Posted by dahsdebater on 2/1/2020 9:04:00 AM (view original):
I think I would take Cat's Cradle or Mother Night over Player Piano. I know I would take them over Slaughterhouse Five. Never understood how that became his 'high school classic' instead of Breakfast of Champions, which seems to me to be the obvious choice.

Cat's Cradle ! That was the really great one. I forgot and had it confused with the Sirens of Titan (I read these books in the early to mid 70s, so a bit of tolerance for my memory here).

You are quite right. Having trouble remembering which one was Mother Night. But I agree that Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, were both much better books than Slaughterhouse Five. I think the latter caught on because of the theme of war or something, but as a work it is not quite as good as those others.

Times Books has a series of books on the american prsidents called the american presidents -gabba gabba hey.
every president through bush ( 2 )....they started around 2000....each book is about 180 pages..concise nuts and bolts.......about the presidencies.
meticulouly researched with great bibliography and index and chronological milestones.
diverse historians and some others are selected authors.....examples - robert dallek.....kevin phillips......garry wills......john s.d. eisenhower....douglas brinkley.........tom wicker.......
the general editors are the preminent arthur schlessinger...and sean wilentz.
a whole collection is like an encyclopedia set.

Nice to know about dino27, thanks ! And yes, it's a first rate group of authors. Wow.

thank you italyprof and welcome back to the great space age league which you dreamed up and founded...

a book recommended for Laramiebob.

The indian world of george washington - colin g. calloway - 2018.....the extremely distinguished Oxford Press.
highly touted by alan taylor who is now to the american revolution era what james mcpherson is to the civil war era.
about the relationship between washington and the native leaders of irioquois confederacy, lenape, miami, creek, deleware tribes...shingas..bloody fellow...little turtle..joseph brant etc.

if a book is published by oxford press probably a keeper.

TY Dino!

Sounds interesting.

In the book I'm now reading is a segment on the Iroquois Federation.

Turns out, parts of our OWN founding principles and documents were based on the framework of the Iroquois Confederation.
It's a tragedy of history that WE learned so little from the peoples who lived on this continent (in global harmony!) prior to our ascendance.
It remains to this day OUR loss.

Now, we seem to be repeating the mistakes of the mid 1800's.

Ignorance and arrogance---the hallmarks of OUR civilization----- will certainly be our downfall.

War for Armageddon: The Omnibus (Warhammer 40,000)

Grant by Chernow; I'm about 1/3 of the way through the 1000 page monster but really enjoying it so far. Thank god for audio books - I have the hard copy but it's like holding a brick so I would say I've listened to the majority of it. I will definitely check out Chernow's book on Washington after this.

I also recently picked up a bunch of the "high school lit"/"required reading" books I never actually read - Slaughterhouse Five, 1984, A Clockwork Orange. I circle back every few years to Hemingway and Kerouac so I may do that again soon as well. On this 20th century American lit kick, I never really loved Steinbeck or Fitzgerald but I might have to give them another shot.

You likely should.

I had never really "got" Steinbeck........... but then I read East of Eden............. masterful.
I hadn't really known Steinbeck could do historical fiction. But IMO, East of Eden was, well historical AND lovely.
Fine read!

You will appreciate those books more now. I actually read those in high school just the kind of guy I am, no judgement, lol, but I should read all three again. I remember very little about Slaughterhouse 5 also remember very little about 1984 other than what has been reinforced over the intervening years but I do remember Clockwork Orange, never read anything like it before or since, that language, right up there with Tolkien, makes you wonder what kind of man Anthony Burgess was.

"Why Liberalism Failed" by Patrick Deneen.

So, why does a Marxist love a book by a Catholic conservative?

Well, because he is right. This book is not about the failure of American liberals. Or at least not ONLY about the failure of their philosophical project, but about the failure of Liberalism as a way of life, including classical Liberalism, or what most conservatives call ...Conservatism, (including the two steroid-enhanced versions of liberalism and conservatism - postmodernism on the left, and libertarianism or Ayn Randism on the right).

In other words, this is a rare work of great scope, great integrity, great courage, that shows unflinchingly that the whole liberal project of basing human society on a concept of an abstract, disconnected individual existing in a world without any community, any social attributes, family, ethnicity, nationality, gender etc. as a basis for universal rights could only 1) undermine all forms of community, 2) become a self-fulfllling prophecy as trying to put it into practice isolated us all from all connections that might maintain our sense of place, belonging, comfort, solidarity, and fulfillment, and so 3) isolate us making it easier for us all to fall prey to 4) the global market and big corporations and 5) as the presumed solution to that predation, a large, centralized, ever less-democratic, technocratic and bureacratic national state.

In other words, liberals have succeeded ONLY in winning the sexual revolution cultural parts of their agenda, while the parts that involve greater equality, more economic democracy and a stronger voice at work have gone in reverse, while conservatives have only succeeded in the part of their agenda that involves freeing the rich and business and finance to exploit people, work and resources without mercy, remorse, limits, taxes or regulations, while their social agenda of restoring the family, community, religious standards, etc. has gone nowhere.

Deneen shows why and how this has happened, and why it is no accident, liberalism was set up from the time of the Founding Fathers on to work that way.

But as liberalism now destroys even the liberal arts, as only the business, finance and technical areas are seen as worth studying, meaning the very bases of civilization are undermined by liberalism's logical outcome, the jig is up.

This work is one of the most important I have read in a long time. It is time to find new ways to base society on community, rather than the market, corporations or the state, on communities rather than abstract individuals who presumably have all the rights they could want but have no power to affect anything and so are in fact helpless before the forces of the market, big business and government bureaucracies.

Well worth your read. Suggested accompaniment: the works of Wendell Berry.

Ahhhhhhh, Wendall Berry and Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.

3 sides of a dice.

Posted by TwoBuckChuck on 2/6/2020 7:09:00 PM (view original):
community is what you think it is



my doggy spot under the porch where the bed bugs creep

my continent my river plain my geographique

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." - Humpty Dumpty to Alice in "Alilce Through the Looking-Glass".

See, the problem is that if your definition of community is "everyone looking at their cellphones, not talking, or communicating with others in the coffee shop, park, college campus, workplace or bus stop where they all happen to physically be at the time" - then your definition of water might as well be "land".