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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 4, 2022 18:34:56 GMT -5
 Grant by Ron Chernow. One of the great effects of the overdue (though still not complete) demise of "Lost Cause" revisionism, is the rehabilitation of Ulysses Grant. I'm not convinced that there's any American historical figure from the Civil War and Reconstruction whose legacy as been as sullied as that of Grant by the last 150 plus years of Confederate apologia. Chernow gives us a balanced look at a complex figure who snatched himself from ignominy, scaled to the apex of fame and power in the U.S., only to have his legacy and character besmirched for over a century by professional apologists for a defeated band of traitors. Chernow, is known for his long, detailed biographies winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of George Washington and for his acclaimed biography of Alexander Hamilton. In Grant, Chernow finds a General who rose to heights not seen since Washington, but with a start that was almost incalculably lower. I've seen this book called a hagiography by some, but that rings hollow. Chernow shows Grant's flaws. There's no question that Grant struggled with alcohol and that it very clearly affected his early army career. It's equally clear that he surrounded himself with people who, by and large, were able to help him abstain from drinking and that many, if not most, of the reports of his drunken escapades after at least 1860 were fabrications. It's also very clear that Grant was incredibly trusting to the point of naivety when it came to friends, family and fellow officers. It was this, along with a somewhat ludicrous trust in wealthy businessmen, that lead to most of his personal financial problems and a number of the scandals of his Presidential administration. And at the risk of indulging in a bit of "whataboutism" those scandals were endemic to the entire Gilded Age, not just to the Grant Administration. While I appreciated the look in to Grant's early life and the Civil War years, what really stood out to me was the look at his presidency. Recent polls of historians have seen Grant moving up the list of Presidents and there's a good reason. Grant was instrumental in helping to ensure rights for citizens who had had none...and far too soon after he left office would lose them. To quote from Chernow, "In 1870 he oversaw creation of the Justice Department, its first duty to bring thousands of anti-Klan indictments. By 1872 the monster had been slain, although its spirit resurfaced as the nation retreated from Reconstruction’s lofty aims. Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, and landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1875 act outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations. His pursuit of justice for southern blacks was at times imperfect, but his noble desire to protect them never wavered." This is a very long book and I read it, by and large, while waiting for Court cases to be heard. It's worth the time and the effort. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 4, 2022 21:31:31 GMT -5
This is definitely on my list... I really liked Chernow's Hamilton bio... it's a bit of a brick though.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 4, 2022 21:53:56 GMT -5
This is definitely on my list... I really liked Chernow's Hamilton bio... it's a bit of a brick though. This one clocks in at about 250 pages more then Hamilton. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 8, 2022 18:36:34 GMT -5
Midnight Riot
by Ben Aaronovitch
I was inspired into picking this up after reading one of the comics... seemed like it would be a good series. (The comic was a bit confusing, what with no world building available). It sort of seemed like it would be a British version of the Dresden Files.
It turned out to be 100% on target with that... it's VERY MUCH a British version of the Dresden Files, and definitely in a good way. Peter Grant might not be as good a wizard as Harry Dresden, but he has a similar wit for sure, and while he actually IS a policeman, working in the Supernatural dept makes him just as much of an outsider as Harry was in his consultant. He's got a human almost-girlfriend, a supernatural one, and while the supernatural characters are Rivers instead of Fairies, the similarities are all there.
The story was nothing spectacular, but was a good opening to the series, with mystery that wasn't particularly twisty or hard to figure out, but kept me reading all the same.
I hope for Peter's sake Mr. Aaronovtich doesn't have a burning hatred of his main character like Jim Butcher seems to.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jan 10, 2022 5:09:46 GMT -5
FoxDubravka Ugresic, 2017 (English translation, 2018)  This the most recent novel by my favorite Croatian writer (although she might chafe at that description, given that she's been living in self-imposed exile in the Netherlands since the early 1990s). This one is really hard to summarize. A few things you should know about Ugresic (Ugrešić): she's also a prolific essayist and commentator (so you can find quite a few volumes of her collected articles in translation if you put her name in, say, Amazon's search page), she's a literary scholar who has often taught at the university level, she's one of the most knowledgeable non-Russian experts on the early 20th century Russian avant-garde, she's harshly critical of the nationalism that led to Yugoslavia's break-up and she's got an often quite subtle yet wicked sense of humor. The book is divided into six sections; the first one starts with a contemplation of how stories come to be written, and that underlying theme runs through the entire book. Similarly, she briefly discusses the metaphor of the fox in folklore (not just Slavic, but in general) and ties this to the production of fiction. Now all of this makes it sound like this is a scholarly text, but despite talking about many real life people (like several Russian writers, including Nabakov), this is, in fact, a work of fiction, and a lot of the scholars and literary personalities she recounts having discussions with are actually made up (I was constantly googling some of the names to keep track - and Ugresic actually has a brief discussion about the internet, which she describes as a "non-hierarchical archive" that makes finding things out almost too easy). Ultimately, I have to say that despite many beautifully written and sometimes hilarious sections and scenes, I was a bit disappointed with this one - which puts me in a minority, as most of the reviews you'll find online are glowing and full of superlatives. For me, I appreciated what she was doing, but I found the execution wanting at places, as there are big chunks of the book that read like a dry comp-lit article in a scholarly journal. That's definitely not the case for her other fiction. Otherwise, the cover above is for the English translation, which I'm sure is quite good, although I read it in Croatian: 
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Post by berkley on Jan 10, 2022 10:10:49 GMT -5
FoxDubravka Ugresic, 2017 (English translation, 2018) This the most recent novel by my favorite Croatian writer (although she might chafe at that description, given that she's been living in self-imposed exile in the Netherlands since the early 1990s). This one is really hard to summarize. A few things you should know about Ugresic (Ugrešić): she's also a prolific essayist and commentator (so you can find quite a few volumes of her collected articles in translation if you put her name in, say, Amazon's search page), she's a literary scholar who has often taught at the university level, she's one of the most knowledgeable non-Russian experts on the early 20th century Russian avant-garde, she's harshly critical of the nationalism that led to Yugoslavia's break-up and she's got an often quite subtle yet wicked sense of humor. The book is divided into six sections; the first one starts with a contemplation of how stories come to be written, and that underlying theme runs through the entire book. Similarly, she briefly discusses the metaphor of the fox in folklore (not just Slavic, but in general) and ties this to the production of fiction. Now all of this makes it sound like this is a scholarly text, but despite talking about many real life people (like several Russian writers, including Nabakov), this is, in fact, a work of fiction, and a lot of the scholars and literary personalities she recounts having discussions with are actually made up (I was constantly googling some of the names to keep track - and Ugresic actually has a brief discussion about the internet, which she describes as a "non-hierarchical archive" that makes finding things out almost too easy). Ultimately, I have to say that despite many beautifully written and sometimes hilarious sections and scenes, I was a bit disappointed with this one - which puts me in a minority, as most of the reviews you'll find online are glowing and full of superlatives. For me, I appreciated what she was doing, but I found the execution wanting at places, as there are big chunks of the book that read like a dry comp-lit article in a scholarly journal. That's definitely not the case for her other fiction. Otherwise, the cover above is for the English translation, which I'm sure is quite good, although I read it in Croatian:
I have a couple of her earlier books on my to-read list, must have a look for them soon. Fording the Stream of Consciousness was one, and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Is either of those a good one to start with, or do you have any other recommendations?
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jan 10, 2022 11:10:20 GMT -5
I have a couple of her earlier books on my to-read list, must have a look for them soon. Fording the Stream of Consciousness was one, and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Is either of those a good one to start with, or do you have any other recommendations?
Both of those are quite good; the former in particular I really enjoyed - its setting is a conference of writers and literary critics in Zagreb in the 1980s, and it's sort of structured as a thriller (i.e., the conference is actually a cover for a meeting of some super-secret global cabal of writers), but it's in fact more of a satire, in which she pokes fun at pretentious writers, literary scholarship and critics, among other things. "Museum" is also quite good, but far more somber in tone. Like I indicated in my post above, I've generally enjoyed all of her books. That's why this last one, Fox, mildly disappointed me, as I don't think it matches the quality of her earlier fiction.
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Post by berkley on Jan 10, 2022 18:38:37 GMT -5
I have a couple of her earlier books on my to-read list, must have a look for them soon. Fording the Stream of Consciousness was one, and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Is either of those a good one to start with, or do you have any other recommendations?
Both of those are quite good; the former in particular I really enjoyed - its setting is a conference of writers and literary critics in Zagreb in the 1980s, and it's sort of structured as a thriller (i.e., the conference is actually a cover for a meeting of some super-secret global cabal of writers), but it's in fact more of a satire, in which she pokes fun at pretentious writers, literary scholarship and critics, among other things. "Museum" is also quite good, but far more somber in tone. Like I indicated in my post above, I've generally enjoyed all of her books. That's why this last one, Fox, mildly disappointed me, as I don't think it matches the quality of her earlier fiction.
That's good to hear. I'll keep an eye out for both. My "modern" reading both in comics and in prose books has progressed to the early 1990s, but I don't mind dipping back into the late '80s now and then as long I keep going forward in a general way.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 12, 2022 0:02:34 GMT -5
I finished reading Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC by Reed Tucker last night.  It was an interesting read, more a synthesis of years of other's people research and writing than anything original though. Tucker has a lively writing style and presents a fairly cohesive narrative (it does skip around a bit and jump back and forth in time as he tries to organize each chapter thematically but present the overall flow chronologically which tend to work against each other. He presents a lot of info, but it's mostly other people's research. It reads like a well-organized and written research paper done by an undergrad (complete with footnotes for every quote he used, which is essentially what each chapter is, a collection of quotes or paraphrases of quotes taken from other sources pieced together with commentary and connective tissue provided by Tucker. I don't know if Tucker brought anything new to the conversation, but he did collect a boatload of info on the topic printed in various sources over a large span of years and put them together in one centralized location in a readable and interesting manner forming a solid starting point for anyone exploring the topic or wishing to discuss it. If you're interested in the topic and are not steeped in years of fanzines and other material about comics, it's well worth reading; if you are already familiar with the material, it's a good overview, but you won't really learn anything new. The last couple of chapters (on the rise of super-hero movies & television and the the installation of corporate culture in the comics industry) may be the only place where Tucker puts forward any kind of original thesis (annotated and supported by quotes from other sources as any research paper does of course) that super-heroes may have outgrown monthly print comics and will transcend that medium for others, as will Marvel and DC, leaving those print comics as an artifact of comics history, not the medium it moves forward into the future with, and that is a sign of growth not something to be lamented. -M I finally got around to reading this. I’m a bit over 1/4 of the way through and I’m about ready to give up. I would not say it’s actively bad. There’s just absolutely nothing new here. I suppose if you were pretty new to comics it would be interesting, but I’ve already read the majority (probably the vast majority) of Tucker’s cited works. And then there’s the occasional snide remark that has thrown me off. The latest was about cons giving readers “living in their parents basements” a chance to meet up. I don’t need that from a “serious” work. I’m taking a break but my gut says this will be a rare “did not finish.” |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 12, 2022 23:16:19 GMT -5
The Ring of Fire by Shirley ROusseau Murphy  I got this a while back at an Annie's Book Stop... the cover grabbed my attention (Not good, exactly, but definitely attention getting). The book was pretty similar. This book is very.... 70s. There are alot of drug references, and long flowing descriptions of caves and plants. There's a small, generic bit of plot about a world oppressed, but there's just ALOT of description. It seems the author has a long running cozy mystery series... perhaps those are better.
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Post by berkley on Jan 13, 2022 1:26:36 GMT -5
I finished reading Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC by Reed Tucker last night. It was an interesting read, more a synthesis of years of other's people research and writing than anything original though. Tucker has a lively writing style and presents a fairly cohesive narrative (it does skip around a bit and jump back and forth in time as he tries to organize each chapter thematically but present the overall flow chronologically which tend to work against each other. He presents a lot of info, but it's mostly other people's research. It reads like a well-organized and written research paper done by an undergrad (complete with footnotes for every quote he used, which is essentially what each chapter is, a collection of quotes or paraphrases of quotes taken from other sources pieced together with commentary and connective tissue provided by Tucker. I don't know if Tucker brought anything new to the conversation, but he did collect a boatload of info on the topic printed in various sources over a large span of years and put them together in one centralized location in a readable and interesting manner forming a solid starting point for anyone exploring the topic or wishing to discuss it. If you're interested in the topic and are not steeped in years of fanzines and other material about comics, it's well worth reading; if you are already familiar with the material, it's a good overview, but you won't really learn anything new. The last couple of chapters (on the rise of super-hero movies & television and the the installation of corporate culture in the comics industry) may be the only place where Tucker puts forward any kind of original thesis (annotated and supported by quotes from other sources as any research paper does of course) that super-heroes may have outgrown monthly print comics and will transcend that medium for others, as will Marvel and DC, leaving those print comics as an artifact of comics history, not the medium it moves forward into the future with, and that is a sign of growth not something to be lamented. -M I finally got around to reading this. I’m a bit over 1/4 of the way through and I’m about ready to give up. I would not say it’s actively bad. There’s just absolutely nothing new here. I suppose if you were pretty new to comics it would be interesting, but I’ve already read the majority (probably the vast majority) of Tucker’s cited works. And then there’s the occasional snide remark that has thrown me off. The latest was about cons giving readers “living in their parents basements” a chance to meet up. I don’t need that from a “serious” work. I’m taking a break but my gut says this will be a rare “did not finish.” That doesn't sound encouraging. I would question the whole premise, really: for me, as far as the creative side of things goes, the Marvel vs DC opposition only made sense up until the 80s or so. Certainly by the 2000s I find their product much the same. Things like Vertigo aside, of course - i'm thinking more of their respective fictional, superhero-centred universes, the DCU and the MU.
Re 'cons giving readers “living in their parents basements” a chance to meet up', is he talking about the 70s or more recent years?
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 13, 2022 1:34:59 GMT -5
I finally got around to reading this. I’m a bit over 1/4 of the way through and I’m about ready to give up. I would not say it’s actively bad. There’s just absolutely nothing new here. I suppose if you were pretty new to comics it would be interesting, but I’ve already read the majority (probably the vast majority) of Tucker’s cited works. And then there’s the occasional snide remark that has thrown me off. The latest was about cons giving readers “living in their parents basements” a chance to meet up. I don’t need that from a “serious” work. I’m taking a break but my gut says this will be a rare “did not finish.” That doesn't sound encouraging. I would question the whole premise, really: for me, as far as the creative side of things goes, the Marvel vs DC opposition only made sense up until the 80s or so. Certainly by the 2000s I find their product much the same. Things like Vertigo aside, of course - i'm thinking more of their respective fictional, superhero-centred universes, the DCU and the MU.
Re 'cons giving readers “living in their parents basements” a chance to meet up', is he talking about the 70s or more recent years?
He was talking about the 70s at the time. It’s really the dismissiveness and stereotyping in what’s supposed to be a serious work that set my teeth on edge. |
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Post by berkley on Jan 13, 2022 2:58:25 GMT -5
That doesn't sound encouraging. I would question the whole premise, really: for me, as far as the creative side of things goes, the Marvel vs DC opposition only made sense up until the 80s or so. Certainly by the 2000s I find their product much the same. Things like Vertigo aside, of course - i'm thinking more of their respective fictional, superhero-centred universes, the DCU and the MU.
Re 'cons giving readers “living in their parents basements” a chance to meet up', is he talking about the 70s or more recent years?
He was talking about the 70s at the time. It’s really the dismissiveness and stereotyping in what’s supposed to be a serious work that set my teeth on edge. I agree about the attitude: it comes frm a place of contempt and I think ultimately of insecurity - the comics fan who's a bit ashamed of being a comics fan and wants to separate himself from those other losers.
But I also think that if he was talking about the 70s he was probably off the mark factually as well: the whole cliché of adults continuing to live in their parents' homes is a relatively recent one, and came into being because of socio-economic changes that have taken place over the last 30 or 40 years - basically, for those who complete some kind of post-secondary education, student debt has sky-rocketed and there are fewer professional opportunities; while for those who don't - well, we all know what's happened to manufacturing jobs and other forms of unskilled labour the last 40 years or so.
All of that was just barely beginning in the 1970s and although where I was from there weren't any cons to go to, so I can't speak from experience, I don't think there were all that many adult comics fans "living in their parents' basements" at that time, especially compared to now. My guess would be that most fans you'd meet at cons back then were university students (who thus had every right to live in their parents' homes without stigmatisation) or perhaps even still in high school.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,222 
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Post by Confessor on Jan 13, 2022 22:03:35 GMT -5
The Ring of Fire by Shirley ROusseau Murphy I got this a while back at an Annie's Book Stop... the cover grabbed my attention (Not good, exactly, but definitely attention getting). The book was pretty similar. This book is very.... 70s. Yeah, I really love that art! It totally smacks of 70s fantasy and table-top role-playing games. I would definitely have picked that up based on the cover too. |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,222
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Post by Confessor on Jan 14, 2022 1:57:31 GMT -5
Bomber Boys by Patrick Bishop.  I'd been wanting to read this book for years. A friend of mine recommended it to me about a decade ago, but for whatever reason I never got around to picking up a copy. Fortuitously, my Mother bought me a copy for my birthday late last year and I just got round to reading it. I've long been fascinated by the USAAF 8th Air Force's time in England during World War II, and consider myself something of an armchair expert on the subject, but my knowledge about the RAF's bombing campaign against Nazi Germany is woefully lacking (outside of the general knowledge that anyone interested in WW2 would have). Thankfully, this book has changed all that. The structure of Bomber Boys is loosely chronological, but a number of the chapters do focus on just one particular aspect of these painfully young men's lives, such as how each bomber crew coalesced, the crew's attitudes towards Bomber Command's shockingly high attrition rate (which was higher than for soldiers in the Battle of the Somme BTW), their leave time on the Home Front etc. What this approach does is bring to life in vivid detail what, in a lesser author's hands, might have been a rather dry account with limited interest to anyone not already into military history. Bishop is clearly sympathetic towards these boys (and they really were little more than that); night after night, they risked death in their cramped, freezing aircraft, to take the battle to the enemy's heartland in their Stirlings, Wellingtons, Mosquitos, Halifaxs, and Lancasters. But he isn't afraid of the uncomfortable legacy of the RAF and Arthur "Bomber" Harris's dogged dedication to "area bombing", which, to this day, sits uncomfortably with a lot of British people. He examines this controversy in unflinching, but even-handed detail, contrasting it with the precision bombing tactics of the American 8th Air Force in Europe. The passages about what the RAF did to cities like Dresden and Cologne are particularly moving. There really is very little to say that is negative about this book. Bomber Boys is well written, balanced and insightful, combining meticulous research with fascinating personal reminiscences. Bishop has written an interesting and, at times, painfully moving portrait of the men of Bomber Command. If the subject matter kindles even a small amount of interest in you, I would say get a copy of this book as soon as you can. Non-fiction military books don't come much better than this.
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