Grand unified books thread

[Scipio]

So, I'm reading the graphic novel Batman: Odyssey by Neal Adams.

Holy fuck, Neal Adams is completely fucking insane.

[Grey Fox]

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson*

Jobs was the craziest dude to ever become a billionaire.

*Isn't this the jewiest jewish name ever.

[Admiral Yi]

Walter is a pretty goy name.

[Sheilbh]

I'm looking for a book on France during WWI.  Particularly the political aspects.  I'm curious how a democracy functions when a portion of the country has been overrun and the rest under siege.

Alastair Horne wrote a book about the Battle of Verdun that may cover some of this. Though it's possibly very out of date now.

I'd recommend getting a general book about WW1 with a good bibliography/suggested reading list at the end and going from there. Sir Hew Strachan did a one volume survey of the war which may be good for that.

[Razgovory]

When I was searching for books on my Kindle I found a book for two bucks called "Pines".  Which I later found out was part of a series.  It's very much airport reading and the writing is fairly poor, but I bought it for two bucks so what should I expect?  First chapter the main character wakes up with... Amnesia!  The first three women he meets are all beautiful women.   It's suppose to be about some nice town with a spooky secret, but we get inundated with the spooky right off the bat.  So I guess it's a spooky town with a spooky secret.

[Capetan Mihali]

Does anybody have a recommendation on a book about Italian political movements?  Mainly interested in the 19th c. (unification/anarchism/etc.) up to pre-WWII fascism period, but something on the 60s-80s Operation Gladio/Red Brigades period would be of interest as well.

[Sheilbh]

I haven't read it yet and it's not strictly on topic but the new biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio might be of interest and will probably touch on a few. May have a decent bibliography too:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/04/pike-gabriele-d-annunzio-biography-review

The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio – Poet, Seducer & Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett – review
Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio might have been a repellent human being, but he's perfect for a page-turning biography
Ian Birrell
The Observer, Sunday 3 February 2013


Gabriele D'Annunzio with Mussolini in Italy, 1925. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
When Liane de Pougy, one of the most celebrated Parisian courtesans, visited Florence, a famous admirer sent a carriage filled with roses to collect her. As she descended the steps, his servants threw more roses at her. "There before me was a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, the manners of a mountebank and the reputation, nevertheless, for being a ladies' man."

This was none other than Gabriele D'Annunzio, the poet and lothario who seduced Italy to wartime slaughter with his rhetoric, scandalised Europe with his writing and set up his own city state in a forerunner of fascism. In this exhaustive biography, Lucy Hughes-Hallett attempts to peel away the many layers of an astonishing Italian egotist who still divides opinion over his politics, poetry and prose.

He was, without doubt, a revolting man, whose rampant vanity and sexual desires knew no bounds. Although he bedded scores of Europe's most beautiful women, his treatment of them was contemptuous; indeed, there are suggestions from his writing he liked the idea of raping working-class women. His housekeeper was expected to have sex with him three times a day.

Then there was his bloodlust as he sought Italian participation in the first world war, with fiery nationalist speeches and sub-Nietzschean fantasies, arguing a race only won respect by spilling the blood of its young. Even his biographer admits she is repelled by him. Once at war, he orders soldiers to shoot some captive countrymen whom he called "sinners against the fatherland". Little wonder he captivated Mussolini.

Yet he was brave in battle, a passionate protector of his men, a pioneering aviator. Above all, he was a prodigious writer whose collected works ran to 48 volumes. Puccini wanted to work with him, Proust admired him and Joyce said he was one of the three most talented writers of the 19th century, alongside Kipling and Tolstoy. His flowery and explicit writing had flair, even if he was not, as he claimed, the greatest Italian writer since Dante. But then, even his children had to call him maestro.

It all makes a splendid subject for a biography, although since he wrote constantly in his notebooks, there is a surfeit of material and at times this biography sags slightly as it tries to make sense of such a well-recorded life. There were rumours he removed his ribs to perform fellatio on himself; he claimed to have eaten the meat of children; there is drug use towards the end of his life as his health deteriorates. Some stories were false, of course, made up by D'Annunzio or reporters soaking up his life for their papers.

Here lies the key to this horrifically fascinating subject. For he was not just the prototype fascist who paved the way for Mussolini, but a pioneer of modern celebrity culture. He understood the fantastic soft power of fame. So while still a teenager, he published a volume of poetry, then informed a newspaper editor the young writer was dead, ensuring national publicity. When the Mona Lisa was stolen, he claimed it was brought to his house. After he sat on a plane at an air show, mechanics auctioned the seat to fans.

His greatest work of art was the construct of Gabriele D'Annunzio. "The world must be convinced that I am capable of anything," he wrote, and in his life, he lived up to this ideal. He was undeniably brilliant – at the age of 16, he wrote to his parents in six languages. The tragedy was that he put this genius to such nefarious ends, fanning the flames of war, nationalism and blood-stained division that culminated in such tragedy for his country and continent.

Hughes-Hallett dances her way through this extraordinary life in a style that is playful, punchy and generally pleasing. She eschews chronology in places for a chopped-up style of vignettes that works surprisingly well as she seeks to separate the man from his myths. Mostly, she allows the poet to hang himself. And she shows the links between him and Mussolini are more blurred then suspected, with D'Annunzio constantly wary of the emerging fascist leader.

Indeed, he seems bored by politics, with few fixed convictions beyond his own importance and a crude sense of Italian greatness, while Mussolini watches and learns from the master of self-promotion. The best bit of the book is the description of the anarchic events at Fiume in 1919, when black-shirted nationalists seized the Adriatic port for Italy. For more than a year, D'Annunzio is duce of it as it descends into darkness and racist divisions, a portent for scenes soon to engulf Europe. Meanwhile, he changes the flowers round his bed three times a day.

He ends his life promoted to general and living in Lake Garda, turning his home into a temple to himself. Mussolini, realising the potency of the poet's appeal in Italy, smothers him with luxury, sending him ever more outrageous gifts for his garden, culminating in a plane and the prow of a battleship. After his death in 1938, his girlfriend turns out to have been a Nazi agent; there are rumours she killed him with a drug overdose. In death, as in life, the amazing story of D'Annunzio was painted in primary colours, but with the darkest of shadows.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett discusses The Pike at Lutyens & Rubinstein book shop, 21 Kensington Park Road, London W11 on Wednesday 6 February at 7pm (£5, including a glass of wine)

His home, with battleship:

[CountDeMoney]

Does anybody have a recommendation on a book about Italian political movements?  Mainly interested in the 19th c. (unification/anarchism/etc.) up to pre-WWII fascism period, but something on the 60s-80s Operation Gladio/Red Brigades period would be of interest as well.

Find a biography on di Cavour;  as a political figure, he was out-Bismarcking Bismarck before realpolitik had a name.  One of the greatest statesmen Italy ever produced.

And you can't do early 20th century Italian Marxist theory without reading Antonio Gramsci.  If you don't want to plow through his Prison Notebooks (and it is a plow, but Mussolini gave him plenty of prison time to write), try his Selected Readings;  good essay-sized bites.

[Capetan Mihali]

Ah, D'Annunzio.   The true author of fascism.  I was amazed at how much of fascist aesthetic practice (as well as real political structure) was developed in his Fiume.

Thanks for the link, I'll definitely check that out.  His post-Fiume life looks amazing, in a pathetic way.  Mussolini's supposed to have said about him: "When you have a rotten tooth you have two possibilities open to you: either you pull the tooth or you fill it with gold. With D'Annunzio I have chosen for the latter treatment."

[Capetan Mihali]

Does anybody have a recommendation on a book about Italian political movements?  Mainly interested in the 19th c. (unification/anarchism/etc.) up to pre-WWII fascism period, but something on the 60s-80s Operation Gladio/Red Brigades period would be of interest as well.

Find a biography on di Cavour;  as a political figure, he was out-Bismarcking Bismarck before realpolitik had a name.  One of the greatest statesmen Italy ever produced.

And you can't do early 20th century Italian Marxist theory without reading Antonio Gramsci.  If you don't want to plow through his Prison Notebooks (and it is a plow, but Mussolini gave him plenty of prison time to write), try his Selected Readings;  good essay-sized bites.

Thanks, I've never even heard of di Cavour. 

I've only read a little bit of Gramsci.  Enough to cite to him for "cultural hegemony," but not enough to really know what he's talking about. 

[Queequeg]

Who here has read Infinite Jest?  Currently tackling it. 

[Sheilbh]

And you can't do early 20th century Italian Marxist theory without reading Antonio Gramsci.  If you don't want to plow through his Prison Notebooks (and it is a plow, but Mussolini gave him plenty of prison time to write), try his Selected Readings;  good essay-sized bites.

And D'Annunzio's home in Garda is apparently extraordinary. I heard a Radio 4 documentary there and it sounds like it has that very fascist combination of the sinister and the kitsch. D'Annunzio also wrote the one of the first and most important epic silent films:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOWicOwtHa8

[CountDeMoney]

Who here has read Infinite Jest?  Currently tackling it.

David Foster Wallace always gave me the shits with his pretentious style.*





*The kind of style that him do annoying gimmicky stream-of-consciousness stuff like foot notes, that were as tedious as you'd expect them to be.

[Queequeg]

I'm liking it in fits and starts but he doesn't seem to have the style of Pynchon or Vollmann and seems completely obsessed with things I don't really care about at all.  I'm way more willing to read 1,000 page Post Modern works on WW2 than on a bunch of people trying to stop smoking pot in to an uninteresting, dated Sci Fi caricature of the Untied States. 

[The Brain]

America Unbound?