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R.’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at R.’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
R. Eric Lieb’s Followers (1)
R. Eric Lieb
Goodreads Author
Member Since
January 2015
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/noclevername
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Where We Live: Las Vegas Shooting Benefit Anthology
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published
2018
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2 editions
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CBGB
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published
2010
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Saw: Rebirth
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
R.’s Recent Updates
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R. Eric
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R. Eric
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R. Eric
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R. Eric
finished reading
The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill
by Brad Meltzer (Goodreads Author) |
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R. Eric
rated a book it was amazing
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R. Eric
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Annie Bot
by Sierra Greer (Goodreads Author) Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee in Readers' Favorite Science Fiction |
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“Those words went unheeded at the time, but when Europe was rebuilt after the Second World War, the Western powers embraced the principle that market economies needed to guarantee enough basic dignity that disillusioned citizens would not go looking once again for a more appealing ideology, whether fascism or Communism. It was this pragmatic imperative that led to the creation of almost everything that we associate today with the bygone days of “decent” capitalism—social security in the U.S., public health care in Canada, welfare in Britain, workers’ protections in France and Germany. A”
― The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
― The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
“A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake. Perhaps the recent incidents represented a last attempt by Wilder and the airline pilots to rebel against this unfolding logic? Sadly, they had little chance of success, precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. Alternatively,”
― High-Rise
― High-Rise
“The hegemonic sanctity of all American institutions—with the notable exceptions of Hollywood and the music industry—went down with the president, finishing off, historian Andreas Killen writes, “the greatest prolonged boom in the history of capitalism.” That year, a year Killen called “a genuine low point in U.S. history,” something that had been ending for years was suddenly over. There was the 1973 oil embargo and subsequent depression; the ’73 failure of the Vietnam War, the longest war to date in U.S. history, with more than thirteen hundred MIAs; the January ’73 report in Time that airplane hijackings had reached epidemic proportions, and the disturbing number of passengers aboard those flights who, incredibly, found themselves siding with their captors. So disenchanted were they, Tom Wolfe wrote, with “the endless exfoliations of American power,” that he observed: “It is astonishing how often hostages come away from their ordeal describing the Hostage Taker as ‘nice,’ ‘considerate,’ even ‘likeable.’” (The term “Stockholm syndrome” was coined in 1973, the year the bad guys won. The year we realized the game was rigged and it was better to be hostage-taker than a hostage.)”
― The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
― The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
“If you give me ten more minutes of music,” Evans whispered to Lambro in April, three weeks before the preview screening, “I can get an album out of the score. There was an hour of music in Love Story and we won the Oscar for that.” Prestige. Evans would remember, thirty years earlier, his father riding the elevator down from rich Uncle Abe’s apartment: “The wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die.” His father, the piano-playing dentist. “I’ll live.”
― The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
― The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
“The sound stunned Evans. The ache, the longing, dying but sweetly pleading, like a happy memory drowning in truth. It was what he had been searching for, not just for Chinatown, his love story in need of love, but for those long Woodland nights he waited out alone in bed, flipping through old photograph albums, the pictures of Ali, whom he had let go, pictures of Ali and his son Josh, the family he had traded, one night at a time, for The Godfather. He knew he had fucked up. Goldsmith’s music was scant consolation, only magic, but where love and real life failed his foolish cravings, the music ennobled them in brass and piano and harp. Their glissandos were running water, growing in him the feeling, easy to forget, of why he was right, despite all the shit, to love Hollywood in the first place. The feeling was that word he lost so much trying to find and hold on to—now he had it—a word, in the time of Nixon, almost embarrassing to speak—“romance.” For Evans it was more than moonlight and ocean winds and Gatsby’s green flare across the bay; it was not fantasy but palpable evidence of a dream becoming true, the rare and shivery threshold of immeasurable pleasure, the promise imagination grants the mundane, and the mountain stream through which beauty and goodness, against all probability and reason, flow down into the world as art. It was, out of the darkness, a faith. Like Polanski’s crane, a lift, redemption, grace. True or false, it didn’t matter; as long as it was felt once, it could be felt again. Hearing that music for the first time, thinking of his father, he cried.”
― The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
― The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
