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[Jazzmoose]

Can all this pretentious crap; the new Michael Connelly is out!

Edited February 18, 2008 by Jazzmoose

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I ordered this from the library (and they actually BOUGHT it for keeping on their shelves - will nyone else read it?)

Africa's urban past - ed by David Anderson & Richard Rathbone

It's a series of academic papers presented at a conference organised by the School of African and Oriental Studies at London University. I'm about halfway through at the moment and it's very mixed. The low point is a cogent argument for more archaeological research to be done on town walls - clearly important but of little interest to the general reader. And a study of inflation in Lagos between 1914 and 1945 is only a little less uninteresting.

But the high points - an analysis of the religious/ceremonial significance of Mbanza Kongo/Sao Salvador in Angola; the development of Kampala in the context of religious wars; Arusha's battles between the Arusha and the British colonials, as a reult of which the Arusha don't live in Arusha; and, particularly, the revelations about the cluster towns, with no monumental or celebratory architecture in the Middle Niger, which I found fascinating.

But it's clear that there's a big bias in this book. Of 16 chapters about specific towns, only six are not from Anglophone countries - Tunis, Middle Niger towns, Mbanza Kongo and Brazzaville, plus two from Ethiopia. Two from Ethiopia and two from the whole of the former French colonies looks a little unbalanced. "Is there some war between British and French academic historians?" I ask myself. Unfortunately, I don't give myself an answer.

MG

[T.D.]

Can all this pretentious crap; the new Michael Connally is out!

I'm sure I'll read it as soon as the local library gets a copy.

My library fare is heavy on commercial writing like Connolly; purchases for the home shelves run to pretentious crap.

[Jazzmoose]

Can all this pretentious crap; the new Michael Connally is out!

I'm sure I'll read it as soon as the local library gets a copy.

My library fare is heavy on commercial writing like Connolly; purchases for the home shelves run to pretentious crap.

Hmmm...sounds like a great budgeting tool; I have got to start getting back to the library!

[jazzbo]

[ejp626]

Another round of South African literature:

Tsotsi by Fugard (bleaker than the movie version if that seems possible)

Triompf by Van Niekerk

Requiem for Sophiatown

In Corner B

The Palm Wine Drunkard (not S. African literature but apparently quite interesting and I was already in the African library already ...)

Yeah, MG if you're ever in Chicago, you should come visit the African Library housed in the Northwestern Library. It's pretty amazing.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Another round of South African literature:

Tsotsi by Fugard (bleaker than the movie version if that seems possible)

Triompf by Van Niekerk

Requiem for Sophiatown

In Corner B

The Palm Wine Drunkard (not S. African literature but apparently quite interesting and I was already in the African library already ...)

Yeah, MG if you're ever in Chicago, you should come visit the African Library housed in the Northwestern Library. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah, another reason why Britain is a bit more than an unsatisfactory place.

MG

[jlhoots]

Daniel Silva: The Kill Artist

[jlhoots]

Ward Just: Forgetfulness

[BillF]

Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.

The story of the State Department-sponsored jazz tours with social and political analysis.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.

The story of the State Department-sponsored jazz tours with social and political analysis.

That looks interesting. I was wondering about this a few months ago.

MG

[BillF]

Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.

The story of the State Department-sponsored jazz tours with social and political analysis.

That looks interesting. I was wondering about this a few months ago.

MG

Yes, ghost of miles did a radio show on this which you can find at http://nightlights.blogs.wfiu.org/2005/04/...o-the-cold-war/

[BillF]

Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.

The story of the State Department-sponsored jazz tours with social and political analysis.

This is turning out to be interesting, and sometimes entertaining, reading. This anecdote appeals to me:

Dave Brubeck's sons, Darius (aged 11) and Michael (10), accompanied him on a 1958 tour that included Poland and Germany. In Stettin a promoter decided to take advantage of the musical family and sent the boys onstage to play, although they had never performed publicly with their father. With Michael on drums, Darius on piano began to improvise right away, until Brubeck whispered, "Play the melody, stupid!" The next day, a German newspaper carried the headline:"Spiel die Melodie, Dummkopf!"

[jazzbo]

I'm starting a Robert E. Howard kick, for nostalgia and comfort.

"The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1: The Shadow Kingdoms"

[poetrylover3]

Charlatan by Brock Pope. This is one of the most hilarious and interesting reads I've had in quite awhile. It's the story of the great medical quack "Dr" John Brinkley, who "restored" faded male virility by surgically transplanting goat glands during the 1920s and 30s.(Who would have thought that this could be big business?). He revolutionized modern politics when he ran for Governor of Kansas and was an early pioneer of radio who started a million watt pirate radio station at the Mexican border (he was then headquartered in Del Rio, TX) peddling his quack nostrums. For entertainment, Dr Brinkley offered a steady diet of country music including The Carter Family and even preached sermons on Sunday. Henry Fielding wrote Jonathan Wild in order to prove that "greatness and goodness have no part in each other". He would have loved Charlatan.

[ejp626]

Basically have wrapped up my survey of S. African literature. Probably the biggest surprise was Can Themba's Requiem for Sophiatown. The guy can write and had a sense of humor about what were just appalling conditions. Probably his own survival mechanism. Am still slogging through Triomf, which has its moments, but on the whole is pretty dark.

After this, I want to wrap up Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (got about halfway through when I had to take a break), Jesse Ball's Samedi the Deafness and maybe a couple of short story collections. I'm leaning towards Wanda Coleman's Jazz and 12 O'Clock Tales and ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.

[jlhoots]

Robert Mayer: Dreams Of Ada

Richard Price: Lush Life

[Kalo]

Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter.

My man has still got it! Don't miss his Edwin Mullhouse. If you dig that, proceed from there...

[BruceH]

That's the new, 13-story collection, right?

Myself, I'm re-reading Movie Love In the Fifties by James Harvey. In the years since it's release I've tended just to reread chapter 2, "Out of the Past," which really stands on its own. The rest of the book is well worth reconsideration I'm finding. Harvey is a perceptive writer; so what if his books don't have a strong narrative thrust?

[Kalo]

That's the new, 13-story collection, right?

Yup!

Myself, I'm re-reading Movie Love In the Fifties by James Harvey. In the years since it's release I've tended just to reread chapter 2, "Out of the Past," which really stands on its own. The rest of the book is well worth reconsideration I'm finding. Harvey is a perceptive writer; so what if his books don't have a strong narrative thrust?

Harvey's one of the best. Very rereadable. His book Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges is my favorite, but Movie Love is excellent as well. I hope he has another in the pipeline.

[king ubu]

reading Ludwik Fleck's sociological (actually "wissenssoziologisch") books:

plus another one collecting some short essays.

funny discussion above... that book also frightened the shit out of me when I was a kid... and my little sister was a thumb-sucker...

here's the cover for the german edition (with original name, too...)

[jazzbo]

Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition on Inner Knowing, Stephan A. Hoeller

[BruceH]

Harvey's one of the best. Very rereadable. His book Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges is my favorite, but Movie Love is excellent as well. I hope he has another in the pipeline.

Yeah, for years I've thought that that particular book is one of my all-time favorite "Screwball Comedy" books because it's one of the very few to get the subject RIGHT. (Arguably the only one.)

[A Lark Ascending]

Easily the most powerful book I've read in many a year - a doorstop I read in two rapid chunks during 2007. A harrowing read - Fisk presents horror after horror and then piles on another.

What amazed me were the things I'd completely forgotten - the shooting down of the Iranian airliner in the 80s, for example.

Fisk is amazing. Two things particularly stick in mind - his flying into Baghdad in 2003 just before the attack! And the amazing story of an Israeli rocket attack on a vehicle - Fisk got a bit of the casing of the missile with the serial number on, smuggled it to the States, booked a meeting at the missile manufacturers under a pretext, listened to the execs talking in sanitised jargon about their 'product'...and then produced the fragment out of his bag and told them what it had done to people!

*********

A fine novel about a young lad growing up in the States in the 50s and 60s trying to reconstruct what happened to his parents in Czechoslovakia during WWII - centred round the Heydrich assassination:

*********

Really enjoying this - it's had me exploring in all sorts of places from the 20s to the 50s. Not so interested in the Miles/Coltrane/Mingus chapters I've got to at present, simply because I've read so much else about this period. The last few chapters will be interesting, seeing his interpretation of more recent music.

[WorldB3]

Easily the most powerful book I've read in many a year - a doorstop I read in two rapid chunks during 2007. A harrowing read - Fisk presents horror after horror and then piles on another.

What amazed me were the things I'd completely forgotten - the shooting down of the Iranian airliner in the 80s, for example.

Fisk is amazing. Two things particularly stick in mind - his flying into Baghdad in 2003 just before the attack! And the amazing story of an Israeli rocket attack on a vehicle - Fisk got a bit of the casing of the missile with the serial number on, smuggled it to the States, booked a meeting at the missile manufacturers under a pretext, listened to the execs talking in sanitised jargon about their 'product'...and then produced the fragment out of his bag and told them what it had done to people!

*********

I am on my third chunk of that right now, I get to a point where I start getting angry and have to put it down.

During the break I started and finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

Currently reading Jack Kerouac - On The Road before I finish the Fisk while also flipping through:

I am a lot happier when I stick to fiction.