What are you reading?

Just finished the first 2 books by Jussi Adler-Olson in the Department Q series: The Keeper of Lost Causes, and The Purity of Vengeance. The setting is Denmark and the newly created Dept Q, led by Carl Morck (who is recovering from an ambush on his team and himself),looks into cold cases. It is an excellent Netflix series. The crimes are pretty brutal, but the books are riveting in their own way.

Also almost halfway through Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Finally getting around to reading Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Also reading In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, and going to start War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.

Taking notes ^^^

In the library the other day a woman was returning a book and said to the librarian "This is the best book I've ever read."

I was out of my seat and had the book before it could get to the restock shelf.

100 Years of Betty, Debra Oswald, isn't the best book I've ever read, but I see where she was coming from. No plot point is unique or even unusual but the perspective and attitude of the author is well worth the read. Loving it.

A biography of Aimee Semple McPherson, Sister, Sinner. She pioneered mass-media evangelism, and probably built the first megachurch in the US. (Not to line her own pockets; among her flaws, greed wasn't one of them.)

A fascinating book.

Rob

After seeing Professor Alice Roberts’ presentation ’From Cell to Civilisation’ I purchased some books.

The books examine the different burial practices through history. Each book looks at Burials in the UK and discusses comparable sites elsewhere. They are heavy reading, quite technical, but interesting.

The first in the series is called ‘Ancestors’ and looks at all burials pre Roman life in Britain. The second deals with Roman and ‘Anglo Saxon’ times and is called ‘Buried’

I am currently reading the third ‘Crypts’. ‘Life, death and disease in the Middle Ages and beyond’

Should be interesting.

Deer Hunting with Jesus (2007) by Joe Bageant is now almost 20 years old, and many of its insights are no longer 'penetrating' or 'prescient'; they're just bedrock reality. His main concern is the riddle of why working class Americans vote Republican, and his #1 answer is that they are nearly illiterate and are not getting reality from their mental diet of right wing radio (and now podcasts.) Trump gets a single reference in the book, but he is cited as a modern sybarite; after all, no one in his right mind back in '07 could imagine a slimy noodge like Donald becoming chief exec.
What most interested me is that Bageant, publishing his book a year before the '08-'09 economic meltdown, saw it coming and saw that the mortgage industry was leading us directly to an abyss. In other words, he saw clearly what Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke couldn't envision.
Then there's this ominous passage, on page 156, in his chapter on gun rights:
"Yet I shudder to think what the Glens and Donnys of the world <i.e., gun owners who relish the idea of blowing away all the people they are convinced are America's enemies>will do if one day things spiral out of control. What happens when the country finally hits Peak Oil Demand and the electrical grid starts browning down and even little things become desperately difficult or unaffordable? What happens if the wrong kind of president declares the wrong kind of national emergency? What will be the first reflex of those hundreds of thousands of devotees of lethality?"
His culminating chapter is on the overblown side, but he hits enough of his targets to earn my respect. And that 'wrong kind of president' line is uncanny. There's a tradition in American letters of journalists and academics penning social critiques which take apart the American corporate state and the American character. They don't always wear well. Wylie's Generation of Vipers (1943) now looks scattershot and unfocused; Reich's Greening of America (1970) reads like cannabis ramblings. Bageant's book is downbeat. His humor is sarcastic, so he drew me in, but he offers zero in the way of comforting answers or constructive avenues of activism. (Personally, I think the challenges we face nationally and globally are so intractable and the solutions so costly that no political party anywhere is going to be able to tell its voters the truth and survive.)