Two reviews I read in the New York Times Today

Is there anything as nice as taking a leisurely time on Saturday getting through the New York Times? Some would say that doing this on Sunday is at least as good, but I digress...

Today I happened across two reviews that made me want to learn more about both of these things.

1) A review of Voyage of the Rose City:

John Moynihan, who during the summer of his junior year at Wesleyan University decided to join the merchant marine and spent four months crossing the equator on an oil supertanker called the Rose City. His excellent account of that trip, “The Voyage of the Rose City,” is packed tight with cigarettes (and other things you can light with a match).

Every book’s publication has a story behind it, this one more so than most. John Moynihan, who died in 2004, was the son of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who as a young man had been in the Navy and worked on the New York City docks. The senator worried about what his son might be in for, and argued against his going. The author’s mother, Elizabeth Moynihan, however, was an ardent sailor who, as she writes in this book’s preface, “immediately set about helping him.”

And 2) a review of Prohibition, the new Ken Burns doc that starts airing on Sunday.

You can hear history talking directly to the Americans of 2011 all through “Prohibition,” an absorbing five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that runs for three nights, beginning on Sunday on PBS stations. Especially now, the story of America’s disastrous experiment with banning alcoholic beverages seems made for Santayana’s phrase about learning from the past or being condemned to repeat it.

...Extremism that sabotages itself by refusing to compromise. Hmm; sounds like tomorrow’s headlines.