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  What Book Are You Currently Reading?
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Author Topic: What Book Are You Currently Reading?  (Read 397218 times)
Lief 🗽
Lief
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« Reply #1050 on: July 19, 2014, 12:31:04 PM »

I'm reading Tony Judt's Postwar. It's okay so far, I hope it gets better. The first few chapters just seem to be endless lists of numbers and statistics. His actual analysis is interesting, but reading page after page listing the numbers of refugees from each European state is kind of exhausting.
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TheDeadFlagBlues
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« Reply #1051 on: July 20, 2014, 04:32:37 PM »



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Suburbia
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« Reply #1052 on: July 20, 2014, 05:01:16 PM »

I'm currently reading Bob Shrum's No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner on John Kerry's 2004 veep search. I wonder why he chose Edwards over Vilsack and Gephardt.
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Rooney
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« Reply #1053 on: July 20, 2014, 10:34:23 PM »

Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo. Guelzo is without a doubt the finest Ciivl War historian writing today. This book reads like a greatly updated (and far more readable) Battle Cry of Freedom. McPherson has always hit me as too heavy on data, far too light on story. Guelzo finds an incredible balance and also works a new view of Reconstruction into the treatment as well. A fine read and highly recommended. 
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #1054 on: July 23, 2014, 04:25:31 AM »

I just read All That's Left to You, by Ghassan Kanafani, in one sitting. Weird and wonderful--one of Kanafani's multiple first-person narrators is a completely inanimate object. Now back to Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic.
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afleitch
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« Reply #1055 on: July 23, 2014, 06:34:31 AM »


Yey! Finally a brainy book mentioned on here that I've read. Though it was ten years ago.

I have a soft spot for Socialist-Realism, though artistically it was horribly romantic (which I'm not fond of) but architecturally could be functional (which I do like). I also like Brutalism so whatever...
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Cassius
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« Reply #1056 on: July 23, 2014, 06:44:55 AM »

The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan.
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #1057 on: July 23, 2014, 06:50:52 AM »
« Edited: July 23, 2014, 06:55:14 AM by asexual trans victimologist »


Yey! Finally a brainy book mentioned on here that I've read. Though it was ten years ago.

I'm a little over halfway through. I just got through the bit on Lenin's attempt at constructing and advancing the image of a 'Red Tolstoy'.

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In that case like (at least some of) the aspects of socialist realism that you don't, and don't like (at least some of) the aspects that you do. And if you like brutalism you'd love my now-former university campus. I mean that sincerely--it's the best-integrated and (for someone who doesn't like brutalism) overall least objectionable use of brutalist architecture I've ever seen. It helps that the brutalist buildings are mixed in with Colonial revival, postmodern, and in one incongruous case Gothic revival buildings in an interestingly heterogeneous way.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #1058 on: July 23, 2014, 01:05:56 PM »

'Socialist' 'Realism' was effectively the kitschification (for glorification of political power) of the Russian Realist tradition, which - as bad luck would have it - was actually one of the most interesting and artistically accomplished of the various 19th century Realist tendencies. Rather delightfully, the American Realist tradition was also pretty accomplished and dynamic, and it also suffered the fate of kitschification-for-politics in the 1930s... though (mercifully) to a less extreme degree.
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #1059 on: July 23, 2014, 02:32:28 PM »
« Edited: July 23, 2014, 02:39:20 PM by asexual trans victimologist »

'Socialist' 'Realism' was effectively the kitschification (for glorification of political power) of the Russian Realist tradition, which - as bad luck would have it - was actually one of the most interesting and artistically accomplished of the various 19th century Realist tendencies.

That's exactly the process that Robin is discussing. Because of my great fondness for Russian realism I like the aspects of socialist realism that suffered less than others from the kitschification, generally because of the skill of the artist in question rather than because some fields of the arts or areas of subject matter were somehow more immune to it than others (although I have seen it noted that socialist realist paintings of Lenin tend on balance to be less atrocious than those of Stalin, which comes as not much of a surprise at all).

Robin seems to think that what Gorky seemed to mean by his preferred term 'revolutionary romanticism' would probably have been more artistically fulfilled, but that's an effect of the fact that Gorky was a better writer and more honest than a lot of the people surrounding him and a lot of the other people at the First Soviet Writers' Congress to which Robin devotes Part One of the book. (The book focuses mostly on novels. Part Two is about the 'realist obsession of the nineteenth century' and spends a lot of time on Goncharov and Turgenev as novelists--there's a particularly vivid dissection of Bazarov from Fathers and Sons--and Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev as critics, along with the requisite Chernyshevsky, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.)

Robin spends the introduction talking about her personal background with Soviet film and literature and her genuine childhood love for this sort of thing. She's for the most part semi-sympathetic--more sympathetic to her former self than to the art in question--without being an apologist, although the 'insane dream' sequence at the end of Part One--which I'll type up if anybody is interested in reading it--is one of the most full-throated criticisms I've read in any book of this kind.

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By the pre-kitschified form are you referring to (in visual art) painters like the Ashcan School, and by the post-kitschified form such as Norman Rockwell, or is my understanding of American realism constrained because I've spent so much of my life focusing on European and Asian art?
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justfollowingtheelections
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« Reply #1060 on: July 23, 2014, 05:22:37 PM »

I'm reading Tony Judt's Postwar. It's okay so far, I hope it gets better. The first few chapters just seem to be endless lists of numbers and statistics. His actual analysis is interesting, but reading page after page listing the numbers of refugees from each European state is kind of exhausting.

I've read it as well as a couple of other books by Judt.  I have read a lot of european history and I think he is a little biased on certain things.

Right now I'm reading "Globalization and its enemies" by Daniel Cohen
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Tetro Kornbluth
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« Reply #1061 on: July 23, 2014, 07:38:15 PM »

I still think the USSR should have made constructivism, instead of socialist 'realism', its official art style... just think of the possibilities, never mind its effect on Communism's low aesthetic reputation.
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Dave from Michigan
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« Reply #1062 on: August 02, 2014, 02:15:59 PM »

Just got back from the library and I got a book on former Michigan governor William Milliken, a moderate republican. He was governor from 1969 to 1983. Looks interesting and should give some good insight to Michigan politics of that era. State politics from past eras can be hard to find info on.
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Rooney
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« Reply #1063 on: August 03, 2014, 02:09:47 PM »

A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred by George Will. This is a charming, informative little history of the Cubs and the great city of Chicago. Chicago has been run down so much these last few years it is nice to read a book that reminds me how much the Empire City of the Great Lakes means to America, it's culture and it's history. Also, it put forward some neat theories on Babe Ruth's famous "Called Shot" in 1932 and also the Zangara's attempted assassination of FDR. A fun read and highly recommended.
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angus
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« Reply #1064 on: August 03, 2014, 06:31:14 PM »

Just finished "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" ten minutes ago.  Like, I mean ten minutes ago.  Long story.  Homework, sort of.  Pretty interesting read anyway. 
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Rooney
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« Reply #1065 on: August 11, 2014, 06:47:48 PM »

Citadel of Sin: The John Looney Story by Richard Hamer and Roger Ruthart. This is a fine work of local history. It tells the dark story of John Patrick Looney, the crime boss of Rock Island, Illinois. I visit the Quad City area monthly and it is amazing to learn about a gangster who ran his own newspaper, held a law degree and wrote a play about Irish freedom fighter Robert Emmett. If you have ever seen the film Road to Perdition you know who Looney is. He was played by Paul Newman and the charterer was named John Rooney. The film does not do a great job telling the historical truth of the John Looney story but it is still a great movie. 
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RogueBeaver
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« Reply #1066 on: August 12, 2014, 10:27:00 PM »

Si l'Union Nationale m'était contée, by Mario Cardinal et al, and Memoires by Georges-Emile Lapalme. The former is an oral history by political scientists interviewing prominent politicians from the Duplessis era... nothing really new to me but I was interested in how everyone rated their colleagues. Lapalme's memoirs are boring as hell, if useful as a peek on that side of the aisle. The PLQ then, like the PCQ decades earlier, was a pathetic joke somewhat in awe of the omnipotent dynasty facing them across the aisle... though to his credit Lapalme doesn't engage in too much self-aggrandizement.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #1067 on: August 13, 2014, 01:25:48 AM »

Heart of the World by Hans Urs von Balthasar.  Interesting, and if I shared his premises I would share his conclusion.  But frankly, I found little in his premises that I agreed with. I don't see Human individuality as inherently incompatible with Divine unity.
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Foucaulf
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« Reply #1068 on: August 15, 2014, 02:23:16 AM »

Straying away from my research project, I'm almost done with a book on economic philosophy: Alex Rosenberg's Economics - Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? The easiest way to explain it is that Rosenberg, as a philosopher of science, notices that many economists believe that their study will lead to understanding about what really holds true in our economy. Progress on this criteria ought to be judged, following empiricist standards, by constant improvements in economics's quantitative predictive power. His main thesis is that we should not hope that this will ever happen in economics; i.e. economics has and cannot be a science.

There are a lot of arguments in the book. Chief ones are that the fact that economics has a formalized methodological core doesn't mean much about its status as science; the nature of preferential statements putting a stop to any reasonable idea of "improvement" in economics; faulty metaphors in evolutionary economics; the confounding effects of information and uncertainty; and the uselessness of general equilibrium theory. I think the last three has become accepted, while the first two remains opposed in looser forms.

Rosenberg tends to see economics as "applied math" - deductive reasoning in support of some institutional setup. This is a pretty pessimistic view and I hope Austrians don't get all up in my grill about it. I think his view has softened in recent years as behavioural economics has identified some psychological trends in human behaviour. It is not impossible for economics to predict what will actually happen - but circumstances for doing so are very hard to arrange.

This is not to mention the big debate over prediction of the future versus identification of causal effects going on within economics. If the discipline is split up into two camps, each of which prizing prediction or identification over the other, that will only stoke complaints that economics isn't only getting its deep variables wrong, but is also totally biased a certain way when selecting them.
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H. Ross Peron
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« Reply #1069 on: August 17, 2014, 03:40:04 AM »

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320498352l/23231.jpg

One of the most quintiessentially Atlasian novels.
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justfollowingtheelections
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« Reply #1070 on: August 20, 2014, 08:49:21 PM »

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st century".  Great book so far.
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Gustaf
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« Reply #1071 on: August 21, 2014, 10:31:00 AM »

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st century".  Great book so far.

That's a waste of time. Tongue
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #1072 on: August 21, 2014, 11:05:39 AM »

Simon Schama's Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations). A glorious piece of A+++ trolling.
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The Mikado
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« Reply #1073 on: August 23, 2014, 06:46:48 PM »



The third Mazower book I've read.  Drier than Dark Continent and Salonika: City of Ghosts, but a good read nonetheless.
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #1074 on: August 24, 2014, 04:41:15 PM »

Spider in a Tree: A Novel of the First Great Awakening by Susan Stinson. I don't know quite what I expected when I heard that there was a historical novel about Jonathan Edwards's household by a writer previously known primarily for lesbian-themed fiction, but I know that I was not expecting this to be as incredibly good as it is so far.
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