Professor Brad DeLong assigns an essay by Charles Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Interesting if you are familiar with Mann’s book (or the essay). If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the link to his Atlantic Monthly article. It may get you to rethink what you probably were taught about the Americas before Columbus.
Some of DeLong’s other assigned readings also appear interesting. He teaches and blogs at Berkeley.
NewMexiKen finally got around to finishing Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
Despite that personal experience with it, I do recommend this book. As Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote in his review:
“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.
It is a fascinating and important story well told. Surely anyone with any abiding interest in New Mexico and Arizona history should read it. I must say, however, that I found the episodic mixed chronology in the first third of the book terribly annoying. And Sides does let some anachronism float into his text — I don’t think Matthew Brady used flash bulbs, for example — and some lapses of fact. It’s not, in other words, a dry encyclopedic narrative. He tells a good story fervently and fairly.
The book I began before I was interrupted by my interest in Kit Carson — and will take up again today — is Craig Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.
The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.
AP via Yahoo! News
NewMexiKen has read seven Harry Potter books alone since April.
Additionally:
Liberals read more books than conservatives. The head of the book publishing industry’s trade group says she knows why — and there’s little flattering about conservative readers in her explanation.
“The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes,'” Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. “It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”
AP via Yahoo! News
“[T]he smallness of people and the grandeur of their demands.”
Edward Condon Conlon, in Blue Blood
Conlon, a detective, formerly wrote the “Cop Diary” columns for The New Yorker.
“The entire criminal-justice system functions as an editorial process, as a story is refined, supported, and checked from the complainant to the cop, to the sergeant and maybe the lieutenant, and then to the ADA, and then to the judge, and sometimes to the jury.”
Take a Cognitive Mental Abilities IQ test from the International High IQ Society. 36 questons; takes about 12-15 minutes. Yes, it gives you your result as an IQ. (I refer to the eCMA test.)
A video of a half-time show in Korea that has to be better than the game could have been — Incredible Halftime Show.
The books may be over but J.K. Rowling goes Beyond Hogwarts in interviews.
Oh, and from Scholastic, “find out how to say Hermione, Eeylops, and Azkaban, using our handy” Harry Potter: Pronunciation Guide.
From a review by Nathaniel Philbrick of Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America.
It was in 1507, with the publication of a large cut-out map suitable for creating a do-it-yourself globe, that Vespucci’s first name, if not Vespucci himself, achieved lasting renown. On this map, published in the intellectual backwater of St. Dié in Lorraine, the designation “America” (the feminine of Amerigo) was chosen for the portion of the hemisphere where Vespucci claimed to have landed during his second voyage. In 1538, the noted mapmaker Mercator, apparently referring to the earlier map from St. Dié, chose to use the name America to mark not just the southern but also the northern portion of the continent. The rest, as they say, is history. “The tradition was secure,” Fernández-Armesto writes, “the decision irreversible.” And so, because of Mercator and assorted others, more than 350 million of us now call ourselves Americans.
A good, if not altogether glowing, look at the Harry Potter series by Christopher Hitchens.
For my part, I have finished Book 6 and now, only three weeks late, am ready for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The New York Times has a topic page with all its Harry Potter news and reviews.
Freakonomics author Steven Levitt is dismayed by the rush of anti-god books recently.
I’m not religious. I don’t think much about God, except when I am in a pinch and need some special favors. I have no particular reason to think he’ll deliver, but I sometimes take a shot anyway. Other than that, I’m just not that interested in God. I’m definitely not interested enough to go out and buy books explaining to me why I shouldn’t believe in God….
There’s more (including a list of books).
“She was living in Scotland as a single mother, and her apartment was unheated, so she would go to the local café and write, while her daughter slept in the baby carriage. She eventually quit her job and lived on public assistance to finish the book.” (The Writer’s Almanac)
And so the book was published in 1998 and today she is a billionaire (a first ever for an author).
J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, 42 today.
According to another source Rowling has denied the lack of heat in her flat: “I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat, in Edinburgh, in mid-winter; it had heating.” Still, a good Dickensian touch, that.
NewMexiKen read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Meanwhile, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Even so, over the weekend I also read Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash
Meanwhile, I’ve also been re-reading Edward Abbey’s classic Desert Solitaire
Scott Horton argues that the Romanticism of Sir Walter Scott altered the Southern character and led to the Civil War. A fascinating short essay, which includes this quote from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883).
Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person.
NewMexiKen would argue that the influence extends to this day.
Aldous Huxley was born on this date in 1894. This is from The Writer’s Almanac:
The result was Brave New World (1932), about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families; people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called “soma.”
Brave New World was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality. When George Orwell’s 1984 came out a few years later, many critics compared the two novels, trying to decide which one was more likely to come true. Huxley argued that his imagined future was more likely, because it would be easier to control people by keeping them happy than it would be by threatening them with violence.
OK, I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Forget Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Update: Actually I read instead Gene Kerrigan’s wonderful police-detective novel set in Dublin, The Midnight Choir
Update update: After dinner Wednesday, I began Legacy of Ashes and got as far as 1950. Already the CIA has failed to predict the Soviet atomic bomb, the Korean war and the Chinese invasion (into Korea). Indeed, the Agency was saying China wouldn’t invade after it had already begun to in early November 1950.
“… Mr. Flannery in his engaging and, yes, bouncy tour of the kangaroo family and the landscape of his native Australia.”
William Grimes in a review of Chasing Kangaroos. It’s an interesting review.
On the way to Virginia, finishing up while there, NewMexiKen read Richard Rodriguez’s Brown: The Last Discovery of America
While in Virginia I began Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Later today I expect to begin Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness
As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”
Trust me, too.
First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.
Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.
… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …
“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”
Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.
The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.
Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.
“But on the whole her book is bound to be dull, because she is averse to examining what actually happened.”
Tim Parks reviewing a new biography of Garibaldi.
“Long ago, when the impact of ‘Star Wars’ was beefed up by a line of merchandise, some of us noticed that the five-inch Lukes and Leias possessed a depth and mobility that was denied to their onscreen counterparts….”
Anthony Lane in a review of Transformers.
NewMexiKen attended a talk Saturday evening by Richard Rodriguez. His presentation was sponsored by The Chicano, Hispano, Latino Program (CHIPOTLE) of the University Libraries at the University of New Mexico. He was excellent.
Rodriguez is an author and journalist, his most recent book being Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Rodriguez’s 75-minute talk was on the browning of the world. It was an anecdotal, amusing, entertaining and provocative presentation. My notes are fleeting but include:
These one-liners, of course, do not do the talk justice. Underlying it all was the theme that individuals everywhere are crossing racial lines — as they have for centuries in some cultures. It’s the browning of the world. And now people are crossing religious lines, too. Reacting to it all are the extremists, doing all that they can to stop the mingling.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born on June 29 in 1900. In January 2003, Outside Magazine listed its 25 essential books for the well-read explorer. At the top was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
Like his most famous creation, The Little Prince, that visitor from Asteroid B-612 who once saw 44 sunsets in a single day, Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky. Killed in World War II at age 44, “Saint Ex” was a pioneering pilot for Aéropostale in the 1920s, carrying mail over the deadly Sahara on the Toulouse-Dakar route, encountering cyclones, marauding Moors, and lonely nights: “So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men. Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited out the night.” Whatever his skills as a pilot—said to be extraordinary—as a writer he is effortlessly sublime. Wind, Sand and Stars is so humane, so poetic, you underline sentences: “It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.” Saint-Exupéry did just that. No writer before or since has distilled the sheer spirit of adventure so beautifully. True, in his excitement he can be righteous, almost irksome—like someone who’s just gotten religion. But that youthful excess is part of his charm. Philosophical yet gritty, sincere yet never earnest, utterly devoid of the postmodern cop-outs of cynicism, sarcasm, and spite, Saint-Exupéry’s prose is a lot like the bracing gusts of fresh air that greet him in his open cockpit. He shows us what it’s like to be subject—and king—of infinite space.
I know, I post this every year (well, actually just three out of four), but it’s a great book. And the Outside Magazine Adventure Canon is an interesting list.
Must reading from Michael Bérubé, Harry Potter and the Power of Narrative. It’s a insightful (and touching) analysis from a literary critic (and a pdf file).
I can’t possibly do justice to any of the plots of these books, let alone the subplots, sub-subplots, and moments of inspired levity and bewildering pathos. Indeed, that’s one of the complaints about Rowling’s creations—that they are too baroquely plotted, too cloak-and-dagger-and triple-reversal-with-a-double-axel, as if they are children’s versions of spy fiction in the mode of Robert Ludlum. But it’s astonishing to me that tens of millions of young readers are following Rowling through her five-, seven-, and even nine-hundredpage elaborations on the themes of betrayal, bravery, and insupportable loss; it’s all the more astonishing that one of those tens of millions is my own “retarded” child, a child who wasn’t expected to be capable of following a plot more complicated than that of Chicken Little. And here’s what’s really stunning: Jamie remembers plot details over thousands of pages even though I read the books to him at night, just before he goes to bed, six or seven pages at a time. Well, narrative has been a memory-enhancing device for some time now, ever since bards got paid to chant family genealogies and catalog the ships that laid siege to Troy. But this is just ridiculous.
Book four, here I come.
Link via Unfogged.
NewMexiKen read Alcatraz
It’s a quick read, just 145 pages, much of it on Coon’s criminal career, which culminated in a federal armed robbery conviction and an eventual transfer from Leavenworth to Alcatraz. Though brief, the details about life in the island prison are interesting. Coon claims to have lent his raincoat to the infamous Morris-Anglin escape (portrayed in the Clint Eastwood movie, Escape from Alcatraz) and there are a number of other short vignettes and profiles. The writing is fast-paced, if somewhat basic.
Amazon has several interesting reviews.
NewMexiKen and family toured the prison about 25 years ago. If you haven’t been, I’d recommend it.
Thanks Byron for sending the book, autographed by #1422.
I think Annette has written an excellent brief review of Al Gore’s book — and made the case that you should read it.
Some pretty good stuff from the “first chapter” of Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America
A sample:
Hal is the oldest licensed pilot in the nation. He joined the UFOs (United Flying Octogenarians)-although technically he’s too old. Has he considered starting a club for nonagenarian pilots? “No,” he answers, “I don’t want to be the president, secretary, treasurer, and the board of directors.”
In addition to his other duties at the Sierra Booster, Hal is also in charge of circulation and is its only paperboy. In this sparsely populated area, with subscribers scattered over six hundred square miles, he decided to deliver papers to the ranches in his airplane. Hal invites me along on his paper route. Driving out to the airstrip, he tells of his three (or is it five?) heart operations, at which point our cameraman, Gilbert, says that, although he’d love to come along, he’ll be mounting a camera inside the cockpit and staying on the ground. It’s a sunny day. I mention to Hal that his windshield wipers are on.
Read more from the book.
The beginning of the review of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity
As anyone who has read Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” or seen the subsequent Broadway show can attest, the Wicked Witch of the West was framed. Elphaba, as Maguire calls her, wasn’t really wicked at all. She was a good girl set up by the powers that be (in this case, the Wizard) for, among other things, the green color of her skin. So it goes with the recently unveiled Gospel of Judas, which posits a theory as impertinent as Maguire’s about the wickedest character in Christendom.
McSweeney’s is holding a big sale and auction to make up for $130,000 lost in a distributor bankruptcy; click here for the full story. A thousand thanks to everyone who has helped out the past few days. The sale is going great, and we are humbled by all the encouragement and support. We’ve just added one-of-a-kind pieces from John Hodgman, Miranda July, Sarah Vowell, and Marcel Dzama, and gems from Michael Chabon, Art Spiegelman, and David Foster Wallace are coming soon. Meanwhile, every single thing we’ve got is on sale, cheap.
Thanks to Veronica for reminding me I meant to link to this.