books, some borrowed, some new
Jun. 10th, 2005 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIllegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle by David Tripp
I have a small numismatic background, so I was caught by this in-depth study of this rare US coin (only one was ever legally released, and that was by mistake). Tripp is one of those popular historians who believes in writing in blackout vignettes which are all about personality, but unlike many such writers he doesn't always forget to give you the facts as well. Starts out as a tale of Depression economics (this is the weak part), and gets much better as it turns into a numismatic crime story. Pretty interesting.
A Passionate Pilgrim: A Biography of Bishop James A. Pike by David M. Robertson
Also all about personality - if you want to learn the evolution of Pike's theology, you'd best go elsewhere - but likewise interesting. I vaguely remember Pike - I'm not Episcopalian but I was living in his diocese at the time he was bishop - and I took the opportunity to read about him for two reasons: 1) the bizarre but true fact that he was a friend of Philip K. Dick (Robertson thinks Dick was a complete nutcase, and writes austerely, "Pike, for his part, took his friends as he found them"; 2) to find out about his memorable death. I'd always presumed that Pike wandered off in the desert in the grip of some spiritual or drug-induced hallucinatory ecstasy, but that's wrong: he was just a really really stupid tourist. Having gotten them utterly lost on unmarked rutted dirt roads with an inadequate map, to his wife's protest that "It looks like endless desert, just endless desert," Pike replied, "It can't be endless desert. The map doesn't show endless desert." Jim, Jim, didn't they ever teach you in theology class? The map is not the territory. Especially if you're looking at the wrong part of the map.
Washington Gone Crazy by Michael J. Ybarra
Really a biography of Pat McCarran, one of the all-time great senatorial wingnuts, now sadly remembered by most only for his airport. Has some good background on people with catchy names like Tasker L. Oddie and Berkeley L. Bunker. But it lost its attraction on p. 444 when, in order to show that senators were really old, Ybarra states, "Only in the Senate was a fifty-seven-year-old man a youngster," when in fact the man being referred to, Hubert Humphrey, was actually 37. Better luck next time.
Zorro by Isabel Allende
Not too often these days I find a novel I can read in two hours, but this was one. Anachronistic enough to make your teeth ache - in this book you can tell the Good Men because they're all 21st-century feminists, and Zorro has a Wise Old Indian grandmother who teaches him Indian Old Wisdom (somewhere I think it says she's Shoshone, but what the Shoshones would be doing living in the LA foothills in 1790 it doesn't explain; maybe they're waiting for someone to build Disneyland) - but it was a light enough book not to be bothersome. This is the Origin of Zorro story: at least half takes place during his late adolescence education in Spain, and it ends abruptly with his first adventure back in Alta California. Very much in the "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya" mode, or perhaps that should be the other way around.
Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology by Verlyn Flieger
I have to review this one. I'm not sure who to recommend it to: the audience with intimate command of Tolkien's posthumous work, who will understand what Flieger is on about (and will catch her in a number of irritating, but fortunately only irritating, errors), is small, and anyone else is likely to be dazed by the complexity of the material being discussed, and the sophistication of the argument. The subject is the framing of Tolkien's mythology: if we're pretending that this is real, who wrote it down? and how did it get into our hands? With real mythologies, transmission is an important process that significantly shapes the work as we know it (and yes, Flieger tells us all about the Kalevala and the Eddas), and Tolkien wanted his fictional one to have the same feel.
Queenan Country: a reluctant Anglophile's pilgrimage to the mother country by Joe Queenan
Well, at least it's funny.
I have a small numismatic background, so I was caught by this in-depth study of this rare US coin (only one was ever legally released, and that was by mistake). Tripp is one of those popular historians who believes in writing in blackout vignettes which are all about personality, but unlike many such writers he doesn't always forget to give you the facts as well. Starts out as a tale of Depression economics (this is the weak part), and gets much better as it turns into a numismatic crime story. Pretty interesting.
A Passionate Pilgrim: A Biography of Bishop James A. Pike by David M. Robertson
Also all about personality - if you want to learn the evolution of Pike's theology, you'd best go elsewhere - but likewise interesting. I vaguely remember Pike - I'm not Episcopalian but I was living in his diocese at the time he was bishop - and I took the opportunity to read about him for two reasons: 1) the bizarre but true fact that he was a friend of Philip K. Dick (Robertson thinks Dick was a complete nutcase, and writes austerely, "Pike, for his part, took his friends as he found them"; 2) to find out about his memorable death. I'd always presumed that Pike wandered off in the desert in the grip of some spiritual or drug-induced hallucinatory ecstasy, but that's wrong: he was just a really really stupid tourist. Having gotten them utterly lost on unmarked rutted dirt roads with an inadequate map, to his wife's protest that "It looks like endless desert, just endless desert," Pike replied, "It can't be endless desert. The map doesn't show endless desert." Jim, Jim, didn't they ever teach you in theology class? The map is not the territory. Especially if you're looking at the wrong part of the map.
Washington Gone Crazy by Michael J. Ybarra
Really a biography of Pat McCarran, one of the all-time great senatorial wingnuts, now sadly remembered by most only for his airport. Has some good background on people with catchy names like Tasker L. Oddie and Berkeley L. Bunker. But it lost its attraction on p. 444 when, in order to show that senators were really old, Ybarra states, "Only in the Senate was a fifty-seven-year-old man a youngster," when in fact the man being referred to, Hubert Humphrey, was actually 37. Better luck next time.
Zorro by Isabel Allende
Not too often these days I find a novel I can read in two hours, but this was one. Anachronistic enough to make your teeth ache - in this book you can tell the Good Men because they're all 21st-century feminists, and Zorro has a Wise Old Indian grandmother who teaches him Indian Old Wisdom (somewhere I think it says she's Shoshone, but what the Shoshones would be doing living in the LA foothills in 1790 it doesn't explain; maybe they're waiting for someone to build Disneyland) - but it was a light enough book not to be bothersome. This is the Origin of Zorro story: at least half takes place during his late adolescence education in Spain, and it ends abruptly with his first adventure back in Alta California. Very much in the "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya" mode, or perhaps that should be the other way around.
Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology by Verlyn Flieger
I have to review this one. I'm not sure who to recommend it to: the audience with intimate command of Tolkien's posthumous work, who will understand what Flieger is on about (and will catch her in a number of irritating, but fortunately only irritating, errors), is small, and anyone else is likely to be dazed by the complexity of the material being discussed, and the sophistication of the argument. The subject is the framing of Tolkien's mythology: if we're pretending that this is real, who wrote it down? and how did it get into our hands? With real mythologies, transmission is an important process that significantly shapes the work as we know it (and yes, Flieger tells us all about the Kalevala and the Eddas), and Tolkien wanted his fictional one to have the same feel.
Queenan Country: a reluctant Anglophile's pilgrimage to the mother country by Joe Queenan
Well, at least it's funny.
