This is an OPEN THREAD but I thought it’d be fun to talk books too. For my birthday, BooMan sent me “What It Takes” by Richard Ben Cramer. It is an exhaustive exploration of what kind of people it takes to make a true candidate for president. The level of detail about the lives of Bob Dole, Gary Hart, George Bush, and many others is remarkable, and exceedingly entertaining.
I’m only on page 169. But, because the print is very small, I figure I’ve read at least 300 pages! it’s a little over 1,000 pages long, which by my math makes it nearly 2,000 pages. Not only am I learning, my biceps are getting quite buff! Just like a Harry Potter reader’s biceps!
How about you? What are you reading? Magazine article, book, funny papers?
I’m finishing up Edward Dolnick’s Madness on the Couch. I also just bought Dan Simmon’s Illium which is a sci-fi futuristic version of the Iliad, I never was into sci-fi until I read Dan Simmons. I also found Peter Singer’s The President of Good and Evil for really cheap a few weeks ago and would like to read that.
The Death of Advertising and the Rise of PR
Dreamweaver 2004 Demystified
Harry Potter
Words and Rules
long time no see. How was your time in the wilderness?
great. I am super busy with a project that launches in a couple of weeks – and then I should have time for pastimes such as writing diary entries and posting them on Booman.
MISSED YOU!!!!!!!!
I have been lurking – so haven’t missed you since I’ve been reading all your great diaries!
Star Wars and Philosophy sitting in the bedroom, but I’m trying to hold off on starting it for a couple of weeks till the train ride to/from SoCal.
Also on my list to bring along: The Art and Craft of Poetry, and I should hit the used bookstore to see if there’s anything that tickles my fancy in the SF/fantasy genre. Oh, and I’ll be sampling the SoCal newspapers; we get the LA Times free at our LA hotel, and I’m sure there’ll be an Orange County Register rack somewhere in the vicinity of our Anaheim digs…
I just spent some time at the bookstore this afternoon tracking down some information about a sci-fi book I read years ago – one of the few I have ever read. Its actually a trilogy written by Suzette Haden Elgin titled “Native Tongue” written in 1984 but republished in 2000. Here’s a bit of the description on the 1984 edition:
“Suzette Halden Elgin, science fiction author and professor of linguistis, combines her talents to tell a vivd story of people in a future society where interplanetary trade had made language-study a necessity – and thereby handed the so-called “weaker” sex a weapon for liberation…if the dared to use it.”
My memory of the book is that its a little bit “Handmaid’s Tale” mixed with a little “Star Wars” that demonstrates the true power of linguistics.
I’m going to recommend it to my book group as a selection for us to read and discuss.
Might be good train-ride reading (if I can tear my self away from the scenery, that is)…will have to take a look-see…
“Non-violent communication, a language of life” by Marshall Rosenberg offers a four-step program for communicating peace while getting your needs met in daily life.
“Non-violent communication, a language of life” by Marshall Rosenberg offers a four-step program for communicating peace while getting your needs met in daily life.
I told you that since I have been feeding the raccoons, I joined a Yahoo group list about how to care for them, and have learned so much about what is safe to feed raccoons (dog food is the best, cat food is not that good for them). And people on the list send photos all the time. Here are a couple photos + the note from the woman who is a licensed rehabber of wildlife. By the way, Valerie P. has brought her four babies around and they are much larger than this little fella:
he is so cute….I have heard that they can become mean, when they get older..is this true?
Awww!!!
Boy do they love dog food!
I made the mistake of leaving the bin with Shinobi’s food out on the back deck. Dog started barking at 3 am and we get up and there’s 3 big fattie pie raccoon’s sitting in the bin as if it was a jacuzzi. Just partying their butts off. Not at all afraid of us, the barking dog nor the lights.
THey like to run around on my roof and it’s like Exorcist or something rolling around up there.
🙂
They don’t give two shits about anything – I advanced towards one waving a baseball bat (I had the bat), and it took menacing steps towards me.
If they’re a real problem, they need to be humanely trapped (fried chicken is the best bait) and relocated by a professional, because they can do some serious damage and they’re notorious rabies carriers.
Right you are Rub! Very aggressive here. They have growled down at my husband several times. We call em “The Gangsters”.
I have a love/hate relationship with them 🙂
I love em when they are along the creek, down by our blackberry bushes..
I hate it when one of us forgets to close up the garage. Little phuckers can make a HUGE mess. They can get into EVERYTHING.
So your raccoons don’t recognize you as the alpha raccoon?
I’m just the lady who lives under the roof they use as a skateboarding park 🙂
No food left out on the deck, garage doors closed and we both live happily amongst each other.
WAIT! ALL WRONG!
For one thing, the danger of rabies depends entirely on where you live.
In Washington state, and in British Columbia, there is NO KNOWN case of rabies in a raccoon. Ever.
And that’s because the people in WA state and B.C. have been very good about vaccinating their cats and dogs for rabies.
ALSO: They are a LOT MORE SCARED OF US than the other way.
If you were waving a baseball bat, you probably terrified the raccoon and it reacted defensively.
I walk towards the raccoons I feed, and they back off gently because they’re shy towards humans. They know that it’s I who tosses them food a lot but they are still wary. And I like it like that.
I have no interest in turning them into pets … I just want to make their outside life a bit nicer.
A FAVORITE: I put out two big bowls of water, which I freshen three times a day. They love the water and they play in it.
TRAPPING: Very undesireable unless you are working with a rehabber. You might end up trapping a mother with babies, or a baby too young to be without its mother.
When I had concerns about a raccoon, I called the state wildlife guy here and he was absolutely wonderful. He gave me the names of two rehabbers, one a veterinary clinic.
You’ve sensibly addressed my pseudo-macho Grizzly Adams posturing.
Damn!
Yeah, the baseball bat thing was pretty aggressive, and I no doubt anthropomorphized (sp?) the experience.
On a related note, the general wildlife population here has changed noticeably in recent months (our yard backs on to tangled woodlands leading to the commuter rail to Boston and, more distant, the Assabet, Sudbury, and Concord Rivers).
Most notably, there are no squirrels. Today I saw a fox – it was clearly adult-sized, shiny red-gold with a big white tipped tail. Maybe that explains that?
I’m glad you survived my rather loud lecture in good spirits. Sorry ’bout that 😉
Damndest thing — we don’t see any squirrels either. What’s up with that? We have a zillion birds around here of all kinds … raccoons … a few stray cats (they and the raccoons co-exist very well).
The best thing I’ve found I can do is to put out those big bowls of water.
The little birds drink and bathe in it and then, at night, the raccoons play in it. They leave their “toys” in the bowls — rocks and sticks, mostly.
I don’t actually miss the squirrels. I wouldn’t go out of my way to do them any harm, but I just can’t figure out where they fit in God’s Great Plan…
It’s been very dry and hot here for 6 weeks – maybe they’ve fallen to some squirrel disease…
are one of the species most affected by the Plague, as are the entire family of ground squirrels, prairie dogs and such. There has been a particularly high incidence of it in the NE foothills here in Co. from Lyons south to the western suburbs of Denver. It normally occurs every 3-5yrs. and will eliminate over 90% of the local colonies. I live on the west edge of Boulder and the city and county have issued public alerts to it’s presence…squirrel and PDog populations have been greatly diminished. Plague, BTW, is communicated via ticks and fleas, so be sure your pets are protected, symptoms are quickly apparent and it is easily and successfully treated if caught early. Coons, OTOH, don’t get me started…major pests in my area and they carry a variety of diseases and parasites that are quite harmfulto pets and people.
Peace
Be very, very careful. Raccoons are very dangerous wild animals. Personally I would not keep one as a pet. You don’t have any children around do you? Not a good mix.
I respect their wildness…. never get near them.
We just celebrate their intelligence and their incredible sense of PLAY!
I couldn’t believe today how much all the wild creatures — from the littlest birds to the most gorgeous blue jays — appreciated those big bowls of water out there for them.
Just filled the bowls again. The drought is very, very hard on wildlife.
OOOOHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
I just saw two possums on the fence, one a baby…they aren’t nearly this cute, but I kind of like ’em!
Those rehabbers on the Racoon (sic) Yahoo list also care for possums .. they love them too! They are kind of rat-ish looking, though.
Skunks are terribly cute, if potentially stinky 🙂
Btw, here’s a wonderful, smart site by a rehabber on Vancouver Island (near Victoria, B.C.) … I learned so much just by reading that one page!
There’s so much common lore about wildlife that’s untrue … like not touching the babies because human scent will make the mom abandon them. Not true. She explains all that.
Happy Belated Birthday Susan. Birthday Whompings to ya, lady 🙂
Well aside from trying to keep up with reading BOOMAN and my Buddies here, I just finished “Arabian Nights” and now I’m reading short stories out of Best American (although there’s some Canadian writers, too :)) Erotica – S. Bright. While rereading my little hardback E.A Poe short stories I found in Boston about 15 years ago.
And reading my MOTHER JONES and ROLLING STONE, baby
But last night I couldn’t read. I laid awake thinking of Adastra, Michael (Supersoling) Janet Strange Bri and Tracy and wishing I was with Alohaleezy and heading out.
Mother Jones and Rolling Stone – why am I not surprised? ;^)
Now if only would someone would give you a gift subscription to the New Yorker…
those are what I have subscriptions to and loan out to friends who loan me their mags. 🙂
And I read RubDMC all the time, too.
“And I read RubDMC all the time, too.”
Surely you can find better uses for your valuable time ;^)
Nope, your diaries keep me “awake”.
And don’t call me ‘Surely’… LOL 🙂 (badly taken from Airplane) 🙂
ha -that phrase never goes out of style does it.
THANK YOU!
The embarrassing part is that my birthday was in mid-June. I have miles to go before I sleep … pages and pages … oh, and I just LOVE that book, but I usually don’t stop blogging until I’m dead tired, and I crawl in bed, read a bit, watch a bit of TV, then crash.
I need a week at the beach with no computer or TV. Well, that’s a bit harsh. How about a day or two.
…am not reading much at the present. I have a book at work stuck in a drawer for times I do not have patients but doing machine work. Pretext to War.. Recieved it as a BD gift from a friend…BTW….happy birthday to you..happy birthday to you….happy birthday to you, dear Susan…..did you say you were sweet 16 and never been kissed???? HUGS
I’m rereading the Horatio Hornblower novels for about the 20th?… 30th? time. On next year’s vacation, I’m going to find someone who still has one of the ships of this era and get myself some time on board. All these years reading these books, and I still don’t have a good sense of the layout.
As always when it comes to a book thread, I should point out that you could be reading Devil’s Tower, or it’s sequel. Or some of the fine News from the Edge comedy / mystery / sci fi novels. Just a thought.
Hornblower! Outstanding!
I’ve got them all – from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower right through to Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies – and have read each a half-dozen times, including several times in their proper sequence.
I love Hornblower, and someday would really like to do a detailed analysis of him and the concept of leadership. Hornblower’s the penultimate leader – he’s human.
His books are also the only ones where I can read the name ‘Bush’ and not get nauseous.
“On next year’s vacation, I’m going to find someone who still has one of the ships of this era and get myself some time on board. All these years reading these books, and I still don’t have a good sense of the layout.”
You’ll have to get yourself up to New England.
Mystic, CT has some nice stuff, but the schooner fleet in Camden, Maine should be your ultimate target. Our honeymoon was a week spent on the schooner Stephen Taber. Not the best choice, privacy-wise, but it was an experience of a lifetime (the sailing was also pretty good ;^)
Check out the Maine windjammer fleet. Short trips or longer, moving with the winds and tides. I was out on the water yesterday afternoon, and there were two or three windjammers working their way through the bay. Gorgeous.
There are trips where you can sit and sip martinis and trips where you can help sail the boat. Your choice.
I recommend the ones where you haul sail and learn to steer.
Today, I’ve been popping in and out of threads all afternoon instead of doing what I’m “supposed” to be doing. But it’s so fascinating, seeing what is being created around Cindy Sheehan’s courage and determination to take a stand.
New from the library but not yet read:
*The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler–how we’re going to be living (not quite in caves but definitely more rural) after all the oil is gone.
*Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, by Asra Q. Nomani–highly recommended by a friend. Nomani grew up in West Virginia, was a Wall Street Journal reporter.
*Kingdom of Shadows, by Alan Furst–the diplomatic underbelly of Europe just before WW2. Furst has written several books set in this period, is brilliant at creating what it must have been like then. See also The World at Night.
*The Gluten-Free Gourmet Cooks Fast and Healthy: Wheat-free Recipes with Less Fuss and Less Fat, by Bette Hagman–what the subtitle says. Found out recently that I’m gluten intolerant, so no wheat, oats, barley, rye. Right about now, I’d kill for a donut.
Joshua Barney: Hero of the Revolution and 1812, by Louis Arthur Norton–doing some historial research.
The Gluten Free Pantry is phenomenal. I also highly, highly recommend Tinkayada rice pasta. I’ve tried them all, and most of them suck. The Tinkayada is almost indistinguishable from regular. Ooh. and here’s a tip: If you have a Trader Joe’s near you, they’ve started carrying their own rice penne and spaghetti, and it’s clearly Tinkayada, repackaged with their label, and cheaper. I’ve been off wheat for years. I’ve learned a few tricks.
Thanks for the link. I’ve been doing this for about a month, huge improvement. Haven’t been formally tested, but think I will for celiac as well as gluten intolerance.
Most rice pastas not only suck, they stick together in a gooey mass. I’ll look for Tinkayada, but the nearest Trader Joe’s is a four-hour drive away.
Shifting the eating patterns is interseting. It’s like learning to eat organic with the seasons. Requires some thinking ahead, no impulse snacking, but manageable so far. Not sure how I’ll do it when traveling, but I’ll think of something.
Travel is brutal, although two things that help: a) gluten intolerance and celiac have been getting lots of press, b) low-carb menus mean more stuff made without breading. It’s a lot easier than it was 15 years ago, which is about how long I’ve been eating an allergy restricted diet. If you have a Whole Foods, they carry Tinkayada, and, if not, it can be ordered. I’m pretty sure Gluten Free Pantry has it. It’s unreal. I’ve served it to people and they can’t even tell the difference.
Well, I started dealing with candida (and a period of being wheat-free) about 15 years ago, which segued into Multiple Chemical Sensitivity in the early ’90s. My immune system is much stronger now, and I thought I was pretty much over the candida, so being told I was gluten intolerant was a bit of a shock.
Or perhaps I was just deluding myself that I could eat wheat.
Fortunately, I work at home so don’t have to deal with office lunches.
That’s so funny. That’s pretty much the way it spun out for me. I went to a chiropractor/kinesiologist years ago and learned that I had multiple food and chem sensitivities including wheat. I had it under control for years and then a few years ago, started getting awful candidiasis again, and through trial and error, found that I can no longer tolerate any gluten, so I had to give up oats, rye, etc. And, when I did that, I finally started to feel better. So, I’ve been completely gluten free for a about a year. But, so weird. I used to do great with oats, rye, barley, and so forth, but my system just shifted. I have no idea why. Thank god it’s much easier to be gluten free now, with all the new product out there. I’m also dairy allergic, so it’s a ball. Although I do fine with raw dairy, when I can get it — enzymes, no duh, huh.
I’m the only one reading “smut” 🙂
well, you’re the only one who’s admitted it….
True 🙂
DETAILS, DETAILS!
Yeah, DJ – will you read us a choice excerpt aloud?
Funny thing is I read to children and classes… but not from blue books 🙂
“Hello Class -Once upon a time there was a very bad girl who liked to…WAIT! WRONG BOOK!” 🙂
Well, you could always try reading them some poetry –
There once was a girl from Nantucket…
I have my stack of magazines from the Rollingstone with Hendrix on the cover, some old issues of American Music Press, People and Entertainment Weekly, Time and Budget Decorating with paint and a stack of some other unread magazines that sit on the coffee table for when I move from the computer to the couch..ha
I found a book at the thrift called ‘The Last Days of the Sioux Nation’ that I’ve been reading a bit at a time..lot to do with the Ghostdance. And for my real fun reading pleasure am finishing up a newer book by Jasper Fforde called ‘The Big Over Easy’…wonderfully inventive books this guy writes..this happens to be about a detective called Jack Spratt..yes that Jack Spratt who is investigating the murder of Humpty Dumpty. And a book by Kay Hooper-Hunting Fear. I have a bad habit of reading more than one book at a time or starting about 4 books at a time.
Rolling Stone is fantastic isn’t it? I’m still reeling from the Autism/mercury articles. Hendric cover is a great one, too.
I’ve enjoyed Fforde’s books starring literary detective Thursday Next, I think 3 or maybe 4 of them — is The Big Over Easy a new one, or earlier, do you know?
Just finished Pizza Tiger, the 1986 autobiography of Tom Monaghan and his story about how he founded Domino’s Pizza.
I picked it up as part of my ePluribus assignment (which I know is taking far too long).
Monaghan pulled down a billion in ca$h when he sold the company in 1998 (to Mitt Romney’s venture group), and since then has been using his formidable energy and war chest to build a scary collection of groups under the “Ave Maria” brand to advance his right wing political and ultra-orthodox catholic agenda.
This guy does not fuck around, and he’s toughed his way through some serious setbacks – he’s relentness when he wants something.
When I detach myself from the implications of what he’s done to pizza, which I love more than I can explain; and to his inseperable religious/political agenda, which we must take serious note of, he’s a pretty amazing guy.
At the risk of sounding like an armchair (keyboard) psychologist, I also think his beliefs and actions are based on some serious unresolved childhood traumas. He’s as much ‘damaged goods’ as Richard Nixon.
I empathize with their grief, but I also see how they’ve overcome it in ways that seriously harm others.
His closing quote (paraphrased, but not much): “My ultimate goal is to go to heaven, and to take as many people with me as possible.”
I read a lot less these days as I SPEND TOO GAWDDAMNMUCH TIME READING THESE STINKING BLINKING BLOGS!!!!!
So I am just now finishing Zen Lessons The Art of Leadership by Thomas Cleary. Good book, lots of good stuff, but not a great one or one that I would recommend to someone new to Zen or Daoist thought. I would recommend it to someone that reads lots of eastern philosophy as it contains lots of good stuff and there are lots of names and sages you’ll recognize.
I also just started reading the Pew Resarch “Beyond Red and Blue” stufy again as I have wanted to go back to that and blog some analysis and thoughts on the subject matter. It is a very interesting report.
As always I have multiple books open and often they are one’s I’ve already read and am either re-reading or using for reference. In this case it is How to Win a Local Election by Judge Lawrence Grey as I have several local elections to win this fall. It is a very good primer covering all sorts of campaign basics.
Next up on the reading list is a book I got halfway through and then stopped due to politics and family life getting in the way of my reading: How to Raise an Ox – Zen Practice as taught in Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo by Francis Dojun Cook. Luckily I was at a good stopping point finishing the first half essays and commentary and resting at the beginning of the second half translations of the actual Shobogenzo. Good stuff. I’ve a complete translation of the Shobogenzo sitting waiting to be read too. But the Wen Tzu is calling me back for a second read as well so we’ll see which way I go when I get there.
Books are cool.
More time on blogs = less time for books.
But the books don’t talk back, right?
They don’t?
Oh….
As soon as I’m done my last course project, I’m picking up The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold and not putting it down until I’m done reading.
In honor of my last 3 weeks before school starts, I read Fools Rush In by Bill Carter, who filmed Miss Sarajevo, the documentary about the Bosnian war, Sellevision by Augusten Burroughs (Fluffy, very fluffy), and selected bits of Dove (about a 16-year-old who sailed solo around the world in the 60s), and Don’t Know Much About History. Next on the list is Don’t Know Much About the Civil War and of course, way too many papers on neurology for class…
Ah yes… I also just finished The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere report by Stoller and Bowers.
I’m reading and printing off from the WhisperPatriot’s site. Getting some stuff ready for a friend who has the kids who visit his house make copies and distribute.
He doesn’t yet have a computer so I print em off for him and his teens go nuts with the papers.
Oh and I might have a buddy join me and my family to the SF march in Sept 🙂
http://psstpsstpsst.blogspot.com/
Make em for yourself to leave at the Post Office, the coffee shop anywhere you can think of. 🙂
I meant the Whispering Campaign. Whispering Patriot is the diarist.
Sorry blonde and hurrying to get these printed out again.
Pssst also been using Whispering Campaign site to paste it onto some nasty sites and nasty emails. 🙂
If you are out there ((((((((((((Whispering Patriot)))))))))) big hugs to ya.
Intimate Voices from the First World War
— the story of the war told from diaries and letters…
also
The Art of Happiness
by the Dalai Lama…a bit of which I could definitely use just at the moment…
I think I’m adding your second book to my priority list!
to Sue!
Hi y’all. Cool thread — especially the raccoons! I just finished Freakonomics, which turned out to be pretty interesting. On the nightstand are “How to Talk Back to your Television Set”, and “Changing Channels” , both recommended at the Media Reform Conference last May http://www.freepress.net/conference/ and Orson Scott Card’s new novel, “Magic Street”. That may get moved up on the list though. Time for some entertainment. Past time.
Eleanor Clift’s Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Ammendment. It covers some of the same ground as Iron Jawed Angels, but actually covers the entire time from 1848 through the passage of the ammendment, and is dated 2003, whereas the film is from 2004. This led me to wonder whether the film might have been derived from the book at all, but in checking the film credits, I found no reference to this book.
Reading this book as Cindy Sheehan is camped in Crawford is a “nothing new under the sun” moment — the image of Woodrow Wilson driving past the suffragists picketing at the White House gates is echoed by the images of W. driving past Cindy.
To quote the book, Alice Paul said
They were ridiculed, lied about, arrested, jailed and force-fed, all because they dared to demand the vote, and embarrassed the president as he led the nation into war.
The suffragists were met with the argument that “because only men bear arms, only men should vote.” They answered, “Yes, but women bear armies.”
“I am being imprisoned not because I obstructed traffic,” shouted Paul, “but because I pointed out to President Wilson the fact that he is obstructing the progress of justice and democracy at home while Americans fight for it abroad!”
I finished the book reflecting on how many women I have known in my lifetime, including my two grandmothers, who were once denied their right to vote on account of their sex.
I am amazed that it all happened so recently.
And I am amazed that it happened at all.
Next up: Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum, by Tyler Anbinder.
Still reading the “Kansas” book. It has had a big impact upon me.
Just finished Michael Moorcock’s White Wolf’s Son and now I’m working on Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.
Spent an hour today wandering around “Downtown Books,” Milwaukee’s biggest used bookstore. Wonderful, old fashioned used bookstore, narrow, windy aisles (funniest section … nearly an entire bookcase full of V.C. Andrews paperbacks. Picked up a bunch more that I won’t have time to read.
oops … left off the closing parenthesis … I DID’T pick up a bunch of V.C. Andrews! Ugh (she only wrote the first seven, the rest were ghostwritten by writers hired by her estate, by the way … read a really entertaining rant by Ellison about that once).
found:
Harlan Ellison’s “Dangerous Visions”
Poppy Z Brites’ “Lost Souls”
Michael Moorcocks’ “Mother London”
James Welch’s “Killing Custer”
Aren’t bookstores especially used bookstores just a bit of heaven on earth!
yup
Gosh I feel out of place… I just finished reading a book on particle physics and before that an excellent book written in 1934 analyzing crime statistics 🙁
Pax
I just finished reading a crash-course book on non-profit financial auditing…and I enjoyed it. 🙂
I’m re-reading a book I read a few years ago called The Shaman’s Secret: The Lost Resurrection Teachings of the Ancient Maya. It’s on Mayan cosmology and the integral role of human sacrifice in their spiritual practice.
I’m reading A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country by Benjamin Weiser Link
It’s a fascinating book — a high-ranking Polish military officer fed thousands of Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA over a period of several years.
I also just finished The Historian. Really quite good until the last 150 or so pages.
The Lobster Coast by Colin Woodard..great book on Maine’s history and culture..well written worth the read … and John Irving’s Until I Find You, one of his best..if you liked A Prayer for Owen Meaney, you’ll like this one..if you haven;t read either..missing treats.
Clan of the Cave Bear during my week-long honeymoon. I loved this book and I cannot recommdend it enough.
My now-husband gave this book to me on our second “date” because I reminded him of the main character Ayla. It took me two years to finally get around to reading it!
I am working on several at once. I am attempting to get an understanding of human society, so when I saw “Guns, Germs and Steel” I bought the book. I haven’t finished it yet, but I did just read “Guns, Sails, & Empires” by Carlo Cipolla, and I am going back to reread David Landes outstanding book, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so rich and some are so poor”.
Since geography, economics, technology and war do not cover all the basics of human society, I have also just read
“Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning” by Victor Frankl
in which a psychiatrist looks at the religious impulse of humans. He approaches it from a background in Freudian psychology and Existentialism, but makes a lot of sense anyway. Much better is
Karen Armstrong’s “A History of God.”
As a religious person who failed in her vocation as a Nun, she then approached religion from the point of view of a Historian. In so doing, she shows what religion really does and (as a very small part of the book) why the fundamentalists have hijacked the Christian religious myths and symbols and why their approach is more about control of population than it is about religion.
Living in the fundamentalist Bible Belt, I had been converted by irrationality of the fundamentalists into an agnostic drifting towards atheist. My one handle on religion was Buddhism, which makes a lot of sense and dispenses with the rather inadequate and disposable concept of a God. Unfortunately, it isn’t very accessible here. Karen Armstrong has brought me back to an understanding of my Christian heritage, although I will never be a Trinitarian.
Armstrong and Jared Diamond also place the idea of organized religion into perspective. It takes the normal human religious impulse, attaches it to the hierarchy with kleptocrats at the top sucking the surplus production and wealth of society away from the producers of that wealth. The kleptocratic Aristrocrats then use the hierarchically organized religion to justify that skimming of wealth to the non-working. This keeps the wealth producers from rising up and overthrowing the kleptrocrats. In exchange for justifying the skimming of wealth to the kleptrocrats, the upper religious leaders get their share of the booty. (Most of this is in Ch 14 of GG&S by Jared Diamond. I didn’t notice it in the PBS show. The use of religion to justify the skimming of wealth is in Armstrong.)
I am also working on the idea that commercial societies base their operation on a network of commercial organizations which operate mostly as power-equals. When you need something from someone who is equal to you in power, you have to negotiate. Administrative societies operate with hierarchies of power, in which you get what someone higher up lets you get, and coordination of human interaction is based on direction from above. Britain was a commercial society, while France was a bureaucratic one. (Oversimplification, but why did Louis XIV establish an absolute monarchy, but when Charles I tries he was overthrown?) This is in Edward Whiting Fox’s book “The Emergence of the Modern European World.”
Fun reading, really.
Recently have been on a Thomas Cahill binge. How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Gifts of the Jews, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, back to back. Desire of the Everlasting Hills is next.
Just started Challenges to the Enlightenment, subtitled “In Defense of Reason and Science”, a collection of essays by the Academy of Humanism.
I imagine I am like many readers of BooTrib. A baby boomer, educated in the post-Sputnik era when math and science were heavily emphasized. Many assumptions that I have long taken for granted are now being called into question.
The primacy of reason and the scientific method as our best means of understanding ourselves and our place in the world. The separation of church and state. The assumption that society is essentially secular and that religion is a personal, private matter. These and many similar questions that I thought long settled seem to be under organized assault by religious fundamentalists, not only in the US but around the world.
I am deeply troubled by the rise of fundamentalism in all its forms. I see it as a conscious rejection of modernity and a deliberate regression into darkness. I think many of the political battles currently being fought on a case by case basis — abortion, creationism, the right to privacy, what’s left of liberalism vs so-called conservatism –are subtexts of a much larger cultural war. The fundamentalists have stolen a number of marches while we, the children of the Enlightenment, slept in the assumption that the war was over.
Like Hank Azaria’s character on Huff said, “It’s like I’ve been asleep for half my life. Well I’m awake now.”
but in case anyone’s still reading I want to recommend Vindication: a Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon if you’re interested in history, women’s rights, or well-written engaging biography. Gordon makes the 18th century come alive as she describes the revolutionary events, ideas and ideals of European reformers, activists, and educators. I’ve learned a lot about the intellectual and political context of the American and French Revolutions already and I’m only on page 88! Wollstonecraft’s life, writings and struggles seem strikingly modern — an independent woman, single mother and innovative teacher fighting for her distinctive voice to be heard.
Also I just finished Matt Taibi’s Spanking the Donkey which I first read about here at the Trib. He is bitingly funny and though I don’t agree with him all the time and found some of his snark a bit mean-spirited, I highly recommend the book and his conclusion that we must all refuse to be lied to.