The new Quakes' merchandise thread got me motivated to re-create an interesting thread from the Columbus Crew not-soccer-related area of their board, where they separately discuss what they are reading, drinking, watching and listening to. I'll start with what I'm currently reading and hopefully other Quakes fans will jump in. Just started this book, purchased used at Recycle Books on The Alameda in San Jose:
Haven't finished Budapest 1900 yet, but started reading this true-life Western on the flight back from Chicago and cannot put it down:
And if you are intrigued (as I am becoming) with true-life California Westerns, I highly recommend this book (researched in part at History San Jose):
Summer reading recommendations from Stanford Law School faculty: https://storify.com/StanfordLaw/stanford-law-school
In honor of this week's opponent, Pirlo and NYCFC ("give me your tired, your rich, yearning for a retirement league"), I recommend this book: Fun fact: Italian immigrants to Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century stayed at a higher rate than in New York and assimilated more readily into Latin American than Yankee culture.
This week's opponent-inspired recommendation, Reading the Riot Act: A Brief History of Riots in Vancouver: My copy, purchased on a May 2011 trip to see the Quakes play at Empire Field, became outdated after the Stanley Cup riot a few weeks later, in June 2011.
Next: Gunsmithing - The AR-15 Volume 2 by Patrick Sweeney Your friendly neighborhood Southern Quakes Fan
Masters of the Air. It's the basis for The Mighty Eight (aka Band of Brothers 3) which is suppose to come out next year.
You got me excited until I saw your location. You should read the book. If your grandfather was Navigator on a Flying Fortress you're lucky to be here. The 8th suffered more fatalities in WWII than the entire USMC. I imagine they caused more too.
In honor of this Saturday's Heritage Cup opponent: Great read. I got my copy at Left Bank Books, a great independent bookstore right on Pike Place (a few steps from the original Starbucks). Worth a visit next time you're in Seattle to see the Quakes.
In the middle of this right now. If you have read Jared Diamond's, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (highly recommended!) you will probably like this. Yuval Noah Harari has some questions. Among the biggest: How did Homo sapiens (or Homo sapiens sapiens , if you’re feeling especially wise today) evolve from an unexceptional savannah-dwelling primate to become the dominant force on the planet, emerging as the lone survivor out of six distinct, competing hominid species? He also has some answers, and they’re not what you’d expect. Tackling evolutionary concepts from a historian’s perspective, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, describes human development through a framework of three not-necessarily-orthodox “Revolutions”: the Cognitive, the Agricultural, and the Scientific. His ideas are interesting and often amusing: Why have humans managed to build astonishingly large populations when other primate groups top out at 150 individuals? Because our talent for gossip allows us to build networks in societies too large for personal relationships between everyone, and our universally accepted “imagined realities”--such as money, religion, and Limited Liability Corporations—keep us in line. Who cultivated whom, humans or wheat?. Wheat. Though the concepts are unusual and sometimes heavy (as is the book, literally) Harari’s deft prose and wry, subversive humor make quick work of material prone to academic tedium. He’s written a book of popular nonfiction (it was a bestseller overseas, no doubt in part because his conclusions draw controversy) landing somewhere in the middle of a Venn diagram of genetics, sociology, and history. Throughout, Harari returns frequently to another question: Does all this progress make us happier, our lives easier? The answer might disappoint you. --Jon Foro
In honor of this evening's opponent, a McGill co-ed's WW2 diary: Not great literature but an interesting first-person historical account. Canada, as a British dominion, was engaged in the Second World War much earlier than the U.S.
Purchased a gripping book about the 1971 Attica prison uprising at a radical bookstore in Buffalo over the holidays and read it cover-to-cover on the plane home. Here's the New York Times review from last fall: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/books/review/blood-in-the-water-attica-heather-ann-thompson.html