On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder

On Tyranny:  Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder is a book about the potential modern day tyranny brought with the election of Trump.  Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale.

Started:  12/14/1017

Completed:  12/14/2017

Recommendation:  Excellent Read and very quick

Recommended By:  Nobody

Review:

This is a quick book that helps identify the hallmarks of tyranny and offers a series of simple steps that can be taken to combat them.  Simple steps include things like, "Believe in the Truth," which is the answer to things like "alternate facts."  We can do it.

The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is a book that I picked up because of the uprising in Baltimore around Freddy Gray and a desire to understand the circumstances in Baltimore that would give rise to that riot.  I am listening to the audio version narrated by Karen Chilton.

Started: 10/23/2017

Completed: 11/15/2017

Recommended By:  Nobody

Recommendation: Highly recommended

Review:

What a great book.  The statistics are simply shocking.  There is no excuse and Ms. Alexander makes a really compelling case.  All Americans have to read this book.  White Americans should be ashamed.  Black Americans are likely to simply feel validated.

Post-PostModernism, Jeffrey T. Nealon

Post-PostModernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism by Jeffrey T. Nealon is a book I picked up because the Hedgehog Review had a whole issue devoted to Post-PostModernism and I needed some sort of background before the magazine arrived.

Started:  5/21/2017

Completed: 11/5/2017 (stopped reading)

Recommendation: Not recommended--run away.

Recommended By:  Google web search on the topic, this seems to be the current survey text

Words and phrases for which I sought help:

chiasmus -- an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases

infelicitous -- inappropriate or awkward; not well said

Review:

Simply unending double speak.  6 months wasted on this book.  Here is the sentence that ended it:  "However incredibly productive and oppositional this deconstructive insight has proven to be over the years, Negri points out that our contemporary masters (corporations, media conglomerates, spin doctors, finance capitalists, port-Fordist outsourcers of all kinds) no longer dream of a kind of exclusionary, binary totalization and don't achieve their hegemonic effects primarily through a normatively repressive logocentrism."  If you can make sense of that, then you should read this book.  Otherwise, run away.

The Fiery Trial, Eric Foner

The Fiery Trial:  Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner caught my eye when it was nominated for the Pulitzer prize.

Started:  8/14/2017

Completed: 10/23/2017

Recommended By:  I thought I read a review in The Nation, but I cannot find that review on-line, so it seems like I must not have.  There were numerous reviews in the Washington Post, New York Times and National Public Radio, but they all seem to be around the time it was published (2010) and not after the Pulitzer.  I remember that the Pulitzer really caught my eye (I've read a fair amount about Lincoln), so it must have been a review after the Prize was awarded in 2011.  Maybe it was mentioned in passing or something like that.  The upshot, however, is that I cannot remember exactly what the recommendation was, but it may have just been a summer reading review or best 100 books review or something along those lines.

Recommendation: Highly Recommended

Words for which I sought help:

clevis -- a "U" shaped or forked metal connector within which another part can be fastened by means of a bolt or pin passing through the ends of the connector.

pertinacious -- holding firmly to an opinion or course of action.

Review:

This book is a really interesting walk through Lincoln's relationship with Slavery.  I have listened to courses from the "The Great Courses" on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and I had read several of the speeches of both Lincoln and Douglas.  I was, thus, aware of Lincoln's position in favor of relocating the slaves and his stated belief that white and black people could not live together.  I understood that the Emancipation Proclamation was as much an effort to bolster the Union's troop strength as it was a condemnation of that "peculiar institution."  I did not realize, however, that Lincoln's personal view of black people and the institution of slavery in general underwent a series of dramatic changes which led him to being an abolitionist and a supporter of suffrage for all regardless of race.  I had never had occasion to read Lincoln's second inaugural address although I quickly recognized, "With malice toward none..."  It really lays out the sense he had of the role of the civil war as a means to emancipation; his sense of the war's start as an effort to preserve the Union; and his desire to bring the war to a swift conclusion and lasting peace.  The research done to bring to the present the details of Lincoln's thinking, the opposition and support he found, as well as the times in which he made his decision was excellent.

Sapiens, Yuval Harari

Sapiens:  A brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is a book that was on President Obama's reading list and looked interesting to me.

Started:  8/2/2017

Completed: 8/24/2017

Recommended By:  President Obama

Recommendation: Highly Recommended

Review:

The first half of the book was a bit of drudgery for me.  It was largely a rehash of things I already knew well and I was getting worried that the whole book would be that way.  The second half, however, was excellent and it built cleanly on the first half (so, I would not skip the first half).  The very end was mostly speculation about when/how "humans" might graduate from being "Sapiens" to some other form of existence.  I found this later part also a rehash of speculation with which I have long been familiar.

The focus on Capitalism as a "religion" and the concept of happiness as a measure of the success of changes that have been made were both novel to me.  I really enjoyed the insights that both pieces brought and I was, once again, reminded that I should be spending more time meditating and making that part of my normal existence.  It seems that almost everything I encounter encourages me to spend more time meditating.  I think that this is because more and more learned people are experiencing the value and wanting to share it with others.  Either that or there is a divine force pushing me to meditate :).

I highly recommend this book as long as you will not be offended by the broad definition of "religion."

Patient H. M., Luke Dittrich

Patient H.M.: a story of memory, madness, and family secrets by Luke Dittrich.  This book focuses on the history of one of the most studied patients in neurology and related brain studies.  I read a paper on this patient about 10 years ago and his story was repeated again in Moonwalking with Einstein.  I haven't been able to get him out of my mind, so when I saw this book, I thought it would be worthwhile reading about the details of the individual now that he has died and his identity no longer requires protection.

Started: 7/11/2017

Completed: 8/2/2017

Recommended By: Nobody

Recommendation: Not Recommended

Review:

It is frustrating to not like the author of a book.  I found Dittrich's character questionable as described by himself early in the book.  He correlated his own character with that of his grandfather who performed the surgery on Patient H. M.  At various points in the book Dittrich gets lost in his own efforts to write this book which is, perversely, effectively a biography of another person.  It is also uncomfortable that this book is told in the first person.

It also seems odd to add a ton of personal family history to a book about a patient of one's grandfather.  While there is some insight to be had based on the author's maternal grandmother's experiences in mental hospitals.  It is difficult to understand how these insights are anything less than background material fleshing out a story that is not better for this material.

Later in the book we hear about how both the author and his grandfather tried their hand at bull fighting.  I find it harder and harder to get anything from this book.  As the book concludes we hear about the grandfather's penchant for fast cars and an unsubstantiated suggestion that he had performed a lobotomy on his wife.  This is a pretty gross man.  The author shows a little bit better set of ethics then his grandfather, but it is a small improvement and his outrage is focused at his mother's best friend in childhood.  His outrage is appropriate given the situation he has described (shredding the test results of almost 50 years of testing on Patient H. M.).  It appears that no records were actually shredded.

So, what I could take away:

• MIT strongly protected Patient H. M., but treated him like a possession rather than a person.
• It is possible that Patient H. M. may have had memory deficits prior to his surgery which might taint or otherwise inform all the studies done on him.
• MIT and Professor Corkin in particular, did their best to treat Patient H. M. well in terms of his role as a subject for study.
• The distinction between episodic and semantic memory is not something I have previously seen and it was nicely and well described.
• Dittrich and his family seem to have questionable morals.

Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman is a dream come true.  I could not have imagined that such a book would ever exist and was thrilled when I found it.

Started:  5/11/2017

Completed: 7/8/2017

Recommendation: Highly Recommended

Recommended by: Nobody

Review:

Great set of stories!  Such an easy listen (I got the audio book from the library--read by Neil Gaiman).  I remember reading the Mobingion as a kid and some of the stories were very hard to follow in the translated poetry.  This set of stories skips trying to make the stories poetry and drives to the heart of making the stories understandable even to a modern audience.  Loki has always been my favorite of the Norse gods, now, however, I better understand the treatment given to his namesake in the History channel's Vikings.  Go get it, read it, enjoy.