In some ways, this is a throwback to a time when great white historians would write about great white historical figures and tell the story of how great and white and historic they were. It ignores basically all the strides made by real historians in the last 40 years to broaden the lens of history. But Mike Duncan is such an endearingly wonderful writer and storyteller that, just this once, I'll allow it. Hell, I'll even recommend it.
The Book of Lamentations by the late Mexican author Rosario Castellanos. The Chiapas born author details the conflict between the indigeneous Maya and traditional Mexicans.
While Charles Duhigg's book on habit formation is more of a journalistic approach to scientific findings, James Clear is more practical in the application of those techniques to making very small changes consistently over time. I should probably get around to reading B.J. Fogg's book which has most of the actual research in it, and likely should have started there. Either way, this is an easy read and something I needed as I get lost in the ideas and often struggle to put them into practice.
The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study, a complicated and nuanced piece of scholarship that basically shows that the work of literary scholarship isn't the work of great men (mostly) writing influential essays and books and keynoting conferences. Well, that's part of it, but Rachel Sagner Burrma and Laura Heffernan have looked at the syllabi of some major figures and have suggested that much of that work isn't the product of networking professionals, but the outgrowth of attempts to teach (undergraduates in most cases, but the students who helped T. S. Eliot formulate the ideas that went into his first two books that featured essays that are still assigned to students today where adult students in a night school setting). One of those books where the biggest flaw, the thing I absolutely hate THE MOST about it, is that I didn't write it.
An interesting read that relies on several Puritan authors, as well as a solid understanding of Greek and Hebrew, to push back against the fire & brimstone style of messaging.
New Grub Street - George Gissing 130 years ago, Gissing recognized the attraction of Twitter -- "As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information—bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat."
The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith and Idiocy, an actor's memoir that is extraordinarily well written for a book in the genre, mostly funny and often insightful, along with a harrowing description of the successful, but nearly disastrous and fatal birth of his and his wife's child, by Rainn Wilson. The brief description of the Baha'i faith in which Wilson was raised, and which he practices to this day (he returned to it after a period of time in college and shortly after that he refers to as a "Baha'i Rumspringge" -- hilariously detailed in the book) in the appendix is a concise introduction that could probably be used in a college course on World Religions.
The book is too spiritual for me. It was about Paulo Coelho finding something spiritual through a trip he embarked in the 1980's with his wife. I would have enjoyed it more if I read it as a younger man in search of something. I stopped after reading over 50% of the book.
May I ask, to push back against Puritans who implemented such policies/preached such policies, or against the idea that Puritans were fire and brimstone types at all?
I am giving brief remarks next Monday in Ralph Bunche Park in Manhattan, and I know only the basics of his role in the UN, the US, and the world so I wanted to dive deeper. He's under-studied; he's a giant. His role as international mediator won him the Nobel Peace Prize (the first person of African descent to win one); he marched at MLK's side in the famous Civil Rights protests in the 1960s. And neither the internationalists nor the civil rights folks talk much about him. Neither have I to this point; I will do better. Ralph Bunche, An American Odyssey by Brian Urquhart.
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, a book about an attempt to write a critical study of D. H. Lawrence that keeps getting sidetracked be events emerging in real life, some of which have Lawrentian overtones, by English novelist Geoff Dyer, who may be making up a lot of the real life stuff, but it's interesting and funny, so no one should care. With occasional insight into the life and works of D. H. Lawrence, in spite of Dyer's inability to finish several of the more famous novels, no matter how hard he tries.
"Someone who is forty-nine is three times more likely to run a marathon than someone who's just a year older." "People who had run multiple marathons posted better times at age twenty-nine and thirty-nine than during the during the two years before or after those ages." "Indeed, being down by one at halftime was more advantageous than being up by one." "Being slightly by [at halftime] significantly increases a team's chance of winning." Pink goes into detail in just 6 chapters, each with a "time hackers handbook" after it, on some very interesting facets of how we perceive time in a multitude of situations. Everything is covered from when to start school for teens to when you're most likely to get divorced or quit your job, and how to marshal both nostalgia and a healthy approach to the future to better handle the present. I should have read this sooner.
Mark gets booted from the GDA, Cecil's backstory is filled out a bit, Oliver is too much like his dad, Eve is acting like Amber, and all of that makes sense if you've read the books. Collects issues 48-53 and there's just not much out there that matches this as a comic series.
Killing The Spirit: Higher Education in America, one of the spate of books that came out 30-35 years ago to explain WTF is/was wrong with college kids these days by historian Page Smith. Better than I remember it, nowhere near as beholden to anti-intellectual themes common to the neo-con attacks of the era (in fact, just as likely to accuse the right of spirit-killing approaches to education), though not without other flaws. The book is 30 years old, and getting close to its expiration date, but it's not there yet.
Our Smallest Ally by Rev. W.A. Wigram. About the Christian Assyrians in present day Iraq and the help they provided the Allies in WWI. The author was a British pastor who spent time with the Assyrians during the conflict. It's a short book and should be a fairly brisk read.
Round trip flights to NYC plus a long layover = started and finished the Interdependency Series by John Scalzi. Pretty enjoyable, as I find all of his books to be. Even better: during the second long layover at O'Hare, our Chicago-based daughter met us and we had dinner together. It was utterly amazing!
The Mansion - William Faulkner “What a shame we cant both of us jest come out two old men setting peaceful in the sun or the shade, waiting to die together, not even thinking no more of hurt or harm or getting even, not even remembering no more about hurt or harm or anguish or revenge.”
In The Time of The Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. About the famous Mirabal Sisters, three of which were killed by the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. There's now a province named after them in the DR. I'm reading the 25th Anniversary Edition. The book was originally written while the fourth sister, Dede, was still alive. Should be a good read.
John Williams -- Augustus I read Stoner in Feb/Mar and Butcher's Crossing in May/June. Both were excellent. I just picked up this newly released LOA collection and started Augustus.
A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, a pretty decent book by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik on old-time liberalism which is flawed a. f. but better than anything we've came up with so far.