Grand unified books thread

[Josquius]

What kind of crazy accent rhymes doom with home?

There is a shift in the 18th century. The classic which comes up all the time is love and proof rhyme until the mid-late 18th century.

I have no idea which way it went. I don't know if we used to pronounce proof "pruv" or if we used to pronounce love "loov" (I hope it's the latter). But I guess this is the same here - I feel like this strengthens my hope and we also used to pronounce home as "hoom".

I think it's the other way (although I'm no expert in 17th century English); as "Doom" is sometimes written as Dome or Dom in middle English.  Also in the case that I quoted "Doom" means judgement; its original meaning in old English, rather than inevitable ruin.

I remember my first weeks at uni I met a monstrously posh guy. He asked where I was from and could only hear Durham as Dome for some reason.

So.... Us? To poshos at least. Or is it the posh?

[Syt]

What kind of crazy accent rhymes doom with home?

There is a shift in the 18th century. The classic which comes up all the time is love and proof rhyme until the mid-late 18th century.

I have no idea which way it went. I don't know if we used to pronounce proof "pruv" or if we used to pronounce love "loov" (I hope it's the latter). But I guess this is the same here - I feel like this strengthens my hope and we also used to pronounce home as "hoom".

I think it's the other way (although I'm no expert in 17th century English); as "Doom" is sometimes written as Dome or Dom in middle English.  Also in the case that I quoted "Doom" means judgement; its original meaning in old English, rather than inevitable ruin.

I would go with the "Dome" pronunciation as well, purely because it's closer to German, and over time the languages have moved from being quite similar in the very early days to widely divergent. Just my gut feeling, though.

[Sheilbh]

But it's the less fun pronunciation

[The Brain]

Finished Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome, by Gates. In 425 pages it describes a number of urban sites spanning a period of more than 3,000 years. It covers a lot of ground, so each individual site gets a very brief description.

There's an oddity about the book: it spends a lot of time on non-urban sites, like isolated temples or tombs. In the pharaonic Egypt section they explicitly say (I paraphrase) "few Egyptian cities are well known archaeologically, so we'll describe pyramids and temples in the desert as well", which struck me as bizarre. Pharaonic Egypt gets 40 pages, 30 of which describe non-urban sites. I don't understand the reason to stray from the subject of the book to cover something that is already covered by an immense amount of easily available literature at all levels. And Greece and other places also get isolated sanctuaries and similar described. And, especially for Greek and Roman sites, details regarding temple sculpture are given (something that is also widely available in art history books and what not), while vital stuff like a city's water supply (for instance) maybe gets one sentence. The author seems like he would be more at home a century ago.

A minor oddity is that "X meters square" routinely gets changed to "Xm²". Imposing halls and plazas suddenly sound very small. But you get used to it.

Overall it's not an objectively horrible book, but it doesn't do what it says on the tin. And I must say I have a problem with that.

[Syt]

This popped up in my Twitter feed. I don't know the author, or whether they know their stuff on this topic, but it might be of interest to some here.

[The Brain]

Finished Women and the French Army during the World Wars 1914-1940, by Orr. The book describes the French view of and utilization of women as employees of the army during the period, which is fairly interesting and something I didn't know any details about. It also, by its nature, illuminates broader military-civilian politics. If, like me, you're not an expert on interwar France, this is also pretty interesting.

One thing that it could do better I think is more clearly defining the exact scope of the book and the reasoning behind it.

One thing that isn't mention at all, not even in the short historical background regarding camp-followers of the early modern period, is women prostitutes. Given the French organization of semi-official army brothels, a practice which spanned the entire period in question, at least mentioning them and why they're not included would be nice. Not including them makes perfect sense, the book can't deal with everything, but reading the book as it is you'd be forgiven for not suspecting that these women even existed. And since the book rightfully deals with the Army's view of different categories of people (conscripts, male civilian employees, women...) mentioning that there existed different kinds of women in the Army's eyes would make sense.

The author has used the French millitary archives for the book. As he points out this means that very few documents are written by women, and even letters from women to the authorities are obviously formal and don't necessarily give insight into what they actually thought about their employer and work situation. But there must exist diaries, private letters etc, that contain precisely that kind of information. Of course they're a much more difficult source to work with, but mentioning why the author has stayed away from them would be nice. Again, limiting the scope makes perfect sense, but mentioning the reasoning behind the limit also makes sense.

While the title suggests an end date in 1940, the book actually gives some interesting information about the rest of the war years, especially about the situation for women working for Vichy, and the way post-WW2 France was a merging of Vichy and Free French (for instance, people could count their years of Vichy service towards their pension, and many Vichy regulations remained in use after the war or were included in new regulations).

Overall, I learned a lot about stuff that rarely gets mentioned in English language books on WW1 or WW2. Nice.

[Oexmelin]

Clémentine Vidal-Naquet has worked extensively with private correspondance of women during WWI - but I am unsure whether this correspondance includes women employed by the army.

[The Minsky Moment]

This popped up in my Twitter feed. I don't know the author, or whether they know their stuff on this topic, but it might be of interest to some here.

He (Ryan) tweets daily on the war in Ukraine.  Worth following IMO.

[Savonarola]

I finished Elizabeth David's "Italian Food;" which is as much a snapshot of Britain in 1954 (it was published just six months after the end of rationing) as it is a cookbook.  It was a time when the only "Italian" foods most British were familiar with was veal scaloppini and spaghetti with meat sauce; when ice, in any sufficient quantity, could only be gotten from a fishmonger; when ice cream was thought of as an ideal digestif; and when the French were thought to use heavy sauces because their produce was inferior.  (Early versions of "The Joy of Cooking" are similarly a wonderful portrait of Depression era America.)

[Admiral Yi]

Seppukku, did you recommend The Arnachy?  Picked up that and The Plantagenets by Dan Jones.  Started Anarchy, good reading so far.

[Habbaku]

Yes, highly recommend The Anarchy.

I finished it in a little over a week due to how addictive a read it was. It's not the most in-depth of the Company's operations, nor internal workings, but is absolutely essential reading for putting their actions (especially military campaigns) into context of India at the time they operated. I have yet to see anything come anywhere near as close to covering the indigenous side of the story as Dalrymple has.

[Admiral Yi]

Like I said I just started but I hope pretty soon he situates all the various Indian kingdoms.  Already feeling a little lost there.

[Sheilbh]

A bit like cel with film, the news finally prompted me to read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich. She's a Belarussian oral historian - although I'm unsure on whether what she writes is non-fiction or fiction - who wrote Boys in Zinc about Afghanistan, an oral history of Soviet women of WW2 and of Chernobyl. Needless to say she's been in and out of exile because of this (she is also, I think, the head of Belarus PEN).

This book is incredible. Her basic perspective is that people from the Soviet system and post-Soviet system are basically from different planets. There are some chapters that are snatches of conversations and recollections - kitchen-talk pre and post collapse of the USSR - while others are an extended single narrative. As you'd expect many are heartbreaking: the woman born in the Gulag then moved into the orphanage system, the woman whose family was made homeless when their flat was sold from under them by gangsters. There's junior party officials and a Tajik woman who tries to help migrant workers in Moscow and other snatches of life.

It's an extraordinary read - all the reviews would probably describe it as polyphonic as it tries to sound out what the Soviet system was, who the people it made and who it left in its aftermath. But it's mainly just these small human stories that lie beneath the big history.

[Syt]

I'm listening to the audiobook of J. Michael Straczynski's autobiography "Becoming Superman", read by Peter Jurasik. Three chapters in but damn - that's one effed up family he grew up in. 

[Syt]

So, I finished watching The Expanse. Since #6 was the final season and there's currently at least three more books out: are they worth reading if I enjoyed the series?

I understand that the show is more concise, shuffles some events around, and merges some characters together, but that's fine by me.