Totally fair. But since the author did that in places, and often showed how opponents use misspellings to mock simplified spelling, and by the time I read all of it, it didn't seem funny or clever any longer.
I recognize the hook, which is genuinely pop-hookalicious. However, I don't think it stands up. Even this is better:
Finished Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America's Alliances by Mira Rapp-Hooper. It's a realistic defense of our alliance system, published in 2020 before we largely marginalized those alliances. There are several "let's imagine" sections where the ground she just covered (Asia in the 50s, say) gets immediately revisited but imagining how that all may have played out without our alliances in place; these are fairly novel contributions. Overall, she posits that they have long been quietly effective - perhaps too quietly for many Americans to see their value to us. She also delineates shortcomings, especially in our larger share of the burden for collective defense.
An exam copy that I took for a test read to see if I'm using it in my comp class next fall: Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement a collaborative text attributed to The Friends of Attention. It's short, and every five pages or so it reprints the three page "manifesto" in an irritating type font the same color of the book... only extremely faded but for the one or two sentences that are the subject of that particular chapter. This gives the feeling of the book being extremely padded. Also I asked some acquaintances with ADHD and similar conditions if they could tolerate the color of the text (most of the book i in regular colored font, but not the manifesto) The answer was, universally, no. So, in short REJECTED. Still worth reading, but not worth buying.
Cry Havoc - Jack Carr The first? prequel to the Terminal List books, this follows Tom Reece the father of James. We're set in the Vietnam War with some really interesting looks at the geopolitical world of the time, the grim realities of every side of the conflict, the distortion of successfulness of the Tet Offensive in US media, and the roles of North Korea, Russia, Laos, Cambodia and others in the conflict. Most of our time is spent with Tom Reece either in his role as part of a MACV-SOG operator or being courted by the CIA. It helps that Carr both learned how to write over the past several years and had historic information to draw from as this is easily the best of his books and is essentially a standalone so it can be read without going through the Terminal List books first.
The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson First volume of 3-volume military history of Revolutionary War. Very interesting and well-written.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Anita Loos 1925 novel in the form of the diary of a gold-digging flapper. Laugh-out-loud funny. On her first day in London — “I always think that the most delightful thing about traveling is to always be running into Americans and to always feel at home.”
I had a student who, when she was ten, learned Russian and Hindi at the same time. Russian, because her family just moved to Moscow from Baghdad, and Hindi, because Bollywood musicals were for some reason readily available to her.
Multiple books at once. Two related ones. Slow A.F. Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run, an entertaining book by a 300 pound plus dude who has by now ten marathons under his ample belt. Good pointers on avoiding injury for the plus size or older person starting to run. It helps that Martinus Evans has a great sense of humor: his description of showering after his first ten mile run left him chafed in multiple, sensitive places had me cringing and laughing at the same time. Slow Jogging: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Have Fun With Science based, Natural Running, an interesting book about a Japanese practice called “niko niko” running. Basically, short strides aiming for 180 steps per minute. The short strides and forefoot landing make it easy on the knees and rather challenging. Interesting approach first practiced and studied by Japanese physician Hiroaki Tanaka, co-authored by the first European-born coach of the practice (and first Western practioner) MagDalena Jackowska.
The Castle by Franz Kafka. This is a novel about a man who visits a village, run by the mysterious castle. Published posthumously. Looks like an interesting read
Continuing my books on Christian Nationalism with an earlier Katherine Stewart effort. Written at the end of the first Trump administration, it is an exploration of how Christian Nationalists have infected government. Only about three chapters in, it is already pretty horrifying, reading about how many members of the Cabinet in Trump 1 were Christian Nationalists. I read "Money, God and Lies" (her 2024 effort on the topic) a few months ago. It covers much of the same material. I wish I had read this one first. I am waiting to read about the awful, terrible school voucher systems. This is a topic I have been trying to explain to people by me, as many people do not see the incredible harm of "school choice" (a crap name for a crap program).
I’m pretty much a dilettante on this subject. My view is that a voucher program run by technocrats is good, but one run by ideologues is bad. Am I right or wrong?
But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes - Anita Loos Follow-up to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Not as good as first book, but still worth reading.
Well, when I was eating entirely plant food during Lent, I would kill time on youtube watching videos to get recipes etc. And the algorithm being what it is, I got more and more extreme diet influencers. One that caught my attention and raised my B.S. detection unit was the guy who wrote this book: The 80/10/10 Diet which advocates a fruit-based diet in which 80% of one's calories through the day come from carbohydrates, 10% from fat, 10% from protein. Some interesting ideas, but the struck my as unsustainable for anyone who doesn't live in a tropical climate with multiple fruit trees and vines on one's property like author Douglas Graham has on his Key West estate. And my B.S. detector was proven largely accurate by this book, The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour an excellent book that is part memoir and part investigation into some of the more extreme influencers on the internet (Graham, isn't even the most extreme, that would be the object of much of her book, a "frugivore" power couple who called themselves "Freelee" and "Durianrider," advocates of an extreme raw food, fruit dominated diet that . . . well, doesn't work for too many people). One of the most interesting details is when she interviewed Dr. Graham, a chiropractor, who has had his license suspended on occasion when someone died on one of his fruitarian retreats. Also interesting is her descent into this world as she attempted to recover from a still-unexplained neurological disorder that hit her in college and cost her a place on her college's track and cross country team. She never really developed a longterm eating disorder, though she did develop a few bad habits over the years (she's in her mid-thirties now, and a professor at a college not far from me). Damn fine book, which I might assign if 1) it comes out in paperback and 2) I ever teach the advance research writing class again, since she does a terrific job investigating online culture in a literate manner, which would be the objective of said class.
The Bootlegger: A Story of Small Town America a book which revolves around the murder of a bootlegger in Colchester, IL during the prohibition era, but which is, in addition to a "true crime" book, also a social history of small town life, an cultural history of coal-mining towns, and story of the battle between the forces of vice and of temperance by my college literature professor John Hallwas,. Damn fine book. Colchester was a coal-mining town (there were seams of coal in parts of Illinois) that still exists about 8 miles from my college town. The bootlegger was a son of a former town marshall who was famous for cracking down on drinking. This is another one of those books (this one predates Ken Burns' special on prohibition) that demonstrates yet again that, while prohibition isn't going to work, it's clear why people wanted to try it: the consequences of drinking were such that it was unsurprising that many people (esp. women who would watch the family budget shrink immensely as the husband drank away a chunk of it on payday night.
Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer I read part of this in early 2020, but I was thrown off track by the pandemic, and finally got back to it late last year. Original Middle English, but this version has footnotes at the bottom of each page for many unfamiliar words and expressions, and a huge glossary in the back. So with time and inclination, it is doable. But it took me 4 months to finish. Some tales are very funny, and some are otherwise entertaining, but others are very boring. “This is th’effect: ther is namoore to seye.”
I liked the Miller’s Tale… “The miller pauseth foar to barffe. Uponne the grounde his pukke estraffe.” If you look closely, that’s the couplet Chaucer is pointing at on the cover.
Truth Matters by Paul P. George and Cornel West. The book is a series of dialogues between George and West. George is a liberal, West is a leftist. Looks like an interesting read.
More pulpy goodness from Hard Case Crime, Jack Clark's Nobody's Angel. Follows old school 'hack' Eddie Miles as he navigates the streets of Chicago, whilst two killers are terrorizing the streets. One of which is targetting streetwalkers, the other cab drivers. Book publicity campaign seemed to have been in love with Clark's story - he originally self-published the book and sold it to his fares from the front of his cab - which is admittedly a mental image that captures the imagination.
The Christian World Liberation Front: The Jesus Movement's Model of Revival and Social Reform for the Postmodern Church a book which really doesn't touch on the subtitle's topic all that much, and is mostly a history/oral history of the "Jesus People" movement as it manifested in and around the University of California - Berkeley, starting in the mid-60s as part of a the Free Speech Movement. I know a bit about the "Jesus People" as it emerged in Southern California, but not much about Berkeley. That the CWLF put out a free weekly newspaper called Right On was not the least bit surprising. That it still exists as Radix Magazine, both print and online, was a bit of a surprise. Pretty much all of the subjects of the book remain Christian and social activists as they are entering into their 80s. The book could have been better ( the Afterword would have been a great Introduction, for example) but hey, it was free on the Dead Nun Bench, and the library will take it to put on the shelf when I'm done with it, so no real complaints.