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

[apl68]

Skylark of Valeron, by E.E. "Doc" Smith.  Forget Buck Rogers--Smith's Skylark and Lensman series are the principal forerunners of modern "space opera" science fiction.  In this one 1935 adventure we have interstellar wars, intergalactic travel (At a time when the existence of multiple galaxies was still a fairly new concept), hyperspace, disembodied alien intelligences, and a federation of planets.  There's also a superhero scientist who makes the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards look like a middle-school science fair participant.  As no less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke has put it, Smith "holds most of the patents" on Star Wars-type story devices. 

Like most science fiction of its vintage, it comes across as rather unsophisticated in terms of plot and characterization.  There's a great deal of purple pulp prose.  Brilliant scientists often speak like Warner Brothers gangster movie characters.  The very few women in the story--and, to be fair, many of the guys as well--exist mainly to give the big brains somebody to explain their technobabble to.  Still, it's an entertaining read if you can accept the dated-but-vigorous writing for what it is.  Fans of space opera might find it of historical interest, especially if they didn't know that so many familiar concepts were already in use 90 years ago.

I'm not really a fan of space opera myself.  I encountered Skylark of Valeron as a kid in a 1960s paperback edition that I found among the shelves of donated paperbacks in my mother's high school classroom.  I had to spend a lot of time in my tween years going there after school and hanging out and browsing the books while she went about her teacher service work.  After forty-odd years I've finally had a chance to revisit this one.  It's always enjoyable to revisit a long-ago book and see how much of it I remember, especially since I used to be bad about skipping around when trying to read a book-length story.  I must have more or less read most of this one, judging from how much I recognized.

[spork]

Read some chapters of Warnings by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy. Not as good as Perrow's Normal Accidents, Taleb's Black Swan, and Meyer and Kunreuther's Ostrich Paradox.

Also tried and gave up on Fareed Zakaria's Age of Revolutions. Needlessly repetitive.

[spork]

Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation, Leslie T. Chang. A worthy successor to her 2008 book on China, Factory Girls.

On a similar topic, I can recommend The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution by Peter Hessler (husband of the preceding author), which I read last year, and Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East by David Kirkpatrick, which I'll probably re-read this summer.

[spork]

Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick. Good history of a Tibetan town suffering from cultural genocide by the PRC.

[apl68]

The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester.  As much as anything, this is a love letter to the Oxford English Dictionary.  The print version of the OED, which I recall using some in grad school, is an awe-inspiring work.  Multiple, vast, well-produced volumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of words, each with a painstaking etymology and numerous quotes tracing its assorted definitions and shades of meaning down through the centuries.  Though the first edition was not completed until the 1920s, it was in origin a fantastically ambitious Victorian project. 

It was the life's work of editor and academic Dr. James Murray.  Murray enlisted an army of correspondents to search out references and historical uses of words.  Interestingly enough, among the most valuable correspondents that he credited were two eccentric expatriate Americans.  Actually Dr. W.C. Minor, the surgeon of the title, was more than merely eccentric.  After serving as a U.S. Army surgeon in the Civil War, Minor was discharged for showing signs of mental disorder.  He kept saying that somebody was out to get him.  His room was invaded nightly by fiends who crept up through the floor and mistreated him.  His delusions sound not unlike accounts of alleged alien abductions.  Today he would be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.

Minor had enough wealth to move to Britain and settle there.  One night, in the grip of his delusions, he murdered an innocent man whom he thought was out to get him.  He was judged insane and institutionalized for what turned out to be the rest of a long life.  Minor's social status and wealth enabled him to set up housekeeping in comfortable quarters at the asylum.  He built up a good private library, and spent his days obsessively indexing the words in his books.  This interest made him just the sort of correspondent Murray was looking for.

Legend has it that Murray, after years of corresponding with Minor, went to visit him and was shocked when his address turned out to be an asylum.  The real story wasn't quite that dramatic, but Murray was indeed shocked when he learned of his valued correspondent's situation.  He didn't let that stop him from visiting Minor anyway, and the two became good friends.  Murray was eventually instrumental in getting Minor returned home to the U.S. for his last years.

A fantastic stranger-than-fiction true story, as well-told as one would expect from Winchester.  Winchester ends with a little memorial to Minor's victim, an Irish laborer named George Merrett.  Minor expressed remorse when he was lucid for what he had done, and Merrett's family is said to have forgiven him.
 

[apl68]

Shotguns and Stagecoaches:  The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West, by John Boessenecker.  Profiles a number of the detectives and shotgun messengers who defended shipments of precious metals and cash on the stagecoaches and trains of the old days against road agents and train robbers.  It's old-fashioned Hollywood western cliche that was largely based on real life.  There really were numerous attempted holdups of coaches and trains in the 1800s.  And beyond--there was an attempted old-style train robbery as late as 1912!  When The Great Train Robbery, usually regarded as the first western movie, was made in 1903, it wasn't a period piece.  It was "ripped from today's headlines" material.

Lots of exciting true stories recounted here.  Many of them do read like movie scenarios.  Some of them have inspired scenes in actual movies.  Some are more far-out than anything a movie would have tried to get away with back in the day. 

Yes, it's all very exciting and colorful.  And should make us glad that the Old West is in the past.  It was a harsh and often brutal time that we would do well not to be too nostalgic about.

[RatGuy]

The few of my friends who have remained in town during the summer have formed an informal book club. We've generated a master list of things that each of us have added "novels near and dear to us" and we're working through them at our own pace.
I'm a third of the way through If We Were Villains. It's ok -- the genre is a little too precious for me, but I can see why my friends like it. The Eyre Affair is next.

[FishProf]

Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels.  It was a mix of interesting, disturbing, and sad.  The reports out of the Trump Fraud trial match what was in the book. 

[apl68]

First-Time Europe:  A Rough Guide Special, by Louis CasaBianca.  This is a 1996 (1997 edition) guide for novices to travel in Europe.  It's got the expected travel-guide stuff on planning, budgeting, packing, accommodation, etc.  There's relatively little on individual countries--this is about the demands and logistics of a serious European trip in general.  The advice is aimed mainly at the budget traveler, so there's a lot about Eurorail and hostels (They're not just for students anymore!). 

It's very readable.  CasaBianca uses a lot of humor, and there are some cartoons here and there to liven things up.  The book is facetiously dedicated to John Wesley Hardin, the gunfighter who is said to have shot a man for snoring in a crowded hotel.  The book's something of a time capsule, what with the advice about having plenty of film for one's camera, and finding telephones when one needs them, and changing all the different pre-Euro currencies, the cheery advice that terrorism is really nothing to worry about, etc.

Travel guides and the like are about as close as I've ever had, or ever will have, to a chance to travel overseas.  This old book showed up in a box of donations to the library.  Adding to the interest is extensive hand-written marginal notes from a previous owner, who adds his two cents' worth about lots of subjects.  Sometimes he agrees with the author, sometimes he disagrees, sometimes he offers supplementary advice.  On the back cover, under a blurb that mentions Berkeley Guides, he advises "forget Berkeley's books."  Between CasaBianca and this previous owner, it's a very entertaining read.

[sprout]

The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester.  As much as anything, this is a love letter to the Oxford English Dictionary.  The print version of the OED, which I recall using some in grad school, is an awe-inspiring work.  Multiple, vast, well-produced volumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of words, each with a painstaking etymology and numerous quotes tracing its assorted definitions and shades of meaning down through the centuries.  Though the first edition was not completed until the 1920s, it was in origin a fantastically ambitious Victorian project. 

...

Sounds like this is a retitling of The Professor and the Madman which I enjoyed a while back!

[apl68]

The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester.  As much as anything, this is a love letter to the Oxford English Dictionary.  The print version of the OED, which I recall using some in grad school, is an awe-inspiring work.  Multiple, vast, well-produced volumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of words, each with a painstaking etymology and numerous quotes tracing its assorted definitions and shades of meaning down through the centuries.  Though the first edition was not completed until the 1920s, it was in origin a fantastically ambitious Victorian project. 

...

Sounds like this is a retitling of The Professor and the Madman which I enjoyed a while back!

I'd forgotten that the book was known under that title as well.  That's probably the title under which I saw it reviewed years ago when it first came out.  Looks like the story has also been made into a movie at some point.

[hmaria1609]

From the library:
DC Cocktails by Travis Mitchell (NF)
Recipes of drinks from bars and restaurants in DC, the sections are by neighborhood.

Murder in a Scottish Shire by Traci Hall ("Scottish Shire" #1)

[Sun_Worshiper]

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s

Great read if you like basketball and are interested in this era of the NBA. I watched the show as well, so I already knew the story fairly well, but I think it would be a fun and interesting read either way.

[apl68]

Africa:  A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader.  Attempts to present just what the title says--nothing less than a biography of the whole continent of Africa.  Reader begins with Africa's geology and natural history in a way that would have done Fernand "The Mountains Come First" Braudel proud. 

Mostly it's a human history of Africa.  Reader invokes Africa's geology and environment to explain why the cultures there developed as they did.  Most of Africa is a very, very tough place for humans to live, with a very heavy load of endemic diseases and parasites, lands that are mostly marginal for subsistence, and wild fluctuations of rainfall.  All this meant that population was generally sparse, and in most places prevented the formation of cities and states.

Reader debunks any ideas that there was anything paradaisical about pre-colonial Africa.  And a lot of apologetics to the effect that most colonialists were basically well-intentioned.  And any ideas that those native authorities who found themselves in a position to take advantage of colonial exploitation by joining in it failed to take full advantage.

It's a sad story, by and large.  Still, the various peoples of Africa showed great adaptation in the ways they found to survive in a harsh set of environments.  And some who came in the colonial era, particularly missionaries, earnestly tried to help the people they worked with.  And many of the people came to appreciate the new technologies and possibilities that they received from outside.  Reader ends on a hopeful note, as South Africa had recently at last passed into majority rule and was working on truth and reconciliation.  Don't know whether he'd consider today's South Africa so hopeful.

A remarkable achievement of research and scholarship.  Large sections of Africa don't get their due, but then you can't fit everything into a single book, even a big one.  Very informative.

[RatGuy]

Halfway through Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and one of my favorite lines has been "amazing, how men who had no use for college could summon such enthusiasm for college ball."