Israel: A History by Martin Gilbert. From early Zionism to the then present. The book was published in 1998 and updated in 2008.
Just finished this based on this recommendation. Thank you for the introduction to it. I read the eReader version, and it was about 60 pages, and a surprisingly gripping read. Some of this was pretty intense and I found myself unable to put it down. I was a little let down by the resolution, but felt the final two pages somewhat redeemed it. Overall, a decent little story.
The All American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race essays and reviews and speeches that are always interesting and usually provocative by the recently deceased and hard-to-classify American Man of Letters Stanley Crouch. Among the highlights of these essays from the mid to late 1990s are epic beatdowns, one a masterpiece of subtlety directed at Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, and the other focused on a British musicologist's condescendingly racist biography of Duke Ellington. Also of note are excellent essays on Miles Davis and Wynton Marsilis, the latter of whom I'm generally not a fan of, but Crouch makes a case. And an essay on the sadly neglected American novelist Leon Forrest, whose Divine Days is what Tolstoy would have written at the height of his powers had he been a black guy living in Chicago in 1966.
I thought it would be interesting to read about a system based on much of modern minimalist productivity thought from the perspective of a woman who balances business owner, mother, and wife amongst other roles. For every good idea or interesting take on an idea you might have seen from Charles Duhigg or Cal Newport, there's a full page of the book that's crappy word art highlighting some pithy statement that the author incorrectly assumes carries great meaning. A competent editor, and honestly just a better writer, could turn this into a needed niche book. Instead, we got full mommy blogger gibberish sharing the stage with evidence based research from someone who apparently can't tell the difference. The first 3 sections of the book are a solid 3.5/5. The final section is toilet paper.
Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews 1979-1989 a collection of the early-ish work of Stanley Crouch, who has a deserved reputation of one of the great jazz critics of all time, but whose literary criticism and reportage is well worth reading. The first essay is his coverage of Jesse Jackson on the presidential campaign trail, and a huge part of it is coverage of the pack of journalists who, as Hermann and Chomsky point out in Manufacturing Consent work overtime to shape the narrative and to define candidates to the benefit of one at the expense of others; For example, Jackson was gaining popularity with white voters in rural primaries... until the media kept hitting him for not denouncing anti semitism among the black community (Louis Farrakhan, etc), and yet, he did, repeatedly denounce anti-semitism: the highlight of the article, though, is Crouch pointing out that the same reporters gave a free pass to Reagan, who not only never had to denounce ANY racism among his supporters, but was also never called to account for his own easily documented racism. And his political reporting isn't even the best part of his work...
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë from an anonymous 1848 review: "This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer." Third read: I still think this is a strange book, but I no longer think that it is confused and disjointed. The biggest loss in English literature was the early death of Emily Brontë.
If you read this and Bogle's Common Sense Investing, you'll almost assure yourself of not being yet another person who needs social security to barely skate by after retirement. I'm a bit more complex on my investing than Collins suggests being. He is almost entirely on VTSAX, VTBLX, and cash in either savings or money market accounts (with the vast majority of that being in VTSAX). I hedge a little more with bonds and it happened to pay off earlier this year. He suggests trying to get to a 50% savings rate and brings us solid definitions of FU money and Financial Independence. My employer forces us to put money into a terrible pension plan (2% return and matching amount doesn't vest until 5 years), with an optional 403b account. The 403b has several providers, and thankfully Fidelity is one of them. We don't have their 0% index funds as an option, but their next tier down are open to us and I have an evenly split mix of 4 that I rebalance annually: FXAIX (S&P 500 - 0.015% expense ratio), FSKAX (Total Market - 0.015%), FXNAX (US Bond - 0.025%), and FNBGX (Long Term Treasury Bond - 0.03%). Those bond indexes mean I don't earn the biggest gains possible when the market is out of its mind bull, but I made money every month this year despite a few months of a serious bear. My savings rate is the forced 7.4% for the pension plus a "matching" 6.8% from work that will vest in 2 more years to tie up 15% in a terrible plan, and another 3% or so going to the index funds. Now that I'm nearly done with my PhD and should have my car paid off in 2-3 years (instead of 5) I should be over that 15% mark before the match pretty quickly and probably over 20% total once the car payment is gone. Simply put, live below your means, invest early and often, avoid debt when possible, and put the vast majority of your investments in low cost index funds. I'd strongly suggest Fidelity's zero fee funds (FZROX - Total Market and FZILX - International Index) if you have access to them. Again, read this book and the Bogle one I suggested and you'll have enough to invest and not worry about it.
I enjoyed "Sapiens", but never read "Homo Deus". . It took me a long time to finish this book. At one point, I could not put it down, but once I put it down, I could not pick it up again.
Hole In Our Sole: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, a book that is often insightful and often guilty of exceptional oversight by Martha Bayles. She leans way more conservative than I do, but a tip of the hat to her for giving black and brown people full credit for their roles in shaping American music and culture, which is something that very few conservative cultural commentators are capable of doing. The book is 30 years old, so some of it hasn't aged well, but it's not bad. Except when it's terrible, of course. But it usually recovers, unlike, say Allen Bloom writing about music in The Closing of the American Mind, when it became clear early on that someone who was incapable of catching irony in a Rolling Stones song was likely to be of little help in interpreting Nietzsche.
Speaking of books about music, I just finished Sarah Pinsker's A Song for a New Day: Released last year, it is (primarily) about musical performance in the decade following a terrible disease that prompted a ban on all gatherings. There's a company staging virtual concerts and signing up acts, and there's a clandestine/underground music scene too despite pervasive social distancing laws. The purveyors of the former send people out to scout the latter, and the bulk of the book is about the dichotomy in how the two "scenes" operate. It's a good book on its own merits - it just won the Nebula Award - but reading it in the midst of what we're all going through re Covid-19, it's phenomenal. Especially since you will probably end up rooting for the underground scene to win out.
Just finished the first six of The Dresden Files on my kindle Easy reads, entertaining, writing is ok. He is painfully awkward at writing anything that comes close to a "love" scene so I just skim through those. Takes place in Chicago, main character is a wizard that is also a PI, so each book is kind of a super natural whodunit. One of the scene in book 5 takes place at Wrigley Field and it is obvious from the get go that the author has never been to Wrigley Field, let alone walked by it, kinda funny. Now, it is onto the conclusion of Clavell's Asian Saga
The scene in the book takes place when there is no game. The way he describes vast empty parking lots surrounding the stadium made me think he went to Sox Park and then wrote Wrigley Field in the book.
No one has ever used the word "vast" to describe Wrigley's parking lot, that's for sure. It isn't vast even by city standards.
Light in August - William Faulkner “It was like me, and her, and all the other folks that I had to get mixed up in it, were just a lot of words that never even stood for anything, were not even us, while all the time what was us was going on and going on without even missing the lack of words.”
For me, there's no other writer like Faulkner if you want to start a book and then give it up in frustration, 20 pages in, a week later.
That's interesting. I read A LOT of Faulkner in grad school. Being in the South and finding it kind of weird to be there helped, in my experience. On the other hand, dewpoints in the mid-70s and higher rendered Henry James unreadable for me. I've since made my way through a couple of his novels, but man... that wasn't going to happen in Louisiana, which meant I missed out on seminars with the founding editor of The Henry James Review... Speaking of Faulkner... this guy is a big fan (less so of Henry James, who gets blamed for what considers the worst tendencies in James Baldwin)... The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity, the title of which comes from a review of a book by American novelist David Shields, a book which is about the 1994-95 Seattle Supersonics. Stanley Crouch is as good of a literary critic as he is a jazz critic, IMO, even when he's wrong-ish
The Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt. The sequel to the Seven Madmen. Thank you to River Boat Books in Minnesota for finding the book.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. The 1970s classic about American Indians. Still true today.