What are you reading at the moment?

The Darkest Hour by Maya Banks


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A girl has to read something when recovering from surgery...;)
 
Maeve Binchey's Whitethorn Woods

Alan Pell Crawford's Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

and

P. J. O'Brien's Will Rogers: Ambassador of Good Will Prince of Wit and Wisdom
(published in 1935 in response to the Alaska airplane crash death of Will Rogers and the aviator Wiley Post)
 
"The Fever" by Sonia Shah.

It's a highly interesting read about Malaria.

Cat
 
what I'm reading

I am reading Devoured by Darkness by Alexandra Ivy. I love a good vamp/werewolf story, but add in an oracle, a jinn, a stunted gargoyle whose magic is best left unused and a Dark Lord's minions trying to unleash him to wreck death and destruction-- sign me up! :D
 
I just discovered George V.Higgins and Jim Harrison.

The Harrison novella is a tale about a young teen introduced and trained in sex by older girls and women. Mostly the wives of his dad's professor friends. Reminds me of William Styron's teenage adventures. The A/H prudes will pucker but its great reading.

The Higgins book is a yarn about small time hoods and convicts fucking with each other. Its almost entirely dialogue and action punctuated with strange characters and description. Like...two hoods are discussing a caper when a wino falls down the stairs to the subway platform. Higgins knew how to write terrific illiterate dialogue.
 
Sex at Dawn - the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality, Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jetha.

Sexual monogamy is NOT natural!
 
DEATHRIDE: Hitler vs Stalin by John Mosier

Mosier is a Lit professor at Loyola U and amateur military historian.

In a nutshell, Mosier examines World War 2 in Europe with emphasis on the Russian Front. He concludes that WW2 was WW1 Act 2; Hitler defeated France and Britain by June 1940; and defeated Russia by early 1942 IF AMERICA HAD REMAINED NEUTRAL. BUT! If Hitler had built strategic bombers America's participation wouldnt have mattered as the Luftwaffe woulda blown the Americans to hell all across Britain before they unloaded the 1st boat.
 
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Milton believed that most people are natural slaves. He got this idea from Aristotle, who used it to rationalize ancient Greek society's dependence on slave labor. In Aristotle, a slave is a person whose actions serve the purposes of somebody else: a person whose own activity is alien to him, because it belongs to another. By serving the purposes of another he ceases to belong to himself— he becomes an attribute, a "property," of the other person. Serving alien purposes is unnatural, because it is human nature to pursue one's own purposes, but many, perhaps most, people are attracted to this unnatural way of life. These people would rather be slaves than free.

It is easy to dismiss the concept of natural slavery as a piece of self-interested fiction. Of course the ruling class in a slave-owning society will need to believe that slaves are naturally suited to their condition. But Milton was well aware that legally enslaved people are not necessarily natural slaves and that many natural slaves are not legally enslaved. The Aristotelian argument describes the nature of servility, not the empirical characteristics of slaves. Milton believed that every individual was naturally inclined toward mental slavery. Not everyone acted on his or her natural inclinations, however, and in fact a virtuous life should be a continuous act of resistance to slavish temptations...

...a natural slave will be unable to distinguish between appearance and reality, between sign and thing. He will assume that signs are all there is; he will believe that the world of appearances is the real world. He will live in a kind of hyper-reality, in which simulacra are all that exist. In other words, he will enter what twenty-first century philosophers call "the postmodern condition."

A natural slave will also be a literalist... The religious fundamentalists of the twenty-first century would, by Milton's standards, exhibit a slavish mentality. But the same would be true of most secular inhabitants of the liberal, relativist, pragmatic Western world, with its postmodernist philosophers who celebrate the plethora of depthless simulacra that distinguishes our era. He would have judged these two modes of thought, which seem polar opposites to us, as different versions of the same underlying slave mentality, different ways of fetishizing images.



-David Hawkes
John Milton: A Hero of Our Time
Berkeley, California 2009.




I didn't know a damn thing about John Milton before I picked up this book. Of course, I'd heard of Paradise Lost but that was the entire extent of my acquaintence with him. Never— in a million years— would I have guessed that Milton was closely associated with the Roundheads of the English Civil War and— at some risk— emerged as one of their leading spokesmen. He was a bit of a "weird unit." Possessed of intelligence and a titanic ego, he was convinced of his place in posterity nothwithstanding a long delayed emergence into prominence.

Hawkes' prose is orthodox and pedestrian. His attitude toward his subject is difficult to divine. Hawkes seems to want to make a point using Milton's life but I'll be damned if I can figure out what that point is. While the knowledge of Milton's life that I gained reading the book made the effort worthwhile, I'm nevertheless left with a feeling that Hawkes swung and missed.


 

Four thousand Turks surrendered at Jaffa on condition that they be allowed to live. Without food, or manpower to police them, Napoleon made a decision there that would become one of the darkest elements of his legacy. He ordered the defenseless, unarmed Turkish prisoners taken to the seashore and killed. To save powder and bullets, the general ordered his men to massacre them with their bayonets, which they did, chasing those who tried to flee into the surf and stabbing them until the sand was stained red. "The atrocious scene makes me shudder when I think of it," wrote Napoleon's own secretary, Bourrienne, describing how the French soldiers used the Turkish sign of truce to lure the escaping swimmers off the rocks only to attack them again with their bayonets. "All that can be imagined of this day of blood, would fall short of the reality." Travelers claimed Jaffa still stank of rotting corpses two years later.



-Nina Burleigh
Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt
New York, N.Y. 2007.




The book is a fascinating account of the brief French occupation of Egypt from 1798-1801. As a child, I learned the role of the Rosetta Stone in Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and because of my later interest in naval history, I knew of Nelson's utter annihilation of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay but I never knew what in hell the French were doing in Egypt in the first place. Subsequent to the military fiasco, many of the French found themselves asking the same question. Likewise, I never understood why, if the French found it, the Rosetta Stone ended up where I last saw it— in the British Museum !

Eventually, due to lack of supplies, military reversals, bubonic plague, abandonment by Napoleon and all the discomforts that tend to be suffered by invading occupiers, the French surrendered to the British and the Ottomans and the survivors were permitted to return to France. Unsurprisingly, the book does not burnish Napoleon's reputation.

The episode did serve as the first "modern" Western exposure to Egypt and was responsible for the birth and development of archaeology and Egyptology.



 
Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry and Public Sociology: Introduction to Australian Society by John Germov and Marilyn Poole. Both pretty good.
 

'The nub of it is, they've accepted the whole package in principle.'

'What principle?'

'D'you mind? I've been listening to over-educated arseholes from Whitehall splitting hairs all morning and I don't need another. We've got a deal. As long as our boy comes through with the goods, the rest of them follow with due expedition. That's their promise, and I've got to believe them.'

Perry closed his eyes and took a breath of mountain air.

'What are you asking me to do?'

'No more than you've done from day one. Compromise your noble principles for the greater good. Soft-soap him. If you tell him it's a maybe, he won't come. If you tell him we accept his terms without qualification, but there will be a short delay before he's reunited with his loved ones, he will. Are you still there?'

'Partly.'

'You tell him the truth, but you tell it to him selectively. Give him half a chance to think we're playing dirty on him, he'll grab it. We may be fair-play English gentlemen, but we're also perfidious Albion shits. Did you hear that or am I talking to the wall?'

'I heard it.'


-John le Carré ( David Cornwall )
Our Kind of Traitor
New York, N.Y. 2010.





John le Carré's entire oeuvre has focused on the struggle of individuals dealing with organizations. All of them are about betrayal, risk, and trust and all of them ring true to anyone who has ever spent time in a large organization filled with humans. The best-selling books that made his reputation just happened to feature spies set in the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, le Carré's novels have had various settings but the theme hasn't changed.

Princes in this case
Do hate the traitor, though they love the treason.
-Samuel Daniel​

 
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I'm re-reading (for the umpteenth time) 'Our Sunshine' by Robert Drewe. Probably on my 100 All-Time Favourite Books list. What am I saying? Probably? No, definitely. It's about 20 years old; but it's worth hunting down.
 
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