Author: Ethan Baldwin
Title: Geology of Oregon
LSU
Rating: 3
Summary: A brief summary of the various types of rock formations in Oregon. Probably of more useful to a professional geologist than to a tourist running around trying to figure out what they're looking at.
Author: David D. Alt and Donald W. Hyndman
Title: Roadside geology of Oregon
LSU
Rating: 3
Summary: I brought this along on my summer vacation since I thought it would be a useful guide to what I was seeing on the side of the road. It's unfortunately too skimpy to really help with that sort of thing (the "Geology Underfoot" series of books do much better), though I think it would be useful as a first introduction if you knew almost nothing about what you were seeing.
Author: (various)
Title: Historical perspectives of the operational art
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: A collection of essays discussing operational-level warfare (briefly, the techniques of maneuvering divisions, corps, and armies in warfare to achieve strategic aims) from Napoleon to the Gulf War.
Very interesting if you like that sort of thing. The perspective on the Gettysburg campaign was particularly useful (and obviates a huge amount of the tactical discussion of July 1-3, 1863, if you realize that Mead’s balance and concentration of his army so far surpassed Lee’s that it would have been extremely difficult for anything the Confederates did during the battle to cancel out the advantages Mead had gained before it). There’s some good discussion of other wars as well, and a big section on the Russian development of operational art (very important).
Author: E. J. Webb
Title: The names of the stars
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: A handy guide to the night sky, best for those already familiar with its appearance (and the author’s lament for the decline of the night sky in these days of electric lights remains true). There is a certain amount of argument with other authors (Webb seems to me to prove his point that the exact borders of the present zodiac were determined by the Greeks, and that most if not all of the Arab starnames we know were translations of Greek originals), but one does not need to be familiar with those debates to enjoy the book.
Author: Nathaniel D. Gould
Title: Church Music in America
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: A throughly enjoyable, if somewhat parochial, history of church music in New England and adjacent parts of the US, originally published in 1853 and later reprinted (the original is in our Vault). Many songs and singers, and methods of teaching, are described, and on the whole it's a very worthwhile read. The author’s sense of humor is also valuable (for instance, in the description of early music schools).
Author: Eric Hoffer
Title: The true believer: thoughts on the nature of mass movements
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: An interesting analysis of mass movements and the people who join them, published in 1951 in the aftermath of the Second World War, and shot through with the desire to figure out what Communism was going to do and whether it would be as successful as Naziism, Protestantism, Islam, Christianity, or a number of other mass movements.
I don’t think it was entirely successful (Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolutions is a better study, though both falter somewhat because of their inability to include the 1688 Revolution in England or the American Revolution within their scope; Hoffer at least pays occasional attention to Lincoln and Gandhi), but it was a fascinating read.
There is also some fun to be found in figuring out the positive vision of humanity against which Hoffer seems to be critiquing the foundation-grounds of revolution: what weakness in society is it that provides fertile soil for the spread of a mass movement? (I'll let you read the book and find out -- it’s interesting.)
Author: Antonia Fraser
Title: Marie Antoinette: The Journey
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: Antonia Fraser is well-known as a biographer of royalty; it was inevitable that sooner or later she would turn her talent toward one of the most famous royals, Marie Antoinette of France, beautiful (at least officially), frivolous (perhaps), and doomed (certainly, but not inevitably).
It must be difficult to write a biography in the shadow of the fierce light that beats upon the guillotine, but Fraser manages to cover the birth of the young Archduchess of Austria, her early life, and much of her life through marriage (to a fat sulky boy who would inherit the Crown of France), misunderstanding (the nature of Louis XVI's marital difficulties still boggles the mind two centuries later, particularly in France!), and motherhood (why did I never realize that king and queen were both mourning their first son during the intensity of the early days of the Revolution) -- and all without too much foreshadowing.
The story slows down as the Revolution approaches, and the gradual collapse of royal authority and influence, till such episodes as the royal family’s attempted flight from Paris and the storming of the Tuileries by the Paris mob, followed by life in prison and Marie Antoinette's final trial (not the first, and alas! far from the last of the political show trials the world has seen, but a remarkably ugly one), and the final journey to the guillotine.
If there is a failure in the biography, it lies in the inability to achieve a relationship between the private Marie Antoinette and the France she ruled. It is true that in France (as opposed to, say, England) there was no tradition of ruling Queens and there was no particular part for her in the machinery of state (traditionally that role had been filled by the King's mistress), but one is left with a baffled incomprehension of why France so hated "la Autrichienne" (a triple French pun on "Austrian (woman)", "ostrich", and "bitch"). There is a lack of connection between the life and death of the protagonist.
But perhaps part of the legend of Marie Antoinette has been the disproportionality of her life as Queen of France, mistress of fashion and beauty, and the cold ending of her prison life and the guillotine of the Revolution... perhaps the fault lies in the fundamental unseriousness of the Queen's life contrasted with the seriousness (and the savagery and strangeness) of the French Revolution.
Author: Georges Lefebvre
Title: Napoleon from Tilsit to Waterloo, 1807-1915
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: It is difficult, when dealing with a great man and a time laden with great events, to adequately describe them and yet not bury the reader in detail.
Lefebvre manages it, telling the tale of Napoleon’s apex and fall without requiring too much knowledge of the reader, and managing to describe not only the Emperor’s own wars and maneuvers but the way in which society changed during this period.
Well-done.
Author: E. C. Krupp
Title: Echoes of the ancient skies: the astronomy of lost civilizations
LSU
Rating: 3
Summary: A profoundly unsatisfactory book.
Krupp offers a sketch of the astronomical practices of dozens of different civilizations, without ever going into one in enough detail to satisfy. Perhaps this is because the book is topically organized, but then one runs into the question of whether or not you can jump between Mayan, Egyptian, Chinese, Pawnee, etc., systems and still come up with useful or valid conclusions. Occasional tantalizing suggestions fail to lead to further discussion. The almost complete omission of Greek astronomy, one of our better-documented past civilizations, is also hard to explain.
I suppose this would work OK as an introduction for someone who knew almost nothing of the topic.
Author: Eric R. Scerri
Title: The periodic table: its story and its significance
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: An excellent (if brief) history of the primary organizing principle of chemistry, from the first early fumblings to some modern suggestions on how to make a better one, complete with some revision of the overly-simplified textbook accounts. Scerri also touches on a few philosophical issues about the history of science and how one studies it.
If you like the history of chemistry or the history of science, this is a fun read.
Author: Mikhail Marov and David Grinspoon
Title: The planet Venus
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: Two astronomers provide a summary of all we know about the planet Venus, coupled with a nice chapter on how we got to know all of that.
(It’s really amazing how much we didn't know about Venus as late as 1960... the Space Age gave us a lot of surprises.)
The book is comprehensive, with nine chapters covering the planet, its surface, and its atmosphere. There’s a lot about the atmosphere, primarily because it’s the most heavily studied part of the planet. (It’s very hard to study the ground surface when your probes usually melt within an hour of touching down; Mars is much easier in this regard).
I probably would have gotten more out of this book if I’d had a physics course in college; the authors don't spare the math. Still a fun read, and the chapters on "The History of Investigations" and "The Surface: Relief, Composition, and Geology" are very readable even without much background knowledge.
Author: William Lee Miller
Title: Arguing About Slavery: the great battle in the United States Congress
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: Who would have thought that the minutia of parliamentary procedure could make such a stunning story?
Miller tells the tale, not of the well-worn 1850s, nor yet of the Civil War, but of a struggle a generation earlier, when John Quincy Adams, last son of the Founding Fathers, went forth to war on the floor of Congress for the right of men to petition Congress. It is not a right that is much challenged in our day, but in the 1830s the Congressmen of the slaveholding states, offended beyond bearing at the idea that anyone might even suggest that anyone had any right at all to oppose slavery, managed to write into the rules of the House of Representatives that no petition dealing at all with slavery could even be so much as listened to, but would be rejected unheard.
And in so doing, they set in train the ruin of their cause. For John Quincy Adams pointed out that in so suppressing speech on one topic, they were cutting away at the foundations of American liberty. To refuse men (or women: the son of Abigail Adams had some things to say on that subject too, and the role of the women of America in this matter was not small) to right to even ask was, well, tyrannical.
The battle to present petitions, whether or not they ostensibly mentioned slavery; the long nine years of struggle to turn back the rule; the failure of the new-elected Whigs, dominating the House by forty votes yet outmaneuvered by the Southerners on arcane points of parliamentary procedure, to release the rule; the organization by Theodore Weld of abolition petitions in tens of thousands (two million signatures, in a total American population of seventeen million); the attempt and failure of the House to censure Adams; and the rising tide of anger in the North and West as it became more and more obvious that the slaveowners would do anything at all to preserve their peculiar institutions... and the final triumph of American civil liberty, as the House voted at last to remove Rule 25 from its book and again allow the reception of petitions on this issue, in December of 1844.
It's a stunning story, and little-known, and anyone at all interested in American politics and the sometimes very strange relationship between the minutiae of parliamentary procedure, the practical demands of politics, and the ways of idealism, should read this book.
Author: Mary Roach
Title: Bonk: the curious coupling of science and sex
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: Mary Roach writes well and interestingly, which makes up for the somewhat scattershot nature of her book, a loose and gossipy investigation of the past and present state of sex research.
The author covers a wide variety of topics, beginning with historical research in the 1920s (and earlier), a much looser era than the 1950s and Kinsey's research, then proceeding to Masters & Johnson in the 1970s and a scattered approach to current topics (infertility research, animal insemination, the use of MRI machines to make 3-D movies of what happens during sexual intercourse, and a number of others).
Light, chatty, fun to read, and the topics are usually interesting. Your mileage may vary.
Author: Philip Jenkins
Title: The new faces of Christianity: believing the Bible in the global south
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: Jenkins is well-known for his reporting on Christianity south of the equator: this book continues the update, looking at the various ways that Christians in Africa, Asia, and South America use the Bible and believe in it.
Actually, it's mostly Africa, with occasional nuggets from South America or India or Korea, but that's enough to say that a lot of things are going on in the world that people in North America are not necessarily aware of. Perhaps we prefer to be unaware of them; we might find ourselves embarassed by the extent to which the Bible is taken literally down south.
Or perhaps we might find ourselves heartened, and wonder why the flood of miracles and regeneration isn't happening up here in the north as well. Jenkins makes us listen to quite a few voices, not all of which make us easy or comfortable. For instance, the African bishop asking the Episcopalian (US) one: "If you don't believe the Bible, why did you bring it to us in the first place?" Groups of women reading the Bible for advice about circumcision, healers proclaiming miracles, "prosperity gospel" advocates, people struggling against witchcraft and demons in a way the West has not done since, really, the fall of the Roman Empire (or perhaps the Christianization of the German tribes), and many many others.
Very definitely worth reading. Probably necessary reading.
Author: Allen Drury
Title: Advise and Consent
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: It’s hard to write a novel with a hundred major characters, but Allen Drury manages it. Perhaps, though, this is really a novel about one major character, the Senate of the United States, what it is, what it does, how it works, and so forth.
Ostensibly the novel is about the confirmation hearings for the President’s nomination for Secretary of State. It’s really about the Senators involved in the hearings, and how they work, and how politics works, the mixture of idealism and cynicism and logrolling and principle on which American politics runs.
The slowly gathering pressure of the novel, the quiet unhurried pace, the dissection of Senatorial character (as seen in four major examples, experienced old hand Bob Munson, aging Southerner Seamus Cooley, young idealist Brigham Anderson, and finally Majority Leader Orrin Knox), the contrast between international pressure and the constant Senatorial attention to the home front, the description of how things happen in Washington, leading up to pressure and secrets and the results of secrets -- all of this makes for a story that continues to absorb the reader fifty years later.
Oh, and don’t forget the sex, blackmail, and suicide.
Or the family love, American decency, and practical politics.
The contrast of sometimes conflicting themes, blending finally into overwhelming harmony, as the Senate moves to action, is overwhelmingly powerful.
Author: John V.C. Nye
Title: War, wine, and taxes: the political economy of Anglo-French trade, 1689-1700
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: Why do the French drink wine and the English drink beer?
Nye traces the answer back to the wars of the seventeenth century and the British need to raise money to pay for their battles against Louis XIV of France; the British ended up taxing French wines at a very high rate to protect their domestic beer industry, from which they could derive a large revenue. The protection lasted through many generations, up until the Anglo-French trade treaty of 1860, and by that time popular taste in Britain had become habitual.
An interesting detective mystery, and a revision of the common albeit unexamined view that Britain was always the most free-trade of nations (which is true about the manufactured goods that Britain, and only Britain, produced in the 18th century, but not about agricultural products, such as alcohol of various sorts, in which the British had to compete with other countries.)
Very recommended if you're into economic history or popular culture.
Author: John Keay
Title: The Honorable Company: A History of the English East India Company
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: No one has ever analyzed the full records of the East India
Company, nor traced its history at full length; the task is
simply too overwhelming. Keay attempts a slightly more
achievable task, sketching the history of the Company from
the first English voyages into the Indian Ocean to the
final dissolution of the Company into the Raj, the governing
body of India.
It's a fascinating story, thought it suffers from the attempt
to cover so many episodes in sufficient brevity to compress
them all within the covers of a single book. There are many
well-known stories (for instance, the Amboina Massacre, or
the Black Hole of Calcutta, or Clive's conquest of Bengal),
and many less-well-known ones (such as the Company's periodic
attempts to establish trade with various Southeast Asian
kingdoms, or the possible contribution of an English surgeon
and his treatment of the Grand Moghul's illness to the Company's
obtaining the _firman_ from Delhi allowing it to trade widely
in India).
Keay covers the various goods the English traded (mostly
English wool cloth, which they were perennially trying
to sell to anyone who would take it; most people in the
tropics wondered why _anyone_ would want it; but also
gold and silver) and what they traded for (pepper and
cloves and nutmeg, and then Indian cottons, and finally
Chinese tea and silks). The analyses of global trade
in the 17th and 18th centuries are stimulating. But there
are also dozens of human interest stories (sailors and
captains, wives and nobles, London merchants and Indian
nawabs, and many more.)
Author: Gleason L. Archer
Title: Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties
LSU
Rating: 3
Summary: An attempt to explain various verses of the Bible that appear
to be in conflict with each other, primarily from a strong
evangelical viewpoint and a firm belief in Biblical inerrancy.
Many of the explanations make sense to me; I think others
make more sense if you believe in strong inerrancy. Some of
the difficulties don't appear to be difficulties except to
a Calvinist. The section on the Old Testament is more
interesting to me than the section of the New Testament,
perhaps because the former difficulties are often more
historical in nature than theological, while the New Testament
ones are almost all straight theology (and of a brand I do
not share).
Worth consulting, but some of the explanations get a bit
strained to this reader's gaze.
Author: Thomas Sowell
Title: Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: You probably should be required to read this before
voting. Sowell attempts to explain, without equations,
the various parts of the economy, how they function,
and all the various things economists understand
but politicians and voters don't. (The description
of Nixon's attempt to impose wage and price controls
in the 1970s is particularly horrifying, and the careful
analysis of why rent control is "the most effective
method of destroying housing except for bombing" likewise.)
This is easily readable for someone with little knowledge
of the subject, and Sowell touches on the relationship
of economics to morals and ideology (the economist can
tell you how to most efficiently achieve your goal -- the
whole science is about the use of "limited resources with
alternate uses", as Sowell points out repeatedly -- but
not what your goal shoudl be), the various myths still
commonly promulgated in the press and by politicians
about how things work (e.g., why the "trade deficit"
is a meaningless statistic), and how investment works.
Highly, highly recommended. Particularly if you plan
on casting an informed vote later this year.
Author: Thomas Sowell
Title: On classical economics
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: This is really a collection of articles on various topics
in classical economics (the period approximately after
Adam Smith and before Karl Marx). It’s interesting --
the one on Marxist economics, in particular, should be
required reading for anyone trying to understand what
Marx was all about -- but much of it required a somewhat
thicker background in the period to understand than I
possessed. I suspect that they would be extremely useful
to someone familiar with Smith and Malthus and Say and
Ricardo and the others of the period, who had already
read (or were about to read) their works. (I’ve read
Smith and Malthus, but not Ricardo).
Sowell also makes a heroic effort to resurrect the work
of J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, who pioneered a great
many concepts used by later economists but is little-
remembered today. There's a short piece on John Stuart
Mill which completely upset my understanding of him
(now I need to go back and re-read _On Liberty_ to see
if Sowell is right about it). This is a collection to
be dipped into, but the reader is advised to come
prepared with at least a basic knowledge of who the
people Sowell discusses are, and what they thought,
rather than taking this as a first introduction to
classical economics.
Author: Serge Lancel, translated by Antonia Nevill
Title: Carthage: a history
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: There are many difficulties associated with writing the history
of a city whose tale is told only by her enemies; almost all
we know of Carthage comes from the Roman accounts of her
Punic foe (with some small snippets two centuries earlier
out of Aristotle's survey of all the governments of the
Mediterranean). Lancel does his best to have the stones
and bones of Carthage tell their own tale, and the result
might rather have been subtitled "An Archaeological History"
rather than just "A History".
It is still a fascinating tale; the book summarizes more
than a century of excavations at Carthage -- the tomb
whose air more than twenty centuries later was still
laden with the odor of myrrh, the thousands of infants
whose burned bones in the _tophet_, most likely sacrificed
to the city's gods, are still hard to believe for many
moderns, the extensive deduction work on where the harbor
of the great naval power might lie.
There is an extensive discussion of the various ruins
across modern Tunisia and what they tell of Carthage's
influence and culture, a long mining of quotes from
various classical authors (the Roman Senate had the
books of Mago on agriculture translated, though only
quotations in later authors remain to us to tell of
Carthage's breeding and growing of plants), and an attempt
to make sense of all the fragments of Carthage's history
up to the point of the final clash with Rome, where
once again Lancel can retell the stories of Hamilcar
and Hannibal and Scipio.
It is not entirely successful; there is too much archaeology
(and too much unknowable mystery) in the early section,
and too skimpy a retelling of the epic later. But perhaps
the fault lies in us, who would not pay for more than
a one-volume history of Carthage, instead of being
familiar with Livy and Polybius and the Lives of Plutarch
and all the other classical accounts that Lancel mentions
so briefly. I'm certainly inclined to go back and take
another look at them.
Author: Vincent Bugliosi
Title: Reclaiming history: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: In this exhaustive account of the Kennedy assassination and the various theories, rumors, et cetera, that have swept along in its wake for almost half a century, former prosecutor Bugliosi gives what is probably the definitive account of Kennedy's assassination and its aftermath.
There is an amazing amount of detail in the book's more than 1500 pages (and the CD included with the book which has all the footnotes; this is HUGE). Bugliosi first recounts the four days in Dallas from Kennedy's arrival and assassination to the manhunt for the assassin and the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, then Oswald's interrogation, and finally his shooting by Jack Ruby, and the subsequent investigation, proceeding to analyze bit by bit, in considerable detail, what happened (for instance, he spends 30 pages just on the murder weapon).
The second half of the book analyzes various conspiracy theories, to which Bugliosi brings his experience as prosecutor. Most of them are throughly and crushingly dismissed -- Bugliosi has some sympathy for assassination buffs and conspiracy writers, admiring their concern for justice, but concludes that they are tragically mistaken when they think that Oswald was a patsy, or a conspirator, or anything but what the first half of the book showed him to be: a very troubled soul who shot the President for reasons of his own.
Highly recommended, both as a reconstruction of history and as a contribution to a debate that has wracked America for many years.
Author: John A. Wilson
Title: The burden of Egypt: an interpretation of ancient Egyptian culture
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: Summary: Wilson sweeps lightly over the long culture of Egypt, focusing on the period from the rise of the Pharoahs and writing to what he sees as the decay and decline of the original Egyptian spirit in the period following the New Kingdom and the Egyptian Empire (to about 1000 BC). He focuses on the official culture and the state ideology (admittedly the parts for which we have the most evidence) rather than daily life or politics.
It’s an interesting book, but there are better ones if you want to know about Egyptian daily life, or about any particular episode in Egyptian history, and I think it would have been a better book if he’d carried the story up through the later years of Egyptian history, at least to the Persian conquest and preferably to the final abandonment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Christianization of Egypt. As it is, I can’t recommend it as a first book on ancient Egypt; it requires too much background knowledge for a newcomer and it’s not satisfactory for someone looking for indepth study.
Author: C.S. Forester
Title: Captain Horation Hornblower, II, Ship of the Line
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the most famous sea story series of all time, Horatio Hornblower has shown up twice in the movies: a 1951 adaptation by the author starring Gregory Peck, and an ongoing made-for-TV series with Ioan Gruffudd as the externally confident and internally conflicted captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.
This book, one of ten that C.S. Forester wrote about Hornblower, and the core of the 1951 movie, features the captain in operation off the coast of Spain, supporting Spanish guerillas against the invading French forces, facing foes such as his own seasickness, press-ganged sailors, the sudden storms of the Mediterranean, French privateers, and his own love for his admiral’s wife.
The story, though a little episodic, never fails to excite, and the conflict between Hornblower’s sensibility and sense of duty is a worthy theme.
Author: Mark S. Smith
Title: The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: Smith looks at the religious background of ancient Israel, combining Biblical, other textual, and archaeological evidence to consider which gods the ancient Israelites actually worshipped. There are some fascinating discussions of how much the evidence can actually bear (for instance, how much can you tell from the evidence of which gods people named their children for, when the Israelite king Ahab, notable in the Bible for introducing the worship of Baal into Israel, named all his children with names relating to Yahweh?)
There is a great deal of comparison with Canaanite religion; Smith has some interesting things to say about the origin of Israelite monotheism. All in all, a worthwhile book if you're interested in religious history or the Old Testament.
Author: Ernest Harmon
Title: Combat commander: autobiography of a soldier
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: Major General Ernest Harmon was one of the US Army’s more successful leaders in World War II, commanding the First, Second, and Third Armored Divisions in various actions in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany.
His autobiography is plainly written but very clear, and draws a good balance between explaining military operations and his personal experiences feelings commanding US soldiers in combat. The story is gripping, if understated, and makes for fascinating reading. A modern reader will probably make a lot of useful comparisons to current situations; a student of WW II will find some fascinating looks at combat psychology and how the Army worked in those days.
Most of the book is devoted to WW II, but there are preliminary chapters on his early life and career in the army, and a subsequent chapter on his adventures as President of Norwich University in Vermont ("...begging is frowned upon in our society -- unless the beggar happens to be a college president.")