|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| From Fantasies to ScienceI read The Mound Builders by Robert Silverberg for the Non-Fiction Five Challenge. For various reasons, Indians built large mounds in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and a couple of southern states. The Europeans were stunned by the artificial knolls and hills because they thought only members of an advanced civilization – i.e., not American Indians - could have constructed such things.
The Euro-Americans came up with many explanations as to their builders and their purpose. These claims ranged from the sober to the wacky, thus showing that the social sciences have a long, if not entirely reputable, history in North America. This book is a fine overview of earthworks theory. He also gives just enough information about the various cultures like the Adena and Hopewell for the general reader.
Readers with an interest n the early days of anthropology and the amateur scientists will like this book as those interested in the social and academic development of archaeology as a field.
| | |
| Weakness a Crime - Don't be a CriminalFor the Non-Fiction Five reading challenge I read the excellent biography Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden by Robert Ernst. Like P.T. Barnum, publishing mogul Bernarr Macfadden (1868 - 1955) was a quintessential American showman. His father died young of drinking, his mother couldn’t be bothered with him, and the relatives abused and exploited him as a dogsbody.
His wounded but not broken spirit drove him to develop his own physical fitness. It also drove him to promote the cause of physical culture and social betterment. His magazines extolled the virtues of exercise and the evils of quackery and prudery.
The magazines tapped into the American spirit of self-improvement. At his most influential and popular in the 1920s , Macfadden published magazine powerhouses such as Liberty, True Romance and Physical Culture, along with 20 other hobby and specialty pubs, with a combined circulation of 16 million a month. He was right about diet, exercise, positive attitude, comfortable shoes and clothes. He should be credited with innovations in advertising and publishing, especially of pulp magazines and tabloid newspapers. However, he had an unrelenting distrust of doctors and the AMA. His son first died because Macfadden refused to summon medical help.He was half-baked at best about fasting as a cure for serious diseases (he died because he treated a urinary infection with fasting).
Like a lot of genius types, he simply wasn't a normal person. His managerial style was slapdash. He saved money by burying it in ammunition boxes. His infidelity made him a bad husband. His despotism made him tyrannize his five unhappy daughters. While reading this biography, one thinks Macfadden would mellow by his early 80s, only to find him celebrating his birthday parachuting (see newsrell video: gawd, I love the web!).
Ernst has organized the bio by topic, not chronologically, and tells plenty of entertaining anecdotes. this is for those interested in the history of fitness, fads and faddists, and American pop culture
| | |
| Emerald IsleIn the middle 1950s, German writer Heinrich Boll took his family to live and travel around Ireland. The book that came out this experience is a tribute to the Land of Saints and Scholars. In Irish Journal he describes life in the Fifites in County Mayo, Limerick, Connemara and Dublin.
He talks to people, who are happy to talk to him even when he disabuses them of the chilling notion that “Hitler wasn’t so bad, only that he went too far.” Boll calls this process of truth-telling “dentistry” because he roots out diseased notions.
Boll describes the hardships and lack of work that drove emigration and depopulated the countryside. He has a wonderful feeling for phrases even in a language not his own when he mines deep meanings of “in a manner of speaking,” “It could be worse,” and “I shouldn’t worry.”
This is the first writing of Boll’s that I’ve ever read. He strikes me as having the qualities I like in a writer: he’s got a big soul, keen eye, and sound judgment. This was translated in the middle 1960s by Leila Vennewitz. I read it for the German Reading Challenge.
| | |
| Survival in the WildernessI put the novel An Instant in the Wind by South African writer Andre Brink on the “to be read” list because it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the late Seventies. The Summer Vacation reading challenge, which is to read books set in different locales, moved me to pick it up and get into it.
South Africa in the 18th century was a slave society and the Dutch farmers were gradually encroaching into Bantu territories. In 1751, Elisabeth Larsson defies her parents’ advice and accompanies her naturalist husband to the interior, where, the conventional wisdom says, women must not go. Their white guide snuffs himself out of shame for getting the party lost. The Hottentots rustle their cattle. Her husband, absurdly indomitable in the face of these disasters, wanders off to classify a bird and doesn’t come back. Elizabeth meets a runaway slave Adam Mantoor. They overcome initial hostility and quickly fall in love as they face ordeals. By the end of the book, they find that it’s easier to love each other when they all alone in a state of nature, far away from the poison of social conventions and rigid attitudes of the Afrikaners.
On the positive side, stunning are the descriptions of the western Cape, the Karoo Desert, and the Swart Berg (Black Mountains). The scenes involving a storm and the trek of a massive herd of buck jump right off the page. I was ambivalent about the explicit language in the love scenes. On the down side, some romantic scenes seemed stilted and over-long and the introspective passages about being one’s own person seemed very Seventies. Not getting enough into the romantic spirit of things, perhaps, I was also doubtful as to why the two were so determined to return to white civilization, so foolish and credulous to think whites would think their relationship was okay.
I’m glad I read this novel because I’ve never read anything set in South Africa, except Prester John by John Buchan, which I can’t count as a genuine serious novel. This novel tells about how different Africa was for whites and blacks and about the roots of Jim Crow in South Africa. The description of landscape was good but love story was incredible.
| | |
| History with an AttitudeI read The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest by historian Francis Jennings as the 2nd of five for the Non-Fiction Five Reading Challenge. This is an examination of Indian and European contact in the colonial period of American history.
Part One is an overview of the history of contact in terms of colonization, the impact of diseases and the fur trade, and dragging the Indians into globalization. He also discusses the uses of the PR constructs of “the savage” versus “the civilized.” I didn’t know that the population of Indians in New England had been colossally diminished by epidemics as early as the 16th and 17th centuries. Nor did I know the brutal techniques to subdue the local population were so effective because the English first honed and practiced them in Scotland and Ireland.
Part Two provides a highly detailed examination – more than the lay reader needs – of the Puritan "oligarchs" and their subsequent historian-apologists. Harsh points are make about deceitful land grabbing by the Puritans and inter-tribal warfare egged on by the colonists. Jennings use of tough language such as “excruciating cant” and “clearly deceitful intent” will attract us non-expert readers but dismay historians who will tut-tut.
For the general reader, this history may be a bit too much, but for serious students of the topic or readers who enjoy reading the work of historians with a tough truth-telling bent, this is the ticket.
| | |
|
