18261. (Émile Souvestre) The World As It Shall Be [Le Monde tel qu’il sera; 1846;
. . . . . tr. Margaret Clarke]
18262. (Neal Ascherson) Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland
18263. (Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne) La découverte australe, Vol.2 [1781] Read more »
Category Archives: BM - Reading 2009
READING — DECEMBER 2009
18295. (John B. Roberts II & Elizabeth A. Roberts) Freeing Tibet ― Fifty Years of Struggle, Resilience, and Hope
For anyone with a serious interest in the Tibetan resistance against Communist Imperialism, this book is a must. Most books on the resistance focus almost entirely on the Dalai Lama, and are suffused with a sentimental image of Tibetan culture. This book is not. It’s a hard-headed analysis of the political events since the Conquest. Read more »
READING — NOVEMBER 2009
18206. (Lawrence Schoonover) The Burnished Blade
18207. (Frank Rich) The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York [article]
18208. (Robert F. Worth) Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen [article] Read more »
Three books on Michael Servitus
Michael Servitus was a strange, and admirable figure in the early Reformation. He made important contributions to medicine and cartography, but is best known for questioning the Church’s idea of the Trinity. He did not, in fact, offer a Unitarian theology, but merely a different interpretation of the Trinity. Read more »
18227. (Alan Weisman) The World Without Us
Many years ago, when I was a callow science fiction fan among other callow science fiction fans, we used to walk about the city, talking about this and that. A topic that often came up was: What would happen to the city if all the human beings in it suddenly vanished? What would become of the buildings? Read more »
READING — OCTOBER 2009
18093. (Robert Sheckley) Journey Beyond Tomorrow [= Journey of Joenes]
18094. (Glen W. Bowersock) The Nabataeans in Historical Context [article]
18095. (Peter J. Parr) The Origin and Emergence of the Nabataeans [article] Read more »
18180. [2] (Anon. 1st Century AD) The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century [translated from the Greek and annotated by Wilfred H. Schoff]
I first read this in 1989, when I became fascinated by ancient India. Along with the work of Megasthenes, it gave me a vivid picture of the travel, commerce, and cultural connections between India and the Mediterranean world in antiquity, and this in turn awakened me to my present attitudes toward the nature and origins of democracy. The Periplus differs from most other documents from the era in that it wasn’t written by an aristocrat or an intellectual. It’s a set of sailing instructions and observations on products for sale and purchase in the Indian Ocean and its adjacent gulfs, written by an Alexandrian merchant sea captain. His name is unknown. But he was a keen observer, with an orderly mind. The book was gathering dust in the Shastri Indo-Canadian Collection of the University of Toronto Library, when I first looked at it — few people were interested in such things then. Read more »
18113. (Antoine de la Sale) [Petit] Jehan de Saintré [c. 1455]
This fourteenth century French prose work is an odd item. It’s a “roman” — prose fiction. But it’s nothing like the fantastic fantasies that dominated the era. No quests, no dragons, no trips to the moon. Instead, it’s a realistic narrative focusing on tournaments and deeds of arms. In the first few chapters, the central character arrives at court as a page, at the age of thirteen. A Great Lady immediately begins a campaign of seduction, twisting and tormenting the lad until he surrenders his innocence. This is coyly, but still pretty blatantly recounted by the author. But the romance is meant to be edifying as well as titillating… she is given to quoting Greek philosophers while making love, and recommends a long list of books for him to read between carving the King’s roasts, learning to fight, and providing her with stud service. Few teenagers have to face this kind of stress, today. Read more »
18109. (Philip Carl Salzman) Black tents of Baluchistan
This is an unusually clear-headed work of ethnography, describing the Sarhadi Baluch, a people of southeastern Iran. Salzman is splendidly immune to the theoretical fads that have succeeded each other like Third Century Roman Emperors. He looks at the Sarhadi, describes what he sees in plain language, interprets it with the minimum of abstractions and jargon. He has a particularly sharp instinct for describing political life. Focusing on who makes decisions, how they are implemented and enforced, and what external and internal circumstances trigger, limit, or modify them, he avoids most of the essentialist, pseudo-evolutionary and a priori quagmires. There’s no “post-modern” gibberish. There is no romanticizing, no pomposity in his observations. I strongly recommend this to anyone who is interested in the nature of decision-making in nomadic segmentary societies.
READING — SEPTEMBER 2009
18049. (Matthew Jarpe) Radio Freefall
18050. (Phil Gordon) Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book
18051. (Steve Muhlberger) [in blog Muhlberger’s Early History] Imperial Decadence ― The Fisher King
. . . . . Bleeds [article]
18052. (Raymond DeMallie) Male and Female in Traditional Lakota Culture [article] Read more »