Just bought Dark Alliance by Gary Webb. Been meaning to read it for a while now.
Incoming Im14andthisisdeep posts.
Incoming Im14andthisisdeep posts.
Last edited by pirana6 (2016-11-05 18:49:05)
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3712
Almost bought a Bill O'Reilly book the other day. I was searching for books about WW2 in the pacific. Top suggestion was one his books. When I went to check the publisher, I realized how big of a mistake I almost made.
I would recommend Neptune's Inferno if you haven't read it.SuperJail Warden wrote:
Almost bought a Bill O'Reilly book the other day. I was searching for books about WW2 in the pacific. Top suggestion was one his books. When I went to check the publisher, I realized how big of a mistake I almost made.
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3712
Thank you for your suggestion. That's not really what I am looking for though. I am interested in an academic overview of the pacific conflict. That book seems to focus on personal stories from one campaign?Trotskygrad wrote:
I would recommend Neptune's Inferno if you haven't read it.SuperJail Warden wrote:
Almost bought a Bill O'Reilly book the other day. I was searching for books about WW2 in the pacific. Top suggestion was one his books. When I went to check the publisher, I realized how big of a mistake I almost made.
uzi, that white noise book any good? I read cosmopolis years ago and found it weird.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
like most postmodernist books it has aged slightly – everyone is weary, if not outwardly cynical, about consumer capitalism now and their role in it – but the writing has such verve and style that it's hard to fault it. delillo turns a good phrase, part wild lyricism, part brooklyn wise ass. the book basically explores how we hide from the fact of death and how capitalism and consumption are these vast engines of desire and lust and acquisition – wards against the background white noise of death.Jay wrote:
uzi, that white noise book any good? I read cosmopolis years ago and found it weird.
the first third is a little implausible and irritating. right from the off his dialogue is heavy on big metaphysical dialogues and lots of big time thinking out loud. you do wonder what teenage son or even college professor talks like that, in such grandiose and well-formed phrases. from a writing point of view that's pretty weak, but these big 'novels of ideas' have to cram it all in somehow. by the end the writing is so good that you don't even mind.
i suspect the main philosophical text in delillo's mind, or rather in the literary culture at large, being terribly fashionable in the 70s and 80s, was heidegger's 'being and time'. the book is basically a poeticised expression of heidegger's ideas about technology and what he calls 'facticity' (i.e. the unavoidable facts of one's existence) and being-towards-death, an existential pose that owes much itself to kierkegaard (read 'the sickness unto death'). it starts out as a bit of a gag at the start, but the main character is a professor of hitler studies: he hides from death by obsessing over a man who has escaped death in his infamy; and plenty has been said by philosophers about how nazism was basically a death-drive made incarnate, a sort of society driven by violence and macabre symbols to its own extinction (read everyone on this from freud's explication of the death drive as opposed to the liberal pleasure principle, through to deleuze and guattari talking about totalitarian societies being a 'death regime').
it's very good but i gave it 4 out of 5 for the above stated reasons. his best book is still 'underworld' in my opinion, but it's 4x as long. 'cosmopolis' is a very weak book – 'white noise' is in another league.
Last edited by uziq (2016-12-30 05:10:09)
Sounds interesting, I'll add it to my list, thanks
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
sorry that turned into a bit of an essay but i only put the book down last night. that's my post-game analysis.
i'm also reading 'private island' by james meek, which was a big non-fiction hit last year. series of essays detailing how thatcher and co. sold off the uk's state-owned assets and utilities (mostly to state-owned conglomerates from western europe and china). it's a fairly savage indictment of the whole market-led ideology and how privatisation fucked the little guy in the name of a few nebulous concepts such as 'competition' and 'small shareholders', which of course inevitably never turned out as hoped.
he also explores how thatcher was obsessed with hayek's 'the roaf to serfdom', a book written during the twilight years of the war by a fear-struck jew with no real knowledge of politics or sociology, and how her resulting anti-socialism became a staunch opposition to all forms of social democracy tout court.
he also explores how thatcher was obsessed with hayek's 'the roaf to serfdom', a book written during the twilight years of the war by a fear-struck jew with no real knowledge of politics or sociology, and how her resulting anti-socialism became a staunch opposition to all forms of social democracy tout court.
Last edited by uziq (2016-12-30 06:30:54)
Hayek is good stuff. You should actually read the book. Get a balanced viewpoint.
Last edited by Jay (2016-12-30 06:52:50)
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
i have read it, i was glossing james meek's interpretation.Jay wrote:
Hayek is good stuff. You should actually read the book. Get a balanced viewpoint.
hayek is one of those 'answers to everything' book that was written by a guy who was really good at his discipline (economics) but pretty rough and ready with the facts in the others. it reflects the historical moment and his own psychology more than anything else. the road to serfdom's main thesis is basically that any type of socialism - any central planning or state control, any dirigistic governments - ends up in communism (and that in this respect communism and fascism are essentially the same thing, a failure of overmeddling states). well, you don't need to be a political science phd to see that isn't the case. democratic socialism has worked - is working - for many states in western europe. they haven't all become radicalised or ended up with leviathan-like states. it's completely out-of-date market-led ideology. in the long view, hayek's book has lost out to the thought of people like keynes.
i read somewhere that 'the road to serfdom' is to political philosophy what 'atlas shrugged' is to literature. that made me laugh - you love them both! but both are serious outliers and amateur efforts.
Last edited by uziq (2016-12-30 07:40:57)
- Superior Mind
- (not macbeth)
- +1,755|6685
Anyone else like Hesse? I've been going though his works for the past year or so and I really like them. Narcissus and Goldmund may be my favorite so far. i find it gentle reading.
steppenwolf good.
siddhartha godawful.
siddhartha godawful.
- Superior Mind
- (not macbeth)
- +1,755|6685
Siddhartha was the first one I read a few years ago. I did fall asleep often while reading it.
Steppenwolf had me communing with the coyotes, roaming the hills.
Steppenwolf had me communing with the coyotes, roaming the hills.
Steppenwolf was a tougher read than it should have been in my opinion. I think it was the translation I had? I wouldn't call it gentle reading at all.
I set a goal for a book a week this year. Very doable, but I tend to read thick books. I asked my brother (who reads a lot of high fantasy and junk like james patterson and grisham) and he said he reads about 100 or so a year. He named off about 50 books he re-reads every year. All nonsense stuff like RA Salvatore and Timothy Zahn Star Wars serials.
This is my first book of 2017:
The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin
I set a goal for a book a week this year. Very doable, but I tend to read thick books. I asked my brother (who reads a lot of high fantasy and junk like james patterson and grisham) and he said he reads about 100 or so a year. He named off about 50 books he re-reads every year. All nonsense stuff like RA Salvatore and Timothy Zahn Star Wars serials.
This is my first book of 2017:
The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin
Should be a good one. I'll write a book report on it here when I'm done.Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is drastically different from the old.
In the 1800s, globalization leaped forward when steam power and international peace lowered the costs of moving goods across borders. This triggered a self-fueling cycle of industrial agglomeration and growth that propelled today’s rich nations to dominance. That was the Great Divergence. The new globalization is driven by information technology, which has radically reduced the cost of moving ideas across borders. This has made it practical for multinational firms to move labor-intensive work to developing nations. But to keep the whole manufacturing process in sync, the firms also shipped their marketing, managerial, and technical know-how abroad along with the offshored jobs. The new possibility of combining high tech with low wages propelled the rapid industrialization of a handful of developing nations, the simultaneous deindustrialization of developed nations, and a commodity supercycle that is only now petering out. The result is today’s Great Convergence.
Because globalization is now driven by fast-paced technological change and the fragmentation of production, its impact is more sudden, more selective, more unpredictable, and more uncontrollable. As The Great Convergence shows, the new globalization presents rich and developing nations alike with unprecedented policy challenges in their efforts to maintain reliable growth and social cohesion.
goodreads has an annual reading challenge. you should give it a go. i set myself a target of 50 last year and made 56 (bearing in mind i am reading, writing, editing, etc. for about 6 hours of every day anyway as the main part of my job). it's definitely do-able. this year i'm going to go for 50 again.
there's still a bf2s group.
https://www.goodreads.com/aaroninky
sign up, add me.
there's still a bf2s group.
https://www.goodreads.com/aaroninky
sign up, add me.
Last edited by uziq (2017-01-04 11:20:52)
i don't know if i have the energy or time to be able to log all my reading like that. It's interesting and i'd love to be a part of a larger discussion group, but I just don't have the time right now. It's hard enough trying to dedicate 2 hours a day to reading.
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3712
I just finished my first book of the year. "The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory" Yale University Press . It goes well with another book I recommended here "The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency" Oxford Press.
The one I just finished does a great job explaining the rise of ISIS from its beginnings in Jordan in 1999 all the way until July 2016. I knew the basic outline but there was a bunch of things I thought I knew and that turned out to be wrong.
The next book I have is "Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity" by Samuel Huntington, the guy who wrote Clash of Civilizations. It sold out after the election because a lot of liberals were trying to make sense of how we lost so badly.
After that I have "The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin" by Steven Myers the longtime New York Times reporter who spent 7 years living in Putin's Russia. It was published in August so it doesn't have the part where Putin starts to run our shit.
Final on my reading list is a novel "The Life Web Bury", it is a first novel of a new writer. It won many awards and has 4000 5 star reviews on Amazon. So I am looking forward to it.
The one I just finished does a great job explaining the rise of ISIS from its beginnings in Jordan in 1999 all the way until July 2016. I knew the basic outline but there was a bunch of things I thought I knew and that turned out to be wrong.
The next book I have is "Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity" by Samuel Huntington, the guy who wrote Clash of Civilizations. It sold out after the election because a lot of liberals were trying to make sense of how we lost so badly.
After that I have "The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin" by Steven Myers the longtime New York Times reporter who spent 7 years living in Putin's Russia. It was published in August so it doesn't have the part where Putin starts to run our shit.
Final on my reading list is a novel "The Life Web Bury", it is a first novel of a new writer. It won many awards and has 4000 5 star reviews on Amazon. So I am looking forward to it.
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3712
When you guys choose non-fiction, are there any guidelines you follow? I mentioned that both of my ISIS books were from university presses. I don't trust any history or political science books that didn't come out of a university press or were published by a tenured professor. The Putin book is an exception because of the NYT. Too much crap out there like the Bill O'Rielly series.
Your loss. The most comprehensive history books I've ever read were written by a lawyer.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
I read 32 last year, but a few of them were 1500 page tomes. My goal is 40 this year
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3712
What book and what lawyer?Jay wrote:
Your loss. The most comprehensive history books I've ever read were written by a lawyer.
Trilogy on the Hundred Years War by Jonathan Sumption. Alan Palmer writes really great, comprehensive, histories as well.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3712
I read something by Sumption before. He was a historian before becoming a lawyer.
I am not going to bother looking up the other person.Sumption was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford.[8] He graduated from Oxford University in 1970, receiving a BA degree in History with first class honours.[9] He became a fellow of Magdalen College teaching and writing books on medieval history, before leaving to pursue a career in the Law.
Point is, why limit yourself to only books published by university presses? Being a professor is not a prerequisite for being a good writer. Some of the worst written books I've read have been spawned by university presses. I get halfway through and think "ok, ok, I get the point, this is as repetitive as Ayn Rand" and put it back on the shelf. Like I said, your loss.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat