Reading and Running Update

Haven't blogged for a bit...quick update on my running and some comments on the book I just finished.

I've more or less stuck with the running and ran a total of 24 miles this past week, with a long run of six miles on Saturday. I'm feeling pretty good, but am still not really dropping the pounds like I hope to.

My brother-in-law Cam ran the Park City Marathon and is planning to run the Logan Marathon here in a couple of weeks. I have a ways to go before I'm ready for that.

Just finished The Glorious Cause and found it a bit more difficult than some of the other books I've read, but it was still interesting. Some of the main things I found interesting...

• The wide variety of issues that led up to the war that basically all boiled down to the Colonies saying, "We ain't paying taxes to Great Britain." Benjamin Franklin, who at one point was in favor of reconciliation, tried to argue that the Colonies would accept "external taxes", but not "internal taxes" although the supposed line between these two types of taxes proved to be quite blurry.
• The difficulty that George Washington had in keeping soldiers in the army (not to mention keeping them fed and clothed).
• The importance of France in the war and the unlikelihood that the Colonies would have won the war without their assistance (guess we do owe some gratitude to those cheese-eating surrender monkeys).
• The details of the Constitutional Convention and how the ratification of the Constitution was not that easy. In fact, many people of the era saw the Constitution as being in violation of the very principles for which the Revolutionary War had been fought. Namely, that it created a powerful central government, not too different from the government they'd just fought a war to be free from.

My next book will be another Franklin biography (this one by Isaacson). I might knock out Sam Walton's ironically titled Made In America quickly first.

Of the Revolutionary Era books that I've read, I'd have to say that my favorites have been by Joseph Ellis (Founding Brothers and His Excellency). I enjoy the analysis that he adds in addition to just telling the story.