Tag: adventure

3,090 words

Earle Labor
Jack London: An American Life
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013

“The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived.”

– Alfred Kazin

American writer Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876. Born into poverty in San Francisco, London later said that “life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.” He would go on to become one of America’s most famous literary sons, albeit one whose life contained many contradictions and internal oppositions. “No American writer,” writes London scholar Earle Labor “has been subjected to more misleading commentaries.” (more…)

1,750 words

I had different ideas about soldiering. — Flashman

In 1965, in the English town of Ashby in Leicestershire, a great literary find was made at a simple household furniture sale. Several oilskin packages containing the memoirs of an old soldier were found in a tea chest. A South African gentleman, nearest in kin to the soldier, took charge of the manuscript before passing it on to another ex-soldier named George Macdonald Fraser for editing.

None of this ever happened, but it was not a literary hoax so much as a good-natured literary conceit. The memoirs were “written” by literary creation Harry Flashman, a school bully who appears in Thomas Hughes’ 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. George Macdonald Fraser rather brilliantly took the character and ran with it, creating Flashman, the most cowardly soldier ever to become a hero. The series ran to 12 novels, and the first, Flashman, begins with Harry’s disgrace. (more…)

Kay Nielsen draft of a shipwreck, ca. 1940

6,074 words

It was a dark and soon-to-be stormy night on the Gulf Coast some years ago, when my other half and I sat on our porch chairs, gazing toward the sea. He held a cigarette — a bad (thankfully short-lived) habit he’d picked up during his year-long research sabbatical in Valladolid; paired with his fedora, I’m sure he knew that it lent him a (pretentious) air reminiscent of interwar Europe (more…)

Jean Raspail as photographed by Pascal Parrot in 1981.

8,709 words

On June 13, 2020, the French explorer and novelist Jean Raspail died in Paris at the age of 94. Many were the nationalists, identitarians, and traditional Catholics who paid tribute at his passing. Former European MP and co-founder of the European identity movement Iliade, Jean-Yves Gallou, stated that Raspail was “the man who foretold the destructive impact of blame culture and anti-racism on our civilization back in 1973.”  (more…)

Puritan-descended poet Robert Frost in the 1910s, about 40 years old. Even his physiognomy was Yankee.

1,853 words

Discussing Robert Frost’s collection Steeple Bush in the New York Times upon its release in 1947, poet Randall Jarrell devoted the bulk of his review to quoting and summarizing just one poem, “Directive,” saying,

Reading through Frost’s new book one stops for a long time at “Directive. . . .” There are weak places in the poem, but these are nothing . . . (more…)

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Defending the Sampo, 1896.

1,641 words

I grew up reading fantasy books. Throughout my teenage years, fantasy books gave me countless hours of entertainment. Yet with any form of entertainment that has a predominantly white male audience, (more…)

6,022 words

Joe Kittinger and Craig Ryan
Come Up and Get Me: An Autobiography of Colonel Joe Kittinger
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010

“Fighter pilots and test pilots do not accept death. We accept the risks.” — Col. Joe Kittinger

Col. Joe Kittinger had been ballooning upward for two hours. (more…)

"Free soloists don't use any ropes or other gear—their skill is their only protection."

1,784 words

Courage—especially social courage—and adventure or thrill-seeking are not the same thing.

Courage is a quality most needed by members of the white racial movement. Conviction and the strength and spirit to stand up to totalitarian authorities and the crowd (often a lynch mob) are more important by far than conventionally “brave” danger-seeking traits.

Whites as a group rank high on the adventure/thrill-seeking scale, but true courage is in short supply. (more…)