podpolia

Ok, so I stand corrected. Many of you SAW the book review post the other day, and none of you actually clicked on any of the links. Looks like I’m going to have to try again! And why not? My posts on reading are still a year behind, I don’t really have much to say on current world events until the situation between Lebanon and Israel develops further, and I actually feel like writing this right now. Maybe somebody will CLICK ON THE LINKS this time. Really. Go ahead. CLICK THE LINKS. Then buy yourself a nice book. Just move the mouse over one of them, and push the little button. Easy! You know you want to…

Gulag: A History — Applebaum
Great American Scandals — Farquhar
Great Short Works — Dostoevsky
Francis of Assisi: A Portrait — Almedingen
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers — Roach
The Handbook For Spiritual Warfare — Murphy
Biblical Demonology — Unger
The Clothes Have No Emperor — Slansky
Prime Evil — Winter
At The Dawn Of Tyranny — Sagan

Gulag: A History is an excellent historical analysis of the Soviet Gulag. This account is not as limited to personal experience in the camps as accounts by Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov, and is more of a general history. Definitely an excellent book if you’re interested in the topic.
Great American Scandals is really a fun book. It talks about the various scandalous things that have happened in the corridors of power in Washington, and treats them all with a gossipy, humorous flair. It’s interesting to get a look at the human side of some of this country’s great leaders, as well as to learn more about the personal environment that history happened in when history was happening. Of course, it wasn’t history yet, but the people participating in it knew it would be history some day. Actually, it would be history immediately after they did it. ANYWAY.
Great Short Works is a compilation of several of Dostoevsky’s shorter works (duh). They’re pretty great (also duh). Dostoevsky is probably my favorite author, and it’s nice to be able to read more stories by him. The shortness of the stories (and I should note here that most of these ‘short’ stories are more than 100 pages long) doesn’t detract from his typically powerful character development and psychological insights. The book includes Записки из подполья (“Zapiski iz podpol’ia,” or The Underground Man, the work that gave this website its name).
Francis of Assisi: A Portrait is, as the title suggests, a moderately short biographical portrait of Francis of Assisi. The book deals with a great deal of the politics within the Catholic church, and Francis’ dealings with those in power. I didn’t know much about St. Francis before reading this. Now I do.
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is really a fun book, despite the ominous-sounding subject matter. If you’re at all interested in forensic anthropology, the funerary business, medical training, or just dead bodies in general, this book is quite fascinating. Even if you’re not, it would also be pretty good. It’s vaguely morbid, but in a very un-morbid way. The Comtesse would despair (!).
The Handbook For Spiritual Warfare is quite a tome. I’m fairly sure it took me almost two months to get through it (with the previous book being read while I was still partway through), but that may have had something to do with the whole student teaching thing going on at the same time. In any event, the book is mostly a thorough analysis of the Bible from a spiritual warfare point of view: there are angels and demons, and both can (and do) interact with humans on an occasional or even frequent basis. Dr. Murphy builds a cogent biblical argument supporting his point of view, and even though I did not completely agree with everything he said, he did make some very interesting points.
Biblical Demonology was a book along the same vein, although it did not go into the depth of analysis that the previous book did. It seemed to be more historically aligned, although still not as much as I might have liked.
The Clothes Have No Emperor is like a hilarious (if somewhat anti-Reagan) crash course on the 1980s in America. Organized by date, the book presents major, minor, and just weird news stories and events, usually with a comical twist. Definitely recommended if you’re like me and can remember things from the ’80s, but weren’t old enough to actually be able to follow current events, and therefore don’t really know what went on.
Prime Evil is a compilation of a number of really good horror stories. All of the stories were very good. Definitely not something to read at night, at least for those of you who dislike reading things like that at night.
And finally, At The Dawn Of Tyranny was a book about native nations in colonized areas, and how they functioned and interacted with colonizing powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The two major examples in the book are the natives of Tahiti, and the people of the kingdom of Buganda in Africa (as you may have guessed, it was in the region of modern day Uganda). It is mostly a political work, rather than an anthropological one, but it does have some fascinating cultural details about both cultures. This is the type of book that seems like it would be boring (a political study of proto-nations during the era of European colonization?), but is really a fascinating read.

Ok, that’s all for now. Remember, feel free to CLICK THE LINKS. You are getting sleepy. Very sleepy. You want to CLICK THE LINKS!

Well, it has been a while since I did one of my reading updates, so it’s time to do one again. I try to do these every so often, and it has been about three months since the last one, and I’ve read thirty more books since then. In any event, if you’re new to my site or if you’ve simply forgotten, here’s the drill as it is supposed to work: I write a blog post about ten books that I’ve read, and include my comments on them. I also include links to Amazon, where you can buy the books fairly cheaply, and I get a small percentage. The money goes towards the costs of the domain name, and other such blog related fees, and possibly to more books to review if I end up with a couple leftover dollars.
In reality, I write the post and include the links, most of you glance over the post, a few of you click on the links, and none of you buy anything. I continue being poor, and all of us remain vaguely irritated with one another about the whole situation. Nevertheless, in order to keep up the beautiful circle of blogger and readers, we both continue to do this ad nauseum. Far be it from me to alter the facts of life! Here we go:

Ender’s Game — Card
The Limerick — Legman
World Of The Odd And The Awesome — Berlitz
What The Church Teaches — Conway
Germs: Biological Weapons And America’s Secret War — Miller
Good As Gold — Heller
The Philosophy Of Space And Time — Reichenbach
Kolyma Tales — Shalamov
You’re Only Old Once — Seuss
An Interpretation Of Christian Ethics — Niebuhr

Ok, now the reviews:
Ender’s Game is a classic of science fiction. I had heard about this book for years, but had never gotten around to actually reading it, and I wish I had when I was younger. Not only is it an excellent read as far as the science-fictiony elements, but it’s also a masterful insight into childhood psychology. As the preface to the copy of the book I had said, many people violently disagreed with the thought that young children actually thought in the way that Card presents it. I know that my own thoughts as a child were not quite so developed and precise, but at the same time I remember thinking a lot of the types of things that so disturb people with idyllic ideas of what childhood was like (in other words, people who don’t really remember it). Definitely recommended.
The Limerick — Legman
is a book about (what else?) limericks. There was an interesting (if occasionally dry for the layman) introduction explaining the history of limericks, and doing some analysis of them. The rest of the book was filled with examples. Having grown up with my only real exposure to limericks being a 45 rpm record of various Ogden Nash limericks and poems, I did not realize just how naughty the limerick genre is generally considered to be. A few of the limericks were quite naughty. The rest of them, however, were extremely naughty. It was definitely an entertaining (if ribald) read. I suggest against reading it all in the course of a day or two, however, as you will start feeling the necessity of talking in limerick form, and be vaguely irritated with yourself when you can’t.
World Of The Odd And The Awesome is a book filled with interesting tidbits of facts that are interesting, if a bit odd. I don’t know how true all of them are — I’ve heard that Berlitz is not necessarily known for his strict adherence to the truth — but they definitely make for an interesting look at the odder side of existance as we know it.
What The Church Teaches is a book from a Catholic perspective about what Catholics believe. As you might expect, it’s quite similar to what a Protestant would write about the same topic, but actually goes out of its way to examine the differences and how those differences relate to interactions between different members of the various Christian faiths. Quite thoughtful and insightful in many places.
Germs: Biological Weapons And America’s Secret War is a fascinating tour of the American projects run out of Fort Detrick during the early part of the Cold War, as well as what the Soviet Union was doing at the same time. Advanced biology like this is not something easy to understand, but Miller manages to explain it carefully and thoroughly, and also shows the political maneuvers that led to the rise and decline of the offensive weapons programs in both countries. After reading this book, I definitely felt better informed about biological weapons and defense, as well as the possibilites of biological terrorism and what those might mean. Definitely a good book.
Good As Gold isn’t much like Catch-22 in most ways. While there are many of the same crazy, logic-bending bureaucratic maneuvers, the book focuses much more directly on family relations. True, the main character goes on a meteoric political career, but on the whole this is a more introspective and social work. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — pulling all of the Catch-22 zaniness (zanyness?) in a book about family just wouldn’t work well. On the whole, it’s an interesting and amusing book on family life for a Jewish family, and how that family interacts.
I have to admit that I did not read all of The Philosophy Of Space And Time. I read the first two parts (of three), but the calculus that the third part was based on went over my head. The book as a whole is absolutely incredible, however. The book discusses such fascinating things as 4 dimensional geometry, and manages to explain them in a way that you can almost visualize the behavior of objects in 4-d space. Not an easy read by any means — I suggest that you only tackle this if you have a decent grounding in geometry and some of the more basic bits of calculus (or even more advanced, if you want to be able to finish it), as well as an acquaintance with philosophy. Fascinating book though.
Kolyma Tales is another set of stories from the Soviet Gulag. The book is shorter and has a more literary feel than Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (books one, two, and three), which is more of a history. There is more of a personal feel, and it somehow connects more deeply than Solzhenitsyn’s work does (on the whole, at least. The Gulag Archipelago is also quite poignant in places).
You’re Only Old Once is a Dr. Seuss book for old people. I was visiting my grandmother’s house in Indiana, and someone had given the book to my grandfather. It’s a story about being old — the doctors, the poking and prodding — but with the typical Dr. Seuss flair.
Last (and least) we have An Interpretation Of Christian Ethics by Reinhold Niebuhr. I don’t remember much about what this book was about (I’m assuming it was on Christian Ethics, but one never knows). I remember being glad that it was fairly short, and telling everyone who asked (and many of those who did not) that, “Reinhold Niebuhr is a blowhard.” Quite probably, if I hadn’t decided to read this book myself (if, say, it had been assigned for school), I would have stopped about 40 pages into it, and thrown it across the room. I tended to do that with books I didn’t want to read for school, like this one. In any event, I don’t plan on reading anything else by Niebuhr. It’s possible I even agreed with some of what he had to say, but his know-it-all style of writing was such a turn-off that if he tried to talk to me like that in real life, I would not hesitate in tossing HIM across the room with disgust. Luckily, that isn’t likely to happen, as he is DEAD.
In any event, I don’t recommend reading this book, although feel free to buy it both to get me money, and possibly to throw it across the room for the therapeutic value.
Oh, one more thing — The Adventures of Brisco County Jr — Not actually a book, but how can you possibly turn down a sci-fi western with Bruce Campbell? The only way to improve that concept is to add zombies with bad food-based special effects.