I see what you mean. I guess it sits fine in my mind 1) because it’s so good 2) I remember this coming out in Robin’s earliest years unveiling his dramatic chops, so it was fun to have this come out of the guy from The Birdcage.
Should mention I loved the story it was based on too.
I don’t think so but from the critic’s point of view plus Robin Williams seemed to have an impression of himself, probably borne of depression, that he was a fraud
Reread Guns, Germs, and Steel. It’s a very impressive work from someone with a uniquely broad and deep background is many different areas. Probably a top 10 of the in the last few decades.
Have you read any of the criticisms of the book? He was pretty wrong about a lot of things in the book… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-aK_Rwr7wI&pp=ygUcZ3VuIGdlcm1zIGFuZCBzdGVlbCBjcml0aXF1ZQ%3D%3D
Sorry…
Sweeping theses tend to have a lot of things wrong.
There may be some valid criticisms, but I think he’s generally operating on an intellectual level above and beyond his critics. For example, I regard it as a much more learned and nuanced book than the Dawn of Everything, by two anthropology professors. It’s an easy book to criticize, in the same way that The Origin of Species was, and the graveyards are littered with such efforts.
Watched that video, and it was pretty bad, especially the incoherent racism signaling (Diamond mentions that he regards most aboriginals as smarter than Europeans). She ends of complaining about Reagan funding antisocialist groups in Nicaragua. Marxists and progressives with an inclination toward Rousseau seem to have a particular problem with the GGS. I fucking hate Rousseau.
Note that some of the YouTube comments are quite good at debunking that video.
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
A good short read from Carrie Fisher. This is the book where she revealed she had an on site affair with co-star Harrison Ford while he was married. How their relationship started was a bit skeevy in my mind. She was drinking too much with the crew and the crew picked her up and where carrying her somewhere and Ford intervened and she told him she had too much to drink so he got her a cab. He then proceeded to make out with her in the back of the cab and she invited him up. He was much older than her and married. Nothing to get him canceled. He admitted she had a crush on him before hand and didn’t see anything wrong with it but still, skeevy.
In any case, their fling was the kind of fling you can only really have when you’re young. He pretty much ignored her during work hours while she pined over him. In the book she reads her diaries when she was 19 and they are appropriately embarrassing and cringy, but then again whose diaries wouldn’t be overwrought and cringy at 19?
Carry Fisher seemed self depreciating, witty, and funny throughout and I enjoyed listening to the book as short as it was.
International Booker Prize longlist is out:
Coming up to last year’s Nobel I noticed (as did the oddsmakers) that there weren’t many credible Latin American candidates, so it’s nice to see them having a bit of a boomlet. I’ve read A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, the great Albanian, and winner of the first Booker Int’l prize, and I don’t feels it’s up to snuff compared to his earlier work. It’s based on a famous (to nerds like me) phone call from Stalin to Pasternak after the arrest of Osip Mandelstam. It seems a pretty flimsy nail to hang a whole novel from and…a bit gimmicky. If you must read Kadare there’s plenty of earlier stuff to visit. I’d recommend the Traitor’s Niche.
I also checked out Crooked Plow on the advice of a couple of folks on World Literature Forum. (Word of advice: Avoid World Literature Forum. The folks there are snooty and insufferable, and I make it a point only to visit in the run up to the Nobel.) So there’s these black plantation workers under the yoke of colonialism (social realism which is fine) and they practice whatever religion and
then there’s animal spirits and blah blah blah (magical realism, which drives me absolutely bugfuck) so I’ll just say it was not my cup of onions. YMMV.
To my mind there are two very strong reasons to keep abreast of international literature. The first reason is that reading only, for instance, Western Literature will make you into a very provincial, perhaps even parochial person. It is only by reading the stories of other people, other tribes, that we can come to understand the world in all its panoramic brilliance, to truly understand the hopes and dreams, the successes and the heartbreaks of those who are our neighbors, and then start to understand ourselves.
The second reason is equally as important: I never know when I’m going to meet a beautiful foreign woman at a party and the fact that I’m versant in her homeland’s literary product might be the key that unlocks her panties.
Recently read The Path Between the Seas by McCullough, about the Panama Canal. Some things that were interesting:
I had forgotten (or never knew?) that the French tried to build it first! In the 1880s the same guy who directed the Suez Canal, de Lesseps, gave it a shot. He was blinded by his Suez attempt, and severely underestimated the difficulty. He tried for a “sea-level” canal, with no locks, as he had done at Suez. The sea-level idea was not feasible at all in Panama, due to many factors, including the sheer volume of dirt this would involve, plus the fact that a goddamn river was in the way, with no good way around it.
Even some Americans favored a sea-level canal, but they eventually settled on the locks. This involved them damming the river to create an artificial lake. The US basically followed the French route. The French had excavated about 30 million cubic yards of useful volume. The US excavated 230 million more. A sea level cut would have required magnitudes more million cubic yards of excavation, and wouldn’t have resolved the river issue. The total excavation for the design with locks was therefore around 260 million cubic yards, which was 4 times the volume the French had predicted for a sea-level cut. So the French plans were complete nonsense.
Also the French didn’t know how malaria and yellow fever were transmitted, so everyone died. They actually put all bedposts in little cups of water to keep the ants off them, so the mosquitoes got to everyone.
The US knew about mosquitoes when they started in 1904. Well, some Americans didn’t buy the mosquito theory, but the right people prevailed and they eventually got the situation under control.
The US completely fucked over Columbia, and at the slightest hesitation on Columbia’s part, engineered a “revolution” (along with some French people who still stood to make some $) so that Panama became an independent country. No wonder the whole region hated the US.
There were still a lot of worker deaths, with a giant racial disparity, of course.
Anyway, a good read. Maybe 7.5 or 8 out of 10
Finally reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I had been meaning to get around to. I’m four chapters in and it’s A+, a very well written deep history of the rise of the Right in the US.
At this point I’m glad there are three other books he’s written on the history of the right that I can also read (Before the Storm (2001), Nixonland (2008), The Invisible Bridge (2014), and Reaganland (2020)). He’s apparently also writing a history of the 1830s, which also sounds great. Highly recommend if you want to know how US politics got to where it is.
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
8/10
Listened to the audio book. I like it when the authors read their own audio books because they know the cadence and emphasis.
The story is about the rise and fall of the Indiana KKK in the 1920s and specifically about the leader, D.C. Stephenson.
The KKK is now seen as silly and threatening but the book points out that they were also seen as a silent majority upholder of Anglo Saxon morality against minorities, sexual deviants, and religious minorities with Stephenson being so powerful through the mass movement that he was considered the ‘51st’ senator in Indiana Senate. The dark humor is that the majority of the leaders were far worse than the deviants they claims to be holding down with orgies, fraud, lying, alcoholism, and sexual violence being common and the leaders privately mocking the plebs for their morality with Stephenson being the worst.
The woman, Madge Oberholtzer, “stopped” the KKK and Stephenson by being kidnapped and raped by him. She then swallowed poison and then was dumped by Stephenson at her parent’s house. She gave a dying declaration of the crimes and he was put on trial with the trial being the seminal case for dying declarations. He was found guilty and the Indiana chapter of the KKK fell apart.
Though the book does go through how the trial helped destroy the KKK, one of the main reasons he gives is that the KKK actually did a lot of what it set out to do in the 20s. Jim Crow was institutionalized, restrictive immigration bills were passed, compulsory public immigration was passed to oppose private Catholic schooling, and Prohibition and related laws were passed. Once they accomplished what they set out to do the coalition was easier bring down after the fact.
I read this too recently, liked it a lot and was unaware of all the history so found it to be quite interesting
The time from reconstruction until WW2 is the most unappreciated US history. So many stories, so many movements, that get cursoryly glanced over
Gone Girl
by
Gillian Flynn
9/10
I can only imagine what it would have been like to read this and not know the twist. I knew the twist and read the book and, in spite knowing, the book still knocked my socks off. Flynn can write some chacters and some good turns of phrase that kept me going and I burned throught the 500 page paperback in less than a week
I remember this book 10 years ago. Read it in 1.5 days and I never binge books. Just couldn’t stop reading. Went in blind other than a friend said it was good and I would like it.
Halfway through. Wait wtf. WTF
The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers
by Maxwell King
8/10
People wanted to know if Fred Rodgers was the same good mannered person he was off camera, and the answer was ‘very much so’. He’s one of the few famous people who was as he was and didn’t compromise.
As such the biography doesn’t have any scintillating details. He started at a young age with an interest in puppets. He went to college, but transferred into a music major. After graduation started doing a kid’s shows. Eventually he started up Mr Rodger’s Neighborhood and the rest was history. He got rich but his family lived in slightly bigger than average but not ostentatious house and lived there until he did.
What struck me the most was, compared to what children’s education is today, namely Youtube, he was so purposeful in his entertainment. He wanted to impart lessons and thought carefully about how to get his message across to young viewers. He’d take his scripts to the local child psychologists at University in Pittsburg and have them looking over scripts to make sure children would understand.
He was also very anti advertisement meaning no advertising to children and by extension there shouldn’t merchandizing, etc. In the book this gets contrasted with Sesame Street that advertised itself and has merchandize. The book doesn’t come down one way or another, pointing out that Sesame Street is now known worldwide and is still putting out a lot of children’s entertainment, while Mr Rodger’s Neighborhood is becoming a lot more obscure.
He was one of the last of a dying group where he was relatively progressive because of his devotion to religion and that informed his world view without becoming a source of identity. He rarely talked about God on his program but the humanistic aspect got infused into his work.
He was very prodigious. He at least partially wrote every edisode, directed a lot, made over 200 songs, made something like 20 operas for the show.
Just a good guy and a role model all around.
I’ve been rereading The Wheel of Time lately and it’s so much better than I remembered it being. I have partially suppressed memories that the pacing is going to go to hell pretty soon, and obviously Jordan died before he could finish the series, but still. Rereading it, it’s really clear how much of modern epic fantasy is both: 1) deeply influenced by WoT, and 2) not nearly as good.
Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe
by Keith O’Brien
7/10
The story about the environmental catastrophe that started the EPA Superfund. The local main employer in Niagara Falls dumped thousands of tons of chemicals in the local landfill and then sold it to the local school board for 1 dollar. The school board built a school on it and a neighborhood developed around it. Children then started showing up with strange chemical burns, birth defects, convulsions, low white blood counts, etc. The local women organized and over a couple of years had the whole neighborhood condemned and bulldozed.
The story has the hallmarks of what you think about when you think about environmental pollution. The local big wig employer first hoping to sell off the waste dump to avoid liability. Then putting a small clause in the contract saying they shouldn’t build on it without disclosing exactly why, and then later pointing to the contract to say that they weren’t at fault, all the while also denying the the chemicals had any direct link to any of the health issues in the community.
You have the state politicians feigning sympathy while keeping an eye on avoiding anything that might cost the state money therefor becoming an semi extension of the corporation by casting doubt on any studies or reports that might extend the cost or reach of the event because of the fear that people might ask the state to do something.
You have the local parents who dropped their entire lives for years just to get some kind of help.
And you have the local reporters that did the digging to provide the parents with the information they needed to organize and advocate.
I haven’t heard of Love Canal before but now I see where later stories like A Civil Action would draw their inspiration (among others).
The story itself was interesting but also kind of lacking the spark that makes great storytelling like a war or a violent murder. Sadly the slow machinations of local organizing and bureaucratic inertia don’t make too interesting of a story. The author kind of tells it straightforward as well, not really employing any tricks to jazz it up. Because of that, I never really was hooked, but never really was disinterested either.
Read book 1 of My brilliant friend series. Really enjoyed the characters and the setting. Just one of those books as you are reading the first time it feels like the 20th time. 25% through book two and I can tell I’m going to really enjoy the last 2.75 books
Also been reading more sci fi fantasy Read two sets of jemison
I’ve read all of Asimov robot foundation series and all the expanse
What /where should I go next
How’s the mars trilogy?
Any good series from Ursula Le Guin worth reading?
Poul Anderson?
Lois McMaster Bujold?
I love Gone Girl the book so much that I thought for sure I’d love other books by Gillian Flynn, but nope, just that one. I realized I love psychological suspense and unreliable narrators. Her other stuff has twists but is incredibly bleak. By the same token, though, this explains why I also loved Big Little Lies.
If you’re looking for an equally WTF novel of twists every chapter, I cannot give a higher recommendation to My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing. The first chapter alone is a mindfuck.