(started 2022 July 25)
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2985766/the-alice-network
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2952389/the-alice-network
http://www.katequinnauthor.com/books/the-alice-network
By Kate Quinn.
Reading Notes: See the Wikipedia Summary
Wikipedia Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alice_Network
Also see an NPR Summary
Physical book: Hat & Beard Press and their Instagram acct
Audio: NA
eBook: NA
By Toby Huss (1966 – )
Hat & Beard Press, Los Angeles
Reading Notes: This book showcases Toby Huss as a narrative photographer and creative writer. The photos are from his travels around the United States. I assume that most of the vignettes that accompany his photographs are products of his unique immagination, powers of observation, broad experience and more. Each is effectively partnered with its accompanying photograph. If you enjoy exposure to immensely talented creative people, this book might be for you.
Some memorable quotes:
Mr. Cheap Butts
Brenda Carmichael
You got a pencil?
Where them stairs?
Bruce Wayne
First direct hit since 1951
Sting.
Oh, God, NO! Don't send Jeff back to housewares
Pardner? Pard? You OK?
"Free Trumpet Lessons"
...buxom with July wheat
Publisher's Summary: https://hatandbeard.com/products/american-sugargristle-by-toby-huss
eBook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/171066/anathem
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/180366/anathem
https://www.nealstephenson.com/anathem.html
By Neal Stephenson (1959 - _)
Published 2008, 937 pages.
See the plot summary at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem#Plot_summary
When you are finished with the book (or whenever...) consider reading Stephenson's Acknowledgments page to get a sense of what parts of this story are more tightly coupled to other's ideas.
This story has enormous scope, incorporating a broad spectrum of science fiction and religious themes as it builds out science, technology, religion, and secular societies across multiple worlds.
Some Quotes from the book:
Its general import is that one should never believe a thing only because one wishes that it were true.
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
"That is the kind of beauty that I was trying to get you to see," Orolo told me. "Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways."
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who made this system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant something had gone wrong...
There is no longer superposition. No wavefunction collapse. Just a lot of copies of me -- of my brain -- each really existing in a different parallel cosmos. The cosmos model residing in each of those parallel brains is really, definitely in one state or another. And they interfere with one another.
Quantum interference -- the crosstalk among similar quantum states -- knits the different versions of your brain together.
Hearing was worse than useless; I was sorry I'd been born with ears.
And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational altrnatives was something that made no sense at all.
There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes -- that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemm space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it.
...the only way to determine the direction of time's arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in a system. The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment.
We don't give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out... to confer thisness on what we perceive. ...absolutely necessary from an evolutionary standpoint...
The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away the consciouness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.
"All right, already! I get it! The Hylaean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across worldtracks! But where is the payoff? There's got to be more to it than this big ship roaming from cosmos to cosmos collecting sample populations and embalming them in spheres."
I thought that I was like a man lame in one leg, who learned to move about well enough that all awareness of his disability had passed out of his mind. And yet, when he tried to go on a journey, he kept finding himself back where he had started, since his weak leg made him go in circles. But if he found a partner who was weak in the other leg, and the two of them set out as companions...
Then I happened to glance down at the coffin beside my knee, and wondered... Who had given the order...
There are certain worldtracks -- certain states of affairs -- that are only compatible with certain persons' being...absent.
Upsight: A sudden, usually unlooked-for moment of clear understanding.
The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.... Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds.
...the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it.
I was an adjunct professor, which means that I was given the most unpleasant and unrewarding teaching assignments with no opportunity for university-supported research, no job security, and no benefits. Also the pay was terrible...
Well, that would challenge certain assumptions about the nature of reality that I did not even know I had.
Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sky_(novel) (It seems widely available in libraries and commercially.)
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/1222142/the-big-sky (14:24)
By A.B.Guthrie, Jr. (Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr.) (1901 - 1991)
Reader notes: A classic western novel. It begins in the 1830s about Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers.
After a fight with his father, Boone takes his unconscious father's rifle and runs away to the West and the mountains. Boone starts his flight as a scared child, but as he overcomes numerous challenges facing him as a penniless runaway he gains confidence in himself and in his plan to head West. Jim Deakins joins Boone along the road in Kentucky. In St. Louis they join a keelboat team that includes Dick Summers heading up the Missouri River -- headed West. After their keelboat meets with disaster, they stick together trapping and hunting in the mountains for years. When Dick Summers goes back East as an old man, Boone and Jim continue together and spend time with the Blackfeet Piegan Indians. Then Boone travels back to Kentucky after receiving a letter from his mother. Finally, Boone begins a journey West again, stopping to talk with Dick Summers, now farming in Missouri, and coming to a vague understanding that The West of his dreams is gone and his behavior has left him unmoored and without a sense of his future.
The story's central character Boone Caudill learns to be an expert trapper, hunter, and tracker -- joining nature and observing his environment with all his senses. He is able to endure enormous suffering from long travel on horseback and on foot and camping in melting heat and sharp cold, from injury, and from lack of food. As far as that goes, he is a classic, maybe even heroic "mountain man." But from many perspectives, Boone Caudill also seems like an anti-hero. He steals a gun, steals a boat, steals horses, murders repeatedly without remorse. He is often ill-tempered, unfriendly, even hostile. He is inarticulate in speech and thought. This combination often makes him a rough, sporatically dangerous, even malicious character.
A.B.Guthrie's writing is the hero of this story. He drew me in and took me on repeated journeys through the mountains, plains and rivers of the 1830s American mountain West. His humans seem human, and I could see and feel the world within which the story took place. Through character's thinking and dialog, the author also presents a range of attitudes and perspectives toward the land and resource theft, and the cultural and literal genocide of indigenous peoples that was practiced across the American West in the 19th century.
If you are interested in the topic of mountain men in the 19th century but want non-fiction, you might try the biography of Joseph L. Meek, "Eleven Years in the Rocky Mountains and Life on the Frontier." By Frances A. Fuller Victor, 1870. Audio: https://librivox.org/eleven-years-in-the-rocky-mountains-and-a-life-on-the-frontier-by-frances-a-fuller-victor/ (13:39) and text: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39465
My copy of this book was a loan from a brother-in-law. It was printed in 1980 and included a helpful map in the front. This was excellent recreational reading and I recommend it to everyone having even a hint of interest in this genre!
This is the first book in a series that also includes: "The Way West." and "Fair Land, Fair Land." (see their entries on this page)
Wikipedia Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sky_(novel)
Additional Resources: https://westernamericanliterature.com/a-b-guithre/
https://catalog.urbandalelibrary.org/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=3.1033.0.0.3&pos=4&cn=146154
By Stott, Rebecca (1964 - ___)
Reader's Notes: From the highest level, "Darwin's Ghosts" is "2,200-year history of Darwin's predecessors" along with investigating how the work of those individuals on the origins of life influenced the arts and popular culture. The author investigates the idea of "transmutation" more thoroughly than did Darwin. Example... While Europe drug through the middle ages Viking long boats were invading Britain, in Basra and Bagdad, elites paid for the expansion and distribution of knwoledge... Ninth century Abbasid empire scholar called al-Jāḥiẓ was part of a corp of translators, translating earlier manuscripts while also creating new books. al-Jāḥiẓ, "to fulfil his moral obligation to God, an obligation enjoined by the Quran to look closely and search for understanding," wrote about nature's interconnectedness, ecosystems and survival of the fittest in his unfinished, 7-volume book of "Living Beings"... Stott moves on through contributions of Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Benoît de Maillet (Telliamed), Bernard Palissy, Abraham Tremblay, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, Robert Edmond Grant, Robert Chambers, Alfred Wallace and more. Many of them performed their investigations and built their arguments/explanations in the context of "governing" bodies and accompanying systems which demanded conformance with the idea that "everything was presumed to have been created perfectly by God" -- sometimes under threat of death.
Third Party Reviews / Summaries:
"Darwin's Ghosts by Rebecca Stott – review." By Richard Fortey, Fri 1 Jun 2012. (accessed 2023-09-19) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/01/darwins-ghosts-rebecca-stott-review
https://catalog.urbandalelibrary.org/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=3.1033.0.0.3&pos=4&cn=146154
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK "[An] extraordinarily wide-ranging and engaging book [about] the men who shaped the work of Charles Darwin . . . a book that enriches our understanding of how the struggle to think new thoughts is shared across time and space and people."-- The Sunday Telegraph (London) Soon after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter that accused him of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Realizing his error of omission, Darwin tried to trace all of the natural philosophers who had laid the groundwork for his theory, but he found that history had already forgotten many of them. Rebecca Stott goes in search of these ghosts, telling the epic story of the discovery of evolution and natural selection from Aristotle to the ninth-century Arab writer Al-Jahiz to Leonardo da Vinci to the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes to Alfred Wallace and Erasmus Darwin, and finally to Charles Darwin himself. Evolution was not discovered single-handedly. It was an idea that was advanced over centuries by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature's extraordinary ways--and the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy. Praise for Darwin's Ghosts "Absorbing . . . Stott captures the breathless excitement of an investigation on the cusp of the unknown. . . . A lively, original book."-- The New York Times Book Review "Stott's research is broad and unerring; her book is wonderful. . . . An exhilarating romp through 2,000 years of fascinating scientific history."-- Nature "Stott brings Darwin himself to life. . . . [She] writes with a novelist's flair. . . . Darwin and the 'ghosts' so richly described in Ms. Stott's enjoyable book are the descendants of Aristotle and Bacon and the ancestors of today's scientists."-- The Wall Street Journal "Riveting . . . Stott has done a wonderful job in showing just how many extraordinary people had speculated on where we came from before the great theorist dispelled all doubts."-- The Guardian (U.K.)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/98115/the-devil-in-the-white-city-by-erik-larson/
By Erik Larson (1954 - ), Published 2004, Vintage, 447 pages.
Reading Notes: An interesting investigation of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and the serial murderer Herman Webster Mudgett (a.k.a. Dr. Henry Howard Holmes or H. H. Holmes) who took advantage of those attracted to the city during its construction and run-time. See the Wikipedia summary for a more thorough review.
3rd Party Summaries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/10/books/books-of-the-times-add-a-serial-murderer-to-1893-chicago-s-opulent-overkill.html
https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/the-devil-in-the-white-city/guide
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/the-devil-in-the-white-city/summary/
eBook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/36903/the-diamond-age
https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/30894530
By Neal Stephenson (1959 - _)
Published 1995 pages 455
Summary:
..."nanotechnology made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it." (page 37) This book covers a lot of territory. Written in the early 1990s, Stephenson created a world in the 3rd or 4th decade of the 21st century where nanotechnology had changed everything and humanity was characterized by extreme tribalism.
Wikipedia Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
This book appears to be widely available. Mine was a physical paperback borrowed from a brother-in-law.
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2700419/fair-land-fair-land
By A.B.Guthrie, Jr. (Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr.) (1901 - 1991)
Obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/27/obituaries/ab-guthrie-jr-is-dead-at-90-won-pulitzer-for-the-way-west.html
and https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1991/04/27/148192.html?pageNumber=13
Reader notes: A classic western novel. If you are wanting to read a Western, this is a great book.
This is the third book in a series that also includes: "The Big Sky." and "The Way West." (see their entries on this page)
Again, we meet Dick Summers, who just left a group of settlers he led across the West to Oregon, Boone Caudill and Teal Eye. Dick Summers complains the destruction of his wild way of life and the natural world of the North American mountain West.
As with the previous two books in this series, A.B.Guthrie's writing is the hero of this story. His humans seem human, and I could see and feel the world within which the story took place. Through character's thinking and dialog, the author also presents a range of attitudes and perspectives toward the land, about right living, natural resource theft, and the cultural and literal genocide of indigenous peoples that was practiced across the American West in the 19th century. He also incorporates references to slavery & derogatory terms for the enslaved and indigenous Americans. This book may be hurtful to some.
NYT book review of 'Fair Land, Fair Land.': "For Guthrie, 'Fair Land' Was A Finishing Touch." March 3, 1983. page 66.
Goodreads Reviews: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/202032.Fair_Land_Fair_Land
https://archive.org/details/innergameoftenni00gall
By Timothy Gallwey published 1974
Reading notes: "The Inner Game of _______" takes place in the mind. Many of us too often struggle with nervousness, self doubt, and fear of failure while participating in activities we hope(d) to love and excel at. This book is about ways to strip away some (and for some, a lot) of that unproductive thinking while learning about the type of concentration that can support a new level of excellence. This book uses tennis as a vehicle to explore these processes, but it seems useful to those involved in any sport as well as appreciative spectators.
"Tennis has evolved over the years. The best players in the world today play a very different style from the champions of 50 years ago. But The Inner Game of Tennis is just as relevant today as it was in 1974. Even as the outer game has changed, the inner game has remained the same." From Bill Gates
https://www.overdrive.com/media/3347264/the-myth-of-seneca-falls
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469633503/the-myth-of-seneca-falls/
By Lisa Tetrault, 2014, The University of North Carolina Press
Reading notes: Explores some of the core myth-making establishing the widely-accepted narrative of the women's suffrage movement in the U.S.
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2396486/notorious-rbg
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2122662/notorious-rbg
This is an often uncritical "Ruth Bader Ginsburg Museum" well-described in a 2015 NYT book review here: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/books/review/notorious-rbg-the-life-and-times-of-ruth-bader-ginsburg.html
By Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, published 2015.
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/5761753/the-rose-code
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/5537221/the-rose-code
https://catalog.urbandalelibrary.org/...
https://www.katequinnauthor.com/books/the-rose-code/
By Kate Quinn.
Reading Notes: This is a useful and entertaining (fictional) history about the WWII cryptographers (and others) of Bletchley Park -- the operators and mathematicians that play a material role in the history of computers and code-breaking.
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/1395942/the-sixth-extinction
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/1378076/the-sixth-extinction
By Elizabeth Kolbert (1961 - )
Reading Notes: This book examines a broad swath of history and science associated with human understanding of life (and death) on earth. Its focus is on five past mass (global scale) extinctions plus the sixth that we are currently living within. It is a useful resource for learning about some of the natural sciences and how some categories of scientists do their science. It might help provide parts of a foundation for climate change reading. See any of the reviews below for more about this book.
A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
Review by Al Gore: https://www.nytimes.com/.../the-sixth-extinction-by-elizabeth-kolbert Review by Robin McKie: https://www.theguardian.com/...sixth-extinction-unnatural-history... Review by Lee Billings: https://www.scientificamerican.com/...book-review-the-sixth-extinction/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670069/still-life-by-sarah-winman/
By Sarah Winman and and interview here (1964 - ), G.P. Putnam's Sons, Publication date: November 2, 2021; 464 pages
Reading Notes:
Quote:
A meager stain in the corridors of history, that's all we are. A little mark of scuff.
This is an excellent story about a collection of kind people starting with a chance meeting in 1940s wartime Italy, then a neighborhood bar in London after the war, and a neighborhood in Florence in the 1950s, 60s, and into the 70s. see the either or both of the reviews below...
3rd Party Summaries:
NYT Review By Lauren Fox, and Washington Post Review By Ron Charles
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Suffrage/Ellen-Carol-DuBois/9781501165184
By Ellen Carol Dubois, 2020, Simon & Schuster.
Summary:
...explores 75 years of suffrage struggle, Organized into four episodes: first, "universal suffrage" -- the vote for all U.S. citizens; second, Gilded Age expansion of suffrage support and intersections with other organizations, especially the WTCU; third, highlighting the states that were able to enfranchise four million women by 1914; and finally, the final push for the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
This book appears to be widely available. Mine was a physical paperback borrowed from a brother-in-law.
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9005495/the-way-west
By A.B.Guthrie, Jr. (Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr.) (1901 - 1991)
Obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/27/obituaries/ab-guthrie-jr-is-dead-at-90-won-pulitzer-for-the-way-west.html
and https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1991/04/27/148192.html?pageNumber=13
Reader notes: A classic western novel. It begins in the 1840s and is told largely through a focus on Lije Evans and Dick Summers (who had been farming in Missouri) as they set out with a group on one of the earliest traverses of the Oregon Trail. That said, Guthrie excells at building scenes and sub-plots through the eyes of others along the way. His writing about heroic (as well as the less-than heroic) men and women that explored and "settled" the American West is an example of Western Fiction at its best. In their pursuit of "free" land in Oregon, Guthrie's characters seem less concerned about the land and resource theft and the cultural and literal genocide of indigenous peoples that was practiced across the American West in the 19th century than some of central personalities of his earlier "The Big Sky." While he references some negative outcomes of colonization, cultural and literal genocide -- the value of indigenous peoples is generally outside the scope of his narrative. The impacts of that colonization continue through today. He also incorporates references to slavery & derogatory terms for the enslaved. This book may be hurtful to some.
My copy of this book was a loan from a brother-in-law. It was printed in 2002 and included three helpful maps. This was excellent recreational reading and I recommend it to everyone having even a hint of interest in this genre!
This is the second book in a series that also includes: "The Big Sky." and "Fair Land, Fair Land." (see their entries on this page)
Wikipedia Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_West
ENotes Summary: https://www.enotes.com/topics/way-west
eBook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9080904/the-white-lady
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9068653/the-white-lady
By Jacqueline Winspear (1955 - )
Bio on her own web site: https://jacquelinewinspear.com/about/
Also a bio on Wikiwand: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Jacqueline_Winspear
Reading Notes: Set in Post WWII Britain in 1947, 40-something former spy Elinor White, veteran of two wars, faces an organized crime gang in London, exposes corruption from Scotland Yard (and beyond, to the highest levels of government). As the story opens, a very private White lives in a "grace and favor" property just outside Shacklehurst, in rural Kent. Londoners, Jim Mackie, wife Rose, and their toddler Susie move in next door -- when Jim takes a job as a farm worker. Mackie's are trying to escape from their infamous London crime family, but that family has other plans... White is drawn into conflict and the story begins...
Review by Carol Memmott in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/03/16/jacqueline-winspear-white-lady/
Review by Laury A. Egan in the New York Journal of Books: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/white-lady-novel
2021 Interview with Jacqueline Winspear: https://crimereads.com/jacqueline-winspear-how-i-became-a-mystery-writer-while-breaking-every-rule/
A list of other reviews: https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/the-white-lady/
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/3359963/the-womans-hour
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/3348755/the-womans-hour
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318833/the-womans-hour-by-elaine-weiss/
By Elaine Weiss, 2019, Penguin Random House
Reading notes: This is a close-up on Nashville and the people working there in the summer of 1920 as Tennessee becomes the final ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/1815407/the-wright-brothers
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2145785/the-wright-brothers
By David McCullough (July 7, 1933 – August 7, 2022)
https://catalog.urbandalelibrary.org/...
Readers Notes: Author David McCullough describes the unique, courageous brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, who did the science, engineering, and construction leading to the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard on December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. McCullough carries the story through the brother's perfection of their machine and its marketing to a sometimes flight-crazed world, their efforts to protect their patents -- all the while providing context by weaving in the brother's family life.
Wikipedia Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_Brothers_(book)
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/3116660/on-tyranny
eBook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/3108868/on-tyranny
By Timothy Snyder (1969 – )
Reading Notes: “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”
From Wikipedia:
On Tyranny focuses on the concept of tyranny in the context of the modern United States politics, analyzing what Snyder calls "America's turn towards authoritarianism". Explaining that "(h)istory does not repeat, but it does instruct," he analyzes recent European history to identify conditions that can enable established democracies to transform into dictatorships. The short (126 pages) book is presented as a series of twenty instructions on how to combat the rise of tyranny, such as "Defend institutions", "Remember professional ethics", and "Believe in truth".
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/10477783/on-freedom
eBook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/10345052/on-freedom
By Timothy Snyder (1969 – )
Reading Notes: This short book outlines one humane approach to resisting the corruption of politics and government by Trumpers & too many Republicans (some of which is described in Steve Benen's "Ministry of Truth." If you read his "On Tyranny" you might enjoy this (these are very different books) equally thoughtful approach to resisting political lies and authoritarianism.
From Wikipedia:
On Freedom, launched September 17, 2024, answers questions asked of him by readers of On Tyranny, "What exactly is that good thing that you're defending, what is the opposite of tyranny?" In the book, he asserts that Americans tend to think of freedom as absence of something, the removal of occupation, oppression, or even government. While agreeing with the need to remove bad systems, Snyder offers a positive notion of freedom that puts the focus on human aspirations, values and how these can be realized in the world, also explaining how proper notions of freedom allow good government to exist.
eBook: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5281/Social-EngineeringHow-Crowdmasters-Phreaks-Hackers
and https://www.overdrive.com/media/6271554/social-engineering
and https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/84609
By Robert W. Gehl and Sean T. Lawson 2022, 342 pages
Reading notes:
Summary from MIT Press:
Manipulative communication—from early twentieth-century propaganda to today's online con artistry—examined through the lens of social engineering.
The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In Social Engineering, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online misinformation has its roots in earlier techniques: mass social engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker social engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call “masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering, possibilities for amelioration become clearer.
The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” they claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to encompass the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto many of its practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms used by hacker social engineers, including the hacker concept of “bullshitting,” which the authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of deception, accuracy, and sociability. They conclude with recommendations for how society can undermine masspersonal social engineering and move toward healthier democratic deliberation.
ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/6180231/woman-running-in-the-mountains
By Yuko Tsushima, aka Satoko Tsushima (1947 – 2016)
Translation by Geraldine Harcourt (1952 – 2019)
https://search.worldcat.org/title/1384410970?oclcNum=1384410970
eBook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9919904/the-world-that-wasnt
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9936597/the-world-that-wasnt
By Benn Steil ( - )
687 pages
Review by Kevin Baskins: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/.../the-world-that-wasnt-...
eBook: https://www.amazon.com/Mania-Novel-Lionel-Shriver-ebook/dp/B0CBKJ8SCH/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
By Lionel Shriver (1957 – )
Harper. 288 pp.
Reading Notes:
Review by [Maureen Corrigan]: "Lionel Shriver pokes fun at woke culture, again."
https://www.overdrive.com/media/10251263/prophet-song
By Paul Lynch (1977 - )
Reader Notes:
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what-or who-is she willing to leave behind? The winner of the Booker Prize 2023, Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
Review by Aimée Walsh: https://www.theguardian.com/books/...prophet-song-by-paul-lynch-review...
Review by Kristen Martin: https://www.npr.org/...book-review-paul-lynch...prophet-song
Review by Benjamin Markovits: https://www.nytimes.com/...paul-lynch-prophet-song.html
Review by Ron Charles: https://www.washingtonpost.com/...booker-winner-prophet-song/
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/6495140/how-the-world-really-works
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/6490996/how-the-world-really-works
By Vaclav Smil published 2022, 336 pages
This is a useful book, one that should be required reading for anyone.
Summary at: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/vaclav-smil/how-the-world-really-works/ and read a review by Bill Gates at: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/How-the-World-Really-Works
By 1800... plant fuels still supply more than 98 percent of all heat and light used by [humans (as opposed to coal or animal oils)], and human and animal muscles still provide more than 90% of all mechanical energy needed in farming, construction, and manufacturing. ...Even by 1850, rising coal extraction in Europe and North America supplies no more than 7% of all fuel energy, nearly half of all useful kenetic energy comes from draft animals, about 40% from human muscles, and just 15% from the three inanimate prime movers: waterwheels, windmills, and the slowly spreading steam engines. ...by 1900...modern energy sources (coal and some crude oil) provide half of all primary energy, and traditional fuels (wood, charcoal, straw) the other half. ...By 1900, inanimate prime movers supply about half of all mechanical energy... By 1950, fossil fuels supply nearly 3/4 of primary energy (still dominated by coal) and inanimate prime movers...provide more than 80% of all mechanical energy... (page 17)
...by the year 2000...only (about 12%) depend on biomass fuels for primary energy. ... Animate prime movers hold only a 5% share of mechanical energy... 1,500-fold increase (in the use of fossil fuels) over the past 220 years. (page 18)
since 1800 the gain (in overall energy efficiency) was about 3,500-fold. ... An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century. ...(by 2020)it is as if 60 adults would be working non-stop, day and night, for each average person; and for the inhabitants of affluent countries this equivalent of steadily laboring adults would be...between 200 and 240. (page 19)
..."the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services." ...Given all these readily verifiable realities, it is hard to understand why modern economics has largely ignored energy. ...as if output could be produced by labor and capital alone... Understanding how the world really works cannot be done without at least a modicum of energy literacy. (page 21)
...our civilization is so deeply reliant on fossil fuels that the next transition will take much longer than most people think. (page 22)
Energy is among the most elusive and most misunderstood concepts, and a poor grasp of basic realities has led to many illusions and delusions. (page 23) (It is often not practical/possible to substitute one form of energy with another)
Energy: The common definition == "The capacity for doing work" or (Richard Feynman) "energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy."
...Electricity still supplies only a relatively small share of the final global energy consumption, just 18 percent. (page 35)
...(the amount of electricity generated by) nuclear fission...peaked in 2006, and has since declined slightly to about 10 percent of global electricity generation. (page 36)
Given the fact that annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion surpassed 37 billion tons in 2019, the net-zero goal by 2050 will call for an energy transition of unprecented in both pace and scale. (page 38)
Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now (2019) just above 10 million tons a year -- a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all stable grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the mass of water drunk annual by the world's nearly 8 billion (2019) inhabitants... (page 42)
...the affluent world...can take some impressive and relatively rapid decarbonization steps (to put it bluntly, it should do with using less energy of any kind). (page 43)
Mechanical energy: Isaac Newton's approach == a joule is the force of one newton, or 'the mass of 1 kilogram accelerated by 1 m/s² acting over a distance of 1 meter.
https://books.google.com/books?id=LKZPEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Harvard Book Store review:
"An essential analysis of the modern science and technology that makes our twenty-first century lives possible--a scientist's investigation into what science really does, and does not, accomplish. We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity."
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2950318/requiem-for-the-american-dream
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/3783918/requiem-for-the-american-dream
By Noam Chomsky (1928 - __)
(This is) a book by political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky. It was created and edited by Peter Hutchinson, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott. It lays out Chomsky's analysis of neoliberalism. It focuses on the concentration of wealth and power in United States over the past forty years, analyzing the income inequality. The book was published by Seven Stories Press in 2017.
The book charts Chomsky's analysis of the concentration of wealth from the 1970s to now. Chomsky analyzes the way in which power relations shifted from the late 1940s to today, in the name of "plutocratic interests".[2] This shift in power relations ends up being an assault "on lower- and middle-class people, which has escalated in recent decades during the ascendancy of what is known as 'neoliberalism' – with fiscal austerity for the poor and tax cuts and other subsidies for the wealthy minority."[3] Chomsky is most interested in how the rise of financialization, which "is a process whereby financial markets, financial institutions, and financial elites gain greater influence over economic policy and economic outcomes,"[4] and how it affects and shapes public life in America, leading to a concentration of wealth and power to elite persons and institutions. This has been shown to lead to phenomena like the richest people in the world having as much wealth as the bottom half of the world.
By Dan T. Carter
https://lsupress.org/9780807125977/the-politics-of-rage/
"Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and later begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate helped to establish the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In this second edition, Carter updates Wallace’s story with a look at the politician’s death and the nation’s reaction to it and gives a summary of his own sense of the legacy of “the most important loser in twentieth-century American politics.”"
ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9767688/red-reckoning
By Mark Boulton
Summary from LSU Press:
Though it ended more than thirty years ago, the Cold War still casts a long shadow over American society. Red Reckoning examines how the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century transformed the nation and forced Americans to reconsider almost every aspect of their society, culture, and identity. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the volume’s contributors examine a broad array of topics, including the Cold War’s impact on national security, race relations, gun culture and masculinity, law, college football, advertising, music, film, free speech, religion, and even board games. Above all, Red Reckoning brings a vitally important era back to life for those who lived through it and for students and scholars wishing to understand it.
https://www.ibramxkendi.com/stampedbook
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/3332121/stamped-from-the-beginning
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/10236401/stamped-from-the-beginning
https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/ibram-x-kendi/stamped-from-the-beginning/9781568585987/
By Ibram X. Kendi and and here (1982 - ), Bold Type Books, Publication date: April 12, 2016; 608 pages
Reading Notes:
3rd Party Summaries:
Author's Summary.
Wikipedia Summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamped_from_the_Beginning)
The Guardian Review By Mark Anthony Neal
Wash.Post Review By Carlos Lozada
Pending release January 9, 2024
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9820151/not-the-end-of-the-world
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9819983/not-the-end-of-the-world
By Hannah Ritchie
GatesNotes Review quote:
"Ritchie has a perspective shaped less by the news than by the facts -- something she’s refined through her work as lead researcher at 'Our World in Data,' an online platform that publishes some of my favorite data-driven articles and graphics on global issues today. (The Gates Foundation is a funder.) ...she uses those facts to tell a surprisingly optimistic and often counterintuitive story, one that completely contradicts the doomsday-ism in most climate change conversations. After reading her whole book -- which comes out in the U.S. on January 9, 2024, and in the U.K. on January 11 -- I can confidently say that Ritchie has done for the environment what (Hans) Rosling spent his life doing for public health and global development."
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/8686036/music-theory-for-the-self-taught-musician
By Will Metz and some of his free videos
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/8686038/music-theory-for-the-self-taught-musician
By Will Metz and some of his free videos
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/7166347/guitar-theory-for-dummies
By Desi Serna and some of his free videos and archived videos
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/4669521/factfulness
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/3940143/factfulness
By Hans Rosling (1948 - 2017)
Wikipedia Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness...
See his: Ten rules of thumb helping to avoid overdramatic interpretations
GatesNotes Summary: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Factfulness#
By Vaclav Smil published 2023
GatesNotes Review quote:
"Smil believes there was only one real period of explosive innovation in the past 150 years: 1867-1914. During those years, inventors created internal combustion engines, electric lights, the telephone, inexpensive methods of producing steel, aluminum smelting, plastics, and the first electronic devices. Humanity also gained revolutionary insights in the fields of infectious disease, medicine, agriculture, and nutrition."
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2570801/how-music-dies-or-lives-field-recording-and-the-battle-f
https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/allworth-press/9781621534877/how-music-dies-or-lives/
https://books.google.com/books/about/How_Music_Dies_or_Lives.html?id=YjmCDwAAQBAJ
By Ian Brennan and and interview here (1966 - ),
Foreword by Corin Tucker
Allworth, Publication date: February 23, 2016; 426 pages
Reading Notes:
Publisher's Summary:
All recordings document life, arising from a specific time and place, and if that place is artificial, the results will be as well. Culled from a lifetime of learning through failure and designed to provoke thought and inspiration for artists in every medium, How Music Dies (or Lives) is a virtual how-to manual for those on a quest for authenticity in an age of airbrushed and Auto-Tuned so-called "artists." Author and Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan chronicles his own journeys to find new and ancient sounds, textured voices, and nonmalleable songs, and he presents readers with an intricate look at our technological society. His concise prose covers topics such as:
This guide serves those who ask themselves, "What's wrong with our culture?" Along with possible answers are lessons in using the microphone as a telescope, hearing the earth as an echo, and appreciating the value of democratizing voices.
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/8821955/by-hands-now-known
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9143698/by-hands-now-known
https://www.google.com/books/edition/By_Hands_Now_Known_Jim_Crow_s_Legal_Exec/9N9hEAAAQBAJ
Illustrated | 328 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company
By Margaret A. Burnham and https://law.northeastern.edu/faculty/burnham/
Reviews:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/books/review/by-hands-now-known-margaret-burnham.html
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/06/a-regional-reign-of-terror-jim-crow-by-hands-now-known/
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-long-weekend-gilly-macmillan
https://catalog.urbandalelibrary.org/...
By Gilly Macmillan.
ISBN: 9780063074323
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/5558525/the-ministry-for-the-future
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/5255196/the-ministry-for-the-future
By Kim Stanley Robinson (1952 - _)
Published October 2020, 576 pages
Wikipedia Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
See the audio book entry on my AudioBooks page
This may be one of those books to read after listening to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_(Alderman_novel)
By Naomi Alderman Published 2016
Review placeholder
"What would the world be like, Alderman asks, if all the women on Earth suddenly developed the ability to discharge massive electric shocks from their bodies? She takes this single idea and explores how it changes the dynamic between men and women, and among women. In doing so, she reveals a lot about how power and gender work today. (The word “power" in the title has multiple meanings.)" From Bill Gates
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9056596/the-inner-game-of-music
eBook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/2192895/the-inner-game-of-music
By Barry Green also B.G. on Wikipedia and Timothy Gallwey
Reading notes:
NOTE: Also, look at Green's "The Mastery of Music, Ten Pathways to True Artistry." May 2003 "reveals ten qualities shared by the world’s most successful musicians," ("based (on) interviews with over 120 world famous musicians on topics of courage, passion, creativity, discipline, humility etc. It deals with qualities of greatness from the human spirit that transcend all professions").
By César Hidalgo published 2015
Review placeholder
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/ORC00000481
(1937 version at: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=6KIFAAAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PP4&hl=en)
By M. C. (Morris Cotgrave) Betts (1875-1936) and T. A. H. (Thomas Arrington Huntington) Miller (1885-1949)
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1926
26 pages
https://catalog.urbandalelibrary.org/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=3.1033.0.0.3&pos=1&cn=63468
by Tibbets, Paul W. and (Paul Warfield), 1915-2007
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-04964-4 and for Amazon users: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B2QY28XC/
By John Ehrenreich, Published 2022-05-30
About this book.
https://rebhallphd.org/ and https://rebhallphd.org/wake-praise/
By Rebecca Hall, Illustrated by Hugo Martinez. Simon & Shuster 2021
Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake describes women-led slave revolts, and Dr. Rebecca Hall's efforts to find and document them.
https://interminablerambling.com/2021/07/09/wake/
https://interminablerambling.com/2021/07/13/layouts-in-rebecca-hall-and-hugo-martinezs-wake/
https://interminablerambling.com/2021/07/15/retrieving-history-in-rebecca-hall-and-hugo-martinezs-wake/
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/CAT87206254
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/ORC00000556
By McDonald, Angus Henry
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1941, 63 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/CAT88900165
By Bennett, Hugh H. (Hugh Hammond)
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1944, 15 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/ORC00000550
By Elias Yanovsky (1886-____)
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1936, 84 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/ORC00000390
By Arthur T. (Arthur Truman) Semple 1895-
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1942, 54 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/ORC00000306
By J. R. (John Robert) Magness 1894-
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1941, 32 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/CAT87209318
By Bennett, Hugh H. (Hugh Hammond)
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1950, 32 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/ORC00000318
By R. D. (Roy Douglas) Hockensmith 1905- and J. G. (John Gordon) Steele 1905-
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1943, 45 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/ORC00000555
By Everett Eugene Edwards (1900-___) and Wayne D. (Wayne David) Rasmussen (1915-2004)
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1942, 107 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/5420602
By C. V. (Charles Vivion) Whalin
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1919, 64 pages
https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/5420532
By Kelley, M. A. R. (Manly Alexander Raymond)
Publisher: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. 1940, 58 pages
https://catalog.urbandalelibrary.org/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=3.1033.0.0.3&pos=1&cn=493593
Ebook: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9599062/the-mysterious-case-of-rudolf-diesel
Audio: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9596527/the-mysterious-case-of-rudolf-diesel
374 pages
Summary:
September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever. But Diesel never arrives at his destination. He vanishes during the night and headlines around the world wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder. After rising from an impoverished European childhood, Diesel had become a multi-millionaire with his powerful engine that does not require expensive petroleum-based fuel. In doing so, he became not only an international celebrity but also the enemy of two extremely powerful men: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world. The Kaiser wanted the engine to power a fleet of submarines that would finally allow him to challenge Great Britain's Royal Navy. But Diesel had intended for his engine to be used for the betterment of mankind and refused to keep the technology out of the hands of the British or any other nation. For John D. Rockefeller, the engine was nothing less than an existential threat to his vast and lucrative oil empire. As electric lighting began to replace kerosene lamps, Rockefeller's bottom line depended on the world's growing thirst for gasoline to power its automobiles and industries. At the outset of this new age of electricity and oil, Europe stood on the precipice of war. Rudolf Diesel grew increasingly concerned about Germany's rising nationalism and military spending. The inventor was on his way to London to establish a new company that would help Britain improve its failing submarine program when he disappeared. -- From publisher's website.
Publishers Weekly Summary: https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781982169909
Review by Andrea Pitzer: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/09/24/mysterious-case-rudolf-diesel-douglas-brunt/