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Guest
Guest
I recently picked up a passel of inter-library loan and University library books found on sundry “Best Nonfiction” lists. There are a lot of different “Best of” lists, fiction and nonfiction, no two lists alike, and those are a never ending source of reading suggestions.
I just finished “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” (C. Vann Woodward, 1955). Some startling segregation statute stories, and an even more startling quote from an Abraham Lincoln speech that makes George Wallace look like Martin Luther King.
If that quote were better known there would be demands for Lincoln’s head to come off the penny, the Memorial on the Mall and that mountainside in South Dakota. I will never again hear some politician evoke the Great Emancipator without putting him in antebellum perspective.
Also finished “Cadillac Desert, The American West and its Disappearing Water” (Marc Reisner, 1986). I had read that in the 80’s but it was well worth a re-read. Some of the long forgotten intro now sounds prescient “As carbon dioxide changes the world’s climate, California will become drier (It is expected to become much drier)”.
Can’t say we weren’t warned 30 years ago.
Currently open on the bedside table “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” (John Allen Paulos, 1995). I’m no mathematician, and barely remember my multiplication tables (god bless cheap calculators), but I am a newspaper junkie and it has so far been a fascinating read.
Waiting on the bedside table; an eclectic pile, some of it dense enough that I may need to be reading-material-poor to tackle. I love a challenge.
“Six Easy Pieces, Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher” (Richard Feynman, 1963). At a browse it ain’t no “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman”. I may need to take a middle of the book running start.
Also in the wings, “The Rise of the West, a History of the Human Community” (William McNeill, 1963). That one is 800 pages of (thankfully paperback) history starting in 1700 b.c. and looks like something to lay in the hammock with on a long trip.
At the bottom of the pile “The Affluent Society” (John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958). Economics, bleh, what the heck was I thinking? I dang near fell asleep browsing it. I may try to muddle through just for the historical perspective of 58 years later. (Yes, I used a calculator to subtract 1958 from 2016)
OK, the book actually anchoring (and I do mean anchoring) bottom of the pile is something else.
Most of those books are from the University of Maryland library. One alumni son goes to the UM library every month and I give him a list of books I can’t locate elsewhere. Most of the last trip’s selections were picked out from Googling the “Modern Library list of 100 Best Nonfiction”. See #27 on the list:
http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/
“The Ants” (Bert Hoeldobler & Edward Wilson. 1990). I was expecting some reader-friendly tome about ant society; nest building, workers, soldiers, queens, interesting analogies to human society. Could be fascinating, I’d love to know more about ants.
Or maybe not.
It is a 700 page hardback that measures 10 inches x 12 inches, weighing in at almost 9 pounds. If I fell asleep and dropped it on my head in bed it might kill me. And I might fall asleep; it is a densely footnoted, graphed and charted encyclopedia of ant taxonomy, mating, larval care, kin recognition, social flexibility, colony odor and…..christ I nodded off just typing that.
Said son brought it home anyway. He was laughing when he lugged it into the house and it remains a topic of jest (“Finished the ant book yet?”). We have been speculating about how this seminal ant encyclopedia got to be #27 on that list. Best guess so far, there is an insistant Myrmecologist on the Modern Library Board.
It is now sitting on my older son’s pillow with a note “Read this. Report due Tuesday 9/27”.
I just finished “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” (C. Vann Woodward, 1955). Some startling segregation statute stories, and an even more startling quote from an Abraham Lincoln speech that makes George Wallace look like Martin Luther King.
If that quote were better known there would be demands for Lincoln’s head to come off the penny, the Memorial on the Mall and that mountainside in South Dakota. I will never again hear some politician evoke the Great Emancipator without putting him in antebellum perspective.
Also finished “Cadillac Desert, The American West and its Disappearing Water” (Marc Reisner, 1986). I had read that in the 80’s but it was well worth a re-read. Some of the long forgotten intro now sounds prescient “As carbon dioxide changes the world’s climate, California will become drier (It is expected to become much drier)”.
Can’t say we weren’t warned 30 years ago.
Currently open on the bedside table “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” (John Allen Paulos, 1995). I’m no mathematician, and barely remember my multiplication tables (god bless cheap calculators), but I am a newspaper junkie and it has so far been a fascinating read.
Waiting on the bedside table; an eclectic pile, some of it dense enough that I may need to be reading-material-poor to tackle. I love a challenge.
“Six Easy Pieces, Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher” (Richard Feynman, 1963). At a browse it ain’t no “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman”. I may need to take a middle of the book running start.
Also in the wings, “The Rise of the West, a History of the Human Community” (William McNeill, 1963). That one is 800 pages of (thankfully paperback) history starting in 1700 b.c. and looks like something to lay in the hammock with on a long trip.
At the bottom of the pile “The Affluent Society” (John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958). Economics, bleh, what the heck was I thinking? I dang near fell asleep browsing it. I may try to muddle through just for the historical perspective of 58 years later. (Yes, I used a calculator to subtract 1958 from 2016)
OK, the book actually anchoring (and I do mean anchoring) bottom of the pile is something else.
Most of those books are from the University of Maryland library. One alumni son goes to the UM library every month and I give him a list of books I can’t locate elsewhere. Most of the last trip’s selections were picked out from Googling the “Modern Library list of 100 Best Nonfiction”. See #27 on the list:
http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/
“The Ants” (Bert Hoeldobler & Edward Wilson. 1990). I was expecting some reader-friendly tome about ant society; nest building, workers, soldiers, queens, interesting analogies to human society. Could be fascinating, I’d love to know more about ants.
Or maybe not.
It is a 700 page hardback that measures 10 inches x 12 inches, weighing in at almost 9 pounds. If I fell asleep and dropped it on my head in bed it might kill me. And I might fall asleep; it is a densely footnoted, graphed and charted encyclopedia of ant taxonomy, mating, larval care, kin recognition, social flexibility, colony odor and…..christ I nodded off just typing that.
Said son brought it home anyway. He was laughing when he lugged it into the house and it remains a topic of jest (“Finished the ant book yet?”). We have been speculating about how this seminal ant encyclopedia got to be #27 on that list. Best guess so far, there is an insistant Myrmecologist on the Modern Library Board.
It is now sitting on my older son’s pillow with a note “Read this. Report due Tuesday 9/27”.
