Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

Valerie, I'm not a huge fan of professional soccer (football), but I do know that the violence level peaked during the time that Buford was researching and writing this book. The Rand Corproation actually prepared and published a major report on hooliganism and associated violence with football matches in 2018. Here's a link to that study.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand...

And interesting study but not nearly as much fun (nor as scary) as Buford's book

For July 2024 - Ron and others will use this thread to discuss Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. Published in 2014, the work has already achieved classic status.

"Viruses, bacteria, disease-carrying species like mosquitoes and ticks, and pest species like bark beetles are now being pushed far beyond their native ranges. Everywhere the intricate interconnections crucial to sustaining life are increasingly being pulled apart. ... This is the world we’ve made. And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us. The result is a clear and comprehensive history of earth’s previous mass extinctions — and the species we’ve lost — and an engaging description of the extraordinarily complex nature of life. Most important, Kolbert delivers a compelling call to action. " (From the New York Times review)

Valerie, glad to have you reading this book. I will be re-reading it.

I did have monthly nominations and elections, but dropped them after there was a general lack of interest. I may offer that again sometime in the future. Until then, I encourage members to use the Buddy Reads feature.

Among the Thugs relates Bill Buford's experiences when he embedded himself in a football "firm" that supported Manchester United. It was a group that went to the games to show its support by beating up the fans of the other teams. It is an amazingly visceral look at what that meant and a very perceptive look into who joins such an organization.

Buford himself is an amazing writer. He has written the books on cooking: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany and Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. He also served for a short time as the fiction editor of the New Yorker and then restarted the periodical, Granta.

One last time of hustle and bustle ... we had 18 scheduled showings of our home and then received 8 offers, all above the listing price. We accepted one (which will allow us to live rent-free until we are ready to move in July) and ended up with a signed contract. We go to settlement on May 20. I think that our life can now return to a much more normal state ... and I can get back to reading!

I can also recommend this book: What W. H. Auden Can Do for You by Alexander McCall Smith. I have not read the whole book, but I did read several chapters. Insightful.

From the GoodReads review, "When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie — Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith — often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live. In this book, McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what Auden has done for him — and what he just might do for you."

Sarah wrote: "Auden is one of my favorite poets. I consider him one of the founders of Modernist poetry, along with T.S. Eliot, especially since critics have called him "anti-Romantic." John G. Blair (author of ..."


Sarah and John, consider looking at this open source text: "Auden's Revisions, a book-length study by the late W. D. Quesenbery, has been made available (in 2010) for public use through the generosity of his daughter ..."

LINK: https://www.audensociety.org/quesenbe...

and here: LINK: https://www.audensociety.org/Audens_R...

In culling my library as we prepare for our move, I kept my collected Auden book, but all I know now is that it is in a box in one the two storage units.

After two months of intensive work, our house went on the market yesterday. Major work ... one day, I had the Salvation Army take away 36 boxes of books as a donation. We can rest a little now.

We have to be out of the house a lot as potential buyers view it. Seven separate showings of the house scheduled for today. I am glad that my son and family only live 15 minutes away. A good place to hang out.

John wrote: "Interesting book just out by Michael Korda on World War 1 poets.

Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets"

Korda understands books and Korda understand war ... those aren't the only things he understands, but he understands both of those very well.

And there is this: Southern United States: An Environmental History by Donald Edward Davis. The material on chestnuts is sprinkled throughout the book ... easy to find if it's an e-book. And the book is just a great book.

Cynda, some articles like this:

https://www.npr.org/local/305/2021/10...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/cl...

Not so much scientific as references to work that is scientific.

Cynda, the one book that I can definitely recommend is one that I bought the first week I had a. Kindle. This is Susan Freinkel's American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. It was published in 2007 and updated but no longer published as a Kindle book in 2009. Other than that, I know of some highly technical books (that I can access through Perlego) but haven't read any of those. It's mainly scientific articles that I've used over the last decade to keep up with the efforts to bring back the chestnut trees to our forests. I'll see if I can find references to any of those.

Cynda is healing 2024 wrote: "Mer the beaver book is excellent. I cannot praise it enough. So much fell into place after reading. It's not just the trees; it's beavers too that make all the difference."

Beavers, chestnuts, a few other things ... the American landscape 250 years ago was so different because of these few other things.

Ron wrote: "Picked up this book:

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness .

The author was a co-author of the book '[book:The Codd..."

Haidt always generates a lot of controversy. Usually I think that may cause more heat than light when it comes to an issue. But I think that he raises a lot of issues that need deep discussion. I think it's easy to blame devices and too much time on devices for how young people are being affected. It's also probably generally correct. I do think that young people have it both easier and much harder to cope with life because of our connected world ... and overall, I think it's harder.

Take the time and read Ted Gioia's recent Substack posting, in which he discusses Haidt's book, mainly in the form of a letter from an 11th grader to him (Gioia). A lot of interesting discussion here.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/i-rec...

Why read this book?

The Wikipedia entry for this book has this:

"David Stuart, in a review published by the Wall Street Journal, praised the book as a "vivid account of what Aztec writers and chroniclers had to say about their own history". Stuart further praised the book as "bridging of the cultures of Aztec literary history both before and after the coming of the Spanish" rather than operating as a more straightforward history.[3] Christopher Wooley, in a review published by the journal The Latin Americanist, praised the book as "extraordinary" and emphasized its accessibility to a broad audience."

Why read this book?

From the GoodReads review: "“The Warmth of Other Suns” is a massive and masterly account of the Great Migration in the United States. Written by Isabel Wilkerson, this epic work delves into the lives of African-Americans who left the Southern states between 1915 and 1970—a migration that involved approximately six million people abandoning the Old Confederacy for a better future in the North and West"

Ron, I wish that NPR would run at least one story on Canada and/or one story on Mexico every day.it could just be a short piece or part of some continuing stories. But our two neighboring countries deserve better coverage … and the NPR listeners deserve better also.

Eileen wrote: "Also, if you are interested in reading on your own more about positive vs. negative liberty and liberty vs. freedom, here is an essay about it:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/li...-..."

Eileen, that distinction is so rarely made and even more rarely understood. Your reference is great.

This distinction came up in an essay by George Scialabba I read today on the difference between liberalism and economic liberalism. I'll quote one paragraph of the essay here (but it's a bit hard to understand without reading the essay up to this one paragraph):

"Moyn's graduate school mentor Judith Shklar is the book's muse. It was she who held out longest against the Cold War liberals' cardinal mistake: the wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment. She also criticized one of the most unfortunate aspects of Cold War liberalism: its near-exclusive preference for negative liberty.
Shklar's friend Isaiah Berlin was, like her, friendlier to the Enlightenment and Romanticism than most Cold War liberals. But his very influential foray into political theory, Two Concepts of Liberty, enshrined a distinction between negative liberty - freedom from - and positive liberty - freedom to. In Shklar's view, this maimed traditional liberalism, which had cared as much about "moral and intellectual self-fulfillment" as about "absence of restraint.""

SOURCE: http://georgescialabba.net/mtgs/2023/...

This thread is for the discussion of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez.

"Martinez reconstructs this history from institutional and private archives and oral histories, to show how the horror of anti-Mexican violence lingered within communities for generations, compounding injustice by inflicting further pain and loss. Yet its memorialization provided victims with an important means of redress, undermining official narratives that sought to whitewash these atrocities. The Injustice Never Leaves You offers an invaluable account of why these incidents happened, what they meant at the time, and how a determined community ensured that the victims were not forgotten."

This thread is for the discussion of Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid.
""Dazzling.” ― Financial Times As lives offline and online merge even more, it is easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the spectacular story of cybernetics, one of the twentieth century’s pivotal ideas. Springing from the mind of mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of seductive myths about the future of machines. Cybernetics triggered blissful cults and military gizmos, the Whole Earth Catalog and the air force’s foray into virtual space, as well as crypto-anarchists fighting for internet freedom. In Rise of the Machines, Thomas Rid draws on unpublished sources―including interviews with hippies, anarchists, sleuths, and spies―to offer an unparalleled perspective into our anxious embrace of technology. "