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!