Now reading...

[AllenLowe]

sounds like my old campaign slogan - only the other way around -

[Van Basten II]

[Christiern]

Give me a call when someone will found on eBay 'AllenLowe for Dummies'.

How about "Dummies for Allen Lowe"?

I've been a member for quite some time.

Back to currently reading, I'm re-reading Bob Wilber's autobiography.

[ghost of miles]

Richard Price, LUSH LIFE.

[jazzbo]

Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten : Nefertiti : Tutankhamen, Boston Museum of Fine Arts catalog and overview, edited by Freed, Markowitz and D'Aurado

[jlhoots]

Richard Price, LUSH LIFE.

Great book IMHO.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Now started reading this

It's my wife's book. But she gave up on page 55, so I'm having a go. I suspect it's rather too full of foot by foot accounts of the battles and, if that's the case, I'll probably give up, too

MG

Didn't give up on this; finished it yesterday evening. Pretty good. Very chilling to read how the British Government was bounced into a war it didn't want by unscrupulous guys who had their own agendas to pursue. And by methods alarmingly similar to those adopted for Iraq.

MG

[Bright Moments]

mary gordon - spending

this is one steamy book!

[A Lark Ascending]

Raced through this in two weeks. A superb collection of accounts from a wide range of witnesses to the Vietnam War. The account by the air stewardess who served on the planes running from California to Japan and then on to Vietnam brought tears to my eyes:

'Definitive' might be over-egging the pudding somewhat.

At present hopping between:

Edited May 19, 2008 by Bev Stapleton

[ghost of miles]

Temporarily set aside LUSH LIFE to read Adrian Tomaine's graphic-novel-in-stories, SHORTCOMINGS (almost as good as Daniel Clowes' GHOST WORLD) and am now in the middle of Pete Hamill's WHY SINATRA MATTERS (a thumbs-up for any other Sinatra fans...a good 200-page treatise that gives a sense of FS's origins and makes sparing but apt use of Hamill's late-period friendship with the Voice).

[Shawn]

I read this years ago and forgot what a fine little book it is.

[Tim McG]

Inheriting the Trade by Tom DeWolf...a childhood friend of mine.

Inheriting the Trade

[paul secor]

Edward P. Jones: The Known World

"So Patterson resigned, took himself back to that English town near the Scottish border where his people had lived for centuries. He spent all the rest of his years as a sheep farmer and became known as a good shepherd, 'a man born to it.'

... Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans."

There are many thoughtful and memorable passages in this novel, but this one stuck with me.

[Tim McG]

Inheriting the Trade by Thomas Norman DeWolf.

Written by a childhood/HS friend of mine.

A must read for those who want to understand the slave trade in America.

[jlhoots]

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine

[BillF]

David Lodge, Deaf Sentence

[rostasi]

[AndrewHill]

Bought this book years ago. Finally getting around to it:

[ghost of miles]

Rick Perlstein, NIXONLAND. Met the author at a party several years ago and he talked about working on this--a very good read so far. Just started it last night, but up till 2 a.m. and pretty much had to make myself put it down and go to bed.

Edited June 6, 2008 by ghost of miles

[kh1958]

In Search of Buddy Bolden--Donald Marquis.

[A Lark Ascending]

Really interesting - Vietnam from the perspective of a Vietnamese. Explains a great deal about the 1945-54 period that had always been misty to me. I'd never realised how brutal the French reconquest was after WWII.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I started reading this a couple of weeks ago.

I've had it for about fifteen years and this is my third time through it. I'm charmed by the quality of the writing and I find his approach, which is more of a cultural history than a political or religious one (though those aspects do come in), to be very enlightening.

So, I'm halfway through it, and this one comes through my door from Amazon

And now I'm reading two!

Stephen Fothergill was a big thorn in my side when I was at work, accusing the Thatcher government of deliberately shunting people off the dole onto incapacity benefit, to make the unemployment figures look better. He was wrong, but we couldn't tell him why. If this book doesn't show that he's worked it out yet, I may tell him now

MG

[poetrylover3]

[poetrylover3]

A difficult read just as The Gulag Archipelago was difficult. The horror of this massive self destruction of the spirit is brought home time and again by the witness of Journals and Letters as well as the objective tone of the narration. The difference between the two works is the deep irony and rage of Solzhenitsyn's book-it is somehow more personal in tone. In an age when there is a widespread attempt to whitewash or distort the historical record we owe it to ourselves and others to master the basic facts of what is otherwise seemingly unthinkable.

[A Lark Ascending]

'The Sacred Willow' got my curious about the Franco-Vietminh War.