All righty Hounded, Kill the Deadand A Madness of Angels are ordered. Should be here end of next week…
In the meantime, I will finish Guns, Germs and Steel today. I have severe mixed feelings about it. I think in his rush to NOT sound racist he has thrown the metaphorical baby out with the bath and completely fails to look at the internal workings of culture as opposed to just the matererialistic needs of the society.
Up next: Warriors of Medieval Japan by Stephen Turnbull
Oh bother -I’m getting behind already! Here goes:
Read the Kindle version of Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character by Jack Hitt. Heard about it based on B&N’s New Books Newsletter back in May & finally got around to it.
Hitt is a magazine writer (and it kinda shows) who believes that the amateur urge has been part of what helped build America. He opens with a discussion of Ben Franklin (the amateur) and John Adams (the pro) and their differing approaches towards diplomatic relations with the French. Sounds terribly boring, I know - but it was really quite entertaining! For example: “Franklin thought Adams was an officious prick. Adams thought Franklin was a decadent blowhard.”
Hitt then explores the current state of amateurism - ranging from the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker fiasco of 2009 (Pros identified, amateurs picked the evidence apart) to a young woman using recombinant DNA to create glow-in-the-dark yogurt for raves (no, really!). Along the way, he ponders why amateurs do what they do: “Fraudulence always seems to lie at the heart of amateur pursuits. Maybe you don’t have the right credentials, or background, or something else—other people’s presumptions—keeps you from doing what you want, so you just pretend. It’s a kind of prison break. The culture around you won’t let you out of where you are or into where you want to go. So, you pretend to be someone else, and make your move.” I really enjoyed this pop-sociological look at the world of creativity and playfulness that informs the world of the amateur - the only thing I could have wished for was a Notes/Sources section - some of his material was sourced within the text, but not nearly enough, IMHO.
I also read My Name is Not Easy by Debby Dahl Edwardson. I found out about it via the Kindle Daily Deal earlier this month & read several positive reviews on GoodReads. This novel is told from the viewpoint of several Native teenage students at a Catholic boarding school in Alaska in the mid 1960’s, primarily following Luke, an I’nupiaq Eskimo (whose real name is “full of sounds white people can’t say”) thru several years of school. The narrative switches up occasionally to Sonny, an Athabascan Indian boy, and Chickie, a “half-breed” Eskimo and white girl, along with a few other characters.
Their experiences include being prevented from speaking their native tongues, finding outside work (including hunting) to pay their way for school, isolation, homesickness and prejudice. But there are moments of humor, of friendship and of love, with the students finding a way to band together to improve their lot.
Reading the afterword, it seems that Luke’s story is very close to the story of Edwardson’s husband; and several real-life incidents were brought into this fictional story. I found it to be a moving and satisfying story - the characters were engaging, without becoming “poster children” and the plot flowed along well. Yes, there were moments of heartbreak, but moments of triumph as well. Edwardson’s writing is evocative at times - “It feels like that plane has poked a hole in the sky, and all the air is leaking out.” and clever at others “Father had a big, friendly smile on his face that looked about as natural as frosting on a fish.”, but feels genuine throughout.
Recommended to anyone interested in Native Alaskan children’s experiences from this time period.
One weird thing about Kill the Dead: like many books in series, it has a bonus at the end, a chapter from the sequel.
Except that, as near as I can tell, the bonus chapter is from the fourth book in the series (Kill the Dead is, I think, the second). It describes a bunch of action that hasn’t happened yet, including what I think was probably the climactic scene of the third book and the hero’s clever twisty plan for victory.
If I’m right, that’s major spoiler territory for the third book, and the decision to include the fourth book’s opening chapter, if it wasn’t a mistake, is bizarre.
I will bear that in mind.. I usuaually don’t read the preview chapters anyway.
It’s not that I read fast – I’m retired and have lots of time. And I don’t retain for beans.
What impressed me most about Narwahl was that it showed explorers as huge celebrities – 19th century astronauts. Some of them did it for the fame, of course, but they still needed to be strong and fearless.
I loved that. After finishing it I picked up again with Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series just to get another taste of vikings. I just finished the third one, Lords of the North, which is set in 878 AD in the northern part of England.
I read The Mammoth Cheese, by Sheri Holman. It’s quirky contemporary fiction. The original Mammoth Cheese was a gift presented to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802; in this novel, a traditional dairy farmer who is desperate for a government bailout is talked into creating another giant cheese. There are lots of references to Jefferson in the book - one character is a historical reenactor. The setting is a small Southern town which has become the center of a media frenzy because a local woman has given birth to eleven babies. (This was written before the Octo-mom spectacle.) I like Holman’s writing and I enjoyed the book, although the ending is a bit weak.
Me, either. If I love it, I get impatient for the next book, which might be years away. If I hate it, it sours me on what might end up being a good book.
That, and the later Andrew Jackson cheese gift, even inspired a West Wing episode: The Crackpots and These Women - Wikipedia
Thanks. I wasn’t able to find a copy locally, but I’ve queued up this reading for later.
I finished the original. It was shorter than I remembered, even though the copy I read as a kid was probably abridged, but otherwise my memory of it was fairly accurate. I’ve started reading The Gold Bug, which was the other Poe story I read way back when.
It’s not really fair to critize a book based on a single line in a review, but: that’s silly. From a modern perspective, Franklin and Adams both were amateurs, since neither were trained diplomats; from a contemporary perspective, it was clearly Franklin who was the pro (rather a misnomer still). Franklin had been a representative of Pennsylvania’s interests in London for decades prior to the Revolution, and had significant foreign experience; Adams, by contrast, hadn’t even been out of the country prior to his departure for Paris, and had (I think) not even been outside Massachusetts before being sent to the Continental Congress. Nor was Adams even a major figure politically in Massachusetts (in the sense of having public office), though he was something like a “public intellectual”.
Not to lessen your enjoyment of the book, of course…
Well, it seems I’ve mis-remembered/mis-understood which of the two men was the amateur & which the pro in terms of diplomacy - as I think back on it. Hitt definitely presented Franklin as having the exploratory nature of an amateur overall; citing his dabblings in the sciences and such. I also think Hitt’s sympathies lay with Adams, and based on the journal excerpts he included, I can see why. Adams did not think Franklin treated the role of diplomat with the appropriate gravitas.
Just finished The Illustrated Longitude, based on a recommendation from te Dope. Excellent, informative, amusing. Get the illustrated version if you are at all interested - it’s worth it.
In short, it is all about the race to win the greatest scientific-technological prize of the 18th century - how to determine longitude accurately while onboard a ship. You could do it with astronomical observations or by means of a really, really accurate clock - but for decades neither method seemed practical or even possible. “The Longitude” became the equivalent of the “cure for cancer” of its day - a solution always seemed just over the realm of the possible, many partial solutions were discovered, many cranks and lunatics claimed to have the solution with everything from a network of anchored ships firing rockets to announce midnight to wounded dogs on board ship made to bark by sympathetic magic at midnight etc , etc.
Then one self-taught clockmaker jumped into the fray … would he win the 20,000 pound prize by making the most accurate clock of all time up 'til then, impervious to violent shaking, heat and humidity, or would he be sabotaged by jealous astronomers on the prize-awarding committee … ?
I started Medieval Warriors of Japan by Stephen Turnball yesterday. Tons of color pictures will make this a pretty easy going and enjoyable read.
I’m not sure if I should post this here, but I need some advice. I joined LibraryThing when it was first developed, but have recently been updating my book collection on both LibraryThing and Goodreads websites. I need to chose one or the other, because it’s become too much of a hassle to do both. Most of my friends on LT have moved on, so I’m not tied to one or the other in that respect.
Which of the two sites do you prefer for book discussion, recommendations, social interface, etc.? LT’s social interface seems clunkier to me, but its library organization seems more straightforward to me.
I finished The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, by Kao Kalia Yang. It follows a Hmong family in the years following the Vietnam war, from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand and finally to Minnesota. It was excellent.
I’m working on The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton.
ETA: I use Goodreads. I’d never heard of LibraryThing until just now. Going to check it out.
Have you read this? My wife’s book club did and most of them liked it: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - Wikipedia
I went ahead and made a new thread about LibraryThing and Goodreads, so as not to clutter up this thread.
I have! My sister passed on to me after she read it for her book club. I liked it, but liked The Latehomecomer more. It was more personal and positive, I thought.
Reading Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore as recommended here. 40% complete (so I’m a kindle user) and so far it’s been… interesting. Very unlike what I usually read. Wondering if the talk of what it’s like in Google offices is just mildly scifi for the sake of making the point about technology marching on. Kind of hoping this isn’t all leading to some kind of Aesop…
So I finished 24 Hour Bookstore, and wow. I didn’t expect the “secret” to be the obvious thing. I figured that was way too obvious to waste someone’s time reading an entire book to reach. Entire book was pretty much an exercise in how up its own ass a book can get in order to “discover” a moral everyone’s heard in a hundred mediums. Completely implausible it’d only just be worked out now.
Just read a good, not-too-technically-complicated book on Spirit and Opportunity, The Mighty Mars Rovers, by Elizabeth Rusch. Amazing how they went above and beyond their expected lifespans to conduct experiments and explore the surface of Mars for years. I also learned that they were named by a little Russian immigrant girl as part of a NASA contest, and that a specialist watchmaker made watches that lost 39 minutes each day (to match the Martian day or “sol”) for the NASA/JPL/Cornell U. project-management team. Cool stuff.