• Part I of TC's furthest look back to the birth of some form of Democracy. She uses this attractive heroine, Aspasia, as her mouthpiece.
• Dealing with a small group of citizens among a much larger group of various types of slaves have only a loose and complicated parallel with what has happened in our nation's history. Yet, TC's insistence that things never change might have her argue against this.
• Aspasia's conversation with her brilliant Greek teacher, Aeneas on the nature of slavery.

✺ 10-07-20AStrongCity: Visible Remnants Of An Industry Whose Rise Taylor Caldwell Described 80 Years Ago

• In the front piece of her 1942 novel, The Strong City, TC refers to her trip through the Bethlehem steel plant in Lackawanna, New York.
• As a late teenager, I often followed the Niagara river, along the recently opened New York Thruway – part of the interstate highway system that became President Dwight Eisenhauer's great infrastructure project – along the north edge of Buffalo.
• Although, TC planted this in Pennsylvania, a Buffalonian can't escape the reference to the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was foretold then, from North-East Canada down through the Great lakes, that opening would spur Buffalo's growth from 650,000 in 1959 to a million by 1970. We didn't doubt that Buffalo would eventually rival even Chicago.
• The newsletter includes reviews from several sources on this story of a Rust Belt Industry that quickly went defunct.

✺ 10-17-20OnceMoreRome: What TC thinks should be our sources of authority

• Part II of ''Glory and the Lightning'' tells of the upbringing of Pericles, and his relation to Zeno of Elea and Anaxagorus, two of the geniuses that still give Athens of its golden age an aura beyond the Parthenon.
• In the mouth of Zeno, TC plants words of 'wisdom' like: ''youth scoffs at bitter knowledge, and wisdom and sagacity, and prefers to make its own disasters and wreck its own life ... The world is very old ... and there will never be a new planet, but only repetition which will be haled as novelty and progress.''
• I have interspersed the words of David Brooks conservative writer for the NY Times, which give an appropriate modification in mild agreement with this.
• TC discourses on a Republic vs a Democracy. She is adamant on which she prefers and why.
• TC doubted that education could have any effect on the masses, the rabble, the mob, the groups she hated most, though precisely who constituted these groups is tough to discern.
• TC still stands among the founders of the J(ohn) B(irch) S(ociety) with links to her standing among them. This including comments that they lauded her most for Growing Up Tough, the book closest to being her autobiography.

✺ 11-01-20CaptainsandtheKings: TC's View Of People In This Wide World

• TC's view that people are the same everywhere, then and now.
• I describe my first long period in Israel when I met the woman who would become my second wife, and how little it seemed like America, despite the serialization of Captains and the Kings appearing on TV sets in the main Jerusalem department store.
• Here is a chance to consider several of TC's tetralogies, especially those extending Dynasty of Death and her Mediterannean novels, each of the latter touching on her approach to Jesus, heavy on his aura, little on his teachings.

✺ 11-04-20TestimonyofTwoMen: TC On Public Virtue Belied By Private Venality

• Those with whom we might side are here struggling to understand why we so often regard certain public characters, who readily play games with evil motives, as the epitome of virtue.
• Set near Caldwell's birth and at the writing of the novel, her then home. Instead of a warning of the meanness of small time life, Caldwell pictures a small town well connected to America's Manifest Destiny.
• TC's novels are driven by tangling with the thoughts of evil. Her vision, though, on her description of evil has changed in various ways over her long career.
• 3 time-frames to contend with how TC, as the novelist, viewed America: The turn of the 19th century; the mores of the '60s; and how we can accept her certainty that men never change. Especially when, from TC her anti-feminism, even in repeating that phrase, is clear.

✺ 11-07-20ThisSideofInnocence: Two Disparate TC Novels Featuring Innocence

• Was This side of Innocence (1946), TC's play on the title of F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut This side of Paradise published in 1920?
• This Side of Innocence went through 108 editions published between 1946 and 1992 – in 8 languages. You can't call it a dud. Yet it plays awkwardly today, primarily because TC like Phyllis Schafly had different rules for 'ordinary' females than she applied to herself.
• I let two modern reviewers (Anna and Sondra) speak to this, and also two voices from the TC newsletter readership, one of whom saw Peggy as a a model for the heroine.

✺ 11-08-20messlist-tc20-ext: iA new stage in these Newsletters on TC's life and accomplishments, including a collated archive of the first 3 quarters of 2020 Newsletters.

• Misgiving 1: After 32 newsletters this year (and another 11 in 2019), I have barely started on Peggy's autobiography.
• Misgiving 2: Novels, like Dear and Glorious Physican, among TC's most acclaimed that I have yet to properly tackle.

✺ 11-17-20PericlesLoveatFirstsight: Taylor Caldwell's Prelude To A Heaven-Lit Historical Romance

• The End of Part II of ''Glory and the Lightning." The first marriage of Pericles
• We are anticipating the meeting of Aspasia and Pericles: The Meeting is arranged by a paramour of Pericles
• TC's familiar tropes, including that progress is an illusion and democracy is to be despised: TC's three chapter prelude to the meeting
• From where come my historical Sources, and what is the relation to TC's tale?
• Can we relate to what has happened between our two protagonists?

✺ 12-05-20Athens-MagnetforGenius-sale: TC's Last Mediterranean Novel; Genius Brought Together

• This novel belongs in a context with TC's three other Mediterranean novels, Dear and Glorious Physician (1959), A Pillar of Iron (1965) and Great Lion of God (1970).
• They mark propitious times in mankind's history. The two novels on the Saints, of course, figure today in the story of Jesus. You hear their very words (translated from Greek and Aramaic) whenever a church makes its yearly run through the liturgy.
• Both here and in Pillar of Iron the overriding topic was what manner of men should be allowed to weigh in on the governing of these empires: The respective Athenian democracy (vs Solon's constitutional Republic), and the Roman Republic being lost to autocracy. Here, in both, there be villains. Common to both, the support of those villains are the rabble/mob exploited by the elite/effete governmental bureaucracy.
• There is ever present allusion to "The Unknown God," TC's reference to the coming of Jesus. Indeed, in this novel Aspasia has an alter to this unknown god.
• Pericles' long friendship with Anaxagorus comes to a climax. In a court trial, Pericles defends Anaxagorus' insights, and we get a chance to compare the evils of Rome (Cataline vs Cicero) with those of Athens, including Pericles' device to defend those he loves, especially Aspasia.

✺ 12-16-20Pillar-Earth: Letter On TC's Career To The Descendants' Grandfather

• Description of three letters containing precious details of TC's life in her own hand.
• The first of these, tells of the time – in 1937 – before TC was in print, giving details of her collaboration with Mr. Reback, her second husband (not our grandfather).
• The Earth is the Lord's, TC's second publication, in 1940, is a good indication of the type of novel that she was trying to write as discussed between she and Marcus Reback, before she was published, another novel with a voluminous historical record, for which most of the writing avoids the documented periods.
• I make several allusions to related history as recorded in famous volumes.

✺ 01-01-21SevenTCpromotions: Seven TC Promotions, And What We've Learned About TC

• In the last year and a half, I have used the OR sales as a way to fathom how TC pictured her own life and how others, in turn, pictured her.
• Peggy seems to have roughly understood TC, yet like my sister and many others, she wished TC to see her as worthy, something they never quite got.
• A prelude to looking again at her having become the darling of the John Birch Society.
• TC's character compared to that of her most exemplary heroines.