Saturday, October 12, 2024
Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages
Friday, October 11, 2024
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - 2022- 791 Pages
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - 2022- 791 Pages
Friday, October 4, 2024
Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages
Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages
"The human race finds itself again under threat of a rising global fascist movement. In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people all across the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.
Democracy requires a common understanding of reality, a shared view of what has happened, that informs ordinary citizens’ decisions about what should happen, now and in the future. Authoritarians target this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. By setting us against each other, authoritarians represent themselves as the sole solution.
In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, the authoritarian right’s tip of the spear, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.
In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places, he explains, that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.
Deeply informed and urgently needed, Erasing History is a global call to action for those who wish to preserve democracy—in America and abroad—before it is too late." From the publisher
Jason Stanley employs details from the rise of Nazism in Germany to explain how authoritarians systematically destroy the knowledge of history, seeking to convince people they are aiming at restoring a period in which times were much better. They accuse one segment of society as out to destroy the country. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews, in India now it is Muslims, in America immigrants. Authoritarians universally vilify the LGTBQ in their societies, insist women should be first of all wives and breeders. In Russia, a totally authoritarianism culture, one man is the great leader.
In America the history of slavery was for generations taught as not harmful to the slaves. Some school text books said slaves were better off in America. In India, the role of Muslims in Indian history is not taught in schools, in Russia historical truths involving the past independence of the Ukraine have been transformed into the notion that it was always part of Russia.
In America absurdities are used to hide the genocide inflicted on Native Americans by Europeans. The American founding fathers are treated like saints. These things require a take over of how schools teach history.
In the United States Stanley details how the governor of Florida as done all he can to turn schools into parrots for the views of trump and his sycophants.
There is so much of great value in this book. Sadly those supporters of authoritarians world wide, especially in America will not read this or probably any other book.
"I am the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I am also an honorary professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, where I use my salary to support the Come Back Alive Foundation.
Before coming to Yale in 2013, I was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. I have also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). My PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and I received my BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.
My first book is Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. My second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of my papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. My third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. My fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy. The proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Prison Policy Initiative. My fifth book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018).
My last book, published in November, 2023, is The Politics of Language, co-authored with David Beaver, with Princeton University Press . My newest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, published in September, 2024 with One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon and Schuster."
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages
Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
The Reading Life Review - September 2024.
The Reading Life Review - September 2024.
Friday, September 27, 2024
"Block Out" - A Shorf Story by Carol Shields - 17 Pages - Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004
Buriedinprint.com
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages
Thursday, September 19, 2024
The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.—2006 - 408 Pages
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin is an incredibly interesting beautifully written account of the amazing linguistic diversity of New York City with native speakers of over 800 languages in resident, many of the languages are Endangered.
"Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.
Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, and a hundred others living in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one native speaker, along with a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and Yiddish, braided alongside Perlin’s own complicated family legacy.
On the 100th anniversary of a notorious anti-immigration law that closed America’s doors for decades and the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. At the same time, Language City celebrates the profound linguistic diversity of a single city and the joy of tuning into this unprecedented Babel." From the publisher Grove Press
New immigrants arriving New York City are caught in extensial delima. The want to Preserve their cultural identity, make sure their children know their heritage language while having to learn English to thrive in New York City. Perlin shows how numerous communities of language Speakers develop communities.
" I am a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City -
My book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is now out with Grove in the US and the UK.
As a linguist, I serve as co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, where since 2013 I have overseen research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming. Himalayan languages are a focus – for my PhD, I created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. I also teach linguistics at Columbia.
As a writer, I have written on language, labor, and China for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper's, among other places, and I published a book on unpaid work and youth economics (Intern Nation). I have given talks to students, scholars, employers, career counselors, union members, activists, and politicians at venues as different as the Googleplex, the UK Parliament, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as universities and colleges across America. TV and radio appearances have been on MSNBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, and NPR, among others.
As a translator, I work primarily from Chinese into English. I translated Liao Yiwu's Bullets and Opium (2019) and Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer (2015). I have recorded two Yiddish-language video series for The Forward and translated essays, stories, and poems as a National Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow.
I have a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and an MA from the University of London (SOAS), the last two thanks to the British people as a Marshall Scholar. My PhD in Linguistics is from the University of Bern in Switzerland. I was a 2023 New Arizona Fellow at New America.
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin talks about the anti-immigration attitude of many Americans, exposing the hateful history and deep racism from which this is derived.
Sunday, September 1, 2024
The Reading Life Review- August 2024 - Future Hopes
Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003
Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003
This is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the Holocaust and the history of Jewish Life in Berlin. Silver goes back to about 1350 when a restricted number of Jewish families were allowed to settle in Berkin, processing to periods when Jews were welcomed. By about 1940 over half of the economic productivity in Berkin was generated by the activity of Jews. (Silva goes into details on who was seen as a Jew by the Nazis and explains his own use of terminology.) As German antisemitism grew worse some how a Jewish Hospital with almost all Jewish Doctors and staff survived, Some employees were saved by being married to Christians and for a while from being World War One Veterans. They began to see family members deported to death camps.
The Germans actually sent Jewscto the hospital to be treated and once they recovered they sent them to death camps. The hospital used to treat everyone. If you could not pay you were welcomed. Then they were told they could treat only Jews so they lost a large percentage of their paying customers. Food rations were cut but still the hospital stayed open.
"Dan Silver, a lawyer and former general counsel to the CIA, tells the astonishing story of Berlin's Jewish Hospital during WWII. For decades before the Nazis seized power in Germany, the hospital had served Berlin's Jews as their principal medical resource. At the war's end, it was still functioning, delivering what medical care it could and sheltering a large percentage of the city's few remaining Jews. Silver asks how a Jewish institution, located in the capital city of a regime dedicated above all to obliterating the Jews, could possibly have survived. To answer this question, Silver has gathered the available documentary evidence and interviewed the handful of hospital staffers still alive. According to these sources, the institution's survival hinged on an amalgam of factors, including sheer, blind luck and bureaucratic infighting among Nazi organizations. As Silver explains, the Nazis' bizarre system for classifying persons of partly Jewish ancestry played a role as well, since some hospital personnel with mixed ancestry were not treated with the same implacable hostility as full Jews were. Silver acknowledges where gaps in the evidence make certainty impossible, as in assessing Dr. Walter Lustig, the hospital's chief during the war years. Lustig may have been a betrayer and collaborator, as some staffers think, or he may have manipulated the system as best he could to save at least some Jews from destruction. The balanced analysis of Dr. Lustig's record typifies the author's careful use of evidence throughout this absorbing book." From Amazon
Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver greatly expanded my knowledge of Holocaust and Jewish history.
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Faithful by Alice Hoffman - 2016 - 288 Pages
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
School for Love by Olivia Manning. - 1951- Introduction by Jane Smiley 2009
School for Love by Olivia Manning - 1951
OLIVIA MANNING (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R. D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. In World War II, the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece and then to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy (available as an NYRB Classic) and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as The Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later." From The New York Review of Books. Publisher of School for Love
This novel centers on Felix, a British boy whose mother has just died. Felix and his mother lived in Baghdad back when Iraq was a British colony, so Felix, whose father is also deceased, has to make a long journey home by ship at a time when berths on ships are reserved for service members, diplomats, and others who are directly working to bring the second world war to a close. He has a sort-of aunt in Jerusalem named Miss Bohun, and she offers to take him in while he waits for a place on the ship. Miss Bohun was an orphan herself and was taken in by Felix’s paternal grandparents, so she grew up with Felix’s father, as a foster-sibling. Felix has never met Miss Bohun before, but he has heard his mother grumbling about her. Felix who seems about thirteen, is first and foremost a lonely, grieving child who desperately needs love. One might think that Miss Bohun, an orphan herself, would be sympathetic to Felix’s feelings, but you would be wrong.
There is a lot of drama involving the other casts in the house.
It soon becomes clear – to the reader at least – that Miss Bohun is a manipulative monster, a rather absurd and disillusioned creature who considers herself a paragon of virtue when in fact she is anything but. She appears to have taken over the running of the house from its former occupant, the Polish refugee, Frau Leszno. Having been relegated to the position of Miss Bohun’s cook/housekeeper, Frau Leszno is currently residing in the servants’ quarters, a reversal of fortunes she deeply resents. In this scene, Miss Bohun tells Felix how she came to live at the house, clearly implying that she was doing Frau Leszno a huge favour by taking control of the situation. Or, if one looks at it another way, Miss Bohun saw an opportunity for personal gain which she seized without a moment’s hesitation. Felix falls in love with Faro, the resident Siamese cat.
You can decide for yourself if Miss Bohun knocks a pregnant war widow boarding in the house down the stairs, causing her a miscarriage, because of jealousy over others in the house liking her.
The close of School of Love really an amazing partially happy ending.
"Read today, it seems a work of uncanny prescience. The grave concerns of our own age—religious fanaticism, passionate competing territorial claims—are here in embryo, set into the precisely rendered, everyday texture of an era that has vanished. The alien British feel that Du Bois complained of in 1956 was not, in fact, cultural—it is a characteristic of Manning’s unique vision and style, her cool way of dissecting her world and her experience, in which even the most pitiable or terrifying circumstances are worthy of interested and detailed scrutiny." From Jane Smiley's introduction