Last year I read the one on the left. This morning I finished the one on the right. Confessions of a Catholic Worker: Our Current Moment of Christian Witness by a guy who actually lives on a Catholic Worker farm about 20 miles from where I live and who is highly critical of Christian Nationalism as manifested in "rad trad Catholic Latin Mass In the Only Real Mass" circles. Solid book by Larry Chapp, though not without things I disagree with.
The Last Place on Earth - Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole - Roland Huntford Excellent read!
Just finished I enjoy Dr. Miller-Idriss' scholarship on the topic, but I really do not like her writing style. Like Man Up, it has a decidedly unscholarly approach to the subject matter. The primary focus of the book is "where" far right ideology lives and "how" it spreads, as opposed to the "why" it continues to persist. For one thing, she really hates MMA. There are hundreds of references to MMA throughout the book, including an entire chapter on the subject of MMA as a home (and recruiting place) for white, right wing hate.. It is true that there are a number of far right "fight clubs" especially in Europe, and I guess I can see the overlap between the hyper-violence of MMA and right wing ideology (with its emphasis on "masculinity"), but I never really thought about it as a recruiting method for right wing hate. Of course, there are plenty of right wing douchenozzles in MMA, even in the UFC, like Colby Covington and, currently, Sean Strickland, plus, of course, Dana White and Joe Rogan, so I guess this should not really surprise me. Also, even though the book is only five years old, things have progressed and become so much worse. This book almost seems "wishful." It is a very quick read and does provide quite a bit of food for thought about the rising scourge of right wing hate. Maybe Jesus and John Wayne will be next. I am not sure.
Started it today. The section at the beginning of the book about the 'shared culture' of the all encompassing nature of what the white evangelicals consume (novels, music, radio, television, etc.) was very good. I had not really thought about it the way she explained it.
Somebody around here (maybe @superdave ?) recommended this book with the superlative compliment; they said it reminded them of The Illuminatus Trilogy. I don't totally agree although I get why they said that. I just felt that Katz tried a little too hard to be edgy (something that Robert Anton Wilson seemed to accomplish effortlessly) and didn't convincingly pull it off.
This came out last Fall and was very well received, and thanks to Hiram College and the InterLibrary Loan program, I read it last month: John Bacon's The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald is both a great overview of the communities and industries involved in commodity shipping on the Great Lakes, and a good account of the Fitz. The "untold" part of the title intrigued me - there's no shortage of works about the sinking, which is memorialized in many ways - but it's his access to family members of the crew members and a couple of guys who had been on the crew temporarily the same year which is novel. There were a few times in the final chapters when a line from The Hunt for Red October came to mind - "You stupid ass, you've killed US!." Because good grief, the whole industry from ship design to speed over safety to inefficient forecasting to arrogant captains supported something like this happening.
It's in the book, too. And ran through my mind perhaps the entire time I read it. I stumbled into a series of "cryptozooligist murder mysteries" that were set in and among the same communities, and one of the three books even included a shipwreck on Lake Superior as a plot point - and the wreck is also in Bacon's book. Not sure why I grabbed them off the shelf at the local public library but the trio of books by Annelise Ryan were decent casual reads.
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years the first two volumes of a six volume biography that I’m not going to finish by my Galesburg, IL, homey, the poet and, obviously, biographer Carl Sandburg. The work is often ripped by elitist snobs like Gote Vidal (who hated Sandburg because he didn’t learn how to be a socialist at Choate or someplace), but many of Lincoln’s subsequent biographers speak well of it, and consider it quite a feat given the amount of material Sandburg did not have access to.
Viva la Revolucion by Eric Hobsbawm. This book is a detail of Hobsbawm's writings over years, concerning Latin America. Hobsbawm was of the left wing persuasion. Looks like an interesting read.
Finished The Night Manager two nights ago. Phenomenal book, a slow burn that takes a bit to get going and honestly, I was kind of confused for the first 100 or so pages, but with about 75 pages left (its like a 415ish page book) I could not put it down. Picked up some fiction and some non-fiction from the library yesterday, reading the fiction first
Dear Committee Members - Julie Schumacher An epistolary novel of letters (mostly recommendation letters) sent by a professor of English and creative writing. Good, funny read.
Nanda Devi - The Tragic Expedition - John Roskelly 1976 ascent of 7817 meter Nanda Devi in India. Tragic because 22-year old Nanda Devi Unsoeld, daughter of leader Willi Unsoeld who named her after the mountain, died of some sort of internal ailment in a camp high on the mountain.
{It's getting harder to find an image that is sharable.} I read Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell by Gabe Henry. I hadn't been aware of how many attempts there had been to reform English, or the iterations of the Simplified Spelling Movement. Loads of high profile advocates too. While the book isn't particularly deep it isn't always an easy read thanks to the frequent usage of simplified and other spelling, which you really have to concentrate on to read (Henry provides regular translations in the footnotes).
So it's Lent and I've been in the habit of undertaking certain fasting protocols. This year I opted for the Orthodox approach (One large meal today, and either two small meals or no caloric intake before 3:00 p.m., and it's meat and dairy free). I was surprised at my energy level, and how productive my workouts have been. Now, it might be because I changed my exercises around, so it's too early to tell, but it seems like my recover is way better, so when Kindle Unlimited made this book available, I checked it out: The Plant-Based Athlete: A Game Changing Approach to Peak Performance by ultra-marathoner Matt Frazier and body-builder Robert Cheeke. Decent book. The recovery thing might have something to do with the anti-inflammatory nature of green plants and berries, and it's possible that whey protein and meat have been causing some inflammation. I'll check in a couple of weeks. Also showing up on Kindle Unlimited Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan Chef Turned Regeerative Farer Discovered that Mother Nature is Conservative a book which should be better than it is but author Mollie Engelhart, for every really terrific point about the benefits of regenerative farming (which, given the rapid rate of soil nutrient depletion of conventional mega-agriculture), will counter it with some anti-vax, pro-Trump idea that . . . well, Trump has given no indication whatsoever of caring about the planet, so looking to him as a beacon for hope in the future will ultimately be self-defeating. But hey, it was free with my Kindle subscription.
@Ismitje, you really missed a chance here. You should have taken what you learned from the book and wrote your review in the "simplified spelling." You could sit back and laugh at the educated folks around here as we tried to figure out what you wrote and bitched about how many words you "misspelled." An opportunity lost, sir.