← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · xmetalhead
Thread ID: 19213 | Posts: 25 | Started: 2005-07-19
2005-07-19 15:44 | User Profile
Bernard Cornwell: Anyone else read his historical-fiction books? I'm really digging his work. I like his using of real historical stories and historical figures but inserting a fictional protaganist to carry the story.
I've read "Heretic", 14th Century tale of Thomas of Hookton's quest for the Holy Grail, and I just finished the most excellent "The Last Kingdom", 9th Century England which details the Danes trying to conquer all of England and King Alfred's attempts to stop them from doing so. The attention to details of battle, religion and customs is extraordinary. I couldn't put either book down for a minute. I'm already looking forward to the upcoming (late 2005) "The Pale Horsemen" which is the 2nd part of Last Kingdom.
I hear alot of praise for his Sharpe's series chronicles of early 19th Century English and Napoleonic wars. I also understand he's written several books on King Arthur.
What's everyone reading out there right now?
2005-07-19 15:49 | User Profile
[url]http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/Lupfer/lupfer.asp[/url]
2005-07-19 16:47 | User Profile
I've got about a dozen going:
Belloc's "Charles I" Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" Boyd & Richerson's "Culture and the Evolutionary Process" David S. Katz's "Jews in the History of England 1485-1850" Samuel Dill's "Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire" James Q. Wilson's "Bureaucracy" Canfield's "The Incredible Scofield and His Book" Landsberger's "Rembrandt, the Jews, and the Bible" Jonathan Israel's "Radical Enlightenment" Warren Hollister's "Medieval Europe: A Short History" Chesterton's "Outline of Sanity" Ibn Khaldun's "Muqadimmah"
2005-07-19 18:48 | User Profile
[url="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0865970580/103-7744886-0822263?v=glance"]The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver[/url]
[url="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0970378408/103-7744886-0822263?v=glance"]Judaism's Strange Gods[/url], by Michael Hoffman
[url="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1932236252/103-7744886-0822263?v=glance"]Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition[/url]
2005-07-19 20:46 | User Profile
Recently finished:
The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919-1945, Richard Steigmann-Gall, 2004, Cambridge University Press
Getting ready to start:
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him, Donald Rayfield, 2004, Random House
2005-07-19 20:53 | User Profile
I'm fascinated by the books you fine gentlemen are reading or have read.
I also recently read Michael Crichton's latest "State of Fear" which gets into the whole global warming issue but also is loaded with suspense. Without spoiling it for those who might read it, there's a pretty neat conspiracy that becomes exposed at the end. Some folks here might like it. Crichton's books are typically loaded with well researched and real facts woven into a fictional story (or maybe not?).
I'm also currently reading "Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About" by Kevin Trudeau.
2005-07-19 21:02 | User Profile
Just finished Catch-22 for the second time. Finishe Ferguson's second book on the Rothschilds. (He wrote like a fanboy.) Read the first last year. March of Folly and First Salute. Gone for Soldiers by Shaara. Caesar against the Celts by Ramon Jimenez. Backyard Ballistics (son and I intend to build a small potato cannon and maybe a little catapult before school year starts. Sversky's Victory through Air Power.
Currently enjoying Harry Potter, number six, as light reading with the kids. No brain required.
2005-07-20 08:21 | User Profile
I still reading Julius Evola's "Revolt Against the Modern World." I have enjoyed reading it greatly. It would seem he was fond of The Golden Bough. Frazerââ¬â¢s name has come up a few times. And Evola's notion of America and the Soviet Union being different forms of degeneration made a great deal of sense. I found some stuff to disagree with but overall a great work.
I have not read any of Bernard Cornwell books but did see some of the BBC adaptations. I have read a little bit of Chesterton and Belloc in the past.
2005-07-20 09:31 | User Profile
I'm currently reading The Portable Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. It contains a few of his complete works and excerpts from others.
I'm finding Nietzsche to be strange reading. Some of it is straightforward, if a bit florid; much of it is very abstract and even opaque. Some of his ideas resonate with me, others don't. All in all, I think it's worth the time I'm giving it.
2005-07-20 11:21 | User Profile
Dostoevsky's [I]Crime & Punishment[/I]: A good story, but tiring to read, what with Dostoevsky's excruciatingly detailed descriptions of Raskolnikov's mercurial moods.
Charles Bracelen Flood's [I]Lee: The Last Years[/I]: For the second time. Highly recomended.
2005-07-20 19:55 | User Profile
"Liars And Thieves" by Stephen Coontz - a real page turner.
2005-07-21 09:26 | User Profile
Howdy. Haven't been at this forum in a couple of years. Nice to see people still read real books here, not the PCC(pol.correct conservative)trash by Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter they supposedly read at places like Town Hall.
I'm currently reading two, and recently finished two, books I would like to bring to your attention.
The current ones are, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan, and Sands of Empire, by Robert W. Merry. The first is a couple of years old; the second has just been published.
Paris 1919 is, of course, the story of the making of the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI and, in the estimation of many historians, made WWII inevitable. Macmillan, a history professor, is interesting, fun to read, but not always fully conscious of things which - being a woman - are simply too far outside her ken to really grasp, no matter how much research she may have done. For example, she refers to the post-treaty German army being denied, "frills such as a general staff and tanks." I don't think a male historian, even one generally ignorant of military affairs, would make such an egregious mistake: classifying the operational brain and most powerful new weapon of the era's armies as "frills."
Although Macmillan is sharply(and justifiably)critical of most of the major leaders at the peace conference, she is way too easy on David Lloyd-George, the British Prime Minister, who happens to be her grandfather. It is he, after all, who forced the Arabs to accept the provisions of the Balfour Declaration, which amounted to a legal invasion of their Palestinian lands by Zionist Jews, who had been promised a "national home" in one of the greatest policy blunders in British history.
Despite its faults, however, the book is a pleasure to read, informative, and worth your consideration.
Sands of Empire is a well-researched challenge to the principal intellectual underpinnings of American neo-imperialism. Merry, former Wall Street Journal reporter(believe it or not! They're not all neocons, apparently) contrasts the Hegelian-Marxian, "End of History" zeitgeist of Fukuyama/Friedman and the neocon policy wonks with the opposing cyclic view of history and "Clash of Civilizations" thesis of people like Oswald Spengler and Samuel Huntington.
So far, it's quite interesting. I'm doubtful Merry will get into the neocon-Israel connection, however. There is only so much these mainstream authors are willing to say; they know they can be marginalized in a New York minute if they call the neocons what they really are: agents for a foreign power, aka, traitors.
I know you guys already knew that, but it's always sobering to hear it from the author himself, as I did from Andrew Bacevich, a retired army lieutenant-colonel, Vietnam vet, and college professor, who has written two excellent critiques of post-Cold War foreign policy, American Empire and The New American Militarism. I emailed him, praising his work but taking him to task for leaving out the neocon-Israel nexus, which, if you're going to make any truly thorough analysis of our foreign policy, deserves at least a chapter or two...or ten! Bacevich did do a good job critiquing the neocons from top to bottom(that would be Irving Kristol at the top, Pod the lesser - Norman's son - at the bottom).
But only as disembodied intellectuals, government officials, or pundits, whose policies he disagrees with, not as flesh and blood folks of a certain ethnicity and a particular affinity for one nation above all others, i/c the USA.
In his reply to my criticism, Bacevich admitted he was afraid that his "other arguments" (which are, to be fair, quite good), especially his bipartisan attack on both Democrats and Republicans for getting us into our present quagmire in the Middle East, would be totally forgotten in the firestorm that would erupt were he to point out that, "Oh, by the way, besides all the bad stuff I've already said, the neocons happen to be traitors."
What he did not say, directly, but which I inferred, was that he would quickly lose his academic position and any chance of publishing again.
The New American Militarism, btw, focusses on the corruption of our military by it's surrender to people like Madelaine Albright during the Clinton administration and Donald Rumsfeld in the reign of Bush II. It also paints a disgusting picture of a nation obsessed and fascinated by bombs, jets, tanks and SEAL teams, where the most fanatical warmongers and militarists are people who have never served a day in the military, from gray-skinned bureaucrats like Richard Perle pontificating on TV to your anonymous fat, pearshaped College Republican, baying for Iranian blood at his annual "leadership" conference.
Well, that's it for now. I recommend all the above books. For "mainstream" reads, not bad.
2005-07-21 21:08 | User Profile
[QUOTE=dubeaux636]
Merry, former Wall Street Journal reporter(believe it or not! They're not all neocons, apparently) contrasts the Hegelian-Marxian, "End of History" zeitgeist of Fukuyama/Friedman...
[/QUOTE] I should have used, "weltanschaung," for "zeitgeist," in the quote above. My apologies for the sloppy language.:wacko:
2005-07-22 01:49 | User Profile
The Museum of Hoaxes by Alex Boese. Of course, as a mainstream title it skirts a couple of Big Ones.
Boese hosts an excellent website on the topic of Hoaxes at: [url]http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/[/url]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A sample:
The Cardiff Giant After leaving Roxbury, NY we drove up to Cooperstown, NY. Most people visit Cooperstown to check out the Baseball Hall of Fame, but I'm not a baseball fan, so I was there to check out the Farmer's Museum, home of the Cardiff Giant. The Farmer's Museum turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected. I thought it was going to be a museum full of tractors and other farm implements, but it's actually set up as a recreation of a 19th century farming community, complete with actors dressed in period costumes who pretend to be part of the community (kind of like Williamsburg). In the middle of the museum's grounds there's a carnival tent in which the Giant lies. An actor stands outside of the tent pretending to be a carnival barker, urging people to come on in and see the Giant. Once a crowd has gathered he explains the history of the Giant, and he actually did a really good job of telling the story right. I half expected that the museum would gloss over the religious aspects of the Giant's story, but the 'interpreter' made it very clear that the Giant was created by an atheist as a spoof of Biblical literalism.
[img]http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/cardiff2.gif[/img]
2005-07-22 02:01 | User Profile
dubeaux636,
Nice to see you. Actually, the reporting of the Wall Street Journal isn't all that bad. Sometimes, the articles contradict the Richard Perle/ Max Boot inspired crap on the editorial page.
2005-07-22 02:29 | User Profile
Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, and the internet.
2005-07-23 16:08 | User Profile
I'm reading Francis Parker Yockey's [B]Imperium[/B] . It's available online; go to a search engine and type "yockey text imperium". It seems that the sh*t-tribe killed Yockey, or had him killed. He died in a prison cell under suspicious circumstances.
I have some archeology and pre-history books on my short list. "Native-Americans" and even Pacific Islanders have similar stories of the return of bearded white men from long ago.
I am also re-reading my Jack London collection. Jack London is terrific. Most of his stories are set in Alaska or elsewhere in the Arctic.
From [B]the White Silence[/B] :
...Of all heartbreaking labors, that of breaking trail is the worst...he who travels twenty sleeps on the Long Trail is a man whom the gods may envy.
...her eyes welled up a great love for her white lord - the first white man she had ever seen - the first man whom she had known to treat a woman as something better than a mere animal or beast of burden.
"Yes, Ruth," continued her husband, having recourse to the macaronic jargon in which it was alone possible for them to understand each other; "wait till we clean up and pull for the Outside. We'll take the White Man's canoe and go to the Salt Water. Yes, bad water, rough water - great mountains dance up and down all the time. And so big, so far, so far away - you travel ten sleep, twenty sleep, forty sleep" - he graphically enumerated the days on his fingers - "all the time water, bad water. Then you come to great village, plenty people, just the same mosquitoes next summer. Wigwams oh, so high - ten, twenty pines. Hi-yu skookum!"
He paused impotently, cast an appealing glance at Malemute kid, then laboriously placed the twenty pines, end on end, by sign language. Malemute Kid smiled with cheeery cynicism; but Ruth's eyes were wide with wonder, and with pleasure; for she half believed he was joking, and such condescension pleased her poor woman's heart.
"And then you step into a - a box, and pouf! up you go." He tossed his empty cup in the air by way of illustration and, as he deftly caught it, cried: "and biff! down you come. Oh, great medicine men! You go Fort Yukon, I go Arctic City - twenty-five sleep - big string, all the time - I catch him string - I say, "Hello, Ruth - How are ye?" - and you say, "Is that my good husband?" - and I say, "yes" - and you say, "no can bake good bread, no more soda" - then I say, "look in cache, under flour; good-by." You look and catch plenty soda. All the time you Fort Yukon, me Arctic City. Hi-yu medicine man!"
2005-07-25 04:48 | User Profile
feminist fantasies by Phyllis Schlafly
Domestic TRANQUILITY by F. Carolyn Graglia
Both are about the totalitarian adgenda feminists have almost succeeded in bringing off.
2005-07-25 09:18 | User Profile
[img]http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0813340861.01.SCLZZZZZZZ.jpg[/img] [img]http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/2268050602.08.LZZZZZZZ.jpg[/img] [img]http://buy.overstock.com/images/products/bnt/FC081334008X.JPG[/img] [img]http://images.amazon.com/images/P/006019247X.01.AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ.jpg[/img] [img]http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/2268054152.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg[/img]
2005-07-25 17:30 | User Profile
I'm not much on reading new books at a rapid rate, but I have a library here of books I like to reference occasionally. One of the more recent ones I reference was [I]Germany's Third Empire/Iby Moeller van den Bruck. Someday I hope they'll come out with a cartoon version for the VNN types.
Some of the recent ones were [I]Hitler's Traitor,[/I] by Kilzer, (good OD semi-thread, [URL=http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15470&highlight=Kilzer]Was Hitler's Secretary Maryin Bormann a Soviet Spy[/URL] ) and [I]Beseiged Patriot[/I], by Gerald L.K. Smith
2005-07-25 21:39 | User Profile
Okiereddust
I read "Beseiged Patriot" too.
2005-07-27 02:19 | User Profile
Do you really want to know? Ok then, I'm currently reading 3 titles. Brushing up on basic zoological principles with Villee, Walker, and Barnes "General Zoology." Also reading an older issue of "Topics in Emergency Medicine" on cardiac arrest and "Basic Overview of Cardiac Pacing, Module II." Exciting stuff, huh?
I wish I never sold my research library on the War of Southern Independence since I was never bored reading on that subject! (Plus the 8 grand I made is long gone now, lol).
K
2005-07-27 03:54 | User Profile
Finishing up Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Started it a long time ago, but as usual, I got distracted with another book I was interested in, so on and so forth.
2005-07-28 04:00 | User Profile
The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment by Carl J. Richard. Harvard University Press. :thumbsup:
How to Paint Like the Impressionists: A practical Guide to re-creating your own Impressionist paintings by Susie Hodge. Harper Design International. :bag:
Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism by Susan Dunn. :unsure:
2005-07-28 06:23 | User Profile
I'm currently reading [U]Born on the Fourth of July[/U] by Ron Kovic and [U]Child of the Appalachian Coalfields[/U] by US Senator Robert C. Byrd.