Recommend Books on This Thread

10 posts

Ix

Last week I read C.S Lewis's The Dark Tower.

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I highly recommend it if you enjoy speculative fiction, though the style is unusual for a C.S. Lewis novel. Unfortunately, the story was never completed. It ends abruptly at a very interesting turn of the plot.

I am now reading what has been touted as the definitive refutation of feminism, Michael Levin's Feminism and Freedom.

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Cadavre Exquis
Team Zissou
Cornelio
Maus: A Survivor's Tale , by Art Spiegelman

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Pulitzer winning “Maus”, by Art Spiegelman, is probably the most respected graphic novel outside of America's basements. The author tells us an Holocaust ® survival tale using a clever metaphorical device: depicts jews as mice, germans as cats, and poles as pigs. While probably his intention with using mice was to emphasize the harmless, innocent nature of jews, for most healthy people the sight of these disgusting rodents brings to mind sickness and filth. Talk about a Freudian slip.

The story is told by Vladek, Spiegelman's father, whom the latter grudgingly visits (he can't stand the old man) to interview him about his Shoa nightmare. Perhaps unwittingly the author confirms each and every jewish stereotype – starting with himself, the typically scurrilous culture destroyer (Spiegelman is the gifted mind behind “Garbage Pail Kids” – nuff said!). His father is the mean, materialistic scumbag who would sell his own mother for 30 sheckels. In an hilarious scene the father uses his Holocaust sob story to be allowed to return an already opened box of cereals at the supermarket.

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While not stellar in any way, the art is apt and at the service of the story. I won't comment further on it.

All things considered, this is a well-crafted piece of propaganda that brought the Holocaust tale to the simple minds of those unable to read real books. Depth or subtlety being impossible to convey in a cartoon, this work will probably appear extremely retarded to any intelligent person.

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Bulan The Khazar
The Truth Society

Speaking of Holocaust, does anybody know where I can still find lampshades and bars of soap made of human skin? I heard that the bitch of Belsen once had quite the collection.

popfop
This is quite interesting. I always saw Columbine more as a fatalistic uprising of sorts than your typical spree killing/school shooting. If high school, especially public high school, is a microcosm of society at large than Harris' revolt was against the deadening mediocrity of character which contemporary education seeks to perpetuate. As a true elitist he felt no need to articulate this for his victims. No dialogue with the unworthy. As such, it makes sense to understand this act as "statement based" while still realizing that the suicidal conclusion was inherently fatalistic and thus based in self pity.
popfop
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I picked up this book after having the privilege to see Jonathan Bowden speak about in London. It offers a fictionalized account of what many American POW's endured in Korea. A company of American soldiers is captured and after some initial observation by their captors, spit into two groups, Revolutionaries and Reactionaries, with no regard to rank. While both groups are forced to attend Marxist education classes, it becomes almost immediately apparent why the men were selected for each group. The Reactionaries protest the compulsory classes and mention the Geneva Convention while the Revolutionaries begrudgingly put up with them, not wanting to make waves. As times goes by, tensions between the two groups of soldiers becomes even more strained. The camp administrator, a Chinese named Ching, begins using food as a bargaining tool for good behavior. The two groups are given separate living quarters and the relative comforts the Revolutionaries receive becomes more telling as a harsh winter sets in. Eventually, the conflict becomes primarily between the two groups as opposed to American soldiers vs. Communist captors. Both groups of prisoners lose men during the winter and the unceremonious way in which the Revolutionaries dispose of their dead prompts the Reactionaries to plan a raid on their compound.

A visceral look at "thought control" techniques and a forgotten chapter of modern American history. Counter Currents has a more detailed review by Bowden here .
Cornelio
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A Man In Full - Tom Wolfe
(1998)

I've read this in a spanish translation miraculously found in my village's public library, so I have probably missed half the fun of this book, being one of it's strong points apparently the good ear Wolfe displays with regards to local dialects, nigger talk, etc.

It's strange to read a contemporary novel by a great author that showcases a clear moral message -- strange to the point of making this work completely anachronistic. Greed is bad, vanity is bad, thinking with your cock is bad, etc. Some inconsistencies (Conrad's story, especially the part where he escapes jail thanks to an earthquake, breaks with the general naturalistic tone of the rest of the book) notwithstanding, this is a top-notch material, that will make you laugh like a maniac but also teach you valuable life lessons. After finishing the book you will for a few minutes, hours even, feel like a real man with solid moral principles, an unconquerable philosopher indifferent to the miseries of the world -- A man in full.

Then you will go back to posting gifs on the shoutbox.
Bob Dylan Roof
Strangely analogous to another fictionalized account of suffering that goes by the same name:

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