That sounds fascinating! I am adding it to the library list. Do you recommend any of her other books in particular?
I remember trying to read one of her books and was bored to friggin' tears with it. I'll have to look up which one it was.
Well, I would also take Nicodemus' recommendation into account, too. But I liked A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, though I can see where it might come across as dry -- it would to me if I was looking for something more... I guess "spiritual" is the right word. Same with Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World. Her first book was her first autobiography: Through the Narrow Gate, which was about her time in the convent from 1962 (when she entered at 17) until she left in 1968. The Spiral Staircase picks up where it left off, and it looks like it is going to focus on her personal evolving understanding of God. She spends a good time here talking about her "other" second volume of her autobiography, Beginning the World which dealt with her first 12 years after leaving the convent. She refers to that book as a disaster, since she was too close to the experiences to be writing about them. If that's the book Nicodemus refers to, he can rest knowing that the author is bored to tears by it, too.
This just came for me on inter-library loan, and so now I'm doing double duty with two books. I'm teaching a college class next fall on American literature of the 1950s, and this book is immensely helpful. Castronovo writes very clear and incisive prose (no jargon in the first 45 or so pages). He treats the fifties as a "third flowering" of American literature (the first two were the 1850s with Emerson/Hawthorne/Melville/Thoreau/Whitman/Dickinson, and the second was in the 1920s and 30s with Eliot/Hemingway/Faulkner etc), and I should have no trouble putting together a decent syllabus with his help. My favorite idea comes from his chapter on "noir" novels, especially those by Jim Thompson, Patricial Highsmith, and David Goodis. Might use a couple of those as "shadow" culture. Read those the week we look at '50s sit-coms, for instance. Anyway...
I am almost done with it. I am not that into science fiction these days, or military fiction, but this was extremely interesting. The idea is that when mankind heads off into space, it finds lots of nasties out there. So the military follows the colonists into space. Earth still is divided into variuous countries. Colonists are recruited from mostly poorer countries or from places like Norway (a country without the resourses to handle a large population). The military recruits only old people from North America. You can volunteer on your 75th birthday. You then leave and never return to Earth. If you survive your tour, you are given a farm on a colonized planet. So the qestion becomes, why exactly does the military want only old people? And how does an army of old folks actually fight?
Finished Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase. It moves ahead of Tony Hendra on my list of best spiritual autobiographies of 2004. Picked this up on the remainder table at Barnes and Noble yesterday: Read the first chapter. Pretty interesting meditation on the contemplative aspects of reading, etc.
I listened to Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven over the weekend, while I was driving a U-Haul truck filled with my mother-in-law's furniture. I'd been given it for Christmas and had avoided it thus far, because I don't generally like the true crime genre. This was okay. Krakauer spent a lot of time on Mormon history, or a version of it, and tried to develop a basis for talking about homicidal religious zealots in general by looking at the religious roots to this particular crime. Basically, a guy who'd formerly been a mainstream Mormon drifted into the realm that those who practice it call "Mormon Fundamentalism" and eventually came to believe he'd been told by God to butcher his sister-in-law (married to his youngest brother) and his 15 month old niece. He got another of his brothers to actually do the killing. The religious argument Krakauer makes aside, the book is about misogyny, both the kind that's frequently codified in religious doctrines and the kind that's taught by parents (the men's father was a wife-beater who also clubbed the family dog to death in front of the kids). The murdered sister-in-law was killed because in his view she thwarted the oldest brothers' plans (which were of course God's plans too) to become a polygamist.
Well they're both still in prison. One's on death row. Maybe they can call in. Aside from the descriptions of the murder scene, maybe what freaked me out most was the fact that their mother sat there on the couch knitting while they planned slitting the throats of her daughter-in-law and only grandchild and never said word one to anybody. My mom never let me get away with anything.
"Case Closed." A book that tries to refute the conspiracy theoriests and show that Oswald did it, alone. Right now, I am in the section addressing the conflicting stories of Goiltsyn and Nosenko, two KGB defectors. This is extremly fascinating. Goiltsyn claimed that the KGB was involved, Nosenko claimed that he reviewed Oswald's file, thought him too unstable to work for the KGB and so the KGB had no involvement. Goiltsyn was supported by Angleton, so the result was that Nosenko was locked up for 4 years in an attempt to get him to admit he was a false defector. Goiltsyn had lead the CIA to Philby, and also claimed there was a high level mole in the CIA. While some parts of Nosenko's story did not add up (there remain questions about his KGB rank and whether the KGB actually recalled him right before he defected), I think the feeling today s that Nosenko was a real defector, while Goiltsyn was at best something of a fantasist trying to tell Angleton what he wanted to hear, and at worst, a false defector.
"John Brown: Abolitionist." New bio (can't remember the author, don't have th book in front of me). Great stuff.
Just started "Bangkok 8" by John Burdett. It's a crime noire set in Bangkok. Pretty good stuff so far.
For that class on 1950s American literature and culture I'm teaching next fall Alas, my copy doesn't have the old-time cover Next up, to decide if I want to do a "noir" unit or not (and if I decide to assign it, MAN do I hope I can find an edition like this one that's not the movie tie-in):
Finished Through the Narrow Gate this weekend and I'm headed to the library at lunch to pick up The Spiral Staircase. I was running behind to the DCU tailgate because I wanted to finish Through the Narrow Gate before I left! Also working on Robin McKinley's Sunshine and re-reading Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris.
Just finished Dublin by Edward Rutherford. Great read. A must for any of you with celtic connections.
The Modern Inquisition: Seven Prominent Catholics and Their Struggles With the Vatican by Paul Collins. Basically an oral history of theologians, nuns and priests who ran into problems for their writings. And on the lighter side of life, The Greedy Bastard Diary by Eric Idle. Damn funny.
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos Bought it and Waiting by Ha Jin as well. Never heard of either of them just looked for something random to read and both of those fit the bill.