📚 Roger's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .

Well, I’d like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. Just once. I know I’m not born to run, I know that the Seven Sisters’ Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can’t be so different, can they? I’d like to phone all those people up and say good luck, and good-bye, and then they’d feel good and I’d feel good.

High Fidelity

Nick Horn

But Lee could see that so long as the enemy held the high ground south of town, the battle was not over. He knew that the rest of the Army of the Potomac must be hurrying toward Gettysburg; his best chance to clinch the victory was to seize those hills and ridges before they arrived. So Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to attack Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Had Jackson still lived, he undoubtedly would have found it practicable. But Ewell was not Jackson. Thinking the enemy position too strong, he did not attack—thereby creating one of the controversial “ifs” of Gettysburg that have echoed down the years. By the time dusk approached, General Winfield Scott Hancock of the 2nd Corps had arrived and laid out a defense line curling around Culps and Cemetery hills and extending two miles south along Cemetery Ridge to a hill called Little Round Top. As three more Union corps arrived during the night—along with Meade himself—the bluecoats turned this line into a formidable position. Not only did it command high ground, but its convex interior lines also allowed troops to be shifted quickly from one point to another while forcing the enemy into concave exterior lines that made communication between right and left wings slow and difficult. Studying the Union defenses through his field glasses on the evening of July 1 and again next morning, Longstreet concluded that this line was too strong for an attack to succeed. He urged Lee to turn its south flank and get between the Union army and Washington. This would compel Meade to attack the Army of Northern Virginia in its chosen position. Longstreet liked best the tactical defensive; the model he had in mind was Fredericksburg where Yankee divisions had battered themselves to pieces while the Confederates had suffered minimal casualties. Longstreet had not been present at Chancellorsville nor had he arrived at Gettysburg on July 1 until after the whooping rebels had driven the enemy pell-mell through the town. These were the models that Lee had in mind. He had not accomplished the hoped-for “destruction” of the enemy in the Seven Days’ or at Chancellorsville. Gettysburg presented him with a third chance.42 The morale of his veteran troops had never been higher; they would regard such a maneuver as Longstreet suggested as a retreat, Lee thought, and lose their fighting edge. According to a British military observer accompanying the Confederates, the men were eager to attack an enemy “they had beaten so constantly” and for whose fighting capacity they felt “profound contempt.” Lee intended to unleash them. Pointing to Cemetery Hill, he said to Longstreet: “The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.” Longstreet replied: “If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him; a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so.” But Lee had made up his mind, and Longstreet turned away sadly with a conviction of impending disaster.

The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom

James M. McPherson

looking back on it, I realize that resisting the temptation of “in this one extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay” has proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed. And it turned out that my teammates didn’t need me. They won the game anyway. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. That’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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