Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc -- Jean Fracois Alden (Mark Twain) Twain, like many of us, was deeply fascinated by Joan of Arc. He learned French so that he could read the transcripts of her trial, and he spent over 12 years on this work. He said he didn't spend a fraction of the time on Huck Finn: "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none." Much has been made of Twain's personal faith. It is clear from this work, that he clearly believed in the veracity of Joan's visions. I'm a man of faith -- I have a friend who told me he's seen an angel (and I believe him) and I've witnessed two faith healings -- but after reading this, I've come to the conclusion that Joan's visions are not "authentic." The Dauphin, who would become Charles VII, is the most pathetic excuse for a monarch I've come across. There is NO way an authentic vision from God would lead Joan to him. This is a fascinating read, and still considered to be one of the finest bios of The Maid from Domremy, even after all this time.
Interesting that you reference this book. Well, interesting to me. In one week of the Washington Post Book World, Winter's Tale, The Handmaid's Tale and Waiting for the Barbarians were reviewed. I read all three within the next year. I've never gotten three reads from a single source. I just re-read: The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood Of the three books already referenced, I enjoyed this the least. My thought at the time was everyone in Gilead lived a pretty shitty life and that Offred's was maybe just the most bizarre. My wife has told me repeatedly that 21-year old me just couldn't fully comprehend the "brutality" of a system that equates women with their wombs. So, obviously, the Hulu series has amped up interest this work, so I I've been trying to re-read for a couple of years. I've gone to library and picked up several other works by Atwood upon seeing that the book was out, and I've come to the conclusion that I don't think Atwood is a very good writer. And I still think that everyone who is not a 1%er is equally victimized in this society.
Invisible Allies, a memoir really in which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicles the networks of friends and associates that helped him hide his work from the KGB and who helped him smuggle it out to the West, at great peril to themselves. A few of them didn't survive the attempts.
I am pleased to report that they did indeed pick up books 2 and 3, so I was able to read half the series: Roseanna, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, The Man on the Balcony, The Laughing Policeman, and The Fire Engine that Disappeared. All enjoyable. I am considering getting a couple of the remaining ones for Christmas and then donating them to the collection.
Impulse borrowing over Thanksgiving Break netted me an interesting trio of detective novels by newbie Joe Ide: The "new" part is the setting in East Long Beach in LA County, with an unlicensed detective named Isaiah Quintabe who uses street smarts and deduction to figure stuff out (mostly for locals and for peanuts but with a central mystery too). The first one was harder for me because it was almost all in the (presumed) vernacular of locals, and it was hard for me to follow along. That's toned down in the other two books. Because I am a bit slow on the uptake, I did not see the connections between the first novel (IQ) and The Hound of the Baskervilles even with a major subplot of a murderous dog, and a sidekick named Dodson. But learning that later was still fun.
Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos "Crammed on the narrow island the million-windowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm."
The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. About the famed Lost Colony.
In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, a highly detailed investigative report into the FBI's "counter-terrorism" investigation into the activities of The American Indian Movement (AIM), leading to multiple sham trials, which may or may not include the one that led to Leonard Peltier's multiple life sentences, by Peter Mathiessen.
David Paulides is a former detective who now documents unsolved missing peoples cases throughout the United States and Canada (mostly people who go missing in national parks). He mainly focuses on cases that are just totally unexplainable. And there is not just hundreds of cases, there are thousands. I became familier with David Paulides and his Missing 411 books about five years. But never got around purchasing one because I don't live in the USA and he makes it difficult for people overseas to actually purchase his books. What gripped me at first, was his interviews that can be mainly found on Youtube. For instance the 2 year old boy who went missing and turned up alive miles away, just totally unexplained of how he got there. A minute long Les Stroud clip sums it up. Paulides is also the founder of the CanAm project: Click Here Now while his talks and interviews are really interesting, which can be mostly found on Youtube. I was dissapointed by this book. He doesn't go into great detail. Just an endless book of unsolved cases that gets tedious reading. I was also dissapointed by his first documentary (I haven't seen his second film).
One of my daughters is totally into his YouTube stuff; I am glad for the "don't buy" recommendation re the book. I read Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, a graphic novel focused on the French Foreign Ministry and the drafting of a tough-to-nail speech in the run-up to the Iraq War. Here's a review from WaPo that captures it well. Recommended for sure.
The Honourable Schoolboy - John le Carré The spycraft is very good, but the extended adventure in Indochina is a bit tedious.
Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978, a memoir covering the first four years of the Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Here's a well-known book that I missed, and which is as good as advertised: Tony Horwitz's tour through many of the former Confederate States takes a very interesting look at just how former that status is. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War excels at establishing tone and tenor, and the encounters Horwitz recounts with all sorts of people are rendered vividly. I've been meaning to read it since being reminded of the book when reading of Horwitz's death earlier this year and am glad I got around to it.
Alex Ferguson's writeup on managing Manchester United is a great read, a rival to other management books
Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets, my last book of 2019, and it's a good one, another one of Svetlana Alexievich in which she listens to the stories of people who remember the fall of the USSR, some fondly, and some with unreconstructed old guard (as in Stalin) Iron Fisted Commie regret. When she won the Nobel, there was some controversy because it wasn't fiction, drama or poetry, but she has an uncanny ability to craft complex, polyphonic narratives out of other people's stories.
Wake Up, A Life of the Buddha – Jack Kerouac Silly me, I thought this would be the Buddha on the road. The sutras are way over my head.
It's been a minute since I logged into this site. Had my back issues flare up with 2 ER visits and some serious traction and physical therapy. Also had an idiot millennial at work quit via text message with 5 days notice right at the start of the semester, so I've been swamped on that front. Also had to change my dissertation topic and had to start from scratch, but I'm 75% of the way done with the lit review at least. Also went digital minimalist and BS didn't make the cut for the time being. The last book I posted here was 1:59, I think, about the possibilities of a real sub 2 hour marathon and not that made for TV event that no serious runner (or governing body) accepts as real. Coehlo pens an interesting, semi-autobiographical account of his youth from being arrested in Brazil to traveling by bus from Amsterdam to Kathmandu with a woman he had met only days earlier. Platt does his typically heartfelt, well argued lambasting of money driven, power seeking American Christianity against the backdrop of a hiking trip he took to see and serve the poor in some of the mountain communities of the Himalayas. Actually four different, but loosely related shorter writings from Orwell. Written between Animal Farm and 1984 (possibly just before Animal Farm), he lambastes capitalism at every point while arguing for a democratic socialism similar to much of the Nordic world of today. Basically, stop adopting any and every technological advance because it offers some value. Determine/identify your own standards, weigh each technology to see if it is the best option, and schedule yourself enough time with a healthy lack of connectedness. Also, quit all social media for 30 days and see if you need any of it. Currently about 50% of the way through Coddling of the American Mind by Haidt and Lukianoff as well as Irresistible by Adam Alter.
I'm assigning that to my freshman writing class in the spring. Should be pretty good. Unless it triggers the snowflakes.
I had my students go a day without using their technology with the following allowances: Once for 15 minutes after they woke in the morning and for a similar amount of time when they ate lunch, until 6:00 p.m. We then had a spirited discussion about how they felt without their auxiliary brain. The course was a psychology senior seminar I named "Our Cyborg Future" in which we explored our ongoing embedding of technology with our bodies and psychological implications of and reactions to it.
My dissertation study is going to be a digital declutter (30 days without social media) with our traditional nursing students with sleep, mental health, physical health, and academic performance variables all measured.
It might be zero. We've got a pretty good setup here, and getting enough for an initial study shouldn't be difficult. I can run it through our institutional mental health institute that is currently focusing on mobile devices and anxiety/depression. One of our faculty did just that this semester and the module was placed in a course and treated as mandatory work (though not tied to the final grade). If I do need to pay, we've got quite a bit per semester that can be allocated to research and it's never fully used.