{"id":25946,"date":"2020-04-04T13:00:09","date_gmt":"2020-04-04T18:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=25946"},"modified":"2020-04-03T18:00:56","modified_gmt":"2020-04-03T23:00:56","slug":"book-report-red-plush-and-black-beard-condensed-by-marguerite-higgins-1955","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/04\/book-report-red-plush-and-black-beard-condensed-by-marguerite-higgins-1955\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Red Plush and Black Beard (Condensed) <\/i> by Marguerite Higgins (1955)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/redplushblackbeard.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">This is a condensed, pamphlet-sized version of a longer book (which is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/plush-black-bread-Marguerite-Higgins\/dp\/B0007DMIRI\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">$300 on Amazon<\/a> if you search via Bing but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Plush-Black-Beard-Marguerite-Higgins\/dp\/B000RWPF4C\/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&#038;keywords=red+plush+black+beard+higgins&#038;qid=1585954252&#038;s=books&#038;sr=1-1\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">$8<\/a> if you search on Amazon?) about Marguerite Higgins&#8217;s experience in the Soviet Union.  It clocks in at 16 pages, and I probably got it in a bundle of chapbooks\/pamphlets for a buck at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale some time ago.  But I&#8217;m counting as a book I read regardless of the length.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, you don&#8217;t have to be a Russiaphile to know what she finds: Brutal architecture, primitive living, but a resilient and resigned people.<\/p>\n<p>But enough about this little publication of the Good Reading Rack Service.  It leads to a little wondering about the Good Reading Rack Service itself.  The book has no price markings; what was the Good Reading Rack Service?  Internet searches yield no history of the company but a boatload of entries from their series.  Was it teaser giveaways for bookstores trying to sell the books themselves?<\/p>\n<p>Also, how about <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Marguerite_Higgins\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Marguerite Higgins<\/a> herself?  A woman war correspondent who covered World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam along with being the bureau head in Moscow when she wrote <em>Red Plush and Black Beard<\/em>.  Wow, that&#8217;s more interesting than what she had to say about Moscow in the middle 1950s.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a condensed, pamphlet-sized version of a longer book (which is $300 on Amazon if you search via Bing but $8 if you search on Amazon?) about Marguerite Higgins&#8217;s experience in the Soviet Union. It clocks in at 16 pages, and I probably got it in a bundle of chapbooks\/pamphlets for a buck at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25947,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25946\/revisions\/25947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}