Yes. Different dust jacket design, but standard LOA design underneath. I am currently reading The High Crusade by Poul Anderson from that volume. 1950s: https://www.loa.org/books/369-american-science-fiction-four-classic-novels-1953-1956 https://www.loa.org/books/370-american-science-fiction-five-classic-novels-1956-1958 ...and set: https://www.loa.org/books/373-american-science-fiction-nine-classic-novels-of-the-1950s-boxed-set 1960s: https://www.loa.org/books/615-american-science-fiction-four-classic-novels-1960-1966 https://www.loa.org/books/616-american-science-fiction-four-classic-novels-1968-1969 ...and set: https://www.loa.org/books/617-american-science-fiction-eight-classic-novels-of-the-1960s-boxed-set
A look at the project that created the reservoir system from which New York City gets its water supply. According to Sante, it was for all intents and purposes an imperialist project in which the city coercively acquired and then literally destroyed rural communities upstate to sate their need for fresh water. This hit home for me because I love all of Sante's historical work, and also because I live within pissing distance of the largest reservoir in the system.
Interestingly, Sante has multiple appearances in the book I'm reading... Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhatten, which I'm also test reading for a class I'll be teaching. Alas, while it is a great, great memoir by a queer Black writer's student days at Columbia and his early-mid-20s hanging out with old-school New York intellectuals like his mentor pictured on the cover (Elizabeth Hardwick) as well as on the art scene, the CBGB music scene, etc... the book is a little too "Inside baseball" for undergraduates. Still, damn fine book by Luc/Lucy Sante's friend and frequent frenemy, Daryl Pinckney
I first watched "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" movie when it first came out. I waited many years for me to forget the plot before I read the book. Last week, I finally read "The Girl who Played with Fire". I almost did not start because it was 720 pages long. oh well, I could not put it down even through I thought Larsson dragged the story too long. I finished the book in about 8 days. Some of you probably read it. Overall, I like it very much, but I thought "Dragon Tattoo" was better. It was darker. I might read the third Larsson's book.
The Dain Curse - Dashiell Hammett This book is okay, but if there is a mystery with a more complicated plot, I don't want to know about it.
It's not a new book, but I just got around to: Very enjoyable read, even if I'm getting a bit tired of the author's POV (I get it--a generation of historians went overboard over-correcting for bias and threw out the flawed greatness of men like Champlain with the revisionist bathwater--thanks for making that point again every couple of chapters or so). He's certainly an excellent writer, and he's doing about as well as you can bringing a character like Champlain alive (he wrote precious little about himself; there's not a single verified portrait of him, etc.). Nearing the end of the text, although there's over a hundred pages of appendices after the conclusion.
Rep for reading Perlstein, and also be being a fellow Fit driver. I have a stick-shift 2013. And I play CDs all the time (have the latest Guided by Voices at the moment).
Invisible Bridge is probably the best understanding I ever got of the 1970s along with what Reagan was up to then. And if I had to reread them, I'd do it in chronological order. Starting with Before the Storm.
I work from home and fill mine up every 3-4 weeks. I only filled up once when gas prices were stupid high last year.
When you're done with Perlstein, you should check out Nicole Hemmer. She's doing the social history of the far right in the late 20th century while he's doing the political history.
I'm almost done with a book of history/historiography that handles the bias over-correction a lot better... The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History, which mostly covers the work of the "Prairie Historians" who were mostly active as an identifiable group from the 1900s to just after WWII. Author Jon Lauck acknowledges the limitations of the group for which they have been justly criticized, but points out that, compared with historians in the Ivy League or Cal ans Stanford, they were actually pretty good. For example, one guy whose name I can't remember was rightly criticized for his free use of words like "darky" in his personal correspondance... and even in some official documents. BUT he also directed the dissertations of three black scholars, one of whom was a woman AND he made sure they got jobs (in those days, you got jobs not through the rigorous and complicated systems universities employ today, but rather through personal contacts of your dissertation advisor). You won't find anyone teaching at Harvard, Yale or Princeton who directed more than one black person to a Ph.D. And even then, you'll find that most such departments rewarded precisely zero history degrees to people of color, and roughly the same to women. So, yes... their biases were there, But in the context of the times... Well, there were advantages to teaching and studying at places like Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, etc., that you couldn't find at the Ivies if you were not from the right sort of families. Lauck recently published a history of the Midwest that I'll be reading over Spring Break.
Crap. I hadn't heard they weren't selling them here anymore. When we eventually need to replace this one, it would have been in the running.
Read Chocky yesterday, Wyndham’s last book I believe. I enjoyed it, not just for the excellent story line but the lifestyles of the socio economic class and England itself in the 60s. He, in the storyline, with his Oxford education, hobnobbing with Harley St specialists. His home with a bathroom and garden and buying a new car. Me asked to leave school at 15. Lived in a ‘nice’ terraced (row) house with the toilet down the yard, 3 generations of us. Dad never learned to drive, a car was out of reach. He was 21 with 2 babies when he spent 6 years at war and lucky to get a job afterwards. Mum and dad were great parents recognized my love of reading and getting out to the English countryside or beaches on weekends. Bus or train rides. In 1966 I was a young dad with 2 babies. Working when I could in the shipyards and in steel work. My wife and I decided that the babies needed a different life than Liverpool back then. So we left for NZ. That worked well especially for the kids. Schooling was different, the 2 girls were the first in our family to get degrees. Jenny with her masters in education let her wander abroad with her family. There’s a big difference with them and my brothers kids in Liverpool. Great kids and they keep in touch with their old uncle. But different attitudes in life. Boy I do digress. Wyndham did suck me into his ‘storied’ lifestyle as well as Michaels friend Chocky did. Apologies
Live No Lies by John Mark Comer. This book was a gift from my pastor. I was pleasantly surprised that he referenced an early church father whom I was not familiar with. Looks interesting.
Tender Is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald "On the long-roofed steamship piers one is in a country that is no longer here and not yet there. The hazy yellow vault is full of echoing shouts. There are the rumble of trucks and the clump of trunks, the strident chatter of cranes, the first salt smell of the sea. One hurries through, even though there’s time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.”
Been reading Steven Waldman's Sacred Liberty: America's Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom. Waldman's assertion is that the whole idea was so groundbreaking that the fact it took 150 years to even approach the ideal shouldn't detract from the fact that the founders structured it this way. He's makes a good argument, emphasizing the progress attained in each example rather than dwelling on all of the crap the group's had to go through to get there. Chapters are roughly chronological, from Evangelicals to Catholics to Mormons to African Americans to Native Americans to Jehovah's Witnesses to Jews and on. What would be interesting is to compare where we were in, say, the 1960s and on with where countries with very different religious tolerance laws were at the same time.
While The Great Gatsby is an easy book to admire for the artful construction, elegant phrases, etc (not to mention one of the great closing lines in American literature), this is the Fitzgerald novel that hits the hardest for me.
Black Boy (American Hunger), finally, a memoir that I take out for a test read that will in fact wind up on my syllabus next year, assuming I can find a decent paperback, by Richard Wright. The original was about half the length and didn't include Wright's (decidedly negative) experience with The Communist Party: this version has it, and if that's now readily available (it wasn't when I was in college), I'll be assigning this one.