed, the planet will be doomed.
There is only one hope: for Glinn and his team to annihilate it, a task which requires Gideon’s expertise with nuclear weapons. But as Gideon and his colleagues soon discover, the “meteorite” has a mind of its own—and it has no intention of going quietly…
The Women (2024) by Kristin Hannah is one of the most popular books of 2024.
Intense.
I’d forgotten just how IDIOTIC was the Vietnam War.
The tragedy that befalls Frankie is multilayered, though all of it can be traced back to the moment she impulsively volunteers to be an Army nurse in Vietnam.
Before she knows what’s happened, she’s 2nd Lt. Frances McGrath, arriving at a 400-bed hospital 60 miles from Saigon.
… Frankie has no understanding of what horrors await her.
Her first full day in-country, after helicopters swoop in carrying dozens of gravely injured men, a medic hands her a boot and, when Frankie realizes a foot is still inside, she vomits and then tells anyone who will listen that she’s made a huge mistake.
Rick McCharles 
