Grand unified books thread

[crazy canuck]

They 100% do. I will warn, of course, that they are not proper histories, per se, but are a pedant's delight. If you want a heap of narratively strung-together anecdotes, fun turns of phrase, excellent humor, and a properly English appreciation for everything non-English (he's even got a soft spot for the Habsburgs), you will have a tough time selecting for a better series.

At the same time as providing the above, he also knows when to get serious, when to point out just how melancholic some of the history of the areas he researches truly is, but never dwells too long on the tragedy of it all lest the sadness drag the entire book down.

40ish pages in, it is great fun.  Great laugh out loud lines every few pages. Great recommendation

[Savonarola]

The Other Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson

Back when WASPs ruled the universities, Edwin Newman had a bit on how university presidents often had hyper-WASPy names that could be reversed or put in any order.  Kingman Brewster (Yale) could have just as easily been Brewster Kingman; or Nicholas Murray Butler (Columbia) could have been Nicholas Butler Murray, Murray Nicholas Butler and so on.  Victor Davis Hanson was simply born too late (and on a farm, to make matters worse.)

I had run across a reference to this book when going through an online course about ancient Greece; and finally got around to reading it (I forget the name of the course, but it was great.  The professor got a number of students up on stage and put them in a phalanx.  Then he had them do the Hoplite war chant (Eleu, eleu eleu, in case you ever find yourself in a phalanx.))  The thesis to the book is that agrarian crisis of the Greek dark ages led to the establishment of a group of small-time independent farmers which, in turn, led to both Hoplite democracy and the phalanx.  The book then goes on to discuss the decline and fall of this system (he dates the beginning of the end to the Persian Wars rather than the rise of the Athenian Empire or the Peloponnesian war.)

This being Hanson he does stop along the way to discuss California raisin farming and the modern American university.  Still the book is an interesting read.  One thing that he said was that people who farm their own land are more willing to diversify and innovate than tenant farmers.  I thought that was insightful; it would explain how such a fertile land as Ireland had such a horrible famine (and why the sharecropping southern United States remained so backwards for so long.)  Another was that there were never a people so free as the Greeks in the Ancient Near East; but also that no one before them had chattel slavery.  I don't know enough about the Ancient Near East to know if that has merit; but if so it's an interesting insight.

[jimmy olsen]

The novelization of the Dora: Lost City of Gold movie looks incredible. Genius move to portray the lead as schizophrenic.

[crazy canuck]

Atwood's new book is hard to put down, but eventually I needed to get some sleep.  I liked the approach she took and it doesn't hurt that she writes so well.

[The Brain]

Is it written on fungi?

[crazy canuck]

 

[Valmy]

Is it written on fungi?

Maybe one of her first works was destroyed by the leak in the Malthus family vacation house

[Malthus]

Was re-reading The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, and looked up some interesting trivia about the book.

It was written during WW2, and it includes a sympathetic Jewish character - a silversmith from Iberia.

In the early 40s, a Norwegian publisher bought the translation rights and, being under Nazi occupation at the time, asked if they could make some "deletions and corrections" (most obviously, Orm's friendship with a Jew). Bengtsson's reply:

I will allow neither a single comma nor a single Jew to be removed from the book (...) I completely refuse to be translated into Norwegian until these criminally insane cretins have stopped working in publishing there, and preferably stopped doing everything else as well.

And when a publisher in the similarly occupied Prague asked to do the same:

May the fires of Sodom and Gomorra wash clean a world in which these ideas are born from the incest of villains and idiots.

Also: the Bluetooth technology was named "Bluetooth" after the character in this book (and historic king) Harald Bluetooth.

[Malthus]

Is it written on fungi?

Maybe one of her first works was destroyed by the leak in the Malthus family vacation house

Heh. No, but there were some original poems pinned to the walls there - all sadly removed now; it was decided they created too great an incentive to break in and steal them. Particularly now that our place is inside a provincial park.

[The Brain]

Was re-reading The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, and looked up some interesting trivia about the book.

It was written during WW2, and it includes a sympathetic Jewish character - a silversmith from Iberia.

In the early 40s, a Norwegian publisher bought the translation rights and, being under Nazi occupation at the time, asked if they could make some "deletions and corrections" (most obviously, Orm's friendship with a Jew). Bengtsson's reply:

I will allow neither a single comma nor a single Jew to be removed from the book (...) I completely refuse to be translated into Norwegian until these criminally insane cretins have stopped working in publishing there, and preferably stopped doing everything else as well.

And when a publisher in the similarly occupied Prague asked to do the same:

May the fires of Sodom and Gomorra wash clean a world in which these ideas are born from the incest of villains and idiots.

Also: the Bluetooth technology was named "Bluetooth" after the character in this book (and historic king) Harald Bluetooth.

Bengtsson was pretty great.

[Admiral Yi]

Needed some pool-side reading material for my trip.  Had seen an interview with the Coen brothers on why they had decided to remake True Grit, and they answered something about their love for the source material, so I grabbed a copy.  I enjoyed the hell out of it.  When I finished I just started again at the beginning.  Quite a bit of the movie dialogue was lifted verbatim, but there were also large parts that were left out.  My guess is studio execs thought some scenes in the book were too border line sexual assaulty.  You all know that at times I'm not super-diligent watchinig every frame of a movie, but I can't recall any mention in either film version about Rooster riding with Quantrill.  That's a major part of the book, Rooster's back story.  The book is told first person by Mattie, the 14 year old girl, so that's one thing that definitely gives the story a different perspective.  It's a short book, more like a longer novella.

Also picked up Beevor's book on The Bulge.  He does give the operational flow, but a lot of his attention is on the Anglo-British rivalries and how much of a cunt Montgomery was.  He also spends a lot of time time talking about Belgian civilians getting blown up.  One thing he doesn't cover at all is the miraculous job of rearming and remanning the Krauts did after Falaise.  In his telling it's pretty much, "they were retreating, Hitler ordered an offensive, then they attacked."

[Habbaku]

Glad you liked True Grit (novel), Yi. I picked it up a few years ago and had much the same experience, minus the restart of it. I finished it in two sittings; it was that engrossing.

[Admiral Yi]

Glad you liked True Grit (novel), Yi. I picked it up a few years ago and had much the same experience, minus the restart of it. I finished it in two sittings; it was that engrossing.

Do you agree they just couldn't do the scene after the ferry with LeBeouf whipping Mattie in this day and age?  The scene in Rooster's crib with Mattie holding the expense reports over the fire was a little dark too.

I don't understand why they left out the Quantrill back story though.  That IMO is what turns it from a simpler story of a hard ass lawman to a tale of redemption.  As I said, maybe they included it but it was in movie scenes that I happened to miss.

[Habbaku]

Are we talking about this whipping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GJDnUrBMu8

Because that's in the movie. 

I will have to rewatch the movie, but I do not recall LaBeouf being as flirtatious/overt in his advances towards Mattie as in the book, however.

Cogburn's service with Quantrill is also mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YA41ZjlW2E

[Admiral Yi]

Well alrighty then.