What Non-Fiction Are We Reading Now (July thru Sept 2023)?

Deposit your Q3 posts here.

I'm reading a compilation of the blog posts of Ursula LeGuin in a little volume called No Time to Spare. Her essays reveal a sweet, cat loving old lady, a cantankerous octogenarian, and a brilliant mind. I don't agree with everything she says, but she sure makes you think.

I'm reading Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada's Most Powerful Media Mogul by Mark Bourrie

New here. Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, jazz, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea.

Serendipitously, just a few days before the Canadian wildfires hit the US news big-time, I started reading The Chinchaga Firestorm: When the Moon and Sun Turned Blue. That occurred in upper Alberta and British Columbia in 1950, the largest fire complex recorded in North America up until that time. It also dumped massive amounts of smoke into the atmosphere, with global effects

>4 PatrickMurtha: Welcome!

.^ Thank you kindly!

>4 PatrickMurtha: "MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey."

Me too! Well, sort of. My degree from BU was a Bachelor's Degree in Public Communications. (Class of 77) My northern New Jersey credentials, however, are impeccable: born in Newark, where I lived until, when I was 11, we moved to Maplewood. How about you?

^ Born in Passaic, so not far from you. Nearby Rutherford and Nutley are two of my favorite towns, and I had library cards there as well as Passaic. I attended Neumann Prep in Wayne for high school.

My father’s family was from Bayonne, so we were there a lot. One uncle lived in Plainfield. My mother attended Leonia High School. So northern New Jersey in a general way is strong turf for me.

My Yale BA was 1980; my MAs from BU, 1999. My brother attended BU as an undergrad, Class of 83 I think.

>8 PatrickMurtha: "My father’s family was from Bayonne, . . . "

You're killing me! My father was born and raised in Newark (Weequahic, to be precise), but my mother grew up in Bayonne and my grandparents lived there pretty much all their lives. Cheers!

Bayonne, situated as it is on a peninsula and only “connected” to Jersey City and Staten Island, is such an odd, unique town.

Staten Island, by the way, is both geographically and culturally completely “New Jersey”.

Hello, Mr. Hoorn (Matthew David van der Hoorn) here. I am an 18-year-old (aspiring) intellectual and learning expert. I primarily read non-fiction and science, though I also want to get back into reading fantasy. For more on me, visit my profile.

Either way, I will be reading a lot.
Currently, for fun, I am busy (almost finished) with: Lost Victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler's Most Brilliant General by Erich von Manstein.

For a project of learning startup theory and business in general (mostly scoping out), I will be learning the following 11 books in 2 weeks (for more information, see my YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEjLAgQJ6s4):
1. Zero to One, Peter Thiel
2. The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
3. The E-myth revisisted, Marc E. Gerber
4. Good to Great, James Collins
5. The Hard thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
6. The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
7. 12 Months to 1 Million, Ryan Daniel Moran
8. Built to last, James Collins
9. Rework, Jason Fried
10. The Startup Manual/Strategy, Steve Blank
11. Your Next Five Moves, Patrick Bet-David

I will read them syntopically (see: How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler for reference). I will learn them by integrating Layered Learning, Inquiry-Based Learning, and Order Control (see Dr. Justin Sung on YouTube for reference).

I'll try to update this thread if I change books along the way, but check out the "currently reading" on my profile for the most accurate results.

Ps) No idea how the touchstones work--so they might be invalid.

Peppermint Twist: The Mob, the Music, and the Most Famous Dance Club of the '60s
John Johnson Jr.
4/5 stars
The title tells it all. This is a very interesting story of the mob and the 60's dance club that they hung out at, along with the singing stars that performed there.

Strictly speaking The Persian Letters of Montesquieu are fiction, but a 21st-century reader necessarily approaches them as an historical and philosophical document--despite them still offering some of the pleasures of literary reading. That's what I'm working on now.

Going on vacation tomorrow. Leaving the paper books at home, downloaded The moves that matter and Debt: the first 5000 years to my Kindle.

Reading this morning in Plutarch’s Lives, the Dryden / Clough translation in the old Modern Library Giant edition. Now that’s as classical as it gets. Long sentences with many clauses, you really have to pay attention. I like this quotation about empire: “And indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome, than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself.”

Along with books such as Plutarch, one might take a look at Moses Hadas’s helpful guide Ancilla to Classical Reading.

I'm reading The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman who Ruled It by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Travel Light, Move Fast by my favorite memoirist.

>17 vwinsloe: she's one of my favourites too.

>18 LynnB: I see that you've reviewed it, but won't look until I'm done!

I'm reading 10 Days that Shaped Modern Canada by Aaron Hughes

You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman
Mike Thomas
This is a well-written biography of the fabulous and funny Phil Hartman, comedian and actor. Author, Mike Thomas does a great job of chronicling the life and career of Hartman and the tragic outcome of his life.

>18 LynnB: I finished Travel Light Move Fast, and I agree with your review. How can someone survive so much?

Coming up on the final chapters of J.M.S. Careless’s Canada: A Story Of Challenge, the revised 1970 edition. Not the name I would want as a historian 😏 , but Careless was good. This is is the second comprehensive history of Canada that I have read, after Roger Riendeau’s A Brief History of Canada, 2000 edition.

I love thinking about geography, and one of my retirement goals is to know the INTERNAL geography of countries much better. Lately I’ve been working on Italy, the UK, Australia, trying to get the counties, regions, features more firmly fixed in my mind. So I appreciate that Careless opens with a consideration of the geographic regions of Canada. I have really never thought much about the Canadian Shield, or even been aware of the water-logged Hudson Bay Lowlands, so this is wonderful material. YouTube travel and geography videos, if used very selectively, can help with the visualization.

Robert S. Kane’s forthright and penetrating travel guides, of which Africa A to Z in 1961 was the first, were my entrée to the nations of the world, and like John Gunther’s Inside… series, still make excellent reading today. Kane was a trend-setter as a travel writer because he was not afraid to speak his mind; he’ll tell you if there are rats in that hotel.

And he was 100% pro-Africa and pro-independence, which was in itself a political stance at that time. Notice the year, 1961. About 25 African counties became independent between 1960 and 1962, so this volume could scarcely help being a fascinating snapshot of the continent at a key moment in its history. Kane is a very sympathetic, uncondescending observer.

Even the preliminary “get ready for travel” chapters are compelling. I was fascinated to learn that there were at least a dozen major organizations devoted to promoting friendship / cooperation / understanding between the US and Africa. I hope we’re doing as well today, but I wonder.

The travel writer Peter Biddlecombe is one of the few writers who can genuinely make me laugh out loud and do spit-takes. His travel books are very valuably from the perspective of a businessman and NOT a tourist or travel professional. His narration is dry and the incidents he relates frequently beggar the imagination.

Biddlecombe writes about Africa a lot; is he ever culturally insensitive? I’m not African so in that sense it is not for me to say, but it does not seem to me that he is insensitive very often, in fact he has plenty of sympathy wherever he goes, and is very attuned to the “human comedy”. Bureaucracy drives him crazy, but of whom is that not true?

Of course all writers of European heritage are going to demonstrate insensitivities or misapprehensions OCCASIONALLY when they venture outside their native sphere, but unless they are vicious about it, I am not put off. None of us is perfect.

I'm about to start Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower by Charlie Angus

The pioneering African-American film-maker Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951) suffered from racism, of course, but he also wanted his own people to be harder on themselves; he had no patience for excuses. This disdain for the unambitious is related to W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of the “Talented Tenth” (which I have always found attractive, but then I’m an unabashed elitist 🙂 ). Micheaux emerges as a complex and inspiring figure in Patrick McGilligan’s excellent biography Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only. Unlike those who become icons of this or that * , he does lend himself to simplification, and this is probably why he is not famous.

* Icons are not always to blame for their own iconography - some self-promote in that way, some don’t. But something about them allows the public to retain a simple image, which is the only sort of concept the public mind can handle.

I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him.

So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.

* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.

I read Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli. I found this book really frustrating in the first part, then as it moved more towards philosophy it became more interesting.
I can't work out who it is aimed at. The first section of the book describes how quantum mechanics came into being and the main elements of the theory. I studied it as part of my science degree, and so I was able to keep up (although it annoyed my by confirming how addled my brain has become in the last 30 years). I can't help but think anyone with less science knowledge would be all at sea, while anyone specialist in the field would find it far to over simplified. Not sure how broad an audience that leaves.

Years ago I was supposed to read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for a course, but I was taking four graduate-level English classes and one education class that semester, plus teaching part-time, so I only managed excerpts. But I promised myself that I would get back to the text, and so I have, now halfway through the Oxford unabridged edition. A complete joy.

I will always be grateful that I got an excellent grounding in 17th and 18th Century British literature as an undergrad at Yale, so I have a head start on Boswell because the context and personalities are familiar.

Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 is a thrillingly contrapuntal account of the FBI vs. the six imagination-capturing criminal gangs of 1933-34: Barker-Karpis, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. The criss-crossing between these overlapping and mutually knowledgeable factions was pretty much completely lost in Michael Mann’s woeful film version (the worst movie that the estimable Mann has ever put his name to). No matter though, because the book is here and it is a dilly.

Some fun points:

John Dillinger was a pioneer in Self-Conscious Criminal Stardom, so it makes symbolic sense that he was killed at a movie theater, Chicago’s Biograph, where I watched movies myself many years later. Criminals who were supposedly “in hiding” went to movies, nightclubs, dinners with their girlfriends, etc - it is really amazing.

The botched FBI raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, April 22, 1934, has got to be one of the most preposterously inept police actions in history. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and their gang members all escaped without injury, while one lawman and one civilian were killed, and four others wounded. The criminals weren’t so brilliant, but the young FBI simply had no idea what it was doing. (The Lodge is still there, substantially unchanged.)

Machine Gun Kelly (George Barnes) was the least criminously impressive of the early Thirties legends, not really that scary at all. Could have been a middle-class husband and Rotarian under slightly different circumstances. More educated than the rest, handsome, well-dressed.

Although the movie Bonnie and Clyde is a landmark, it has to be said that the real Bonnie and Clyde were pretty grubby and ordinary-looking. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, they weren’t. But then, Hollywood always glamorizes.

How Y'all Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived
Leslie Jordan
4/5 stars
Leslie Jordan writes about his life and his career on TV, Instagram and films. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about his life. A fast read, you'll get a kick out of this book!

I seem to be running into King Philip’s War a lot in my reading, so I thought I would undertake a classic history of the subject, Douglas Leach’s Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War. This is very well balanced between military, political, and social history, with plenty of conflict detail as best can be reconstructed.

We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Film
Noah Isenberg
4/5 stars
This is the wonderfully interesting book about the film Casablanca. Isenberg discusses the origins of the film, the actors, parodies of the movie and discussions about a sequel. Definitely, for Casablanca fans!

I finished Out of the Red a collection of columns written from 1946 through 1949 by Red Smith, one of America's pre-eminent sportswriters of that, or any, era.

Rather than being arranged in chronological order, the columns are grouped here by subject matter: predominantly baseball, boxing, college football, horse racing, fly fishing and basketball (which Smith famously abhorred). These columns, being published immediately post-WW2, very much reflect mainstream American attitudes of the era, which do not always wear well. For one thing, what we see reflected is very much a scotch and soda, back-slapping, mutuel window, locker room "man's world." Women are barely there, unless they're hosting cocktail parties for charitable organizations. And although Smith is scornful of Major League Baseball's pre-Jackie Robinson Jim Crow paradigm, in later columns Smith's own racism comes to the surface several times.

Smith, though, could indeed turn a phrase. For example:
"In the eighth Hermanski smashed a drive to the scoreboard. Henrich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen feet into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging it its locker. When he came down he had the ball."

Smith's 1946 pre-Kentucky Derby column began like this:

"A consignment of apprentice horse lovers who have been touring the bourbon quarries and oats disposal plants of the bluegrass country pulled in here a trifle lame today and the bellhop rooming one of them clutched the newcomer's lapels before he grabbed his luggage.

'Look,' this one-man reception committee whispered huskily, 'Get down on Golden Man in the fifth today. And I'll see you afterward. Don't forget my number.'

You knew then you were in Louisville, which may be the only town in America where the tips go from bellhop to tourist instead of vice versa"

The writing is not uniformly excellent, however. Smith is much better at describing events and scenes and people he enjoys and/or approves of, even when poking fun at them (and at himself) than events he doesn't care for. In those cases, he can quickly go from entertainingly humorous to unentertainingly snide.

So this is a time capsule, really, into a certain segment of American life in the immediate post-WW2 era, in sports and in overall attitudes. It's a look back to the time when the Harvard-Yale football game was still a major sporting event, and when boxing matches proliferated, boxers, trainers and managers had colorful tales to tell, and gamblers' activities often brought suspicion to individual fight results. But it was also still the time when men would naturally assume that they were speaking to, and about, other men--other white men--essentially exclusively. A slap on the back and pass the flask. Who ya got in the sixth?

Accordingly, the collection ends up being a look at that era, faults and all, with a lot of very good, often humorous, writing baked in. In that way, this collection provides a history lesson of sorts. The ability to be entertained despite the sometimes unappealing paradigms of the day will of course vary by reader.

Recently read and enjoyed Justin Wolff’s excellent biography Thomas Hart Benton, and what strikes me are the same things I noticed while reading Herbert R. Lottman’s Albert Camus: A Biography: An awful lot of writing about “culture” is really just writing about politics, and the insistence that everything is in some sense political (hard to argue with) rapidly becomes an insistence that everything is ONLY political. Those who occupy positions somewhere in the center will be pummeled quite nastily by the hard Right and Left. Critics tried to both enlist Benton and repudiate him, on the basis of interpretations that he himself gave no support to (and which seem flimsy and non-insightful in retrospect). And so it goes.

Just started Christian Holmes’ Company Towns of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Seems a little specialized? Well, pull up a chair…

Local history is a distinctive branch of publication, and one dear to my own heart. Much of it is produced and distributed locally, by small presses, state and municipal historical associations, museums, etc, and may not be obtainable through Amazon or conventional sources. Looking for a specific older piece of local history literature can be as daunting as seeking a rare edition of an obscure novelist.

Much of this material is “non-book” and even downright ephemera: periodicals, booklets, brochures, flyers. Much of it is produced by dedicated non-professionals.

When I lived in Northeast Wisconsin in the Oughties, I was really involved in local history - and arts, economic development, small town revitalization, journalism; too much really, but it was fun. For several years I lived in the town of Little Chute, on the Fox River between Appleton and Green Bay, one of the most Dutch-American municipalities in the country. I was very active in the Little Chute Historical Society and Little Chute Windmill Association (which eventually succeeded in its goal of building an authentic Dutch windmill as an attraction).

I also served on the Editorial Board of Voyageur Magazine, “Northeast Wisconsin's Historical Review”. This was a great gig! I got to review and comment on submissions for the magazine, and the Board met quarterly to hash out the contents of future issues. Those sessions were intensely stimulating, because we had the cream of local history professors, librarians, and dedicated amateurs on the Board.

Here in Mexico, government funding for local history publishing is EXCELLENT, way exceeding the US on a per capita basis. Every Mexican state capital seems to have at least one bookstore devoted to local history, and the number of very substantial publications on offer is simply amazing.

I would be most interested to learn what the situation is in other nations in this respect. I would assume that the conditions are good in the UK, which has long been a bastion of local history, but elsewhere I don’t know.

Among the rather specialized titles I’m currently reading is Farm Broadcasting: The First Sixty Years (1981). I’d like to own it, but hard copies are pretty pricey and it can be read for free online:

http://publications.iowa.gov/30172/1/Farm-Broadcasting-The-First-Sixty-Years-Bak...

When I was a New Jersey kid waking up gosh darn early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons like Colonel Bleep and Dodo the Kid from Outer Space at 6 AM, there were farm programs scheduled even earlier - Modern Farmer or Agriculture USA * at 5:30 AM. This Baker book includes info about the latter, which started on KNBC in Los Angeles in 1961, produced and hosted by John A. Stearns, and was widely syndicated over the next two decades. Information about the production history of Modern Farmer is more elusive, even though I’ve seen old New York Times TV listings for it, and many people online remember the show. No footage from either series on YouTube - probably all wiped a long time ago.

The book contains proportionately much more information about farm radio, surveying the field state by state. I love forgotten pockets of media history like this.

* Also the title of a USDA radio series produced in the 1950s.

>38 PatrickMurtha: We all have different definitions of "too expensive", but I thought you might like to know that abebooks.com has that title for $48 US. Shipping to Canada costs almost the same, but you are in the US so it should be cheaper. Here's the link if you are interested:

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-...

>39 LynnB: Thanks so much! Yes, that pricing is a little out of my retirement income league, which is not to say that I would never pay that much, but it would probably have to be a book that was completely inaccessible to me otherwise, and for which $48 would be on the low end of available copies. I paid $35 (including shipping) last year for a beautiful copy of Henri Amiel’s Journals edited by Van Wyck Brooks, and $25 for a rare historical novel, By Dulvercombe Water, that has not been digitized by the Internet Archive or HathiTrust. But in general I buy much cheaper copies of things, even in pretty rough shape because I can have them beautifully rebound here in Tlaxcala for $6.00 / volume.

I'm reading Tastes Like War: A Memoir by Grace M. Cho

I comb through the notes and bibliographies of any non-fiction book I am reading and make lists of follow-up books and articles, frequently buying one or two immediately and putting others on the to buy / locate list. Of course, this strategy leads me in new directions, which is part of the point.

Here is an excellent example: In the end notes of Robert F. Gish’s fine biography of New Mexico-born novelist Harvey Fergusson, Frontier’s End: The Life and Literature of Harvey Fergusson, there is a reference to Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest, published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1972. Well this sounded interesting. So I poked around, and found a beautiful dust-jacketed copy signed by one of the authors, George Fitzpatrick, at an extremely reasonable price. Snapped it right up. And now that I have it and am reading it, it is indeed very interesting!

Although I haven’t the money to be a real book collector, I am always happy to own interesting things. Perhaps it is just as well that I have to buy online now, instead of having access to used bookshops, because the problem with those is that my interests have broadened to the extent that I want to at least look at everything in the shop, and then desire to buy way too much.

In 1903, members of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization were often considered terrorists, and some later specifically described themselves as terrorists: killers for a cause. But by 1948, many wars and struggles later, the surviving elderly veterans of the group were retrospectively considered freedom fighters by the new Yugoslav Macedonian government, and were invited to apply for pension recognition. Although the shift in categorization from terrorist to freedom fighter is not Keith Brown's specific or overriding subject in his fine monograph, Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia, it hovered in my mind throughout my reading of the book, probably because it is an issue that has obvious contemporary relevance and that will never be fully settled to everyone's satisfaction. The linchpin seems to be that if one approves of the goals of a revolutionary organization, one has moved some way towards excusing its methods, and in re-defining terrorists as freedom fighters.

Brown's study is specialized, but quite readable. He uses up-to-date historical and anthropological concepts without getting bogged down in impenetrable language or overly convoluted relations of ideas. He also does not commit the common sin of sniffily dismissing earlier literature on his topic - in fact, he mines such writing, both academic and popular, for all it is worth, and in a very respectful spirit. His chief sources are archival - the aforementioned pension applications, and British Foreign Office records. His goal is to trace the internal workings of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization through anthropological analysis. The promotional copy for the book lays out the project well: "Keith Brown focuses on social and cultural mechanisms of loyalty to describe the circuits of trust and terror--webs of secret communications and bonds of solidarity--that linked migrant workers, remote villagers, and their leaders in common cause. Loyalties were covertly created and maintained through acts of oath-taking, record-keeping, arms-trading, and in the use and management of deadly violence."

Brown has some pointed things to say about the interpretation of past events in the Balkans through a prism of contemporary ethno-nationalism, even suggesting that it was not an ESSENTIAL goal of the MRO to replace one "distant" governing authority, the Ottoman Empire, with another, localized government that would presumably be more representative of and responsive to the people. He calls this skepticism "thinking past the nation," borrowing a term from Arjun Appadurai, and he draws on James Scott's work on traditional forms of "anarchist" resistance to "being governed" to elucidate the theme. I can identify this as an area where experts will debate his conclusions, without claiming any competence to make a judgment on them myself.

The readership for a work of academic history such as this, driven by analysis rather than narrative, is naturally somewhat circumscribed, but it could be larger than it is. Enthusiastic readers of "popular history" ought not to be overly wary of tackling more advanced analyses which will help them to understand historical events in a different, more complex way, and in fact this book is a perfectly recommendable one in that respect, because it is challenging without being inaccessible to the typical educated reader. Brown opens up the concepts that he uses in a way that invites further curiosity, rather than shutting it down, and his very ample bibliography offers many avenues for additional exploration.

Henry Charlton Beck (1902-1965) was New Jersey’s pre-eminent folklorist, with six excellent volumes to his credit, of which Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey, which I’m currently reading, is the first. Great material captured in an individual writing style. Beck is especially interested in ghost towns, odd place names, and interesting but obscure individuals.

I highly recommend reading Beck’s books about southern New Jersey in tandem with John McPhee’s later classic The Pine Barrens. They complement each other nicely.

I love history books of the past because they were not written for us, nor with our preoccupations in mind; they had no way of knowing what our preoccupations would BE. They do provide a sense of the time when they were written, as well as the specific past they were written about. I don’t generally see them as “superseded”; they are informative. Whether the theory-ridden, hectoring books of today will hold up as well remains to be seen.

The 50-volume Chronicles of America series published by Yale University Press in 1918 makes for delightful reading, and are very handsome hand-sized volumes as well. I have read Charles M. Andrews’ Colonial Folkways: A Chronicle of American Life in the Reign of the Georges and Maud Wilder Goodwin’s Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York, and am just about to start Emerson Hough’s The Passing of the Frontier; A Chronicle of the Old West.

>45 PatrickMurtha:

Without even going so far back, a book like Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) fits your bill, I think. Certainly the books of Frances Yates from that same period are intetesting not only for their subject matter but for the air of discovery with which she approaches it.

>46 paradoxosalpha: The Thomas book was assigned in a course on the history of witchcraft that I took as an undergrad, and I read parts but need to get back to the whole thing.

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an essay a while back on what it called “undead texts”, monumental synthesizing works of past scholarship that can find no home or even slight recognition in today’s academy because they were not written in the last ten minutes and do not reflect our current exceptionally narrow preoccupations, and thus are forced to live an underground life. The CHE’s article on this subject was amusing in the way it cited contemporary scholars who view such books as dangerous, subversive, not to be assigned and in fact to be kept a secret from today’s cohort of graduate students. No wonder our intellectual life is so thin.

This attitude also raises a question: If books are superseded so quickly and easily, why even write them? Do the scholars of today really think that they are immune to this tendency, that their massive tomes of 2023 won’t be consigned to the trash heap by 2035? I have seen books from the 1990s dismissed as old school. 🙄

I am reading the States and the Nation series of bicentennial histories; ex-library copies can be had very inexpensively. (I get this uneasy feeling that libraries don’t hold onto anything anymore, but are in a constant itch to deaccession.)

I read North Dakota first, because who knows anything about North Dakota? And it was fascinating. Now I am starting South Carolina, because my sister was until recently living in Charleston. And I have New Hampshire in my possession.

A nice feature of the series is the inclusion of a photographic essay about the state in each volume. The notes and bibliographies are excellent, and are hard on my wallet, because I have discovered MANY books that I want to have.

A benefit of reading these books is that I afterwards feel a deeper connection to that state, that I kind of “own” it, because how many residents of a state have read a full-length history of their home? One in a thousand? Probably not even that many.

So even though North Dakota is one of the few states that I haven’t visited, because it is not on the way to anything and requires a separate trip, I now feel very possessive of North Dakota. Did you know that Lawrence Welk’s distinctive accent was North Dakota Russo-German? He didn’t learn English until he was an adult.

The Dr. Johnson-as-detective stories of Lillian de la Torre (1902-1993) were widely admired, and she served as President of the Mystery Writers of America. Her non-fiction true crime books are wrongly listed as novels in her Wikipedia entry, no doubt because they are presented novelistically. The Heir of Douglas is available in my Scribd subscription, so I started in on it this morning. A handful of reviews that made the book sound arcane were naturally enticing for me. 😏

Actually, the story is not that arcane at all. The “Douglas Cause” was a major scandal and media sensation in 18th Century Britain, about which everyone had an opinion; comparable to the case of the Tichborne Claimant in the next century.

Probably by now, anyone who reads my posts will have discerned that I have a soft spot for many books, obscurities and older classics, that probably not many people are drawn to nowadays (and that is putting it mildly). No matter, they have an enthusiast in me.

The historian James Bryce (1838-1922) first published his history of the Holy Roman Empire in 1864, and revised it several times over the coming decades. When I taught World History, of course I could not resist using Voltaire’s quip (“Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”); it is the sort of thing that students remember. But there is a lot more to the story, and although this Bryce treatment is demanding, it is not at all musty. Catch this tart comment:

“Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in a singular fashion. Not only did it not occur to them to ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were originally addressed; they were quite as careless whether the sense they discovered was one which the language used would naturally and rationally bear to any reader at any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text.”

The Word of God is supernally elastic, natch!

I'm reading Poirot: The Greatest detective in the world. I foresee a series read of the Poirot novels in my future. I read a lot of Miss Marple, as a teen, but not a lot of Poirot. Now might be the time to think about correcting that.

Anyone with a serious interest in literature and literary history should get a total kick out of Richard Altick’s 1950 study The Scholar Adventurers. Immensely informative and entertaining look at the byways of literary scholarship.

One of the delights of the Altick volume is a 13-page section of Bibliographic Notes. Any non-fiction book that contains especially good (end or foot)notes, (preferably annotated) bibliography, bibliographic notes or essay, etc, has my everlasting gratitude, because I really will comb through those for other materials I want to follow up on. Books are findable most of the time; journal articles are a bear (American colloquial for “difficult situation”). Fortunately I have JSTOR access through being a Yale alumni, that helps with some articles. I would like to collect old scholarly journals and such, but my financial resources are not unlimited. 😏

I am certain that I will order at least a dozen books mentioned in the Altick notes, not all immediately but eventually. Two other books I have recently found a wealth of follow-up in are Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (which has an impressive annotated Bibliography) and Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers of the Far West 1848-1880 (killer endnotes).

>24 PatrickMurtha: im a huge fan of travel narratives and like you interested in the geography of countries. I am not familiar with Kane;what book of his would you suggest I read first? Same with Peter Biddlecombe

and your comments about Africa independence movement reminded me of social studies teacher who started up my love for travel history and geography I remember she had placed a sheet of plastic over the map of Africa so she could change boundaries and names of countries as they happened.

and welcome to your new rabbit hole :)

Been reading orwells roses for a while now, enjoying it inbetween all my other reads this month. The author does a great job with her subjects and and her essays connect them with many other issues. One was about the roses industry. We get our roses from columbia, and the condition for the workers is horrible. and that Orwell planted a garden. Plan to finish this weekend. so far giving it high marks

>54 cindydavid4: For Kane, the Africa volume I mentioned is a great place to start, seeing as it was his first and the subject is fascinating.

For Biddlecombe, French Lessons in Africa.

Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig
Jonathan Eig
5/5 stars
What a wonderful book about the life of baseball star Lou Gehrig. I highly recommend this for anyone to read. I also had read Eig's book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution and loved that book. Looking forward to reading more of his books.

started after the romanovsfor the RTT August theme: immigration. I think i like Teffi memoir about the journey to paris a bit better, but still interesting

I made an impulse borrow at the public library today: Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place by Will Self, with Ralph Steadman illustrations.

That's Not All Folks!
Mel Blanc
5/5 stars
What a wonderful book about Mel Blanc! He writes about his time voicing cartoon characters Bugs Bunny and many others, also his life on radio, films and on television! He also talks about his wife and son and also how show business affected his life. Highly recommended!
Books About Film and Television

I’ve just started reading Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read.

I finished Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World
It was interesting and informative and gave no spoilers (or almost none). It covered all of the books, but also the radio, stage film & TV adaptations in the last century since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
I feel a Poirot read coming on...

I'm reading Three Women by Lisa Tadeo

I'm reading The Missing Lynx which is more about extinctions than it is about rewilding at the moment, but hoping some good indications for the future are coming up in it.

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
Denise Kiernan
4/5 stars
Interesting story about the women who left their homes to come to Oak Ridge, Tennesse in the Appalachian Mountains to help with the winning of the World War II effort. The women did not know at the time what they were doing at this secretive site till the end of the war. Well written!

>65 JulieLill: zorrie is an excellent HF of that time that was very good,

Finished Orwells Roses Ive enjoyed much of her work and this is no different' Her first essay is Bread and Roses, probably my favorite protest song, and loved the history tale she tells

"A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. ..... This is the starting point for Rebecca Solnit's new book, which presents another side of Orwell, a neglected arcadian Orwell who took enormous pleasure in the natural world and found great meaning and value in it. Orwell's planting of the roses is an axle from which Solnit's chapters radiate out like spokes as she brilliantly explores its various contexts, perspectives, and meanings, following the contours of Orwell's life and tracking how deeply enmeshed the love of nature is in all his writing"

highly recommended

Now reading a book that popped out at me on the shelves at the used bookstore hands of my father a memoir about growing up with deaf parents during the depression . Ive read others like thie in this sign was quite good, and I watched CODA with Troy Kusner who won the oscar for best actor He's from Mesa, where I taught. The book describes beautifully his love for his parents, but also the frustration and anger he felt at having to interepret every thing for them from the age of nine (no sign interpreters back then) but then being ashamed . Typical for many CODAs (children of deaf adults) Enjoying this very much

I just finished Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives by Darcy Eveleigh, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, and Rachel L. Swarns. This is a beautiful coffee table book full of great photographs and fascinating back stories. In 2016, New York Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh tumbled onto the fact that there were tens of thousands of photographs and negatives languishing, usually unseen for decades, in the Times photo archives. In many cases, Times photographers or freelancers would have shot several rolls of film (remember film?) while on assignment, and either only one of the photos would have been chosen for printing in the paper, or the editors would have ended up running the story without any photos, or the stories might never have been run at all.

In many cases the photographs provided scenes of triumph and accomplishment, such as a photograph taken backstage at Carnegie Hall in 1982 depicting opera singers Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry embracing Marian Anderson after an evening of music celebrating Anderson's art and career. That 1982 photo is in fact one of the most recent. Most are from the 1950s through the 1970s. Many portray moments from the Civil Rights Movement and the uprisings of the 1960s. There are several searing photographs depicting the fierce Detroit riots of 1968 and the aftermath of destruction and anger.

There are heartbreaking and horrifying historical photographs: Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral, inside Malcolm X's house in Queens just after it was firebombed. No one was injured, but soon we see the photograph of Malcolm X's funeral after he was assassinated by rifle fire just eight days later. There is a photograph of Fred Hampton's bullet-ridden apartment immediately after his murder by Chicago policemen, and a series of photos of black soldiers in Vietnam.

Each of the photographs/photo series is accompanied by a short essay describing the photograph, the circumstances behind its creation and information about what photo was chosen to run in its place (or whether a photo was used at all or whether a story about the incident or scene was ever run). When possible, followup information and/or relatively contemporary interviews with the subjects are included, and a few times those essays are even written by the original photographer.

finished Orwells Roses Loved this book esp as she starts with 'bread and roses" my fav protest song. I have lots of good thoughts about this book but have trouble putting them in a review Sassy Lassy has one that says it all and wth her permission I am including it here

"It's somehow comforting to discover that George Orwell loved roses. This man, with one of the bleakest perspectives on his times and the future, found solace in that most elemental of human activities, cultivating a garden, the solution preferred by another philosopher in another turbulent age.

In April, 1936, Orwell moved to a small rented cottage in Wallington, one with a tin roof, lacking gas, electricity, and indoor toilet. While fairly standard rural living for the times, it was not exactly easy living. He immediately planted a garden, one focussed mainly on food, but he also planted roses; not an obvious choice given the circumstances. Later there would be goats.

Gardens are full of life and death, but also of hope. This is the influence on Orwell and his writings Solnit examines in these essays.

At first they seem to meander, but then suddenly they return to the subject, and everything falls into place. How else does Ralph Lauren's 1980s insistence on chintz and roses morph into a discussion of the imperial passion for importing the products of empire, and then connect to Jamaica Kincaid and her visceral reaction to the colonisation of her Antigua home? Solnit suggests The Road to Wigan Pier provides the parallel and the answer, with Orwell saying You have got to choose between liberating India and having extra sugar. Which do you prefer?

Another essay. "In the Rose Factory", quotes Orwell on coal, saying It is only very rarely, when I make a great mental effort, that I connect this coal with the far-off labor in the mines. Solnit visited an actual rose factory in Bogata, describing the process of growing roses for the floral industry, and the condition under which the female workers work, ending with ...it was even more rarely that anyone connected the roses to the invisible toil in these greenhouses. They were the invisible factories of visual pleasure.

Orwell's Roses is not by any means a standard biography. Rather, it is an exploration and a meditation on the writer, his works, and how he is viewed today. Solnit certainly knows her subject and his writing. Her thoughts often provide a different way of viewing them; ideas that definitely inspire another look at Orwell.

As for those roses he planted, they were still there at the cottage when Solnit visited in 2016."

highly recommended 5*(my rating)

Finished my read of Psychogeography and posted a review.

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy
Caseen Gaines
4/5 stars
Wonderful book about the Back To The Future Trilogy. Gaines writes a thorough synopsis of the movies and what has been going on with the films and actors, and how the movies impacted on the public and fans. Books About Film and Television

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Mary Roach
4/5 stars
I have read several books by Mary Roach who writes about non-fiction subjects and she is never boring. This book talks about all things surrounding the science of sex. Very interesting! Science

Currently reading with great delight Agamben's Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty. It touches very many of my peculiar interests, and is wonderfully dense. Not a recommendation to anyone else, alas.

reading the black sea for the Reading Globally third quarter read "the black sea" its slow going but hes a fascinating writer, with knowledge of the past history of the area and its peoples

also reading the lost education of Horace Tate for the RTT School Days theme. For the most part I find this a fascinating account of his life and times when the nascent civil rights movement was starting up. He focused on equal education for children of color, and there were many incidents that made me angry, not just because the happened before, but that they are still happening today. Im finding my self skimming some parts that talk about meetings and people that seem to be repetitive. But still liking it

I'm reading The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey

I'm reading The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig

my review of the lost education of Horace Tate is herehttps://www.librarything.com/topic/351927#n8228934

>76 LynnB: tempted, how is it reading?

I'm finally getting around to reading The Sixth Extinction, and I wonder how many species we have lost in the last decade since it was published.

>78 Helenliz: only 1/4 thru, but I'm enjoying it. It looks at four people who were instrumental in bringing the pill to the world. Right now, I'm reading about Margaret Sanger.

>76 LynnB: So interesting!

John Hughes: A Life in Film: The Genius Behind Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club, Home Alone, and more
Kirk Honeycutt
4/5 stars
Kirk Honeycutt recaps and discusses the films of John Hughes. This book does also talk about his life but not in an in-depth way. I enjoyed it.

I finished the LTER book Making the Low Notes. As the author carefully points out, this is a memoir focusing on his life in the music business, playing the bass in jazz groups, gigs, and musicals. It provides interesting insights into the life of a musician both on and off stage.

I'm reading Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

I finished Opus Dei, posted my review, and started Letters on the Royal Art.

My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business
Dick Van Dyke
4/5 stars
This is not a current book about Dick Van Dyke but he writes about the highlights of his career in TV and film and talks about his family life up to 2011. I always admired him and this was a very enjoyable book.

I finished Bog, Fen & Swamp by Annie Proulx. I listened to it, so I now also know how to pronounce Proulx. >:-)

I finished the LTER, Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System. This is a frightening account of much of the evidence used to convict suspects of crime. Equally appalling is the reluctance to overturn faulty convictions and the snail's pace of our justice system. These failings are presented using a series of particular cases.

I finished Caste which I found comprehensive, thought provoking and profoundly depressing.
I also think it was missing a chapter on how to break a caste system.

The Old Man and the Gun: And Other Tales of True Crime
David Grann
3/5 stars
Interesting book on true crime! There are three stories of crime in this book. The first one was The Old Man and The Gun which was made into a movie with Robert Redford. True Crime and The Chameleon were next. The second story was just okay but I really enjoyed the The Chameleon and The Old Man and The Gun. Crime

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film
Patton Oswalt
3/5 stars
Actor/Writer/Standup Comedian Patton Oswalt talks about his love of films and that he had seen three times a week through the nineties at the New Beverly Cinema. Interesting! Books About Film and Television

I'm reading Democracy Awakening which is about this moment in American history, how we got here and where we are going. Anyone familiar with the work of Heather Cox Richardson's work will be familiar with many of the arguments made here.

>93 vwinsloe: I get her daily email letter, which I usually appreciate very much.

>94 rocketjk: Same. She's a brilliant writer and thinker, and she can phrase the information that she imparts in a way that creates a theme or a story.

>95 vwinsloe: That's really well put. What also resonates with me strongly is the way in which she is able to impart information in a relatively objective way, yet still make clear the sense of urgency she feels about it all.

finally back to reading the black sea Had to put it down coz I kinda got lost in some of his historic details, but am back to enjoying it again

>96 rocketjk:. I agree. I think it's because she just presents it in a way that is free from spin and hyperbole, unlike the outrage merchants who live by clicks and pundit appearances these days. It's unnecessary because the facts really speak for themselves.