Yes, but what quotes come to mind? The blurb on the jacket says it is thoroughly quotable, and yet you shared no quotes. (I think if it is that quotable, you should remember without looking back at the text for help.)
The book recounted the murder of a white Harvard student in 1976 during a visit to Combat Zone at the conclusion of the Harvard football team's season as a traditional team ritual. Three African American men were accused of the crime, leading to two highly charged trials influenced by the changing racial tensions prevalent in Boston during that period. The first trial was tainted by injustice for the three accused individuals, who, being Black, did not receive a fair trial. One of the accused was probably innocent. However, the appeal trial took place against the backdrop of evolving racial tensions in Boston, potentially enabling at least one of the accused to evade justice for the murder. In a sense, this narrative appeared to be a sadly familiar tale in the United States. There was no justice for everyone. .
A Fan's Notes – Frederick Exley Parts of this novel are hilarious, and parts are boring, but overall it is well worth reading.
Fever In the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over American, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, a frightening true account of how the revised, post Birth of a Nation Klan, based largely in Indiana and with an expanded focus of hate (the original KKK was anti-Black, the new Klan included Blacks, but since there weren't that many in Indiana at the time, they expanded to Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in general). An election 100 years ago was pretty crucial to defeating the bastards, that, and a trial of their main leader for raping and contributing to the death of a woman, whose deathbed testimony to a lawyer put his ass away. Author Timothy Egan is an excellent journalist with a flair for narrative. One of the highlights for me was when the klan marched on South Bend intending to seriously vandalize the college there. They got their asses kicked by the students. This one of the few times in history I was cheering for Notre Dame. Also interesting to me: in the early 20s the klan attempted to by a financially distressed college. Luckily, the college survived in spite of rejecting millions of klan dollars. Valparaiso University. Props to the Lutherans who came to bail out the former Methodist college.
Just finished this today. Interesting how deep the fascism in the US ran prior to WWII. The Nazis made significant inroads, more than I realized. Has some of Maddow's snarky comments, and not exactly scholarly, but a decent, breezy introduction to a dark time in US history.
Took a break from The Wheel of Time to read Three-Body Problem and currently 233 pages into the third book, Death's End And I am loving the whole series, gets weird, really weird, and I'm here for it.
An Atlas Of Extinct Countries by Gideon Defoe. It's a tale of 48 bygone countries. I read Vanished Kingdoms by Davies some years ago, though it mostly focused on the first millennium. Should be interesting.
Finished it, yep, it got freaky. Very much enjoyed it, not sure how they make a TV show out of it. Well, a good TV show.
What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern a book I'm reading for work reasons but enjoying enough to put here because the author Jed Rasula is far an away the best critic of American poetry in my life time. The bastard. Thankfully, it's mostly a cultural history. Eliot is covered in the preface then disappears for the first half of the book as Rasula recreates the history of European and American art from the last half of the 19th century to the post WWI era, starting with the operas of Wagner and ending with surrealism, etc. Not to mention the aforementioned war.
To Have And Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. It's a novel about Harry Morgan, who becomes a smuggler between Key West and Cuba. I saw the movie years ago. One reviewer called it Hemingway's worst novel. I might find it interesting.
This year I've been reading an odd mix of books I acquired during grad school and am still working my way through, the odd fiction title also from my personal library, popular history & band/musician bios from the library upstairs from my office on lunch breaks, a couple of books I needed to read for work purposes, and some pre-publisher advanced copies to review for "Book Pages", a giveaway magazine produced for libraries by the ALA. The last two books I finished were Penance for Jerry Kennedy by George V. Higgins, and Reckless: My Life as a Pretender by Chrissie Hynde. The former is a mid-career work from Higgins; the second of four Jerry Kennedy books he wrote. Although many characters from his novels appear or are referenced in others, they are otherwise all standalone works. Along with being the only series he wrote, AFAIK they are also the only books he wrote in first-person. Even so, he stays true to his by-then well-honed style which is quite heavy on dialogue and keeping the action "off-stage" so to speak. If you're a fan of Higgins' style, it's a fun read. If you're not, you might struggle to understand why you're reading 300 pages about a talented if stubborn criminal defense lawyer finding himself in a bit of trouble with the IRS. There's a plot, somewhere, but as always with Higgins the telling of the story is more important than the story itself. Hynde's biography spends a lot of time on her early years growing up in Ohio; conversely, even though she wrote it in 2015 she essentially ends the story in 1982, summarizing the thirty-plus years since in one single, final page. I remember reading a review about Christopher Hitchens' biography, where it was noted that while American bios strive to tell the subject's life story in total, English bios & memoirs tend to be more selective, focusing on particular aspects or eras of the subject's life. In that regard, Hynde truly has assimilated and become English. It's a fascinating, if not always artful nor balanced, read. She was, indeed, quite reckless and heedless of consequences or danger, and between the drug abuse (she states at least once that the book is "a story of drug abuse"), her nomadic tendencies, and sexual and physical abuse at the hands of dangerous men, she seems more than a little lucky (and plucky) to be alive.
At Midnight on the 31st of March, a book-length narrative poem I'd never heard of until a month or two back which I could conceivably wind up assigning in a couple of classes that I might teach by Josephine Young Case. Basically, a small town in the mountains of upstate New York wakes up without electricity and finds out that all roads out of town just . . . end. The town in cut off and everyone suddenly finds themselves in this town with no access to the outside world. If Stephen King wrote The Spoon River Anthology, it would be similar to this.
Great Plains by Ian Frazier. I read Frazier's On The Rez years ago. I've only seen the Great Plains from an airplane. Frazier tells of bringing a friend from the West Indies to Montana who was amazed by the Plains. I expect to enjoy this.
Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics, a pretty grim book by journalist Elle Reeve, who has been researching the darkest depths of the internet, interviewing it's celebrities, and tracing the process by which they oozed out of cyberspace and into the real world (from influencing for Trump, marching in Charlottesville, etc). Damn fine review from Washington Post for anyone interested: https://archive.ph/7H25Z “Black Pill” is a feat of fearless reporting, and its ambiguities and tensions are not necessarily weaknesses. Instead, they point to essential contradictions at the heart of what was once the alt-right and is now Trump’s Republican Party. Perhaps this movement’s defining feature is its slippery irony, its refusal to clarify how much of its racism and sexism is sincere. But whether Trump’s online army is willing to mimic fascists as a dark joke or whether its convictions are authentic does not matter. On the internet, nobody knows — or needs to know — if you are a real fascist. All they need to know is that you are fatally committed to the bit.
Honestly, it was pretty dark. Full credit to Elle Reeve for meeting these people up close and personal. Interesting point that she discovered: the white nationalists behind Charlottesville, 2017, were NOT down with Jan 6th, 2021 (the exceptions were a handful of Proud Boys and 3%ers who were at both. Why? As Richard Spencer and others put it . . . It’s a generational thing. Charlottesville was about YOUNG extremely online nihilists who were “black pilled” (I.e., made nihilistic) by a particular ideology that explained their misery by blaming Jews and POC. Jan. 6ers, on the other hand, tended to be older and were radicalized primarily by QAnon, which extremely online younger people knew was a joke. In short, they’re borderline contemptuous of the oldsters who took this crap literally and seriously. I mean, they were down with the chaos, but the fact that they were irony deficient is cringy. so in short, after reading up on the current far right and its connection to the Traditionalist philosophers, and figuring out that these people are mostly overtly anti-Christian, and now after reading this book about dangerous nihilists that are not as well read . . . I’m going to read a few of the classic Rivers of America books, starting with the Allegheny, and then my neighbor the Susquehanna, before moving on to some midwestern rivers.
The Moscow Rules – Antonio Mendez Lots of interesting CIA tradecraft used in Moscow during the Cold War. Vetted for publication by the CIA. Too bad it wasn't vetted by a better editor.
Ever since I moved this far into the Pacific Northwest, I've wondered why the Snake River isn't part of the Rivers of America series. Super cool path, incredible topography, four states, and the ninth longest in the country. It's about 30 miles from us, pretty placid around here owing to a series of dams. My daughter pulled some pottery out of the riverbed the other day she's excited about, from a flooded portion; she's looking to meet with someone to check on its provenance.
Never having been to the Pacific Northwest myself (Yellowstone NP is my personal record), that wasn't on my radar, but I'll add it to my list of major oversights in the series: the others being the New River, the Kanawha, the Platte and the Yellowstone, with the Snake possibly being the biggest of them all, now that I think about it. I mean, most of those are more impressive than the Monongahela, toward which I mean no disrespect. My only guess is that they didn't have anyone to write about it. I can see the WV rivers being overlooked for that reason, though surely there was someone in Nebraska who could have covered The Platte
It would be harder finding somebody who could shut up about the Platte. The mandatory "Nebraska Studies" class we all had to take in 4th grade had two basic themes: 1) The Platte River valley was the road west from the Oregon Trail, through the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express, the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Interstate system; and 2) After the US government ethnically cleansed the indigenous people from the state, they needed the Homestead Act to lure white settlers to the recently-emptied land. So...we were taught that Nebraska was most important & significant as the road to somewhere better; and that the Federal government was reduced to giving away land for free to entice citizens and migrants actually stay put and live in the middle of god-forsaken nowhere.
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard. When I was in high school and college, I read National Review. There was a column there that bemoaned the fact that kids never read Haggard. So, I'm reading it now. Classic 19th Century adventure novel in Africa, with all that that entails. Should be enjoyable.
The Allegheny, one of the Rivers of America book, but not one of the better ones by Frederick Way, Jr. a former Pittsburgh-based riverboat pilot, etc. who published a few books. Interesting in parts, esp. the role of the river in the discovery of oil near Titusville, PA, which basically initiated our present age. And the brief history of Pithole, PA, which for about ten years was basically Dodge City of the East. The last 90+ pages where a list of every boat the navigated the Allegheny from Oleans, NY to Pittsburgh. That was highly skimmable. Next up will be the Susquehanna. So it appears that the theme will be "Rivers I have walked across on bridges."