Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson. It's a sad , but true, story of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, which is still the deadliest natural disaster in US History. This is the first book that I've read about this tragedy. Should be informative.
Erik Larsen is my wife's favorite pop historian. If you like this one, chesco, she recommends Devil in the White City about the Chicago World's Fair, and a murder that happened during the Fair.
It's not a murder, it's about H.H. Holmes who is considered by some to be the first true serial killer in the US. It's also about the Chicago World's Fair. Absolutely brilliant book,
I moved here to the Palouse region of Eastern Washington in August 1994, when the Congressional representative of WA Legislative District 5 was Tom Foley - the Speaker of the House. I didn't know much about him but was excited to have the Speaker of the House representing us. He had been in the House for thirty years, a Democrat in a Conservative district. And he was voted out that November in the Republican wave led by Newt Gingrich (who replaced him as Speaker - as polar opposite in temperament, tone, and approach to the job as he was in political ideology). I also meant fellow graduate student Kenton Bird that month. He was in American Studies, I in History, but the AmSt program was largely housed in History so we overlapped a good deal. He is about fifteen years older than me and had been a newspaperman for about twenty years before coming to school. In 2000 we were both hired as professors at nearby University of Idaho, him in Journalism and me in International Studies. His dissertation was about Tom Foley. He's the co-author of Tom Foley: The Man in the Middle published by Kansas University Press during his last term as professor at UI (he retired in December): It's a fitting final scholarly act, and makes sense of how someone like Foley was able to rise to power when he didn't act much like the power wielding people who preceded or followed him - and how he fell before the wave. I get to attend a talk about the book tomorrow so I was keen to read it first.
A book about a Gonzaga grad. Cool. My next Larson book will probably be Dead Wake, about the Lusitania.
Don't Hide The Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, a transcription of a taped conversation recorded over a couple of days in WSB's Kansas home as two old writers talked about their pasts, the present and all sorts of literary gossip in between, transcribed and edited by Stephen Taylor. Pretty good, except when they were talking about cats.
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad I’ve lost track of how many times I have read this novel - at least 4. I always thought there was something unsatisfying about the last paragraphs of the ending. This time, I finally realized that the entire ending works very well.
Erasure: A Novel about an African American writer and professor who publishes abstract, highly cerebral fiction based on post-modern theories who gets tired of being told (exclusively by white people) that his writing isn't "black enough" or "authentically black." That's tiresome enough, but when he comes across a massively best selling novel by Juanita Mae Jenkins called We's Lives in da Ghetto, he starts to lose it (especially when he sees Juanita on the Kenya Dunstan Show's Book Club edition and it turns out that, of coursre, Juanita is an Oberlin grad). Eventually, he writes his own novel called My Pafologies under the pen name of Stagg R. Leigh, an ex-con thug. Long story short... the book sells for a half a million dollar advance, movie rights go for 3 million, and he gets on Kenya's book club. Oh... and Stagg Leigh insists on changing the title of his novel to ********. (that's the F-bomb). Author Percival Everett gets credit for penning the best satire from this century that I have read to date. I hope he gets paid quite a bit for the Oscar-nominate movie American Fiction, which is based on this book.
The Automatic Millionaire - David Bach A hilariously mediocre book about saving, investing, etc. Bach rants repeatedly against budgeting but nearly everything he recommends is part of a good budgeting approach. The "updated" edition moves us from 2003 to 2016, but he clearly only expanded things and updated the names of certain institutions (ING Direct becoming Capitol One 360, etc.). Otherwise there are still bits in there about calling your bank to see if they can do direct deposit of your paycheck and other archaic ideas. There are a few nuggets of legitimate insight, but even those are things other people have said that just aren't as commonly mentioned in personal finance books. It's worth a read, I guess, but you could probably find all the actually useful stuff somewhere online without ever seeing the book itself.
Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, a short book about the writing of history in the US during the 20th century: long story short, historian David S. Brown argues that history written by Midwestern historians or by historians working at Midwestern universities (esp. Wisconsin) wrote more progressive and democratic books than scholars working at Harvard. That's an oversimplification, to be sure, but . . . he has a point. And it's pretty funny that up to the middle of the 20th century places like Princeton, Yale, Brown, and Cornell were common first jobs for newly minted Wisconsin Ph.D.s. That doesn't happen any more.
The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. It's a tale of a journey from Massachusetts to Honduras. There was a movie made of the book.
At the end of the fifteenth century, many Jews had to flee Spain and Portugal. The most adventurous among them took to the seas as freewheeling outlaws. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, they attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding
Been reading quite a bit of this-and-that so far in 2024. One notable book I finished a week ago: It's a history of the pre-Enlightenment drug trade (so, approximately 1500-1700) which, among other things, argues that modern distinctions between licit and illicit drugs date from this era; it was the 'exotic' (i.e., non-Western) origins (or at least perceived origins--he notes that opium actually came from Europe but later came to be associated with "the Orient") of the drugs which became illicit, not their objective medicinal or chemical properties (the latter of which would not really be fully worked out until the 19th century for the most part) that lies at the heart of that divide. Hard to summarize neatly; this book deals a lot with categories and how they are created--starting with the caveat that "drugs" in the early modern period covered a host of substances including spices and unusual ingredients--as much as it talks about drugs as we think of them today.
Oh I’d love to hear what you think once you’ve read it. This is the only one if his books I’ve read so far.
I'm like eighth in line, so I'm pretty sure leaves will be on trees by the time I get it. But I heard an interview with him, and I know a bit about the subject (I can do a lecture anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours on the role of psychotropics in American literature of the 50s and 60s.
No rush--I'm making a concerted effort to make a sizable dent in the 'unread' portion of my personal book collection this year, so adding new stuff to the list is a low priority right now.
Your secret is safe with me. And, for the record--I just took advantage of a sale from Yale University Press, and ordered a 700-plus pager last week. So...I'm ********ing up my own plan.
Madeleine Debrel: A Life Beyond Boundaries a biography about a French writer and Catholic activist who is basically the Dorothy Day of France by American scholar Charles Mann.
Currently pressing pause on this one (its really long, really good but just long)..... because my hold at the library on this one came up and it needs to go back in two weeks
Letter to an Imaginary Friend, a 400 page autobiographical poem by Thomas McGrath. He was born to poor farmers in North Dakota, and from his early teens worked as a hired hand. Eventually he went to college (Moorhead State in Minnesota, LSU, and then some place in England called Oxford), served in WWII and then started teaching in Los Angeles. He was then blacklisted in the 50s and had to resort to the kinds of jobs he had as a kid. That gave him time to start this book c. 1954, which he finished about 30 years later.
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson I didn't start reading until my mid 20s, and even then it was mostly non fiction. I'm only beginning to get to some of the modern classics from genres like sci-fi. Stephenson wrote something really interesting here. His vision of the future of VR and AR is astonishingly accurate for a book first published in 1992. The characters are well defined and their unusual stereotypes work well together. Hiro Protagonist is a hacker/swordfighter enthusiast in a ridiculously corporatized near future, who suddenly finds himself in a situation where he has to stop a threat that effects the users in the physical world and not just in the "metaverse." Along the way we see glimpses of oddly written mashups of stereotypes in the leaders of those corporations who is clearly a take on L. Ron Hubbard, Uncle Enzo who is the Mafia leader and their subsidiaries, Mr. Lee who runs all the Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong housing, members of the Central Intelligence Corporation that replaced the CIA, etc. It's a little too goofy in some of the attempts at unique vernacular and a handful of supporting characters don't feel fleshed out. All in all, it's a fun read.