[rtpoe]

Time to revive this thread - lots of new people may not have seen it.

"One Pitch Away: The Players' Stories of the 1986 League Championships and World Series" by Mike Sowell. This was the year the Angels came within one out of the pennant, and the Mets beat Houston for the NL title in a 16 inning thriller. Then the Mets beat the Red Sox to win the World Series ("Everybody remembers the ball through Bill Buckner's legs. Not the fact that the guy had over 2,700 hits in his career." - Gary Carter). After a recap of the games, Sowell checks in with key players to see how they've come to terms with victory and defeat several years later.

"Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants" by Robert Sullivan. Not as gross as one might think. Sullivan sets up camp at the end of an alley in lower Manhattan to watch city rats in their natural habitat. He winds up (in addition to studying the rats) musing on who the streets are named for, rats in NYC history, and the business of pest control (he spends a lot of time with pest control specialists and people from the city' health dept.). A fascinating insight to Rattus norvegicus that makes you respect them as living creatures. Almost.

rtpoe  

[Scarlet]

  Last week I read two of the Pern books: Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern and  Dragonflight.
and now I am begining Dragonquest.
All of these books are by a very talented writer, Anne McCaffrey    

[Zatoichi]

Rereading, for the nth time, Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings (one of those books where you find something new everytime you read it).

[homevintner]

Since I was having 'puter probs for a while, I caught up on some of my reading.

 H.M.S. Ulysses  by Alistair MacLean
 Midnight Never Comes ,  The Keys of Hell , and  Year of the Tiger  by Jack Higgins
 Black Thursday  by Martin Caidin
 March Upcountry, March to the Sea, and  March to the Stars  by David Weber and John Ringo
 1632  by Eric Flint
 1633  by Eric Flint and David Weber
 Sanctuary  by Lynn Abbey
 The Rescue by Steven Trent Smith
 The Real Hornblower, the Life and Times of Admiral Sir James Gordon, GCB  by Bryan Perrett. PE might find that one interesting.

Currently working on  In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign  by Leon Wolf.
 

[Palomine]

Working again on "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It's a non-Eurocentric review of world history. More objectively academic than overtly leftist, it seems like it'll be excellent reading, particularly if you enjoy history sans most of the usual revisionist "the victors write the history books" veneer. Link to buy here.



It's an amazing time we live in, where a person can obtain THIS much info and analysis on such an expansive topic, delivered to your door for less than nine bucks!    

[rtpoe]

Interesting, Palomine, because I thought it *was* Eurocentric. After all, he tries to explain why it was that Europe came to dominate the world. (I say it has to do with accidents of geography; I am willing to elaborate on that if you like)

Be that as it may....

The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man's Guide to Chivalry by Brad Miner. An entertaining look at what it means to be a "gentleman" in the 21st century, and a plea for the revival of the concept (if not gentlemen themselves). Lots of historical anecdotes from the "Age of Chivalry" and the Titanic, and references from everything from the Boy Scouts to Emily Post:

"Far more important than any dictum of mere etiquitte is the fundamental code of honor, without strict observance of which no man, no matter how 'polished', can be considered a gentleman." - Emily Post, Etiquitte, 1922.

rtpoe

[Scarlet]

  I am currently reading the third book,Circus of the Damned, in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series by Laurel K. Hamilton.
 

[Hentaibee]

I'm devouring the works of Kafka that I hadnt read for study yet.

[Palomine]

Quote:
Interesting, Palomine, because I thought it *was* Eurocentric. After all, he tries to explain why it was that Europe came to dominate the world. (I say it has to do with accidents of geography; I am willing to elaborate on that if you like)

Be that as it may....  

I haven't finished it yet, so I can't comment from experience. However, in many regards European cultures have come to dominate large areas of the world (economically, culturally, geographically, etc...) ...that's not contestable. However, this book would appear to take a much larger view as to the why and how such things came to be, and judging only by what I've read so far it DOES seem to take a very broad view of other culture's involvement in various processes AND in other circumstances INCLUDING 'accidents of geography.'

I'll know more when I'm done... but it would look as if rather than glorifying European accomplishments, "Guns Germs and Steel" explains how/why the way things have come to pass may have been, in some respects, inevitable (as you suggest).

Added later:

So as not to make you wait til I'm done (not sure if you've already read it OR you were saying that you heard it was Euro-centric), I skimmed through it a bit more and it seems CERTAIN that it is not a traditional Euro-centric recitation of events and their causes... rather than try to sum it up myself, here's a quote from a review by Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford from the back cover:

Quote:
 
"This is a brilliantly writen, passionate, whirlwind tour through 13,000 years of history on all the continents---a short history of everything about everybody. The origins of empires, religion, writing, crops and guns are all here. By at last providing a convincing explanation for the differing develoments of human societies on different continents, the book demolishes the grounds for racist theories of history. Its account of how the modern world was formed is full of lessons for our own future. After reading the first two pages, you won't be able to put it down."

This book was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and was also a national bestseller.

I think you'd like it rtpoe, if you haven't already read it of course.        

[IceOwl]

Just finished these two:

Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein

and

Chronicle Of A War Foretold: How MidEast Peace Became America's Fight by Norman Spector, former Canadian ambassador to Israel

Both are collections of news articles by their respective authors.

Fences and Windows is about the barriers put up by so-called free trade and globalization and the way they've been implemented, and what the people affected by these policies are doing to take back their lives from the bankers and economists that have made their jobs and rights disappear.

Chronicle of a War Foretold is about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and is mainly a collection of Norman Spector's views of what has happened there in the past decade or so.

The book I'm reading right now is Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and The Myth of Converging Values by Michael Adams, CEO of Environics Canada, which is a national statistics research company. So far, it shows some very interesting divergences between Canadian and American values. If you want to know what truly makes Canadians and Americans different, pick this one up.
 

[rtpoe]

Yes, I have read it, Palomine, but it was a while ago.

I guess we are having different interpretations of the term "Euro-centric". I'm thinking that it's Euro-centric in that Diamond looks for the underlying reasons why it was European nations and not others that came to eventually dominate the globe. But I concur that this is not the traditional meaning of the term, in that Diamond does not try to say that the dominance means that European civilization is therefore "better" than any other. They just had the right situation to give them a "leg up" on everyone else.

rtpoe

[Palomine]

Your appraisal seems to jibe with what I gather thus far. Even in the prolog, the author provides anecdotal evidence as to why individuals in (what are often called) third-world countries may actually be better-equipped (intellectually) than their European counterparts.

[homevintner]

Break out the paddles...
Set 200 joules...
CLEAR!!!

 ZAP!!!

We have a pulse.

This was too good of a thread to let it stay dead.

I haven't been on line as much for the past several months, so I've been hitting the books. So, without further delay, here is the best of what I've read in the meantime.

 Tigers In The Mud  by Otto Carius - An excellent memior by a heavy  panzer commander
 The Sea Hunters II  by Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo
 Natural History of the Black Hills and Badlands  by Sven G. Froiland
 The Tank Killers  by Harry Yeide - A history of U.S. tank destroyer units
 Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs  by Michael Novacek -The American expiditions to the Gobi Desert from 1990-1994
 They Are Soldiers  by Harold Coyle
 In Danger's Hour  by Douglas Reeman
 Pride Runs Deep  by R. Cameron Cooke - A well written novel that I didn't want to put down
 Grantville Gazette  edited and created by Eric Flint
 The Battle of Cowpens  by Kenneth Roberts
 Panzer Aces II  by Franz Kurowski
 Red Scorpion - The War Patrols of the USS Rasher  by Peter Sasgen - son of one of the plank holders

[rtpoe]

Just finished "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter L. Bernstein.

A pretty good overview of the history of the science of probabilty, which segues into a history of economics. I guess the underlying thread is the search for the answer to the question of "What is an acceptable risk?"

Very light on the actual math, so your brain won't hurt... too much.

rtpoe

[prinz]

Just finnished The Da Vinci Code  by Dan Brown..pretty good read..cheers