Re: What Have You Read Lately? (2024 Edition)

[apl68]

Citizens:  A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama.  Having read about the French Revolution recently, I decided to re-read Schama's work.  Since it's Schama, the usual account of the political twists and turns of the Revolutionary period are accompanied by a great deal about the ideas, personalities, images, and other aspects of the culture that the French Revolution stemmed from, and that it produced in turn.  This approach does a lot to bring the whole period vividly to life. 

Apologists for bloody revolutions like to say that one must regrettably break eggs to make an omelet.  Schama finds that far too many "eggs" were broken for the results obtained.  The French Revolution was driven by violence from the beginning, and yet in the end, in Schama's telling, all it really did was accelerate cultural and economic trends that would have continued anyway.


Having gotten on something of a French history kick, The Course of French History, by Pierre Goubert.  Goubert was an eminent Annales historian who helped to pioneer demographic approaches to history.  The title of his classic Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen gives an idea of his approach.  Here, late in his career (1980s), he tries to cover the whole sweep of France's history.  It's brisk and concise and, certainly in English translation, very readable.  It's the sort of book that would make a good general college history textbook, if colleges still, you know, actually taught history.  Book and historian are now old enough that some of it is perhaps dated.  It's still quite good.

Goubert avowedly finds his sympathies with the French Left who tried and failed to create additional revolutions at intervals during the 19th century.  He has a good deal to say about the egg-breaking tendencies of the violent reactions that suppressed these revolutionary efforts.  That's fair enough--the French reactionary Right had a good deal to answer for, especially in its treatment of religious minorities.  After reading Schama on the savagery of the 1790s revolutionaries whom the later Left kept citing as their forbears, though, one can understand why their opponents were so deathly afraid of them.  They must have felt that they had to suppress the new revolutionaries with the utmost ruthlessness before the revolutionaries had them all "shaved by the National Razor."

[Langue_doc]

Slightly off-topic, but still about books.

Not Your Usual Secondhand Book Sale
Bibliophiles and film fans leafed through hundreds of books that once belonged to the eminent editor Robert Gottlieb.

The first few paragraphs:

Robert Gottlieb didn't just edit books. He voraciously read and collected them.

On Saturday, a portion of his personal library — his books on show business — were sold at a fair in the lobby of the Metrograph theater on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

When Mr. Gottlieb, who died last June at 92, wasn't heartlessly lancing thousands of words out of Robert Caro's biographical volumes or marking up the manuscripts of Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, he loved watching movies. Along the course of his career, he built a vast collection of books on Hollywood's golden age.

His family was unsure what to do with the collection until earlier this year, when they started talking with Metrograph, a two-screen cinema that is a pillar of the downtown art house scene.

Visitors lined up to buy "My Life with Chaplin," "Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis," "Little Girl Lost: The Life & Hard Times of Judy Garland" and hundreds of other books. When they opened them, they found a stamped seal reading "From the Library of Robert Gottlieb." The books were priced around $15 to $40.

Reinaldo Buitron, 28, a documentary filmmaker, flipped through a book about the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

"Being able to touch the same books Gottlieb had in his own home is surreal," he said. "I see we admired the same films, and that makes me think we might have gotten along. That we could have sat for dinner and talked cinema and about his opinions on semicolons."

"People don't think like Gottlieb did anymore," he added. "Whether film or publishing, it's all about the algorithm now, and not taking risks. The world needs more Gottliebs."

The article goes on to note:

Will Regalado Succop, 21, a budding writer from Brooklyn, said he was working on his first short stories but had yet to publish anything. "It's romantic to me that Gottlieb and his writers bickered over semicolons," he said.

As the day waned, the inventory depleted. Choice offerings like biographies of Joan Crawford and anthologies of Pauline Kael's reviews for The New Yorker grew scarce.

John Gillen, 32, an aspiring filmmaker who secured a copy of "Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story," offered a less misty-eyed view of things.

"If a writer needs to work on a sentence for three weeks, then they need to work on a sentence for three weeks, and I respect that," he said. "But people also have to eat. You can't just say you always want to be making Michelangelo's David."

David Fear, 53, an editor and film critic for Rolling Stone, snagged a copy of Dwight Macdonald's "On Movies."

"If you believe that a comma put in the right place is the work of the divine, then what Gottlieb represented isn't antiquated," he said. "But I also think everyone mourns the era they missed. The idea of writing off an entire generation of young writers just because they can't have editors like Gottlieb is foolish."

"The online beast needs to be fed now," he added. "The idea of wrestling tooth and nail over paragraphs just isn't practical anymore."

[apl68]

La Belle France:  A Short History, by Alistair Horne.  Goubert's book above took the economic/demographic Annales perspective.  Schama's Citizens took the cultural studies approach that was in vogue when I was in grad school.  I don't know whether those working in the field of French history have yet gotten deep into the sorts of intersectional and identitarian preoccupations that dominate American historiography today.  Instead, Horne writes old-fashioned great-men-and-great-events history.  Nothing really wrong with that, as long as the historian has kept up with recent developments in the field.

Unfortunately Horne, a noted historian writing late in his career, seems not to have done so.  He did most of his work on the history of modern France.  His treatment here of everything before the French Revolution--and a couple of millennia of French history before 1789 occupies well under half of the book--comes across as perfunctory and dated.  A lot of it consists of the sorts of lurid anecdotes about kings and queens of old that make up too much popular history written about medieval and early-modern times.  Horne also seems to have been let down by his editors, which unfortunately has become common with publishers in recent years.  A disappointment, coming from an historian from whom better might have been expected. 

[Parasaurolophus]

July has been a slow month. I've made progress on two other books (one is the massive Gould book), but all I've finished is:

Emily Willoughby - Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs: Using Art and Science to Bring the Past to Life: As expected, a very interesting insight into palaeoartistic practice (although if you've read other recentish work on the subject, you won't find any real surprises), and particularly informative concerning dromaeosaurs and avian dinosaurs (aka birds). Lots of lovely Willoughby art, plus a few darw-along exercises.

[hmaria1609]

La Belle France:  A Short History, by Alistair Horne.  Goubert's book above took the economic/demographic Annales perspective.  Schama's Citizens took the cultural studies approach that was in vogue when I was in grad school.  I don't know whether those working in the field of French history have yet gotten deep into the sorts of intersectional and identitarian preoccupations that dominate American historiography today.  Instead, Horne writes old-fashioned great-men-and-great-events history.  Nothing really wrong with that, as long as the historian has kept up with recent developments in the field.

Unfortunately Horne, a noted historian writing late in his career, seems not to have done so.  He did most of his work on the history of modern France.  His treatment here of everything before the French Revolution--and a couple of millennia of French history before 1789 occupies well under half of the book--comes across as perfunctory and dated.  A lot of it consists of the sorts of lurid anecdotes about kings and queens of old that make up too much popular history written about medieval and early-modern times.  Horne also seems to have been let down by his editors, which unfortunately has become common with publishers in recent years.  A disappointment, coming from an historian from whom better might have been expected. 

I read his 2004 book Seven Ages of Paris. It covers the city's history from the 12th century to De Gaulle. The late novelist Maurice Druon (of The Accursed Kings series) wrote the forward for the book.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: The Rise of the Dragon: An Illustrated History of the Targaryen Dynasty, Vol. 1 by George RR Martin, Elio M. Garcia, Jr., and Linda Antonsson
The book is an oversized, illustrated edition of Fire & Blood (the original title). If you read this book, you had a leg up for watching House of the Dragon TV series! I never watched the show but read the book to satisfy my curiosity.

Next up: the Inkheart trilogy by Cornelia Funke, English translation by Anthea Bell. The copyright dates in the library bound copies we have are from 2003-08, when they were released in the US. These covers have better artwork than the later editions. The author has a new companion book, Inkworld, releasing in November 2024! So I'm reading the trilogy while it's not in high demand at the library.

[apl68]

The Coming Plague:  Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, by Laurie Garrett.  There was a time when the medical establishment here and in other wealthy nations figured they had infectious diseases just about licked once and for all.  They'd made fantastic progress in defeating longtime killers like smallpox, tuberculosis, and polio. 

But subsequent decades would demonstrate that the microbial world, and its interactions with human bodies and human societies, was vastly more complex than they had dreamed.  Nasty surprises lay in store, with emerging new disease threats like the Marburg virus, Legionnaires' disease, and AIDS.  Declining support and resources for public health medicine, born of complacency, didn't help.  Nor did the fact that so much of the world has remained afflicted by wars, corruption and bad government, and sheer poverty that have left so many vulnerable to disease threats.

Garrett's book certainly makes clear the mind-boggling complexity of the issues involved.  Many of its chapters are medical detective stories involving emerging disease threats.  And we've had 20 years of further developments since then!  Garrett has been proven all too correct in her warning that sooner or later something really big was going to hit the world, if the human race didn't get together to do something about the conditions that made such a thing possible. 

Her final chapter, about how the richer parts of the world can't just let the poorer regions suffer and pretend like their problems aren't ultimately ours as well, is dead-on.  The observation that a society is ultimately judged by how it treats its weakest members applies to today's globalized society.  We can read the judgements upon us in most of today's headlines.

[apl68]

The Bomber Mafia:  A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, by Malcolm Gladwell.  Who knew that Malcolm Gladwell was such a World War II aviation geek?  Those old planes are so cool.  And yet they figured in such horrible and tragic events.

The "Bomber Mafia" was a group of U.S. Air Force officers who became true believers in the potential of precision strategic bombing.  British strategic air power advocates soon learned that their bombers could only survive over enemy territory at night, and could hit no target smaller than a good-sized city.  So they made the ruthless devastation of enemy cities, to break Germany's morale and economy, their strategy.  After the Blitz, few Britons were not prepared to support such a strategy.

The American "Bomber Mafia" thought that their heavily-armed bombers, equipped with high-tech precision bomb sights, could fight their way through in daylight to destroy a relatively few key precision industrial targets.  They could end the war with relatively little bloodshed and collateral damage.  It didn't work.  Finally America's air generals gave up and joined the British in targeting whole cities.  The people of Germany and Japan paid the price.

Since then scholars of subsequent generations, from the safety and comfort of hindsight, have often condemned the bomber advocates as war criminals.  Gladwell is surely no more comfortable with the human cost of strategic bombing than anybody else, but he seeks to understand why the air power advocates, confronted with the dilemmas that they faced in their day, came to believe and act as they did.  It's the sort of thing good historians should be prepared to do, if we are to have any understanding of the people and decision makers of the past.

Or if we are to have any understanding of why people and decision makers do many of the things they do today.  For example, what does a nation that has just warded off a genocidal mass terrorist attack do when the terrorists retreat and hide behind a civilian population that largely supports what they've just done?  Do they let the terrorists go and wait for them to attack again?  Or do they do whatever it takes to hunt them down and destroy them despite the horrifying harm it will mean for their civilian shields, perhaps hoping that maybe they'll think twice about harboring terrorists again in the future?  As somebody once said, history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

[FishProf]

I revisited an old favorite author in Robin Hob's Ship of Magic.  I read the Farseer trilogy (Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin and Assassin's Quest)a long time ago, and I wanted to get back into the story.  This book, however, is set in a different part of the same fantasy realm and the first trilogy setting is hardly mentioned in the book except in a hand-waving sort of "those barbarians in the north are different for us" sort of way.  The plot is complicated, and the book is long, in a GRMM sort of way.  Atypical for the first book of a series, there are MANY plot lines opened up and none are resolved.  The characters are well-written and there is a lot of world-building, but it felt...unfinished at the end.  I will be reading the nest book "Mad Ship" but I hope it doesn't go further into the "too many threads to know what is even important anymore direction".

Here's the Amazon blurb plot , since it is as good as any I would write:
"Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships—rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. Now the fortunes of one of Bingtown's oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia.

For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy. For Althea's young nephew, wrenched from his religious studies and forced to serve aboard the Vivacia, the ship is a life sentence. But the fate of the ship—and the Vestrits—may ultimately lie in the hands of an outsider: the ruthless buccaneer captain Kennit, who plans to seize power over the Pirate Isles by capturing a liveship and bending it to his will."

Also, there is a plot thread about sentient sea serpents seeking their...messiah?  And a Satrap who has broken his father's promises and is just a self-indulgent junkie  destabilizing his own empire.  And Althea's niece who is a greedy, grasping, vain child who thinks she is a woman and knows everything (i.e. a teenager).  And... well, you get the picture.  There is a LOT going on.

[nebo113]

L'amour's The Sacketts

[spork]

The Coming Plague:  Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, by Laurie Garrett. 

[...]

I read this a few years after it was first published. An amazing book for teaching about globalization, disease, and public health. I always mentioned the concluding thoughts of the virologists and epidemiologists she profiled in the book -- that a pandemic was a matter of when, not if. This became all the more relevant when Covid-19 appeared.

I tried reading The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by Timothy Winegard, which should have been equal to The Coming Plague, but wasn't, and I gave up on it. It's a selective summary of works by other people, without citations, with too many adjectives and adverbs. Each chapter profiles a war and concludes that the winning side lost fewer people to mosquito-borne diseases. Very little science. Very inferior to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

[apl68]

L'amour's The Sacketts

My brother loved the Sackett books back in the day.  They actually broke L'amour out of the paperback western ghetto for a time.

[apl68]

The Coming Plague:  Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, by Laurie Garrett. 

[...]

I read this a few years after it was first published. An amazing book for teaching about globalization, disease, and public health. I always mentioned the concluding thoughts of the virologists and epidemiologists she profiled in the book -- that a pandemic was a matter of when, not if. This became all the more relevant when Covid-19 appeared.

I tried reading The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by Timothy Winegard, which should have been equal to The Coming Plague, but wasn't, and I gave up on it. It's a selective summary of works by other people, without citations, with too many adjectives and adverbs. Each chapter profiles a war and concludes that the winning side lost fewer people to mosquito-borne diseases. Very little science. Very inferior to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

The Coming Plague does provide a lot of food for thought regarding globalization. 

I should read The Emperor of All Maladies sometime.  Mukherjee has had some very interesting articles in the New Yorker.

[spork]

[...]

I should read The Emperor of All Maladies sometime.  Mukherjee has had some very interesting articles in the New Yorker.

It's a fantastic book.

[FishProf]

The 3-part PBS video adaptation is very good as well.