In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.
In this week’s MC, let’s talk non-fiction books.
Reading our own Tom Levenson’s terrific book on the South Sea Bubble got me thinking about good non-fiction books. I don’t read too many non-fic books that aren’t work-related, but I did just order this:
Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
Read an excerpt and was riveted, so can’t wait to dive in.
What non-fiction are you reading or would recommend?
Ksmiami
Paris 1919, the God Delusion, the Ancestors Tale, I Contain Multitudes
Ksmiami
First frist:)
BGinCHI
Was hoping my aliens book would arrive today, but since we got almost a foot of snow, everything slowed to a crawl…..
Delk
@BGinCHI: maybe it was on the Amazon truck that got stuck in front of my place.
zhena gogolia
We just read Scott Eyman’s biography of Cary Grant. I wasn’t thrilled by his analyses of the films (which were minimal and sometimes seemed to indicate he hadn’t seen them), but the portrait of the man is very detailed and illuminating. It’s particularly good on his retirement phase and his relationship with his daughter.
BGinCHI
@Delk: Get in there and check!
Friend of mine texted to say a fire truck on his street wiped out a stop sign then got stuck.
raven
I knew Joe briefly in the early 70’s and I guess a novel taken from the writings of a person doesn’t count but what the hell!
Barbara
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
The Third Rainbow Girl
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
The Club
Fatal Discord
One of these is not like the others! I read more nonfiction than literary fiction these days.
MagdaInBlack
One I read this summer, which I found incredibly soothing, and very interesting, was “If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir” Ilana Kurshan. Brief explanation that hardly does the practice justice, is that it is the memoir of her reading one page a day of The Talmud : daf yomi. I’m sure many of you know far more about that than I.
SFBayAreaGal
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman
WaterGirl
@BGinCHI: And we got maybe an inch. Maybe. Jealous about all the snow.
Scout211
I haven’t read it, but Mr. Scout is almost through Mayday 1971 by Lawrence Roberts and is raving about it. There is such a parallel with that era and Nixon to this era and T****.
I guess the author found transcripts of the Nixon tapes that had never had been released and had been in storage for decades.
Xavier
Been looking at Frank Wilczek, “Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.” “A gorgeous and inviting overview of the fundamental facts of physical reality” according to Steven Pinker.
Most of the nonfiction I read is economics…won’t bore you with that here.
SiubhanDuinne
Currently (re)reading M. Owen Lee’s Turning the Sky Round, based on a series of Met Opera lectures he gave in 1989 as radio intermission features during performances of the Ring cycle.
I never tire of reading thoughtful analyses of the Ring, and Lee is particularly insightful.
MagdaInBlack
@SFBayAreaGal: I loved ” Undaunted Courage” in great part because we traveled part of that route when I was a child and so could picture some of it. Also, my mother was fascinated with the history. I wish she were alive to read it =-)
Eta: In fact, we camped at Three Forks, Montana.
BGinCHI
@Scout211: Interesting. Haven’t heard about it….
There go two miscreants
Whoa! The Visual tab is suddenly working for me (FF85.0 on W10) after being AWOL the rest of the day.
Definitely seconding Paris 1919, which I am working through, and also Into Thin Air — stayed up until 3AM finishing that when it was first released, and have re-read it a couple of times.
Currently also reading The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner, about the glory days of Bell Labs (my first job was at COMSAT Labs, which was modeled on Bell Labs to some extent).
And also reading The Borrowed Years 1938-1941, by Richard Ketchum. That was mentioned a while back by another commenter here, but I forget who.
scav
The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything by Ruth Goodman, which is far better than my bias against “________ changed everything” titles (mis)led me to expect. And I’m still in the lengthy exploration of the wood-economy background.
Also jealous about snow.
WaterGirl
@There go two miscreants: Let me know whether that turns out to be a momentary fluke, or if turns out that it’s consistently functional again.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
Ugh. We’re about to get at least a foot. Yuck.
japa21
1491
And I am sick of the snow having just come in from shoveling what the plow dumped onto my driveway.
MagdaInBlack
@WaterGirl: It’s been snowing here in Arlington Heights since about 4 pm yesterday. It is still snowing, tho not as heavy. 6 inches on my sheltered, east facing balcony. You may have some if you wish =-)
Scout211
@BGinCHI:
Published July 2020
Mayday 1971
Calouste
Ninety Degrees North by Ferguson Fleming, about the attempts to reach the North Pole from the mid 19th century until the eventual success in the early 20th century. Keep a hot drink and a woolly jumper at hand, things are going to get icy :)
frosty
The Boys In The Boat. The men’s crew of Depression-era poor kids that won the 1936 Olympics.
Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson. Forget all the crossroads BS. Written by two guys who researched his life for 50 years, interviewed his friends and family.
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. They liked their speed!
The Retirement Maze. Recommended by Raven and made me change some of the things I was going to do.
Final recommendation: an app called Reading List. Every time I see something interesting it’s only a couple of keystrokes to enter it. A bunch of my list is from B-J. Including the first one, I think.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Reading some Nat Geo magazines I’ve been meaning to get to, as well as some old Life magazines I got as gifts when I was a kid. This is one of them: Life: Man in Space : An Illustrated History from Sputnik to Columbia
Bluegirlfromwyo
I loved Into Thin Air as well!
The Splendid and the Vile (Erik Larson) saved my sanity in 2020. Reading about Churchill’s leadership in the Blitz gave me hope that we could have positive leadership again one day.
Now starting The Great Bridge (David McCollough). It’s pretty weighty but my dad gave it to me so I feel like I should give it a try.
frosty
@Calouste: Sounds like a good book to read in Key West. Along with anything by Carl Hiaissen too.
Scout211
Anything by Erik Larson but particularly In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.
SFBayAreaGal
@MagdaInBlack: The biotech company I used to work for had a meeting in St. Louis right after I read Undaunted Courage. I was so excited to be able to stand on the riverbank of the Mississippi and imagine them setting out on their expedition.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@frosty: I saw a TV special (PBS, maybe?) based on Blitzed. Yeah, WWIi was fought with everyone high as kites.
Princess Leia
New Faves:
The Secret lives of Color- KassiaSt. Clair -Describes the stories of various shades and how they came to be. From plants to mineral to animal products (including, maybe, urine) – amazing how driven humans are to find and use color in creative ways. Just fascinating.
The Smallest Lights in the Universe- Sarah Seager – a memoir of an astrophysicist. I loved the language, the science, her story. Hated to see it end.
Old Faves:
Deep Survival- Laurence Gonzales – Looks at folks caught in extreme situations (like an avalanche, the plane crash in the Andes, boat sinking- and examines who lives, who dies, and why. I keep coming back to this book over and over for what it teaches me about resilience, and also for how to keep my head when things are nuts.
The Freedom Manifesto – Tom Hodgkinson – This is a book about how to live well, say f* you to the “system” and have a good time. Very British, and light, but it’s the best reflection on living at a human pace and enjoying every minute. Changed my life a bit, I will say.
Old faves:
RSA
These are a few books I’ve been reading over the past month or so; they’re not directly relevant to my work, but maybe in the future.
W. D. Ross (1930). The Right and The Good.
W. Wallach and C. Allen (2009). Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong.
P. Lin, K. Abney, and G. A. Bekey (eds.) (2012). Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics.
WaterGirl
@japa21: That is the only bad part about snow – when the fucking snow trucks push all their snow into your driveway.
JanieM
I don’t reach much non-fiction either. But these are among my all-time favorite books of any genre:
The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, and
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.
Amazing achievements of research and of weaving stories with information, biography with science and history and politics. I resisted Henrietta Lacks for years because I knew it would make me angry, and it did (I didn’t actually finish the backmatter…), but it’s worth it regardless.
Also: This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, by Roger S. Gottlieb. Sadly, out of print, but Abebooks has cheap second-hand copies. A vast collection of essays, historical accounts, and sacred texts from many religious and philosophical traditions, and a great foundation for thinking about the how/why of dealing with climate change.
frosty
@Scout211: Sounds interesting I couldn’t read Perlstein on Nixon -still too raw. Maybe this will be easier.
MagdaInBlack
@japa21: But…it’s really good snowball snow =-)
Starboard Tack
I’ve had a copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism on the shelf for a few months. I’ll get to it pretty soon.
BGinCHI
@scav: How did it change everything? Because people were warmer, but also sootier?
BGinCHI
@japa21: I loved that book too. Should be required reading.
Obvious Russian Troll
I’m temporarily stalled on the novel I’m reading, so I just started Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City, which is about the women who worked in Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project. Interesting so far.
Also got Loeb’s book from the library and some writing books.
(The stalling thing happens to me fairly often even on books I end up enjoying. It may indicate pacing problems; I think I’m reading a first novel. Or length–I did the same thing on the first two Robin Hobb novels I read, at least in part because they were so damn long.)
zhena gogolia
@Obvious Russian Troll:
Not nonfiction, but I have stalled on The Debt to Pleasure. I enjoyed the first 20 pages or so, but it’s kind of faux Nabokov so is getting irritating.
I stalled on The Mirror and the Light when it got too gory. The Trump era has made it impossible for me to read that kind of stuff.
raven
@Scout211: That was a week after Operation Dewey Canyon III. We had few issues besides the Supreme Court ruling that we could stay on the Mall but couldn’t sleep. We voted to sleep
From an extensive Amazon review.
Quotes from the Nixon administration are eerily reminiscent of Trump’s: Referring to protestors. Nixon is described as saying disdainfully, “Goddamit these people are thugs, vandals, terrorists . . . dope addicts . . .” And Roberts describes Haldeman’s comments on VVAW: “Haldeman complained that there were ‘about six paraplegics’ in the crowd and the press was writing ‘nauseating stories’ about them. ‘God, everything you read would make you think all those guys out there had no legs!’”
frosty
@Princess Leia: Yea on Deep Survival. I only read it once but it stuck with me. Never assume that risky behavior will come out OK just because it always has before.
NotMax
A small sampling:
Peter the Great: His Life and World, Robert Massie
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Robert Hughes
Montcalm and Wolfe, Francis Parkman
Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn , Evan Connell
Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, Fawn Brodie
The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut
Baghdad Without a Map, Tony Horwitz
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman
Tuva or Bust!, Ralph Leighton
The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman
Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson
Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Bruce Catton
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (a/k/a A Diary from Dixie), Mary Chestnut
The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Stephen Ambrose
MagdaInBlack
@japa21: Also, I think about “1491” often lately, the part about diseases, like the flu…wiping out a civilization….
BGinCHI
@MagdaInBlack: Body aching from well over an hour of shoveling (corner lot, awesome, but long sidewalks…).
hueyplong
Wartime by Paul Fussell.
McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.
frosty
@JanieM: If you recommended The Boys in the Boat here, that’s how I found it. I rowed recreationally in my 30s and loved the sport and the camaraderie. Also coxed but I had no idea what to do, besides steer. Their cox was brilliant!!!
BGinCHI
@frosty: Been wanting to read Blitzed since it came out. Good?
raven
hueyplong
@frosty: Nixonland was well done but depressing.
Wag
Lately I’ve been reading nonfiction books by Craig Childs, an author who specializes in writing about various subjects in the Southwest. I was first introduced to his writings in the late 90s with his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, a series of essays about how water has influenced the history of the southwest. I’m now reading his book from 2006, House of Rain, a book about his wanderings through the Southwest tracing the influence of the Chaco Canyon civilization on the later periods of the Pueblo Indian cultures, including Mesa Verde. Its a great book.
frosty
@NotMax: I didn’t think back as far as you did, but I second many of those. From the early 70s I’m going to add Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Non-fiction but not written like it.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: Formidable list.
Uncle Omar
The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper. It’s worth reading to see where we’re headed.
The Greatest Knight by Thomas Asbridge, a biography of William Marshall, Marshall of England who served five Kings of England, from Henry II through Henry III.
geg6
Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Grant by Ron Chernow (which led me to…)
The Personal Memiors of Ulysses S. Grant
The Last Lion (3 volumes) by William Manchester
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer (I re-read this every few years…great observer of history)
Murrow:His Life and Times by A. M. Sperber
i could go on and on and on. Non-fiction, especially history and biography, is my go-to reading. I read more of it than anything.
billcinsd
While I’m not a huge non-fiction fan, books in this genre that I am working on: Mike Knoczal, “Freedom From The Market”, and Kate Raworth, “Doughnut Economics”, two very good economics books. Raworth is particularly good about defining how Economics should be approached.
“The Toaster Project” about an art student trying to make a toaster from its most basic components — so smelting his own steel, etc.
“Breath Figures”, a scientific-artistic method for making art that I am thinking of implementing for some summer research
Emma from FL
Let’s see. Currently on the nonfiction pipeline:
The Uses of Literature, by Italo Calvino (I just found this again on the back of a shelf, so a reread)
Measure for Measure, a Musical History of the Sciences, by Thomas Levenson I love the intersection of science and music and the guy’s name sounds familiar, so….)
The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy by William J. Burns (considering the mess we’re in…)
Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn (considering the stress I’m under…)
Kristine
Just bought the Loeb book. I couldn’t resist.
Nelle
Walking with the Wind, A Memoir of the Movement – John Lewis
How the South Won the Civil War -Heather Cox Richardson
Recollections of My Nonexistence -Rebecca Solnit
The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake – Erik Larsen
The Warmth of Other Suns- Isabel Wilkerson
Now reading the new bio of Eleanor Roosevelt by David Michaelis
frosty
@BGinCHI: Yes, good. Started with amphetamines for pilots and tank crews for the Blitzkrieg, then watching them take over the whole society. Including Hitler and his quack doctor injecting him with crap multiple times a day. Worth a read.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I read Soul of an Octopus, which was about octopuses in the New England Aquarium and how we underestimate the intelligence and emotional range of animals
There go two miscreants
Visual tab still working! I have no idea why — I have not changed anything, not even closed and re-opened the browser.
1491 is good, but I thought 1493 (the follow-on) was better, because less speculation — more stuff was documented. (Going by memory here; I should re-read both of them — they’re around here somewhere.) He has a better opinion of Columbus than I do.
The Great Bridge is very good. If you like that, you will probably enjoy The Path Between The Seas (about the Panama Canal), also by McCullough.
Not even 50 comments and I’ve already seen some titles that I will have to add to my list!
BGinCHI
@billcinsd: Toaster book sounds very cool.
frosty
@geg6: Your top 3 are on my list. Have you read Shirer’s Berlin Diaries? A more personal account of the rise of the Third Reich from a radioman’s perspective.
ETA I alternate between fiction and non-fiction. I’ve read every WWII codebreaking book I can find. Plus POW escapes, starting with The Wooden Horse when I was in Jr High. The most recent one was a tunnel escape by German prisoners in Arizona. Spoiler: they didn’t make it to Mexico.
Princess Leia
@NotMax: Forgot about Blue Highways! Great book.
And Tuva or Bust! Loved it. Kind of Goes with the Feynman book which is also so much fun.
Catherine D.
@WaterGirl: The Snow Shanty
nclurker
carlos eire’s “reformations”
u.s.grant “memoirs……”
geg6
@NotMax:
Oooo, I forgot The Fatal Shore! I love that book!
geg6
@frosty:
Yes, great read.
There go two miscreants
Now suddenly Text only!!
Mike in NC
I finished “Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump” by David Rothkopf last week.
trollhattan
These pop to mind:
“The Whole Shebang: A state of the universe(s) report” by Timothy Ferris (written 20 years ago, am sure it needs wholesale updating)
“Battle Cry of Freedom” (Book 6 Oxford history of America) by James McPherson
“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson (hard to pick one Bryson book)
“The Mountains of California” John Muir
“The Man Who Walked Through Time” Colin Fletcher
“Beyond the 100th Meridian” Wallace Stegner
“Cadillac Desert” Marc Reisner
A list much influenced by living in the American west.
WaterGirl
@Catherine D.: Enjoying the song!
WaterGirl
@There go two miscreants: I figured. :-(
JanieM
Just thought of FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal, by James F. Simon.
This isn’t one of my all-time favorites, but it was very good, and rather topical at this moment in history. It’s a good weaving of biography with history and politics.
I’ve been remembering it lately because my book group just read The Last Days of Night, by Graham Moore, in which Charles Evans Hughes plays a small role. Moore’s book is a genre that I don’t much care for — fairly recent history turned into fiction, with a mashing of time frames and an imagining of the inner lives of the characters that I find suspect — and I didn’t think it was very good, but some of the actual story (involving Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, JP Morgan, and Paul Cravath, whose law firm is still a powerhouse) is fascinating.
HumboldtBlue
Levant: Splendor and catastrophe on the Mediterranean
Phillip Mansel
It’s about the great port cities of eastern Med. Just starting out.
cope
I’ll keep it current with what I have on hold at my library. That would be Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That” and “Culture Warlords : My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy” by Talia Lavin. World War I and white supremacy…just some light reading.
The Graves book is one I have read before, probably more than once but not in a long time. The other just came out.
japa21
@There go two miscreants: I started reading The Path Between the Seas. and it is good. However, I have, for about the last 10 months, really had trouble getting into reading. Hopefully that will change soon.
trollhattan
@geg6:
The Chernow Grant bio is really something. I wanted so badly for Ulysses to live longer than he was allotted.
JanieM
@frosty: :-)
@There go two miscreants:
Me too…life is short, reading lists are not!
JanieM
@trollhattan:
That was a great book and a big inspiration/guide for my first hiking trip in the Grand Canyon — two weeks’ worth, in 1972.
hueyplong
@frosty: Shirer also did a long history of the fall of France’s Third Republic. I’m kind of a geek about France from 1930 through the Liberation.
Reread them all during Trump’s first year.
SiubhanDuinne
@Princess Leia:
Ooh, I ordered that for my Kindle app about a month ago when either Bookbub or Early Bird Books was offering it for a couple of bucks, but I haven’t cracked it yet. Glad to know you’re finding it fascinating; I’ll read it when I’ve finished my current book. It sounds really interesting.
Princess Leia
Another oldie but goodie- Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses. Also Michael Pollan’s Cooked.
SFBayAreaGal
@cope: I loved I Claudius by Robert Graves.
Princess Leia
@SiubhanDuinne: I keep saying”that is SO interesting!!” as I read. I love that surprise- looking into the world in a new way I didn’t even realize I could. Hope you enjoy it as well!!!!
cope
@JanieM: That book also was important to me having read it before taking a spring break float trip down the Grand Canyon in 1969, the centennial of Powell’s first trip. A geology cohort of mine and I half-heartedly planned a South Rim to North Rim hike after that but nothing came of those plans. Youthful exuberance…
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI:
Whiner.
JanieM
The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things, by Hannah Holmes
frosty
@hueyplong: Just added it to the reading list. Up to 98 now. That’s five new ones just from this post.
About 1/3 including Tom’s aren’t in the library so I’ll have to buy them. Some other good ones, too.
Mart
Some might think a book about aliens visiting from another star system, even if written by an esteemed astronomer, is you know fiction. For non-fiction you can always read about Heavens Gate, the suicide cult hoping for the comet space ships to scoop up their souls along with their Nikes.
cope
@SFBayAreaGal: Never read it but saw that my library has it when I was looking for the WW I book. I plan to read it next.
Major Major Major Major
I recently read “The End Of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)” by Katie Mack. It’s not too long, a lay read about what the universe might be, how it might end, and what that might look like from here. It’s really fun! It goes through the big crunch, heat death, the big rip…vacuum decay, that’s a brutal one… then it gets into more theoretical stuff like membrane universes…
Good times! I mean that with no sarcasm. Was thinking of writing it up here.
JanieM
@cope: We did South Rim not quite to all the way to the North Rim. I had two more trips in later years, not as long as that first one time-wise, but I never did get all the way to the North Rim. Next lifetime, perhaps. I also never did a river trip.
ziggy
Great to see non-fiction! I love it, and lots of good ideas here. I’m currently reading several books by Francis Fukuyama that seem quite timely:
The Origins of Political Order--haven’t started yet
Political Order and Political Decay (read that one first)
Identity–The Demand for Dignity and The Politics of Resentment
A couple of my favorites: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond and Patient HM: A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets by Luke Dittrich
Anything by David McCullough
cope
@JanieM: My wife likes to make fun of my reading choices (she reads only fiction) by telling people I once read a book called “Dirt”. I have to remind her the book I read was about dust, not dirt. She just loves to play that card, though.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@trollhattan: Yeah that was great.
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is great. It’s about the woman who ran France’s largest resistance intelligence network during WWII.
A book on the Civil War I really liked was Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy. It’s about two northern war correspondents who get captured and are imprisoned in a southern POW camp, from which they eventually escape and make their way north with the help of several Union sympathizers.
Tehanu
Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, given to me for Xmas. I dip into it when I run out of steam on Don Quixote, which I’m reading for the first time.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI:
For some reason, it sounds like a book the Immp would like.
cope
@JanieM: Our river trip only went to Bright Angel Ranch and then we hiked the south rim trail out. Great trip and wonderful memories.
JanieM
@cope: LOL.
*****
Another title: A Year at the Races, by Jane Smiley, about thoroughbreds.
frosty
@Major Major Major Major: A Universe from Nothing is similar. Oddest bit: we are sentient and looking out at a unique time when we can see the universe. As it expands, we’ll eventually go fast that light won’t reach us and the skies will go dark.
Not an immediate problem, to be sure.
ETA No personal knowledge of astrophysics is implied by this comment. I maxed out with Halladay and Resnick.
SiubhanDuinne
@trollhattan:
Ain’t that ever the truth.
Obvious Russian Troll
@zhena gogolia: I haven’t had the energy to read anything too dark, either.
I still haven’t read Wolf Hall. I started it, put it down for one reason or another and my wife read it and lent out my copy to our friends (with my blessing).
PJ
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, is a good read on the evolution of intelligence in animals, and in particular in octopuses and other cephalopods.
Currently I’m reading It Came From Memphis by Robert Gordon and Red, Hot, and Blue by Stanley Booth, and I highly recommend them for anyone interested in Southern blues or rock and roll from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. Gordon is a great writer, and while Booth is a fine stylist, he is unfortunately compelled to self-mythologize and insert himself into the story when he isn’t that interesting a character.
frosty
@cope: Hah! I read The Story of Corn on a beach trip with neighbors and friends and caught some grief.
Well OK, but show me another plant that’s starch, protein, can be processed into sugar and fat AND WAS ALSO WORSHIPPED!!!!
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Could someone please explain why sea shanteys are suddenly A Thing? Don’t get me wrong — I love them — but they seem to be a meme recently, and I’m not sure why.
Ksmiami
@JanieM: I loved the book on Henrietta Lacks even though it definitely took off some of the luster from Johns Hopkins. Also I did read Rising Tide by John Barry about the Mississippi flood and it’s aftermath leading to the Great Migration
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: This TikTok may have done it.
ETA: It’s a quarantine thing. Building on the version someone else did.
Jerzy Russian
@Mart:
I think Loeb has gone off of the deep end. I read his earlier paper on that interstellar asteroid, and every “odd” behavior he claimed it had can be explained by mundane things.
Major Major Major Major
@frosty:
Hmm, welll, there is a bubble beyond which we can see nothing, and things are leaving it. Of course from their perspective we’re the ones flying away. I loved this bit about how there are things moving away from us faster than light:
I think I found an FTL drive for my next space opera project.
@PJ: Oh I need to read Other Minds…
frosty
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Both of these are right in my wheelhouse. List is up to 100 now!
Mart
@Jerzy Russian: Just being a crank. Sorry.
SiubhanDuinne
@cope:
Is that Dirt: The Earth’s Ecstatic Skin? One of my all-time favourite books. I need to read it again. It’s just wonderful!
Starboard Tack
@Obvious Russian Troll:
Movies, too, for me. I’m going for the light and distracting. Maybe when the T**** miasma lifts some I’ll want something more substantial.
frosty
@SiubhanDuinne: “I once knew a sailor before he died…”
I’ll stop there. Learned many verses of Barnacle Bill in college.
Tony Jay
Justinian’s Flea by William Rosen, the thrilling tale of how the (partial, probably) reunification of the Roman Empire was kicked square in the plums by a series of impossible but inevitable mutations in a tiny wee organism originally evolved to live in a rat’s gut and a very brief change in the climate of East Africa. It contrasts the military and cultural history of the feuding superpowers with the single-minded determination of bubonic plague to get out of its native backwater and
kill off about 30% ofsee the world, without which most of what we see around us today simply wouldn’t exist in any kind of recognisable form.Can’t think why it seems so relevant today.
TomatoQueen
Finished the Mirror and the Light and while the gore was disturbing, the parallels to modern times were… I can’t find the right one word description for that ol feeling of “JFC we knew this clown from 500 years ago. We enabled him then in the same way and did not learn one single damn thing.”
Now in Mr Levenson’s restful Inflation in Berlin, when Born writes formally to Einstein asking for an appropriation of an eye-watering sum for Xray equipment, as soon as may be, because next week the price will double, or triple. Einstein is well embarked on the 30-year quest, but other things may interrupt him.
Starboard Tack
@frosty:
Also POPCORN!
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: Oh my gosh, I am the last person who would know about memes, so when you find out, please tell me. :-)
HinTN
@raven: I was there in DuPont Circle. For The Moratorium the previous autumn I slept on a church pew and helped with the logistics of the candle marchers reading the names at 1600 Pennsylvania. For the life of me I cannot remember much from the May Day protest, other than a motorcycle cop tried to run over my foot as I stepped into the street.
raven
@HinTN: Well it was a long time ago.
ziggy
@Tony Jay: Ooh, an book about disease and death, sounds right up my alley! Has anyone read The Great Mortality?
SiubhanDuinne
@frosty:
“ ‘Who’s that knocking at my door…?’ cried the fair young maiden.”
HinTN
@Uncle Omar: FFS – what took them 2000 years had taken us 200.
EthylEster
Galileo’s Middle Finger Alice Dreger
Learn about things intersex and trans…..from a principled journalist.
I was amazed and horrified.
Phylllis
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Another fan of Junius and Albert’s Adventures. Terrific book.
I recently revisited Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. Part memoir, part treatise on Loblolly pine forests. As good as I remembered it to be.
prostratedragon
Anything by John McPhee, e.g. The Crofter and the Laird or Encounters with the Archdruid
Chasing Che by Patrick Symmes, retracing Che Guevara’s motorcycle journey through South America
Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson, and quite a few others on urban history.
dm
Max Tegmark’s Our mathematical universe — an entertaining and personal story of quantum information theory and cosmology which maybe goes a little bit off the deep end. Tegmark has made a name for himself with his many layers of multiverse — first, the universe(s) beyond the reach of the speed of light; then other universes where the settings for certain quantum constants are different; then the Everett Multiverse (all quantum events come out all possible ways); and finally, all the universes described by all possible mathematical models. He has a sort-of radical Platonism.
Mark Baker’s The atoms of language — working out the implications of the Chomskyian theory that linguistic diversity is the result of taking a different fork along a small number of parameters, with a goal of something like a periodic table of language forms. Lots of examples from many, many languages forming up into a pretty plausible story. The final chapter is interesting in that it gives a plausible story for how a language can switch from one form in parents to another form in their children, with hints that this can be seen happening around 1100 in the evolution from Old English (subject-object-verb, like German) to Middle English (subject-verb-object, like today).
Donald Hoffman, Visual Intelligence and The case against reality. A cognitive scientist explores the limits of perception, optical (and other sensory) illusions, and how they show that a great deal of what we perceive is actually constructed by the brain from limited evidence. They’re a delightful pair of books.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Accurate.
billcinsd
@BGinCHI: The Toaster Project is pretty cool. He did “cheat” by not making his own plastics from oil. He recycled plastic instead, which seems pretty reasonable
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I cleared snow off of my car.
PJ
Lafcadio Hearn came up in the next post, which reminded me that he is a fine stylist as well, and I need to dig more into his writings on Japan, the Caribbean and New Orleans (as far as I know, he was the first white person to chronicle residents live Marie Laveau and Dr. John, and a lot of the mythology of the city).
Princess Leia
2 more:
Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson- what a book!!! but anything by him is great.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
Both are great for these times when reading is…harder as they are such great storytellers and you have to find out what happens next.
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@SiubhanDuinne: It’s because they work well in Tik-Tok’s “duet” functionality. See Adam Neely’s video.
Phylllis
Kill’em and Leave; James McBride* goes looking for James Brown.
*Author of The Color of Water and The Good Lord Bird.
frosty
@SiubhanDuinne: First time I heard it it was: “It’s only me from across the sea.”
Later: “ It’s me and my crew, we’ve come to (fill in the blanks)”
Uncle Cosmo
Probably yerstruly – it’s one of my all-time favorites, & one of those tomes I keep a loaner copy of for valued friends. Hope you’re enjoying it as much as I have.
My all-time favorite non-fiction book is Richard Rhodes’ The Making Of The Atomic Bomb. So much so I’ve read it 3x – all 800 pages – & will probably read it again soon. It reads like a novel, a history, a biography, an introduction to nuclear physics.
Only slightly less rewarding is the sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. which loses a little focus as it bounces back & forth between the title subject, the Soviet A-bomb project, and nuclear espionage.
ETA: At the moment I’m reading Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History. Amazing all that we don’t know about sodium chloride. Should probably track down his earlier Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World.
ETA 2: Another favorite is Ross King’s The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave The World Impressionism. Should probably get hold of his earier Brunelleschi’s Dome.
dm
@@SiubhanDuinne: NYTimes did an explainer: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/style/sea-shanty-tiktok-wellerman.html
Started with TikTok.
Here’s a great variation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EV4hQzCbJA
Speaking of ACapella Science, this you might like this song about William Rowan Hamliton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZXHoWwBcDc
Another Scott
1, 2, 3, … Infinity – George Gamow
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter – Richard Feynman
The Making of the Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes
And a +1 each for Undaunted Courage and Guns, Germs, and Steel.
I used to be a voracious book reader, but I mainly spend my time reading technical stuff (and too much on the web) these days. There are too few hours in the day!!
Cheers,
Scott.
O. Felix Culpa
@SiubhanDuinne: I had tickets for the Ring Cycle at the Lyric last May. Didn’t happen of course. Sigh.
HinTN
@raven: Yeah you right
HinTN
@Another Scott: Guns, Germs, and Steel was amazing.
debbie
Into the Silence is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read. It’s been more than 10 years since I read the book, but it combines the history of the earliest expeditions to Mt. Everest, the histories of the first climbers (all WWI vets), and the history of exploration of the Himalayas. Wade Davis is a hell of a writer!
Smalla
Evicted by Matthew Desmond does a great job showing how the lack of affordable housing perpetuates the cycle of poverty.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, about a Hmong family with a child with epilepsy and the clash of two different medical paradigms.
JanieM
@Phylllis:The Good Lord Bird — reminds me to mention Hope is the Thing with Feathers, by Christopher Cokinos — about 6 extinct birds. You’d think it would be depressing, and it is, somewhat, but it’s also fascinating
ETA: Yes to Guns, Germs, and Steel. Also enjoyed The Third Chimpanzee and Collapse.
I guess I’ve read and enjoyed more non-fiction than I thought. The Language Instinct was so amazing that I was inspired to spend two years taking linguistics classes (at the age of 55+), and actually ended up teaching a couple of classes before I decided that I really couldn’t afford to go get another PhD at that age
ETA #2: Into the Silence reminds me to mention Annapurna: A Woman’s Place. I read it not long after it came out (i.e. a long time ago), right after reading a book about a men’s expedition to I believe Everest. (Maybe by Jim Wickwire? I don’t remember.) The contrast between the whole “feel” of the books, and the expeditions, was … interesting and eye-opening.
Uncle Cosmo
@NotMax: Thumbs up for Peter the Great and Battle Cry of Freedom. Don’t omit Massie’s Dreadnought, as good an introduction to the runup to the Great War as there is.
Another ETA: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. A stunning explanation of how the entire world changed drastically – to the point of near unrecognizability – in the 53 months between Sarajevo and Versailles.
Yet another ETA: Bernard de Voto’s 3 volumes re the taking of the West: The Course of Empire, Across the Wide Missouri, and The Year of Decision: 1846. Particular props to the last, as it successfully weaves together the Mexican-American War, the Mormon trek from Nauvoo to the Great Salt Lake, and the travails of the Donner Party.
hueyplong
@Uncle Cosmo: Love The Great War and Modern Memory but like his Wartime even better.
(Mine is a minority view.)
Uncle Cosmo
@frosty: Have you read Leo Marks’ Between Silk and Cyanide? If not I think you can google up a PDF of it.
dm
@Uncle Cosmo: Between silk and cyanide was a great book. Poignant and sad because of the fate of so many of the spies that Marks oversaw.
Princess Leia
@Smalla: Loved both of those- Great suggestions. I put off reading The Spirit… for such a long time. Didn’t think I would like it. Then I just started it- and ZING – what an amazing read.
HumboldtBlue
@raven:
Thanks for that.
SFBayAreaGal
@Princess Leia: I was going to add Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to the nonfiction books I’ve read and liked.
ziggy
Anyone who likes Guns, Germs and Steel would probably appreciate Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich (which has been discussed here before). Well written book about using ancient DNA to uncover human history. Amazing findings, I’ve read it 3 times.
Another interesting book on the beginnings of civilization is Against the Grain by James C. Scott.
raven
@HumboldtBlue: Let me add that it’s not that great of a book. A bunch of us knew him and that made it interesting enough but it’a ain’t great literature.
JanieM
@JanieM: The book about a men’s expedition was The Last Step: The American Ascent of K2, first published in 1980, by Rick Ridgeway. Jim Wickwire was on the expedition, but he’s not the one who wrote the book.
Denali
I quite liked Symbiotic Planet (A New View of Evolution) by Lynn Margulis, although it is a bit dated since it came out in 1998 before much of the new findings on DNA and RNA. I think someone on this blog recommended it. I am not a science person, but found it rather compelling.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!):
Oh, thank you so much for that explainer! I’ve been wondering for a while. This is great, very useful!
StringOnAStick
Anything by Kraukauer, Under the Banner of Heaven is excellent.
The Great Influenza: the Spanish Flu and how society, politics and war all swirled together in the face of the last global pandemic.
The Children’s Blizzard: The massive snow storm of the mid 1800’s; in some counties of the plains the population has never returned to the levels seen before the blizzard.
Krakatoa: if you haven’t read this one yet, you really should.
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The people and projects for creating materiel needed for sabotage in WWII.
Brachiator
A great read.
Sometime after reading this book, I went to see an IMAX film about climbing Everest. The movie was bright and beautiful looking. But even though the climbers spoke out it, as a viewer you did not get as good a sense of the danger and physical exertion necessary to climb higher. The book conveyed this element extremely well.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: HERO
bertintx
I need to save this thread, there are so many books listed here to check out, and several already read. Here are a few of mine that made an impression, in no particular order:
Hucks’s Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan (a physically heavy hardback that pulls no punches about Texas history)
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
General shoutout and echo to these writers who’ve been mentioned above:
John McPhee, Jared Diamond, Isabel Wilkerson.
cope
@JanieM: A really good mountaineering story is told in “Four Against Everest” by Woodrow Wilson Sayre. It’s about an attempt of Everest from the Chinese side (North) in 1961. At that time, that side of Everest was closed to westerners and they had to make their attempt on the sly without legal permission. They were decades ahead of the curve in that they climbed without supplemental oxygen and in alpine style. It stands in stark comparison to the current situation on Everest. They also ferried their own supplies for the climb about 25 miles from the mountain they SAID they were climbing (and to which a few porters had helped them with their carries) and had permission for to Everest’s north approach.
This book inspired the 12 year old me to make the first successful winter ascent of our garage roof with one of my brothers belaying me as I inched skyward in foot deep snow. I can honestly say this one book set me on a life-long love of and fascination for mountains.
schrodingers_cat
@frosty: Pearlstein’s takes on our current politics are borderline moronic which leads me to be suspicious of his after the fact analysis of the administrations gone by.
His hot take about the November election was the Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are going to let the Orange Clown declare himself President for life for the sake of comity.
I can’t take him seriously after that moronic a take.
JanieM
@bertintx: I couldn’t finish The Color of Law — it was too infuriating. I suppose I should try again, out of respect for the people who have suffered. Ditto The New Jim Crow.
@cope: I’ll put that one on my list. The story of summiting your garage made me laugh.
bertintx
@JanieM:
Yes, Color of Law was not an easy read, but a useful one for me. This came after finishing Warmth of Other Suns and before Caste, all read in this pandemic era.
dnfree
@SiubhanDuinne: people apparently started doing them on TikTok. Somebody does one and puts it out there and then other people harmonize. But what I want to know is why they are now “shanties” instead of “chanties”, which is how I first saw it spelled years ago. To me a shanty is a run-down house.
JanieM
Inspired by something someone wrote in the next thread:
Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande
Advice for Future Corpses*: A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying, by Sallie Tisdale (*And Those Who Love Them)
Dead thread, books about death……
frosty
@Uncle Cosmo:
Yes, I’ve read Between Silk and Cyanide, The title is a puzzle until you get a little bit into it. A good read.
Spanish Moss
Not a big reader of non-fiction, but I do read it occasionally. I also loved “The Boys in the Boat”. Here are a couple others:
“Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.” Riveting and horrifying.
“Between the World and Me”. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite writers. This book exposed me to an entirely different perspective on our country.
Captain C
@Major Major Major Major:
I saw her give a (virtual) lecture a few months ago. It was fascinating, and she seems to really enjoy (and know) her material.
Captain C
I’ve managed to put a small dent in my TBR pile in the last year, including a decent amount of nonfiction. Some highlights in roughly reverse order:
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. A history of the NYC music scene 1973-77, done year-by-year and covering an array of scenes and genres (and the cross pollination therebetween) including the nascent punk and art rock at CBGBs, the birth of hip hop, loft jazz, salsa, the minimalist classical composers, and the rise of disco.
Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All American Town by Brian Alexander. The decline of Lancaster, Ohio, home of the enormous Anchor Hocking glass plant and profiled as the All-American Town by Forbes magazine in 1947, but ground down by numerous internal and external factors, including the passing around of the plant between various companies and equity funds.
Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead’s Long Strange Trip by Joel Selvin. The story of the various musical and other adventures and travails of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead after Jerry died in 1995 until the final tour including all surviving members in 2015.
Stasiland by Anna Funder. An oral history of the ubiquitous secret police of East Germany, from both its victims and its members and informants.
Mapping the Heavens by Priyamada Natarajan. A history of our knowledge of the size of the cosmos, and how we knew and know.
Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John D. Clark. A highly entertaining look at one of the most amusingly explosive eras of engineering in human history.
stringph
Unfortunately the featured book is more in the fantasy genre than non-fiction. Literally no astronomers outside that guy’s office believe it has a hope of being correct.
In case it isn’t clear how these things work, he is writing a ‘popular’ book *because* the idea has been rejected by peer review and broadly disproved in the professional literature. His credibility on this has been zero for some time.