Since I can’t remember if Tom D. has started his summer reading thread yet…I thought I’d beat him to the punch…particularly since I’m in the middle of a LARGE chunk of time off that has allowed me copious amounts of reading time.
Anyway…on with the listing…who’s reading what?
Me?
Blink, by Malcom Gladwell
Stalin, by Robert Service
The Emperor’s Notes, by Marcus Aurelius
The Well Educated Mind, by Susan Wise Bauer
Don Quixote, Cervantes (3rd or 4th time reading this one…)
So far…
Blink…A discussion of the power of the unconcious decision making ability that we all possess. There is nothing new here. Just new buzz-words like “thin-slicing.” It was an entertaining read, but I felt that Gladwell never really resolved his argument.
Stalin…The author promises to fill in the human elements of one of history’s most vile characters. I am only half-way through, but I just don’t see Service succeeding in his purported mission. The book reads very “and then…and then…” without enough critical inquiry. Service is beginning to sound more apologetic than informative about the man we know as Stalin. Will I know more about the man? Yes, but he still remains as opaque as his “official” Soviet propaganda biographies. Pity.
The Emperor’s Notes…just started this one…nothing to report yet…
The Well Trained Mind…Bauer discusses and provides a structure for educating or re-educating your mind in the classical sense. I have taken up the challenge as I felt I had grown a bit brain-lazy over the years. No doubt the too-many hours spent here reading and posting on Slowtitch has contributed…anyway…it led to the re-reading of the last book here…
Don Quixote…rereading it AGAIN, but with a further eye toward critical analysis…This is the first book on the reading lists of “The Well Trained Mind.” Lets just hope that with this many readings of the book that I don’t end up tilting at windmills like the story’s protagonist…
One hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Marquez
won a Nobel for Lit in '82. Brilliant.
The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
In Defense of Globalization - Bagwadi
Why Globalization Works - Martin Wolf
I’m an Economics student and reading up on globalization in prep for the fall. The Friedman book is a good read. The other two are a bit dry.
…and I’m taking summer econ classes. What a whip it’s been.
Fascinating list. Speaking of the book on Stalin and your observations about the “opaque” (great choice of words) nature of his character (characature?) I saw a little footnote piece on the History Channel this morning that featured an interview with Sergei Kruschev, son of Nikita Kruschev. Apparently the junior Kruschev is a professor at Stanford (?) and a U.S. citizen. The irony of that, as I served Reagan’s military at the height of the cold war, is not lost on me.
Sergei Kruschev did, as a son, try to paint a personal portrait of his father and his flamboyant, arrogant outbursts. He spoke about the mis-translation of the famous “We’ll bury you…” speech and asserted that his father never said that. He mentioned that his father was retrospective about the absurd shoe-banging incident at the United Nations, and that he instantly regretted it, realizing it was vulgar and “over the top”.
Anyway, excellent list, and your comments about the book on Stalin ring true since I was just watching Kruschev’s son trying (and somewhat succeeding in the contest of a couple 60 second sound bites) to humanize the figure to us that is just a cross expression and a legion of now-fallen iron statues formerly strewn across eleven time zones.
“be conversant with Sophocles and Rene Descartes”
I checked out the website for the well educated mind. Interesting.
I actually just read a couple books on Spinoza, one of Descartes protegé’s
Here’s a fewbooks I’d recommend…
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Márquez
Timequake - Vonnegut
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
Civilization and It’s Discontents - Freud (short read)
Siddartha - Hesse
One Day in the Life of Ivan Deisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Crusade In Europe - Eisenhower (I’m a WWII history geek)
I googled Blink but it didn’t come back with anything. I suggested Tacitus after checking out the Emperor’s Notes.
Ah history…I love it. I shoulda chosen that as my major but I opted to test myself and took econ instead. I like the political side of it, hate the metrics. So, I’m sittin here going over LM and IS curves, how to derive them, shifts…blah blah blah. I’m hoping to go to law school as I long as I don’t kill my GPA between now and graduation next year.
Blink was a suggestion of Lieutenant General Van Riper, who spoke to my Expeditionary Warfare School class last year…oddly enough he turned out to be one of the subjects in the book…funny…I don’t remember him mentioning that…anyway…he’s a big advocate of chaos theory and its application to command and control (C2)…Blink fits nicely into his overall philosophy on C2.
I hear ya on working out mind. Not all of us posses the inherent smarts Francois does. I’m always amazed at the fact he’s a prof, long course trigeek, and constant ST’er. How he gets it all done (so well I might add) I’ll never know. Gordo trips me out too. Genius.
As for reading I’m such a non-fiction freak. I have to remember to compliment it with good literature. Philosophy and math are also great mind benders. You start looking at upper level math and you see a convergence between the two: Descartes, Spinoza, and Omar Khayyan are examples of this.
I like the light stuff too…Vonnegut being an example. That dude is funny.
“Not a Good Day to Die”…the story about Operation ANACONDA. Tremendously good read about what America’s warriors had to endure in that fight in Afghanistan. Some good lessons in leadership as well.
“In the Company of Soldiers” by Rick Atkins…story of the 101st in OIF. (Has one of my favorite phrases of all time…“Embrace the suck”…uttered in response to someone saying “this sucks” when encountering the vicious sandstorm in late March '03…embrace that which you can’t change or do anything about. Found myself thinking this during my very sucky run at RRman in Macon in the heat.)
Listening to the unabridged version of “America’s Secret War” by George Friedman, founder of STRATFOR. Some outstanding insights…I am very impressed so far with the level of analysis.
Well, I just finished two good reads. The first, A Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews (sp?) is an interesting book about pieceing together your life story and self identity. Starts a little slow but funny and a fantastic ending. The other one was Scurvy - Stephen Bown. It’s about the history behind the discovery for the cure for scurvy and how it impacted the development of world events (ie American War of Independence, Napoleonic Wars and more). Very interesting.
I’m just about to start a book examining the life of Winston Churchill.
“…humanize the figure to us that is just a cross expression and a legion of now-fallen iron statues formerly strewn across eleven time zones.”
This is a little OT but there is man here in Dallas (very wealthy real estate magnate), who I had the pleasure of sharing a scotch with one evening at his home, loooonng story. Anyway, his family are very astute collectors of art. His passion happens to be world history, in particular cold war era. When the iron curtain fell he had man go into the former Soviet union and buy several of the statues that were being torn down. Among them is a 8 foot tall statue of Lenin and a 10 foot tall bust of Stalin. He had many other pieces and several were versions of those two men. He also had an enormous bust of Winston Churchill and a painting painted by Adolf Hitler.
