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April 02
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Clidston
gave
 
to:
I, Claudius : From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 (Vintage International)
by Robert Graves
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my rating:
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recommended for: People who love Roman history.
read in June, 2007
Clidston said:
"Um, huh. This book was pretty good. A bit slow, I have to say. Written in a pretty formal, dry style. I was not a great fan of the pace for the first say two thirds, and then Caligula takes over and all hell breaks loose. Events accelerate, to s...more
Um, huh. This book was pretty good. A bit slow, I have to say. Written in a pretty formal, dry style. I was not a great fan of the pace for the first say two thirds, and then Caligula takes over and all hell breaks loose. Events accelerate, to say the least. It's a little frustrating to get so many anecdotes about day-to-day life and very, very little coverage of Claudius' or anyone else's emotional state.
Still, these are some fascinating events (although you might want to keep a family tree handy). Pretty good book....less
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July 10
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Clidston
is currently reading:
The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain (Hardcover)
by David Shenk
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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read in July, 2007
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Clidston
gave
to:
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Paperback)
by Mary Roach
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my rating:
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read in July, 2007
Clidston said:
"A trip through various scientific and not-so-scientific attempts to ascertain whether or not the human soul, consciousness, personality, or whatever survives the death of the body. Looks at reincarnation, mediums, ectoplasms, attempts to measure or ...more
A trip through various scientific and not-so-scientific attempts to ascertain whether or not the human soul, consciousness, personality, or whatever survives the death of the body. Looks at reincarnation, mediums, ectoplasms, attempts to measure or weigh the soul, anatomical searches for the seat of the soul within the body, electromagnetic haunting, quantum physics theories of consciousness, ghost-hunting, electronic voice phenomena and near-death experiences. Not at all a "scholarly" work and written in a tongue-firmly-in-cheek fashion. I'll allow there were some funny moments (I'm still chuckling over the chapter on reincarnation, entitled "You Again?"), but unfortunately it's not as entertaining as the diverse and bizarre subject matter might suggest. The tone of the whole thing is smug and self-involved, enamored of its own clever little turns of phrase, like an endless NPR personal essay or a salon.com article.
Could be good, amusing food for thought if you're interested in this kind of thing, but for some reason it seems to drag a little bit. It's almost boring.
How can anything be boring when it includes people killing themselves out of curiousity about the afterlife, mediums hiding cheesecloth and animal parts in their vaginas, electromagnetic impulses being sent into the right lobe of the brain to simulate the experience of being "haunted," and a man mowing his lawn in a three-piece suit? Don't ask me, but it is.
Incidentally, I actually listened to this on audiobook - whatever you do don't do that. The reader is terrible, and manages to step on the punchline of nearly every joke (I also didn't need the exaggerated French accent when reading a quotation from Descartes in English, thank you very much)....less
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July 09
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Clidston
gave
to:
Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels (Paperback)
by Hella Winston
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my rating:
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read in July, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
Clidston said:
"Riveting. Engrossing. More a collection of anecdotes than an academic, formal sociological study, Winston tells the story of Hasids, ex-Hasids, and soon-to-be-ex-Hasids who for one reason or another could not live within the rules of the Satmar com...more
Riveting. Engrossing. More a collection of anecdotes than an academic, formal sociological study, Winston tells the story of Hasids, ex-Hasids, and soon-to-be-ex-Hasids who for one reason or another could not live within the rules of the Satmar community (usually because they wanted to watch movies, wear different clothes, read secular books and newspapers, etc). In a review of a book called "A Hope in the Unseen" about an affirmative-action student who struggles and then succeeds at Brown University, the writer used the phrase "a suspense novel of the human spirit" to describe it. That phrase fits Unchosen just as well.
Winston's view is complex and nuanced, although unapologetically "modern" and secular. Despite the sometimes blistering criticisms of Hasidism that wind up in the book (mostly coming from disaffected Hasids themselves), Unchosen is not without love and appreciation for their way of life. Compassion and empathy wells up in the text (and, one hopes, in the reader) when Winston begins to talk about the possibility that Hasidic practice and law is, in a sense, a result of the terrible psychological scars left from the Destruction. Some Hasidic rebbes have taught that G-d brought the Holocaust upon the Jews as punishment for neglecting the mitzvot, assimilating, mixing with gentiles, etc. The community's terror of disappointing G-d again is palpable.
Also enlightening to learn just how poorly prepared the average Satmar Hasid is for life outside the community: it's basically impossible. Lacking even a high school education in secular subjects and often uncomfortable with English (Yiddish is spoken in most homes) means few job prospects in the outside world, and even teaching Talmud to Modern Orthodox girls is apparently considered an immodest job for a Satmar man. And there's some rather damning material, which I had previously heard only as rumour, exposing the commonly accepted practice of cheating on welfare and public assistance programs (huge families of 8-11 children and low-paying jobs for the one breadwinner tend to necessitate some creativity in making ends meet). Fascinating look at a hidden world and its discontents....less
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Clidston
gave
to:
Conservatives Without Conscience (Hardcover)
by John W. Dean
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my rating:
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read in July, 2007
Clidston said:
"The title of the book is a reference to Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative," and in fact Dean had initially planned to write this book together with Goldwater, but the senator's failing health and eventual death prevented i...more
The title of the book is a reference to Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative," and in fact Dean had initially planned to write this book together with Goldwater, but the senator's failing health and eventual death prevented it.
Partly a clinical, psychological study and partly a catalog of the many sins of J. Edgar Hoover, G. Gordon Liddy, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Bill Frist and of course Dick Cheney. There's also some account of the intellectual history of conservatism, a number of thinkers' definitions of conservatism, and a longish and frankly jaw-dropping personal account of how Liddy and some conspiracy theorists attempted to pin the Watergate break-in on Dean twenty years later in a libelous book called "Silent Coup."
Dean talks about personality types in terms of "social dominators," "right-wing authoritarian followers" and then the ominous "double highs" who combine characteristics of both of those other types. Dean considers everyone I listed above to be a double-high, although he goes marginally easier on Bill Frist than on the others.
There's some truth to the criticisms that Dean is going a little far, for how can you "diagnose" people psychologically/sociologically if you're not treating them over some length of time? You could see this book as a collection of hit pieces on Republicans that Dean doesn't like (but whose conduct, I'd say, is objectively reprehensible), but I think that to do that is to ignore the truth of the larger theses a) that Republicans have become less moderate and much less civil since 1994 and b) that "American conservativism" has been redefined and popularized by this bunch as something almost antithetical to what it originally was: a philosophy of limited government characterized by the desire for transparency, strict constitutionalism, and overwhelming skepticism toward the prospect of an imperial executive (see FDR).
I think you can (and very well might) agree to disagree about the psychological profiling and still be very, very concerned about the future of libertarian conservatism in the Republican party, and the future of the Republican party itself, after Bush.
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May 22
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Clidston
gave
to:
The Yiddish Policemen's Union CD: A Novel (Audio CD)
by Michael Chabon
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in May, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
Clidston said:
"Wow, this is a hell of a book. The prose style is ravishing - Chabon is definitely a maximalist. His language is virtuosic, full of pyrotechnics and equally in love with the idiom of hard-boiled detective fiction and with Yiddish. It blows you awa...more
Wow, this is a hell of a book. The prose style is ravishing - Chabon is definitely a maximalist. His language is virtuosic, full of pyrotechnics and equally in love with the idiom of hard-boiled detective fiction and with Yiddish. It blows you away, and it's also funny.
The world that Chabon creates - the federal district of Sitka, Alaska which became a temporary Jewish homeland after the Holocaust and the collapse of Israel in 1948 - is so thoroughly, magnificently detailed that you never question it for a moment. It's immersive - there is no blinking.
This book did for me what Tolkien's books did for so many people (and what no book has done for me since William Pene duBois' "The Twenty-One Balloons" in fourth grade) -- provided another world for the reader to enter and live in which has all the depth, flavor and texture as the real one, and is preferable. It makes your heart break to put the book down and remember that none of it is real. There are no Jews in Sitka.
Each character is vividly imagined and seemingly taken as an opportunity to have as much fun as possible with the premise - there's the detective's partner, a half-Tlingit-half-Jewish behemoth who wears a yarmulke and carries a tribal warhammer to aid in interrogations. There's the heavy, in this case a 400-lb hasidic rebbe. And there's the deceased, a gay, heroin-addicted, reluctant tzadik hador who uses tefillin to tie-off before shooting up for the last time and also happens to be a chess prodigy.
And it's deep, too! As if writing the first alternate-history-Yiddish-noir weren't enough for one book, Chabon also gets into some fairly heavy thematic territory: fathers and sons, faith and redemption, doubt and despair, alcoholism and drug dependency, marriage, messianism, homeland, and what I sense are the big questions for himself -- what is the birthright of the Jewish people? What is the inheritance of every Jew? What does it mean to be Jewish?
Do I have any problems with the book? Alright, maybe the pace slows a bit in the middle section (although I'm grateful to have spent more time with these characters). Maybe the solution to the mystery, the revelation of the grand conspiracy, feels less credible than the rest of the story. Maybe it seems like a stretch, but it also may be that it has to be as it is for thematic reasons.
I can't quibble with this thing. I loved it. It was a knockout. It's hard to be objective when a book is just two of my favorite things (Judaism and a murder-mystery) together at last, but I haven't gotten this much giddy joy out of a book since I was ten years old and reading about the diamond mines of Krakatoa. It carries you away - you put it down, and just like when you were a kid, you stare off, grinning, and say "wow..."...less
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