So OftenBen and I were having a discussion about how "the flame of rebellion" isn't necessarily a "youth thing" so much as it's an "imprudence thing" and I opined that, basically, the world does not run in a democratic fashion. Voting is nice and all, but the world is run by appointees, ambassadors, field agents and mid-level bureaucrats who care very little for congress, presidents, or anything on the Hill so long as they continue to get their money.
I threatened Ben with a reading list. He called my bluff. It is listed below.
* * *
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Not just for Good Will Hunting. Zinn is definitely an agitator but he makes a point to outline all the failed rebellions crushed by the establishment in the name of the American Dream: Why we celebrate MLK Day instead of Malcolm X Day, the Socialist movement of Washington State, how racism created the San Fernando Valley.
The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. Gaddis lays out the basic fact that the past 100 years were about two warring ideologies that ground themselves to nubs against each other while the rest of the world picked something in the middle. It's not that the US won the Cold War, it's that we lost last.
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War and its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman. Hoffman won a Pulitzer for this one. It's not just about Perimeter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war) ), the Soviets' still-functioning suicide switch on Armageddon. It's the first book to really explore the Russian decline from world power to kleptocracy, from the ascension of Andropov to the shelling of Yeltsin's Kremlin (and Western roles in it).
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer. Hawaii is a state because of a coup. The Panama Canal isn't the Nicaragua Canal because someone rich had land to sell. Why, exactly, the Iranians are 100% in the right for hating the fuck out of the United States. And more!
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. This was an mk recommendation and I wholeheartedly second it. Basically outlines, in gripping terms, how a calcified alliance system and the crumbling remnants of the Hapsburgs brought about unconditional European annihilation despite everyone's best intentions. On a related note -
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour also by Barbara Tuchman. If you've ever wanted to know "why Israel" this book will tell you. It's not what you think.
Similarly, Paris 1919: 6 months that changed the world You learned the Treaty of Versailles. You took a test on it. And you didn't realize that it was a British-American ploy to remake the world in their own image, for their own advantage, and that every Western conflict since traces its roots to what was or was not settled when Germany was beat back and the Ottomans expired.
Speaking of "Ottomans" and "Palestine", let's bring this back to current adventures:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA paints an incomplete but fascinating portrait of everything we've done in the world since WWII that you don't know about. The Cold War was a Hot War for a select group of Americans, and a lot of them are dead. Tim Weiner's book ends shortly after 9/11 and paints a portrait of a stumbling, incompetent, overbureaucratized agency left castrated and defenseless by an angry Congress, which, thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know is complete bullshit. Along those lines, See No Evil by Robert Baer is a great inside perspective on how secret wars are conducted, and illustrates pretty cleanly the point that we hate Iran because the CIA fucked the Iranians over so the Iranians got back at the CIA (not exactly the United States) through Hizbollah through much of the '80s. Seen Syriana? Robert Baer was played by George Clooney.
Excellent companions to See No Evil are Charlie Wilson's War and Ghost Wars Charlie Wilson's War explains how we threw gasoline on the spark of global jihad in order to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan while Ghost Wars documents how the spark turned into a conflagration. The larger contexts of this particular pickle are laid out well in
The Fight for Jerusalem and Hatred's Kingdom by Dore Gold, paired with How to Win A Cosmic War and No God But God by Reza Aslan. Dore Gold is the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. He's published by Regnery. He does not fuck around and lays out the case that Wahabi Islam, as practiced in Saudi Arabia, is the direct cause of global jihad and terrorism. To quote Bernard Lewis,
- "Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan gets total control of the state of Texas,” Lewis told Princeton’s Alumni Weekly. “And the Ku Klux Klan has at its disposal all the oil rigs in Texas. And they use this money to set up a well-endowed network of colleges and schools throughout Christendom, peddling their peculiar brand of Christianity. You would then have an approximate equivalent of what has happened in the modern Muslim world.”
Reza Aslan, on the other hand, is an Islamic apologist. He makes the point that the entire muslim world isn't crazy but there is a lunatic fringe (that will eventually die out as the world becomes more modern). Of course, Robert Baer disagrees "Sleeping with the Devil" and "Hatred's Kingdom" dovetail to a disturbing degree.
I don't know how many books that is, but the only one that contains anything related to "voting" is Charlie Wilson's War, and that only as appropriations in secret by elected representatives with no responsibility to constituents whatsoever. The closest any of these books get to political involvement by the average citizen is when the voters in Charlie Wilson's conservative Texas district choose to re-elect him, despite a scandal involving Vegas, hookers and blow.
You can't just leave it there, man! What annoyed you? What surprised you? What made you think? What made you want to not think? What changed about your worldview? What stayed the same? I just finished Strange Rebels and on the one hand - the idea that the fucking sixties weren't all that goddamn important it's just the fact that the fuckin' 'boomers think everything is about them - is cool. On the other hand, the author is firmly of the opinion that we owe our modern free market salvation to Maggie Thatcher (who didn't go far enough) and Pope John Paul II (because he was Polish, you see) and also Iran and Afghanistan and China. I will freely accuse it of being a 'winger bullshit book.
Aight - Mostly how goddamn correct you ended up being. Our original discussion was around the difference between rebellion and mature subversion with regard to making a tangible difference in world events at historical scale. You made the point that with education in the practical history if the last century or so comes the knowledge that democratic processes didn't ever really amount to bupkis with regard to the course of events. Based on the reading list, that appears to be true. Decisions that mobilize troops, actors that conduct the covert and "covert" operations of international relations before, during and after wars are simply not affected by democratic processes. There simply isn't enough time to make decisions that way. I can't tell you how many times I have read and watched Charlie Wilson's War. It drives me to liquor almost every time. How deeply personal history can be. To use the example of Charlie Wilson's War, who the fuck has ever heard of Gust Avrokatos or Mike Vickers? How did a few guys with grudges and bad personnel reviews and a coke-n-strippers habit basically bring about the end of the USSR and change all of global politics forever? How did they defeat the monster that Churchill warned about? I was surprised how divided every nation-state's government's seem to be with regard to international policy. It highlights the damage done to the state department by 45, because it takes decades to cultivate even shitty international relations, to say nothing of developing workable, non shitty, professional and respected ones. As much as I talk about the personal nature of history writ large, it's also deeply impersonal. The Russians don't really care about the average American, they want to not be the butt of dumb/poor/drunk/low-life-expectancy jokes. They want a strong domestic economy and they have a history of not playing nice which makes people not want to play nice with them. But Nobody who considers the US an enemy gives a damn about John and Jane Doe. They either have a legitimate grievance about something done without our knowledge or approval or they have a world philosophy that precludes peaceful coexistence. How goddamn correct you ended up being. I, as an individual who has no intention of pursuing international politics or covert operations will have exactly zero impact on who decides to bomb who. The best i can hope for is to be a nonviolent actor personally and vote for an anti-war candidate if one ever comes along. Otherwise better to not think about such things except to study history and try to better whatever community I can find or scratch out of the dirt for myself. Bombs will fall or they won't, either way, I'm not a part of the process. Much as I want to take all human failing on my own shoulders, Mattis didn't check in with me before he launched several billion dollars worth of whoop ass at Syria. I take these things significantly less personally. I try to take Dan Carlin's 'Martian' perspective on world events. I'm more interested in the politics of my state and city than national and global events simply because they are more likely to affect me and my opinion of them has a snowball's chance of actually causing some change that might be helpful to the next generation. Hopefully we michiganders can get our asses in gear and save the great lakes from NESTLE and the petrochemical companies running leaky pipe under the Mackinac bridge. Think global act local has never made more sense to me. I'm still not gonna vote blue team just because. Lesser evilism is no more appealing to me now than in the past. Maybe the blue team will have its house in order the next time national elections roll around. I am not hopeful in this regard. I am reminded of Obama's analogy of the US and national policy as an ocean liner, and of the colossal force needed consistently to bring about a minor course correction. The whole business reinforces the little house on the prairie fantasies we have discussed and you have derided in the past. I don't get to opt out. In some clockwork orange ish way, I get to watch the whole thing unfold and I don't get to look away. In short, I need to read more. For some reason, no matter how much I listen I still can't seem to get through Durant, even at 1.25x speed. I think I have 17 hours left on the first volume, we're currently discussing the origins and structure of Hinduism.You can't just leave it there, man!
What annoyed you?
What surprised you?
What made you think?
What made you want to not think?
What changed about your worldview?
What stayed the same?
First things first: I didn't read Durant to encourage others to read Durant. I read Durant because it's easier to get ahold of than Toynbee, who is responsible for one of my favorite quotes: Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder. Devac was insane enough to follow me up the mountain but it has to stop now. Second thing: This was a self-exploratory venture through geopolitics. It ended up being a largely rationalist venture but the rationalists are the hardest to argue with. They are the geopolitical equivalent of "reversion to the mean." If I read twenty books and came up with a rationalist point of view, odds are good that if you read the same 20 books you would end up with the same rationalist view. Really, our discussion was "read the following ten thousand pages of prose and see if you can agree with my viewpoint." You'd have come around through sheer fatigue. Doesn't mean I'm right. I think fundamentally, you're lawful good while I'm chaotic good. I vote Blue Team because they're the lesser of two evils; for lots of people (I'm guessing yourself included) "lesser of two evils" is fightin' words. I'd definitely have voted for Hillary Clinton all over again but not because she was the lesser of two evils. I think she would have done a reasonably good job... from a globalist, center-right point of view. I would much rather have had Bernie Sanders' platform in place but I remain unconvinced that Bernie Sanders would have been as good an administrator. Carter came from a place of good and I think we can both agree he made a bit of a cockup of the place. An argument for the lesser evil: every time you tug the rope a little closer to you, you're further from the fringe. But you have to grab the rope. The Democratic Socialists of America would have been a joke in the '80s - shit they would have been a joke in the '00s. Yet here we are. I would like to vote Green but at a national or even state level, I don't see it as a tenable choice. Craven pragmatism, that's me. If I could make a suggestion? You've earned a break. Join me. Just yesterday, Friedman & Co recommended Judt.
Not happening. I didn't make it to base camp just to take a selfie and go home. Seems like a fair estimation. I am a literal bleeding heart choirboy. I completely agree with this estimation, which is why I couldn't vote for her. I don't want a globalist center-right perspective pushed or endorsed. When you vote in the US it's not like the UN where I get to say 'Yes, with rights' and explain how my support of a candidate or idea is tentative and subject to immediate revocation if certain terms and conditions are not met. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote in positive, unmitigated support of the Democratic Party and all it stands for. I do not give the blue team my positive, unmitigated support. He wouldn't have been as good an administrator and his term would have been full of stumbling blocks and unfulfilled idealism. He likely would not have won a second term, if he lived long enough to run. Still better than either of the alternatives. Evidently a lot of folks felt the same way, so here we are in the darker, stupider timeline. I don't think so. The world doesn't take breaks and I have too much enforced downtime as it is. One day maybe my stack of books will be high enough to see over the fence into the promised land. it has to stop now.
I think fundamentally, you're lawful good while I'm chaotic good.
I think she would have done a reasonably good job... from a globalist, center-right point of view.
I remain unconvinced that Bernie Sanders would have been as good an administrator.
You've earned a break.
We're not very far apart in one ways but in others we're leagues away. I voted for Bernie in the primaries and would have given him my full-throated support had his journey continued. Quixotic or no, shitty administrator or no, I would have continued to give him money for as long as there were ads to buy. However, the idea that "A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote in positive, unmitigated support of the Democratic Party and all it stands for" strikes me as purest insanity. If someone says "which do you prefer, diarrhea or vomiting" I'ma go with diarrhea. Doesn't mean I'm endorsing diarrhea. Means I'd rather sit on the crapper for hours than hug it for same. Clearly, "a day at the spa" beats both choices but I recognize that if you do not choose, you are allowing others to choose for you. The last time I voted in person, I wandered into the church and a nice guy in his '40s struck up a conversation with me. Within about five minutes he flat out asked me who he should vote for. He was doing his civic duty, but he felt completely in the dark about his options (it was a state-level election, as I recall). I did my civic duty: I gave him the pros and cons of every choice and let him make up his mind. He resented me for it. I think that guy has become my democratic exemplar. THESE guys are voting and they are often voting based on color. If you know what's going on, you owe it to future generations to make an informed choice because stupid can't be allowed to win. "Grandpa, how did Jamaica get nuked? Didn't you guys know not to let Trump win?" "Sorry, sweetie, but I voted Jill Stein because principle, shame about those Jamaicans." A darker, stupider timeline indeed... your words, not mine. When I say "break" I mean "something easy and fun to read." Think of the Century Trilogy as a well-written dramatization of the past 100 years of world history.
We've been down this road before. I'd care not tread down it again unless you think that there is some possible meeting of minds that I can't foresee. You believe that I'm crazy, I believe you are being strong-armed/held hostage by the lack of non-shitty candidates. And we just established that big decisions aren't settled by democratic processes anyway. To re-use a phrase Bombs will fall or they won't, either way, I'm not a part of the process. Show me an anti-war candidate, they will get everything I can afford to give them and then some. I haven't seen one in my lifetime. Bernie was the closest I think we are likely to get for a few boot-cycles. I have no taste for crumpets at the moment. There is enough drama in the present day. Saved your link for a later time though.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-25/cambridge-analytica-s-promotion-of-discontent-tied-to-bannonYou believe that I'm crazy, I believe you are being strong-armed/held hostage by the lack of non-shitty candidates.
Bannon said he wanted to use Cambridge Analytica to discourage specific groups of people from voting, including those likely to vote for Democrats, Wylie told lawmakers, according to the partial transcript released on Wednesday.
A Study of History is on archive.org. You probably found it yourself, but I'm leaving the link anyway. You made a compelling argument for Durant in your review and I didn't see it as advertising or trying to gather a following or whatever. It looked like the kind of overview of history and ethnology (among other disciplines) that I'd enjoy and, after passing the middle-point of the series, it's still the case. Also, I track all of my projects and the more ambitious and massive they are, the greater the chance I'll complete them. Same goes for almost all of my studies: I'm half-convinced that I'd drop out three semesters ago if I couldn't take graduate level courses. Grit >> boredom. Dunno if it makes me insane, tho.Devac was insane enough to follow me up the mountain but it has to stop now.
mk is working on clarifying it on the page where the functions can be applied. basically ignore will prevent you from being notified about someone's posts, and mute is supposed to block people from posting under your submissions, while collapsing all previous posts by them for anyone who is looking. obviously the blocking needs to be worked on a bit ;o
Just picked up Blood Meridian today. I look forward to cranking out a good chunk of it this weekend.
I read about 30 pages tonight and I'm immediately gripped by the writing. A lot of people have said it takes a lot of "work" but I find the writing extremely easy and almost familiar. Reminds me of Hemingway in the sense that he doesn't waste words. There's nothing that drives me out of a novel more than seemingly extemporaneous writing. This seems crafted, but in a way where I don't see the hand of the craftsman -if that makes sense? Give it a whirl, I'm really digging it. I feel like I'm there.
I had trouble in the beginning dealing with his lack of quotation marks and odd punctuation. It makes the reading flow in a different way, which I don't mind now that I feel comfortable with it, but I found the dialogue hard to follow in parts, especially conversations between more than two people, of which there are a few.
I agree, the lack of quotation marks took a little bit to get used to but it didn't take long. I don't want to yet refer to specific parts but there were definitely moments where I had to reread to get an idea of who was talking. The scenes and the dialog are so "of an era" that I feel very emersed. First time in a while that I can't wait to get home to read again.
Yeah, same. The way that the dialogue occurs and how the characters are sometimes introduced reminds me of walking into a room and sitting down, just doing my own thing and then looking up to realize there is someone else in the room and has been since before I entered.
If you finish the Signal and the Noise, check out Blood Meridian we're about to read it for the book club. You ever read any Cormac McCarthy? This is my first.
We can talk more about it in the proper thread, but I actually don't think it's all that difficult to read... yet. I'm only 30 pages in.
Thanks for the mention lil. I have replicated the list from that article below, along with some additional books that I either A) forgot to mention last time, or B) have since read and feel worthy of inclusion: --- The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 by Alfred Crosby (1972) Orientalism by Edward Said (1979) Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan (1985) The Global Brain by Peter Russell (1985) Hyperspace by Michio Kaku (1994) Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan (1994) History of God by Karen Armstrong (1994) The Major Transitions in Evolution by John Smith & Eors Szathmary (1995) The Demon-Hauned World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (1996) The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm (1996) Beyond art: Pleistocene image and symbol by Margaret Conkey (1997) The Symbolic Species by Terrance Deacon (1997) Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins (1998) The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behaviour by Craig Stanford (1999) The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil (2000) The Origins of LIfe: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language by John Smith & Eors Szathmary (2000) Global Brain by Howard Bloom (2000) A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins (2003) On The Shoulders of Giants by Stephen Hawking (2003) The unbound Prometheus: technological change and industrial development by David Landes (2003) Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2004) A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (2004) The Epic of Evolution by Eric Chaisson (2005) Holistic Darwinism by Peter Corning (2005) Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll (2006) The Living Cosmos: Our Search for Life in the Universe by Chris Impey (2007) The Extended Mind by Robert Logan (2007) The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker (2007) History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer (2007) Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku (2008) The Wayfinders by Wade Davis (2009) The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester (2009) Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shuban (2009) Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham (2009) Jane Goodall: 50 Years at Gombe by Jane Goodall (2010) The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (2011) Big History and the Future of Humanity by Fred Spier (2011) Evolution: The First Four Billion Years ed. by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis (2011) The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (2011) The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (2011) Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2012) Masters of the Planet by Ian Tattersall (2012) Debt: The first 5,000 years by David Graeber (2012) Wild Cultures: A Comparison of Chimpanzee and Human Cultures by Christophe Boesch (2012) The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking (2012) Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth by Chris Stringer (2012) --- Hope you find it useful thundara
Haha, I'd be impressed too - but no I copy and pasted from my old list and added a few extra books from a bibliography on my hard drive.
This is hard. Because I want to give you books where you could easily LEARN physics and learn about the problem solving methodology, but at the same time, learning science comes from DOING science and not from reading about science.
What I mean is this: So you can read the Feynman Lectures but without having problem sets at the end, you're not going to retiain more than an abstract view of the situation. On the other hand, I could also suggest Griffith's "Introduction to Electrodynamics" Which is widely regarded as the best resource for learning about Electrodynamics, but you'd be scared off by the time you got to the first chapter if you weren't prepared to do multivariable calculus. In either of these cases though you still aren't learning about the science, you are learning about how to calculate the things we already know. So in this case I would suggest G. Polya's "How to Solve it" while focused on the pedagogy of mathematics, also offers a great way to learn about and solve problems. Of course there are popular science books, and those are fine if you are fine with having an abstract view of the course of science Six Easy Pieces - Feynman
A Brief History of Time - Hawking
Cosmos - Sagan
Demon Haunted World - Sagan
What Evolution Is - Ernst Mayr For me though the more satisfying route in the long run is to sit down and look at the problems others have solved, and try to solve them yourself. See what kind of conclusions you come to.
A bit inside me is humored by the fact that I originally asked this question with molecular biology in mind, then got two big reply consisting of largely anthropology and physics topics. Good on you for picking out the more general problem-solving / abstract approaches to understanding arbitrary phenomena though!
Hi thundara - maybe you didn't see this post by theadvancedapes about a year ago. It's called Shoulders of Giants. The hubski link will take you to Cadell's article where he writes, "The following is a list of the top 10 modern scientists who have influenced my perceptions, ideas, and thoughts regarding the universe and our species’ place within it." It's a wonderful list of scientists and their books. Check it out.
List the genres to pick from? I'm primarily interested in science history at the moment (How do we know what we know, what were the big changes in philosophy over time, etc), but it's much more fun to be reminded of what you're not already thinking about. Currently working on this lil' book on the lambda virus, previous to that was one on oncogene research (Little out of date, but does a good job of following the history up to the 1980s).
Yeah, I can't do it that way. "Give us a list of stuff you're well-read on." It's more like "hey, this discussion came up, and as it turns out I've got an assload of research in my background." Inconvenient, I know, but there it is. As far as the history of science, I'm far more of a populist. I will say that anyone who hasn't seen Connections in its entirety is missing out, particularly as they're all up on Youtube.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
As an epilogue to Guns of August, I would suggest reading Richard Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer. He builds on Tuchman quite a bit, but had access to new archived material (as it was written decades later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain), so there's a lot to add. Despite being history books, both are remarkably gripping reads.
Yes, here is the extension Fomkin makes, in a nutshell. You say of GoA: Which I would agree with. Fromkin uses his archived material to show that the calcified alliances were what set up the conditions of unnecessary war, but that one singular man, von Moltke, was almost entirely responsible for precipitating it. It shows that in the right place at the right time, one man can have dramatic effects on the world.Basically outlines, in gripping terms, how a calcified alliance system and the crumbling remnants of the Hapsburgs brought about unconditional European annihilation despite everyone's best intentions.
I don't think you'll be disappointed. When I get off my current fiction kick (I tend to go back and forth in long stretches of only reading fiction or non-fiction; I don't know why I do that), I plan to read his A Peace to End All Peace, which also might interest you, because the subject matter is the creation of the modern Middle East, a subject that you appear to have read at some length about.
interested third party here I did some googling and couldn't find a satisfying answer to what Breslau as an event means. Was it the siege of Breslau in 1914? Was it the name of a ship that Tuchman witnessed as a two year old?
I finished this book a few weeks ago. Phenomenal. I remember the Cold War a little from the Reagan era, but did not have a full grasp of everything which set it into motion. What I ultimately took from the book is that it kind of was a 'hot' war fought by proxy, and rather confront each other directly, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. ended up having to deal with each other the way divorced parents tackle a problem child. Kind of funny in a way, because whenever the two sides did want to get together, another world leader would create some sort of ridiculous commotion. Of course, better it was fought that way than with nukes. (My current book, which is also turning out to be a solid follow-up on the subject is Eric Scholsser's "Command and Control." I believe it was previously discussed on Hubski.)The Cold War: A New History
I wouldn't say 150 pages into Scholsser that his book is as well-researched on Cold War details as Gaddis', but it is a good complement. Gaddis' book also sparked my interest in Cold War Germany, but I think the closest I may come to on a comprehensive work on the subject is "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989" by Frederick Taylor. I may read that next, then "The Dead Hand" because from what you describe, it sounds like it overlaps with the end of "The Berlin Wall."
Reading The Cold War: A New History, today I learned about the Great Chinese Famine. I don't know how every single history class I took managed to pass over this one.
Because every history class you've ever taken starts in the ancient past and has a week or two on the syllabus for everything after WWII. Lose a day on the Egyptians, two days on Rome, three days on the Renaissance and a day on the Civil War and suddenly there's no time for anything after the Spanish American War. I've long thought that history ought to be taught backwards, from current events clear back to the magna carta. You'd get a lot more causality. Also a lot more controversy, which is why it isn't done.
I'm sure you're aware that some people do in fact teach history this way. It's gotten more traction in the last 10 years. I think someone wrote a book.I've long thought that history ought to be taught backwards, from current events clear back to the magna carta. You'd get a lot more causality. Also a lot more controversy, which is why it isn't done.
Can't. I found a lot of "education science" type literature. Including one really great teaching model: start in the present, isolate some important events, then sort of create one of those old Inspiration 6-style idea maps going backward in time. So midterm elections inspires discussions going back to last generation, maybe about Clinton, and then from Clinton you spin off to foreign policy or presidential scandals or the environment, and from there etc. It all seems relevant to students but it still takes you back hundreds of years by the time the semester's over. Basically this:
Yeah, this ain't it. This is remedial college social studies, and it presents history as a longitudinal "what did your parents think" problem. There's no attempt to, say, link Reagan's attitude against the Soviets to even Reagan's role as the mouthpiece of the HUAC - it's "what do you think of Reagan? Well, what did your parents think of LBJ? See? History!"
Totally agree. It's a way to interrogate why the world is both as great and as fucked as it is today. We have a narrative that says "Putin is a crazy person," precisely because no one has bothered to ask the question, "Why might Putin want to invade Ukraine?" which would require working backward to at least the time of Peter the Great.I've long thought that history ought to be taught backwards, from current events clear back to the magna carta.
Finished the book. I definitely agree that that's a better way to maintain interest in a train of thought, but part of me wonders if it'd end up being too broad an instruction if you follow all political / historical ideas back to their roots. I did enjoy the above's approach of scanning repeatedly over the same decades, each time focusing on a different major idea and picking relevant events though!
Yeah, I had a few teachers who made it a point to point out the euro-centric biases of their courses. And then didn't do jack to include anything but western history. I've noticed similar trends in books on architecture, art, and music history. Paul Graham picked Civilisation as the one book to read on art history if a person were to read only one book about art history, but it didn't have a single instance of non-Western art. I felt pretty let down at the time.
Further reading from "Charlie Wilson's War" and "Ghost Wars": War At the Top of the World by Eric Margolis is a fascinating read on the history of the middle east, and some reasons why things are so complicated over there.
humanodon, what books are necessary for poetry? Are we going to have this discussion in the sense of "What theory/meta- books (books about writing) are essential for understanding poetry" or "What books of poems are essential for understanding poetry"? Is this a parallel discussion that is even possible? We could talk favorite poets but that is not the same.
Those are interesting questions. I almost always recommend Pinsky's The Sounds of Poetry and Dobyn's Best Words, Best Order for people looking to understand what's going on technically, as described in layman's terms. I'm not sure if that is possible, as one of the basics of poetry is the play on perception and expectation. Thus, no one poet's work will illuminate all other works. I think that The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara might be a good place to begin building an understanding of how a lot of contemporary poetry was formed. I also think though, that being familiar with the basics of appreciating painting (and other visual arts) and music (in a more in-depth sense than putting music on for background noise) also help to understand poetry. Then again, sometimes people immediately "get" particular poems, whether it's due to their own habits of expression or imagination, or where they happen to be in their lives when they read those poems. Poetry's a slippery thing, both on purpose and by design and because of its inherent nature. I'd be interested to get other people's ideas on this subject too.
This is a place where my appreciation is sorely lacking, likely because I've been exposed to far too much crappy free verse. I get Williams' red Wheelbarrow, after a fashion. But when I compare Red Wheelbarrow to Ozymandias or Rime of the Ancient Mariner I don't feel like I'm comparing Jackson Pollack with Rembrandt. I feel like I'm comparing fingerpainting with art. I'd be curious to see a "crash course" in modern poetry just so I could decide whether I'm an unedcuated heathen with no appreciation for the finer things or whether I am an educated heathen with no real taste for modern poetry.
The thing is, there is so much going on in modern poetry right now, you can find anything you want to. You can find complete nonsense which I expect you might dislike. You can find Amit Majmudar's "Save the Candor" which I talked about on my blog, but seem to have misplaced the post. You can find political poetry from war-torn countries. You can find free verse, you can find blank verse, you can find haiku, sonnets, and every other form you know of (and some you don't). I very selfishly link to my blog with most of these because I feel like part of this is the point of my blog: what is going on in poetry, now? I do definitely talk about 'older' poetry as well - it's kind of hard to talk about poetry without doing so - but one of my aims is definitely to point a helpful finger in the direction of "What's going on now in poetry?" or "What's an aspect of poetry I could learn more about?" (I eventually want to write some poets about more esoteric forms like gazhals and pantoums.) I certainly can't give you a crash course in modern poetry... but Coursera can
Yeah, it seems like a lot of people feel this way and with good reason. I mentioned some familiarity with painting as being helpful, as even within movements there is a lot of variation, especially on the surface. To use your example, of Jackson Pollock is considered to be an Abstract Expressionist, as is Mark Rothko, in the same way that Ezra Pound and Archibald MacLeish are considered Modernists and yet very different in subject matter and style. Anyway, you might find simply that you like one writer's work over another, even while liking or disliking the movement they are associated with as a whole. It does bug me a little that poetry is placed on a pedestal, as it has resulted in making it seem unapproachable and unfathomable, instead of another way that humans experience the world.I'd be curious to see a "crash course" in modern poetry just so I could decide whether I'm an unedcuated heathen with no appreciation for the finer things or whether I am an educated heathen with no real taste for modern poetry.
Wow, some great reading lists here from both Kleinbl00 and theadvancedapes. Now my already large reading list is all that larger, but I suppose the good thing about a large reading list is that the larger it gets, the less pain you feel about adding more books on the to-read list!
Inspired by Zinn, Chris Harman produced A People's History Of The World - sitting on my reading desk now.
I'm about 2/3 through this - pretty good so far. Quite a socialist slant to it, as you might expect.