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

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

I am part Cherokee (sometimes I think that 110 percent of the American population thinks that they are Cherokee) and part Creek Indian. I have some cousins who are 100 percent Choctaw (they were adopted). I will say that my family carried none of the Indian traditions into how we lived. That's unfortunate but understandable when you consider this nation's history.

I bought the Ned Blackhawk book after I read his generally negative review of another book, one that I feel is the best history of the American Indian experience. That is Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hamalainen, an Oxford University history of Finnish descent. Maybe Blackhawk can do better. If so, we all benefit.

Sugarmegs has over 100,000 concerts and recordings like this. I’ve listened to them for years. Many have bad sound quality, but some are great in terms of both content and sound quality. Some great stuff by the Beatles there. I'm pretty sure that the driving force for Sugarmegs has been the Deadheads (the Grateful Dead community) who were into tape sharing of concerts before almost anyone else was.

Here's the general link to Sugarmegs: http://sugarmegs.org/

John wrote: "Thanks Larry. I will give a listen. I knew Colts Neck fairly well, and so it is a stroll down memory lane. I remember buying the album when it came out."

I bought it as a cassette. That was a long time ago.

John, if you want to hear the demos for the Nebraska album, go here http://tela.sugarmegs.org/alpha/b.html

and go way down ... it's a long way down ... until you find the BruceSpringsteen_LostMastersVol01.asx ... you can read the contents of the file by clicking on View Setlist. If you do that, you will see this:

Original Labour of Love disc---EAC(secure)---SHN


Info taken from Brucelegs--

THE LOST MASTERS I: Alone In Colts Neck (The Complete Nebraska Session)


Label: Labour Of Love Format: 1CD
Catalog #: LOVE 001 Source: Acoustic Demos
Total Time: 60:01 Sound: 9.4/96
Date: December 1981 - January 1982 Performance: 9.5/95
Location: Colts Neck, New Jersey Overall: 9.5/97


1.Nebraska (4:27)
2.Atlantic City (4:02)
3.Mansion On The Hill (4:00)
4.Born In The U.S.A. (3:04)
5.Johnny 99 (3:32)
6.Downbound Train (2:26)
7.Losin' Kind (4:52)
8.State Trooper (3:07)
9.Used Cars (3:01)
10.Open All Night (2:49)
11.Pink Cadillac (5:24))
12.Deputy (5:30) - aka "Highway Patrolman"
13.Reason To Believe (4:01)
14.Child Bride (5:27)
15.Dream Baby (0:34)
16.Precious Memories (1:11)
17.Nebraska #1 (1:15)
18.Nebraska #2 (1:13)

Notes:
Solo acoustic demos for "Nebraska"
Taken from the original 4-track cassette mixes of the "Nebraska" acoustic home demos
Tracks 15-16 Location(s)/date(s) unknown

You can listen directly, streaming the file, or you save it by hovering over the file (wma or mp3) and right clicking. A long time ago, this would have been regarded as a bootleg file. (It still is, but artists like Springsteen allow these downloads.)

NONFICTION READING - ONLY THE BEST

Newsletter -- May 2023

* BOOK OF THE MONTH - MODERATOR'S CHOICE
* BOOK OF THE MONTH - MEMBERS' CHOICE
* BUDDY READS


MAY BOOK OF THE MONTH - MODERATOR'S CHOICE

The May Book of the Month is Siddartha Mukherjee's The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

LINK TO THE DISCUSSION: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Why read Song of the Cell?

Let’s start with the reviews of this book.

Bookmarks collects the reviews of books from the best sources and then summarizes those reviews. In the case of The Song of the Cell, there were eight reviews, and six of them were Rave reviews. SOURCE: https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the...

The review from the Guardian is fairly typical of those six reviews.

“Mukherjee uses sometimes salutary and always engaging stories such as these to teach the fundamentals of cell biology, but also to illustrate that no one individual is ever responsible for any advancement in science. Rather, progress is made in a series of often unwitting collaborations ... If you are not already in awe of biology, The Song of the Cell might get you there. It is a masterclass in how cells function and malfunction ... Catering for every level of reader, Mukherjee sometimes uses visual metaphor to simplify matters. In so far as it is possible, Mukherjee has captured the wonder of that in one book.”

These are my own thoughts. We live in an Age of Biology. It’s not that physics or chemistry or the other sciences are less important these days. It’s that we have come into a time when the science and the tools connected with that science have transformed biology to the point where major developments seem to come almost every day. Mukherjee’s book will help you to understand past failures and also the successes in the science. I'll also note that he deals with the Covid-19 pandemic in a chapter near the end of the book.


APRIL BOOK OF THE MONTH - MODERATOR'S CHOICE

The April Book of the Month was Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. We have an active discussion that continues. Feel free to dive in.

LINK TO THE DISCUSSION: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Why are we reading Mary Beard’s SPQR?

Well, in one word … historiography.

But first to the story she tells. To give you a flavor of what she focuses on … it really is not just emperors. I’ll steal these two sentences from a review of the book in The New Republic: “Though she here claims that 50 years of training and study have led up to SPQR, Beard wears her learning lightly. As she takes us through the brothels, bars, and back alleys where the populus Romanus left their imprint, one senses, above all, that she is having fun.” So it’s about the emperors, and the armies, and the Senate, but a lot about the people of the Republic and of the Empire.

And now back to that historiography, or the study of historical writing. She actually makes historiography fun. She actually only uses that word three times in the book, and never with reference to what she’s doing. But what she is doing in this book is not just telling us the story of Rome but answering these questions. How do we know what we know about Rome? What are we sure of when it comes to that knowledge, and what do we just have a reasonable belief about?


UPCOMING BOOKS OF THE MONTH

June 2023 - Elizabeth Kolbert - Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

July 2023 - David Quammen - Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

August 2023 - Judith A. Green - The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe

September 2023 - Carl Zimmer - A Planet of Viruses

October 2023 - Elizabeth Pisani - Indonesia, Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation

November 2023 - Peter Zeihan - The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

December 2023 - Michael Ruhlman - Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

January 2024 - Michael Herr - Dispatches

February 2024 - Michael J. Sandel - Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

March 2024 - Isabel Wilkerson - The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration

UPCOMING BOOKS OF THE MONTH - MEMBERS' CHOICE

Beginning in July, a second Book of the Month will be selected by votes of the interested members.

This will be different than in most (maybe all) of the other GoodReads book groups. First of all, no automated polls.

More important is that you get to vote only on the choice if you nominate a book. But to make this easy … if you can't think of a book you want to nominate, you can just nominate the same book that someone else has already nominated for that month. I’m really looking for participation and want to aid that.

An example may help. So we may get ten members making nominations and six nominated books. And then the ten members who have participated in the nominations will be those who choose the books by voting. Why this process? Well, after having participated/lurked in about 20 GoodReads book groups, I have seen too many book groups select books of the month by a small minority, with in some cases minimal activity in the reading of the book selected.

I would hope that the person who nominates a book that is chosen will actively participate in the discussion. You don’t have to lead that discussion, but if you do, that’s great.

Beginning on June 1, I will call for nominations for the Monthly Reading - Members’ Choice for July. On June 11, I will call for votes among the books nominated from any and all who participated in the nomination process. On June 21, I will announce the winner. That book will be the July Members’ Choice Book of the Month. In case of ties, I will choose the winner.

Each month will follow a similar process.

BUDDY READS - Call them Buddy Reads or Side Reads ... I don't really think it matters. But if you want to read any (or almost any ... I have some limits) books with someone else here, I will set up folders for doing just that. Just propose a book that you would like to read as a Buddy Read with any details, e.g. when you want to start and how long you want the discussion to continue.

I'll set up a topic/thread for a proposed buddy reads when someone proposes a book and someone else opts in for the shared reading experience ... or in some cases, even before someone accepts the invitation.

Here's a link to the Buddy Read folder, with two ongoing Buddy Reads (from Ron and Cynda):

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...


Good Reading!

Larry, Founder and Moderator

You are right, Ron. I also like the Canadian term, First Nations. I will say that many do prefer to be called by their tribe, e.g. Navajo or in that case Diné.

Many Native Americans don’t mind being called Indians. I asked the Vice Chief of the Western Band of the Cherokee Nation when he visited me in my office a number of years ago. He said it really depends on who is saying it and how they are saying it. The museum devoted to their story is actually the National Museum of the American Indian.

John, I have that earlier book by Emma Smith also.

Ron, I preordered the book by Ned Blackhawk and it arrived on my Kindle. I do plan to read it, but it will take a while to get to it.

John, Michael Dirda reviews both books in his WaPo column today. Here is one paragraph:

“As you might guess, several studies of the First Folio have been issued this month, but two are neatly complementary. “Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare,” by Chris Laoutaris (Pegasus) concentrates on the loose syndicate of people who came together to produce this historic and now totemic volume. By contrast, the revised second edition of “Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book,” by Emma Smith (Oxford), tracks the work’s afterlife, partly as a literary document but mainly as a cultural trophy.”

The reason for these books coming now is that 2023 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio.

Christine wrote: "Started these two In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters by Nancy Goldstone [bookcover:In ..."

Christine, I hope you enjoy SPQR!

John wrote: "Just started this.

Shakespeare's Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare"

John, here's a link to a story in the current Smithsonian magazine that looks at the First Folio and its importance.

https://apple.news/AYu10sI-JRwil9jvo-...

It also mentions this book:Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book

The May Book of the Month is Siddartha Mukherjee's The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

Why read Song of the Cell?

Let’s start with the reviews of this book.

REVIEWS

Bookmarks collects the reviews of books from the best sources and then summarizes those reviews. In the case of The Song of the Cell, there were eight reviews, and six of them were Rave reviews. SOURCE: https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the...

The review from the Guardian is typical of those six reviews.

“Mukherjee uses sometimes salutary and always engaging stories such as these to teach the fundamentals of cell biology, but also to illustrate that no one individual is ever responsible for any advancement in science. Rather, progress is made in a series of often unwitting collaborations ... If you are not already in awe of biology, The Song of the Cell might get you there. It is a masterclass in how cells function and malfunction ... Catering for every level of reader, Mukherjee sometimes uses visual metaphor to simplify matters. In so far as it is possible, Mukherjee has captured the wonder of that in one book.”

These are my own thoughts. We live in an Age of Biology. It’s not that physics or chemistry or the other sciences are less important these days. It’s that we have come into a time when the science and the tools connected with that science have transformed biology to the point where major developments deem to come almost every day. Mukherjee’s book will help you to understand past failures and also the successes in the science. He deals with the Covid-19 pandemic in a chapter near the end of the book.

Ch. 5 relates among other things how Polybius, the Greek historian, moved from being an enemy to a hostage of Rome to a friend of Rome ... and a friend of the Scipio family. He was "embedded" with the Roman army when Scipio Africanus invaded North Africa and conquered Hannibal.

He described how Scipio and Hannibal actually met and Hannibal tried to dissuade the Roman general from carrying through on his attack. And then he wrote this:

“After these speeches Hannibal and Scipio parted without coming to any terms; and next morning by daybreak both generals drew out their forces and engaged. To the Carthaginians it was a struggle for their own lives and the sovereignty of Libya; to the Romans for universal dominion and supremacy. And could any one who grasped the situation fail to be moved at the story? Armies more fitted for war than these, or generals who had been more successful or more thoroughly trained in all the operations of war, it would be impossible to find, or any other occasion on which the prizes proposed by destiny to the combatants were more momentous. For it was not merely of Libya or Europe that the victors in this battle were destined to become masters, but of all other parts of the world known to history, — a destiny which had not to wait long for its fulfilment.

Polybius. Delphi Complete Works of Polybius (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 31) . Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition. “

Barbara, I can relate to how life interferes with our reading ... and how we gladly turn toward that life. In fact, we just got a call last night asking if we could watch our younger granddaughter while my son and DIL take our older granddaughter to a 7th grade orientation tonight. It takes us about two seconds to respond positively to these kind of requests.

I did not know that about the recent Jeopardy question.

I am deep into chapter 5 now, but I want to look back at chapter 4, which perhaps is the best chapter of the book. Beard explains what we know about how the Roman Republic came into existence.

Just a few of the things she makes clear:

How did the Republic really begin? The Republic was born slowly, over a period of decades.

Livy hints the the original highest position was actually called chief praetor, and not consul.

It is unclear how bloody the transition was. The first know use of the word consul shows up two hundred years later on the tomb of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus. (Beard also notes that changing Latin language as she says that on Barbatus' tomb, he is called "consol" and not "consul.")

Sometime between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, Roman institutions began to take shape.

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "Ron, you do you. You are the one in the best position to know what works for you, your family and friends, your career, your home life. . . .
..."

Cynda, such simple advice ... and yet it sometimes help to hear this from a friend. My wife texted pretty much the same words to her sister yesterday over an improtant decision ... and the advice was well received.

Carol wrote: "Obama was democratically elected for 2 terms; Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, has not been democratically elected by the British people as Prime Minister. He was only chosen by Conservative M.Ps following the resignation of Liz Truss. Humza Yousuf has followed Nicola Sturgeon, and will have to face the electorate, as will Sunak, when the next General Election is held...."

Carol, we in the United States sometimes miss or forget about the points you made about how Sunak and Yousuf came to power,

Kay wrote: "Have you read Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future? One of my all-time favorites! ..."

Kay, It's funny that you ask about that book. I have it as a hardback and as an ebook but still haven't read it. I'll move to near the top of my TBR stack.

Cynda, I just got up, made coffee, and turned on NPR. It’s RADIOLAB and they are playing segments from the Orson Welles’ Mars Invasion show and then talking about those segments. Strange chronicity!