Nonfiction, mostly history
Karen E. Fields & Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality: Essays about race in America-race as racecraft, similar to witchcraft. Race itself doesn’t exist as a scientific fact, but racism does, much as witchcraft doesn’t work but in some places has a social reality that explains things to members of a society and that can lead people to kill. I liked the beginning parts on the metaphor of “blood” and the way that saying “Michael Brown was killed because he was black,” while a useful shorthand, can also locate the source of the problem in his “blackness,” as if that were a thing that existed outside society, whereas we do not as easily say “this kid was not killed for his misbehavior because he was white.” Later essays, including an imagined dialogue between DuBois and Durkheim-who were writing at the same time-were less interesting to me.
Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa: Atkinson is a beautiful writer, though I was left with questions as to how exactly he knew what the dawn of the day of a WWII battle looked and smelled like-was he prettying up descriptions provided by actual attendees, or inferring from some other source? He spends a lot of time on the physical miseries of war for ordinary soldiers, and emphasizes just how dumb a lot of battles were in purely tactical terms. In North Africa, the Americans started to learn how to fight, but not without lots of mistakes and casualties.
Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The Allies’ Italian campaign in WWII, again a beautifully written story involving a fair share of total screwups, as well as detailed accounts of what it was like for those stuck at Anzio. Jan Smuts is not someone I’d usually quote, but his description of Churchill is so apt: in great things he was very great, in small things … not great.
Sean Wilentz & Paul E. Johnson, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America: This is the story of a small cult whose rise and fall is most interesting-even the authors agree-as a window into the great controversies about religion and gender unsettling the country at the end of the 19th century. “Matthias” actually tried to get welcomed by Joseph Smith & crew at the end of his active life, but he was too controversial for them (!), owing to the widely reported scandal about whether he or one of his followers had killed his benefactor (whose wife he had also taken as his own, which was really the scandal that sold the papers). The authors present Matthias as part of a larger evangelical, patriarchal backlash against new varieties of religious life that were largely led by women, or at least in which women could claim equal moral authority in instructing children in religion and making claims about godliness.
Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: If you want a screed about how much America sucks and how the roots of that stem from the religious convictions white Europeans brought over from the outset, this is your book. Andersen concludes that the collapse in shared reality comes from our childishness, which is tied to our religiosity. Fan fiction comes in for condemnation, as does cosplay, and conspiracy theories and belief in UFOs and pretty much everything else that isn’t at least cold-eyed agnosticism. I recognize that my ox is being gored so perhaps I’m not in the best position to judge, but it seemed to me that Andersen confused two very different things: relativism, which is to say that not everything that is true for me is true for you, and evangelicism, which is to say that everything I feel is true is true and if you disagree you are wrong and must be punished. By condemning both together, Andersen makes it hard for people who believe in pluralism to find a place to stand.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa: Atkinson is a beautiful writer, though I was left with questions as to how exactly he knew what the dawn of the day of a WWII battle looked and smelled like-was he prettying up descriptions provided by actual attendees, or inferring from some other source? He spends a lot of time on the physical miseries of war for ordinary soldiers, and emphasizes just how dumb a lot of battles were in purely tactical terms. In North Africa, the Americans started to learn how to fight, but not without lots of mistakes and casualties.
Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The Allies’ Italian campaign in WWII, again a beautifully written story involving a fair share of total screwups, as well as detailed accounts of what it was like for those stuck at Anzio. Jan Smuts is not someone I’d usually quote, but his description of Churchill is so apt: in great things he was very great, in small things … not great.
Sean Wilentz & Paul E. Johnson, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America: This is the story of a small cult whose rise and fall is most interesting-even the authors agree-as a window into the great controversies about religion and gender unsettling the country at the end of the 19th century. “Matthias” actually tried to get welcomed by Joseph Smith & crew at the end of his active life, but he was too controversial for them (!), owing to the widely reported scandal about whether he or one of his followers had killed his benefactor (whose wife he had also taken as his own, which was really the scandal that sold the papers). The authors present Matthias as part of a larger evangelical, patriarchal backlash against new varieties of religious life that were largely led by women, or at least in which women could claim equal moral authority in instructing children in religion and making claims about godliness.
Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: If you want a screed about how much America sucks and how the roots of that stem from the religious convictions white Europeans brought over from the outset, this is your book. Andersen concludes that the collapse in shared reality comes from our childishness, which is tied to our religiosity. Fan fiction comes in for condemnation, as does cosplay, and conspiracy theories and belief in UFOs and pretty much everything else that isn’t at least cold-eyed agnosticism. I recognize that my ox is being gored so perhaps I’m not in the best position to judge, but it seemed to me that Andersen confused two very different things: relativism, which is to say that not everything that is true for me is true for you, and evangelicism, which is to say that everything I feel is true is true and if you disagree you are wrong and must be punished. By condemning both together, Andersen makes it hard for people who believe in pluralism to find a place to stand.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.