[mike]

[zephyr]

I recently finished reading Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, first published in 2004, with a lengthy Notes and Bibliography. Excellent and thought-provoking as is most of his work. Blurbs and reviews are here via his website. ~z

[Backpacker Joe]

Forgotten Forbidden America. Thomas A. Watson

[zephyr]

Just finished this one a couple of days ago. 428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire by Giusto Traina. Translated from the Italian. This is an academic work focusing on one year towards the end of the Roman Empire (476 CE). If you have an interest in Late Antiquity then this is for you. It was necessary for me to read it twice since there were so many place names, key figures of rulers, bishops, writers, barbarian tribes, place names and events to keep straight. Here's a short section from the Princeton University Press blurb: This is a sweeping tour of the Mediterranean world from the Atlantic to Persia during the last half-century of the Roman Empire. By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, 428 AD provides a truly fresh look at a civilization in the midst of enormous change--as Christianity takes hold in rural areas across the empire, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine east, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople. ~z

[MtnGoat]

Funny, I'm just wrapping up SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. A very impressive book covering the other end of the Roman empire, from about 700 BC to 200 AD. I'm glad I picked it up, I had no idea that so much of modern life still contained so many things Roman, from our calendar of course, to a ton of common phrases, legal ideas, and literary and rhetorical devices pioneered by Cicero.

[MtnGoat]

[zephyr]

[olderthanIusedtobe]

So...non linear storytelling. Huh. Can be effective if done well, but can also drive me freaking nuts. I'm used to it in movies, but then you're only waiting 1 1/2 or 2 hours for the pay off for why the script writer/director chose to do it that way. With literature, takes a lot longer. Anyway just started a novel "Celine" by Peter Heller about an aristocratic detective who mostly does pro bono work and specializes in missing persons cold cases. There's elements of the story I'm intrigued by, but it's constantly jumping back and forth across decades and just the utterly inane minutiae from the main characters childhood that has nothing to do with anything. Totally sidetracks/dead ends the narrative. So frustrating. Not sure if I can stick with this. Why do authors do this?

[mike]

[zephyr]

Letter to a Christian Nation, Vintage Books, 2006. Another short but powerful book by Sam Harris. Here is a link to his blog with a description and review quotes. I pulled this quote from the Conclusion section: One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns--about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering--in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty.Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. Kinda' makes you think. ~z

[olderthanIusedtobe]

[Mike Collins]

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown brings the story of the gold medal quest for rowing in the 1936 Olympics alive. The reader won't feel the splash of the white sculling oars on the Berlin water until page 455 which allows the author time to develop the characters, many of whom had hardscrabble boyhoods. Much of the book has the backdrop of the Seattle area adding further flavor to a heartwarming read. Two oars up for this book.

[Toni]

I just started reading the 'sample' of this that B&N offers, has anyone here read this book? pg 21 of 36, pretty darn good so far! Love the history/facts building up to eruption.

[Mike Collins]

The three year siege of Sarajevo is the longest of modern time. At four o'clock in the afternoon of May 27, 1992 a mortar shell killed twenty-two people waiting to buy bread. For the next twenty-two days Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist played Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor at that site to honor the dead. Within the framework of that tragedy The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway brilliantly exposes the inanity of war by bringing you into the mind of a fictitious sniper with a nom de guerre of Arrow.

[wildernessed]

Chris Hedges was a war correspondent with the NYT and was trapped in Sarajevo during that siege he has some great insight into it. Horrific.