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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.
 
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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.)
 
I figure I should get around to reading Civil War history, so I ordered The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, and Half Slave and Half Free, Revised Edition: The Roots of Civil War. Also reading Battle Cry of Freedom.
 
That damned elusive Pimpernel.

-- The Scarlet Pimpernel, in other words. Much different from adaptations. For one thing, the Pimpernel and his alter ego are supporting characters; the main character is Marguerite Blakeney. Also contains no swordplay.

Rob
 
Aristophanes' The Birds, from 414 BC. I read the William Arrowsmith translation, which takes a number of liberties with the text but is a fun read. Arrowsmith wrote a fascinating introduction in which he explains that he tweaked the text in places where the word play is untranslatable. The text he came up with would lend itself to college productions easily, and I wish I could see one.
The play is the source of the word Cloudcuckooland. It has broad humor and some obscene/scatological humor, along with a satirical look at what Aristophanes saw as hubris and reckless ambition in the Athenian character.
Plentiful endnotes, which I needed to make sense of things, but the sharp dialogue made up for that inconvenience.
 
I read Stranger in a Strange Land a long time ago, and was impressed. Have reviewed discussions about it it recently and am less impressed. I find that true about most of Heinlein's stories. My childhood HS friends that continued on into college days also were impressed by Stranger in a Strange Land. I sometimes wonder, if they are still alive, how they would view his stories now. Libertarian Ivory Tower dreams, IMO now.
 
I suspect that Heinlein appeals because his pages are the first place you encounter some concepts as a young reader. That is certainly true for me.

50 years later my (our?) ideas are more nuanced.

That said, the minute my friend returns The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress I intend to reread it. I also just lent Azimov's The Gods Themselves to someone without first wondering if the shine would be off it after 50 years.
 
I just finished Chapter III of Great Commanders of World War II: Volume II: the British by Charles E. Pfannes and Victor A. Salamone.

I've read a few books about WWII but never strove for expertise; I can't even name more than a few of the top Generals. My favorite books were the famous memoirs of Winston Churchill. I realized those memoirs are riddled with Churchill's opinions, right or wrong, but So what? He was fun to read and I was not aspiring to competent knowledge.

On a recent stroll I slowed down to check titles at the 40-baht shelf on the sidewalk next to a bookstore. Cheaper than a cup of coffee so I picked up afore-mentioned book. Chapter 3 is about Claude Auchinleck. Much of his career was spent as an officer in the Indian Army (and thus he was looked down on by British officers who served in "white man's" armies). He finished his career elevated to Field Marshall and presiding over the post-War Partition of India. The six chapters in the book cover six top Generals, but more pages are spent on Auchinleck than any other.

But the height of his career was the thirteen months he spent as (British) Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East. Even those unfamiliar with the details of the Desert War have probably heard Churchill's quote "Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat." The loss of Egypt would have been a major disaster, but at the height of Rommel's power, clerks in Cairo were shredding documents in anticipation of possible surrender! (But which "Battle of Alamein" do we speak of? Britain won both the 1st and 2nd Battles of Alamein.)

The opinions of Plannes-Salamone and of Churchill about Auchinleck could not be more different.

According to Plannes-Salamone, Auchinlech was almost universally admired, by ranks, subordinates and his peers. They quote experts who think North Africa would have been lost without him. After he took personal command of the Eighth Army he impressed Rommel with his strategies; and managed a reorganization into new infantry divisions, each with its own artillery and tanks.

Churchill OTOH continually blamed Auchinleck for not going on the offensive, hectored him, even asking him to report to London. Surely 1200 tanks were enough; but Churchill ignored the reply that less than half those tanks were fit for action. Just after the height of crisis, after British defeated Rommel at the 1st Battle of Alamein, Churchill replaced Auchinleck with Alexander as C-in-C, with the Eighth Army command given to Montgomery (after the 1st choice Gott was killed en route to command). Montgomery, an extreme narcissist, spread the lie that the Eighth Army was in shambles before he took over.

It's true that El Alamein was the great turning-point in the War, BUT Plannes-Salamone claim that the First Battle of Alamein (led by Auchinleck) was the turning-point with Rommel's failure at the Second Battle of Alamein (led by Montgomery) a fore-gone conclusion.

Plannes-Salamone provide thorough discussion. Auchinleck is strongly criticized for letting Ritchie command the Eighth Army. They do explain that decision but think Auchinleck should have taken personal command sooner.
 
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