I think I have heard/read this before.

Malcolm Gladwell has his own style, and if you don’t like it, he isn’t changing it for you.  So, you should stop reading his books.

This is certainly the case with The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War.  It is inescapably a Gladwell book in tone and structure.  

However now there is confusion. There is his Podcast, and even the hybrid book-podcasts, so this material feels like I have read it before, or listened to it.  Did I?  Maybe so...

So, Gladwell’s scene has become complex, yet really the same.  He is still firmly Gladwell in tone and style.  Now we are just thrown into confusion if we have read/heard his work before.  I think I have heard/read this before [?]

 

What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

 

The title tells us as much, that in Katherine Dykstra’s What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood, we never do learn who killed Paula Oberbroeckling.  Theories are explored, but this true crime book moves away from the details of the particular crime to the culture we have created where woman and girls face danger from men with male impunity.  This book shows how the all-male police failed to take Paula’s disappearance and murder investigation seriously.  She was a girl who had gone “bad” and therefore deserved what happened to her.  Although her death took place in 1970, this author reminds us these prejudicial and unfavorable attitudes are still prevalent today.  Ask the woman closest to you!  Our culture forces women to be fearful for their safety and wellbeing.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven H. Strogatz

 

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven H. Strogatz is the best book written for laypeople about Calculus (I have yet to read).  The author handles it all: the rise of the questions and challenges of Calculus before its exact formulation, its formulation and how it works, and how it is employed in all manner of human endeavors.  But Calculus not only has a past and a present but a future.  Stogatz speculates how this form of math, the language God speaks, may work for us in the time to come.

Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks―and What It Can Teach Us

 

With Sonorous Desert Kim Haines-Eitzen has written a gorgeously evocative book about an experience most of us take for granted. As an expert on early Christian hermits and monasticism, she has given us a work where sound is the primary conduit to understand both the solitary and the social sides of our experience.  How much do we give to others, and how much time do we need for ourselves?  We all face this to some degree or another.  Haines-Eitzen has written a book where this primary dilemma is explored through how we hear our world, our sonorous experience.  This is a novel and exciting investigation of how sound deeply informs how we experience, and live in our world.  With this  book Haines-Eitzen has given us a key to a deeper understand of ourselves.

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right

 

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right is Max Boot’s elegy of his departure from the Republican Party and conservative politics.  This is the route many more conservatives should have taken with the rise of Trump and Trumpism.  Their duty was to put country before party and their own narrow self-interests.  Most did not.  Boot did, and he is to be commended for doing so and telling his story.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is Boot’s post-mortem on contemporary conservatism.  He sees, for the first time in his life, that conservatism has from the very beginning had been built on a foundation of nativism, misogyny, racism (all the bad-isms).  Therefore, Trump is not an anomaly from the conservative movement and the Republican Party, but produced by it and its natural progression.

Canada's Fault Line

 

A People's History of Quebec by Jacques Lacoursière and Robin Philpot offers a readable account of the history of French-speaking Canada.  Americans tend to think of Canada as a harmonious and polite county, not rent apart by painful and deep divisions like the United States.  But that is only our liberal fantasy about Canada.  There have always been fault lines in Canada: ethnic, political, social, regional, and economic – and this book explores and explains one of Canada’s most consequential, the friction between English and French-speaking Canada.

The authors provide a brisk and informative overview of one of Canada’s thorniest existential issues.

The Happening happening as all happening: Rami Shapiro

 

I have read most of Rami Shapiro’s books and I am an unqualified fan.  He presents a flexible and appealing non-dual version of Judaism which I believe is one way for people to get involved in Judaism without having to literally buy into many things they can no longer believe.

Rabbi Shapiro here defines God as: “The Happening happening as all happening” which is a version of the name God provided Moses on Sinai.  This is not a personal god but the very ground of being, which is not ground at all, but process.  Another of his similes is that Reality is God) and Reality is the ocean, and individual beings, like us, are merely waves in that great ocean.  We think we are free, detached entities, but we are always a part of Reality, of God, and eventually, we return to Reality.

This book is for anyone, Jewish or not, who would like to embrace a religion for grownups. 

Heroin & The Cloisters

 

When I was in college and 20 years old, I dated a fellow student, a young woman, for a VERY short time.  One day, she took me on a trip to upper Manhattan to see the Cloisters.   We rode the subway north, and once there, the Cloisters and its setting took my breath away. A gem was hidden at the tip of Manhattan.  She took me there for one reason: she had read The Basketball Diaries and wanted to see the place where most of the novel occurs. 

Now, decades later, I have read it.  I can see her attraction to the novel: she was a troubled person, moving sideways without anyone helping her.  It is apparent how this story of marginalization and addiction would appeal to her: something was guiding her life that she could not control, like the author of this book.  The trajectory of doom would have mirrored how she felt at that time.

The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat

 

As a true crime book, Eric Jager’s The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat is in a class by itself.  This book takes a single story involving three people, a crime, in a distant place long ago, and works the material like a modern non-fiction true crime story (with some literary liberties taken, I would think).

In world where everything was viewed as the will of God, a trial by combat, a judicial duel, makes a great deal of sense.  This was the last "official duel" – for the kings of France began to reign in the powers of their aristocrats and centralize their governments as evolving, modern national states.  This was the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages.

Jager paints the Norman French landscape of knights, squires, aristocrats, and kings in vivid colors.  This compelling book is well researched and written. 

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion

 

Few Americans know the history of Mexico, even when the Mexico’s history is entangled in our history.  Jeff Guinn’s War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion is a helpful way to alleviate our abysmal ignorance of US meddling in Mexico. 

Here Guinn documents our intricate, and nearly always illegal, manipulations of Mexico’s internal affairs, in this case in the Mexico Civil War in the early years of the twentieth century.  Reading this book one can’t help but see in Perishing’s Punitive Expedition more recent invasions of other countries to pursue America’s enemies.  We never did get Poncho Villa, by the way.  Catching a fugitive in his own country, or a friendly country, or in this case an indifferent country, was as difficult in 1916 as it is in 2022.