Books with author Joseph P. Cook

The Secret Club is a book about the adventures and imaginations of children. As children; my sister and I created the Secret Club. We used our imaginations in the same manner as the children in the book. We have continued to promote this play-act for our children and grandchildren. The children in the book create a Secret Club and plan various adventures. The children display good manners and respect for their parents throughout the book.

Three young men find each other on a baseball field. Each has suffered rejection in their own way; Tom, a product of a broken home; Mike, an orphan with living parents, and Llewellyn, often rejected by his peers. Each boy finds in the others a common bond--something neither had ever experienced before. Though this bond was unspoken, it also seemed unbreakable. And in this, they were half-right. Their bond could never have been broken by intruders, but it was still vulnerable from within. In this way, they are faced with having to put the pieces back together, only to fear that they will remain broken forever.

Alcohol injures the blood by changing the color and chemical composition of its corpuscles.In the stereopticon illustrations, you saw that the red discs of blood are distorted in shape by the action of alcohol. You saw that the arrangement of the coloring matter in the red discs is changed. You saw that various adulterations appeared to come into the blood, or at least into visibility there, under the influence of alcohol. Lastly, you saw, most terrible of all, an absolutely new growth occurring there—a sprout protruding itself from the side of the red corpuscle in the vital stream. Last year I showed you what some of the diseases of leprosy did for the blood, and you see how closely alcoholism in the blood resembles in physical effects the most terrific diseases known to man.Here are the diseases that are the great red seal of God Almighty's wrath against sensuality; and when we apply the microscope to them, we find in the blood discs these sprouts, that greatly resemble each other in the inebriate and in the leper. Dr. Harriman has explained, with the authority of an expert, these ghastly growths. These sprouts shoot out of the red discs, and he tells you that, after having been called before jury after jury as an expert, sometimes in cases where life was at stake, he has studied alcoholized blood, and that a certain kind of spore, a peculiar kind of sprout, which you have seen here, he never saw except in the veins of a confirmed drunkard. I think the day is coming when, by microscopic examination of the blood discs, we can tell what disease a man has inherited or acquired—if it be one of that kind which takes hold of the circulatory fluid.

Cassio's language in Othello is to-day adopted by cool physiological science: "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, revel, pleasure and applause, transform ourselves into beasts! To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unbless'd, and the ingredient is the devil."—Shakespeare, Othello, Act II., Scene iii.

Cassio’s language in Othello is to-day adopted by cool physiological science: "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, revel, pleasure and applause, transform ourselves into beasts! To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unbless'd, and the ingredient is the devil."—Shakespeare, Othello, Act II., Scene iii. Central in all the discussion of the influence of intoxicating drink upon the human brain is the fact that albuminous substances are hardened by alcohol. I take the white of an egg, and, as you see, turn it out in a fluid condition into a goblet. The liquid is a viscous, glue-like substance, largely composed of albumen. It is made up of pretty nearly the same chemical ingredients that constitute a large part of the brain and the nervous system, and of many other tissues of the body. Forty per cent of the matter in the corpuscles of the blood is albumen. I am about to drench this white of an egg with alcohol. I have never performed this experiment before, and it may not succeed, but so certain am I that it will, that I purpose never to put the bottle to my lips and introduce into my system a fiend to steal away my brain. Edmund Burke, when he heard William Pitt say in Parliament that England would stand till the day of judgment, rose and replied; "What I fear is the day of no judgment." When Booth was about to assassinate Lincoln, his courage failed him, and he rushed away from the theater for an instant into the nearest restaurant and called for brandy. Harden the brain by drenching it in alcohol and you harden the moral nature.

Three young men find each other on a baseball field. Each has suffered rejection in their own way; Tom, a product of a broken home; Mike, an orphan with living parents, and Llewellyn, often rejected by his peers. Each boy finds in the others a common bond--something neither had ever experienced before. Though this bond was unspoken, it also seemed unbreakable. And in this, they were half-right. Their bond could never have been broken by intruders, but it was still vulnerable from within. In this way, they are faced with having to put the pieces back together, only to fear that they will remain broken forever.