This is a short, but decent history of how different cultures conceived of the four cardinal directions and how that informed their cosmologies and relationships to earth and other cultures. There are some surprising etymological tidbits and some great map illustrations included. I‘d call this a fun little history book that‘s not too cumbersome or academic (not that there aren‘t topics which should require that).

This type of narrative reminds me of novels like East of Eden and A Dream in Polar Fog -a grand arch of a life. Cather was exquisite in her descriptions of the landscapes and mood of the southwest wilderness, frontier life and cultural milieu; I grew up in the southwest and that‘s possibly my favorite aspect. In any case, it‘s a nice, cozy read for one of those nights here in Seattle with the sounds of rain on your skylight and a cup of coffee.

I‘m still not a fan of the stream of consciousness style of story telling. In contrast to when I read To The Lighthouse, I perhaps had a slightly better idea of what was happening, but overall I‘m still left with the vague feeling of having read a story, but never being able to grasp it or relate to any feelings or sensations or ideas in it. Much like The Sound and the Fury, it‘s just not enjoyable to try to focus on this style.

This book was…okay. The quotes on the front declare, “compelling” and “extraordinary,” but from my own perspective, I didn‘t find much in this book that I‘d characterize in that way, much less an alternative history. In other words, nothing in this narrative struck me as ground-breaking or as obscure historical processes coming to light. It‘s written well, but just doesn‘t excite me or reveal any significant new parts of the historical map.

This story, largely inspired by a real murder case in the early 1900s, is both psychologically masterful and a slog to get through. The first two “books” which deal with Clyde‘s (stand in for real-life convict Charles Gillette) childhood and adolescence and move to New York, affair with the factory girl and infatuation with a woman of high society and dreams of ascending within that society and his murder plot are long, but compelling.

This book is a sort of romp through German history, geography, art and conspicuous personalities. The author is neither German nor a historian, but he is well traveled across Central Europe and demonstrates what seems to be a good grasp of the terrain and culture. This book is good and humorous, playful even, but it is very dense, each chapter or essay taking some time to digest before moving onto the next. Incidentally, Winder does not cover WW2.

Montell explores the connections between the manipulative language tactics cults we normally think of (Jonestown, Heaven‘s Gate) with organizations and trends we might not think of as cults such as MLMs, boutique fitness trends and followings, conspiracy theories and my favorite, corporate techno-babble. It‘s not to say that these other things are cults, but that they exhibit some features, not always negative. This book is good; maybe not great.

Second time I‘ve met this hilarious person. I don‘t think I need to explain.

Greene spoke of this work as one of his “entertainments” or in other words, not a serious novel and that seems to track in my view as it‘s a formulaic thriller much like Orient Express. While not at all among my favorite Graham Greene novels, I still appreciate his protagonists‘ often complex, shifting and conflicted feelings about their own actions. This might be the first Greene novel I‘ve encountered which lacks Catholic themes. It was…okay.

This fantastic book closely follows the stories of hardship and determined effort to escape intolerable life threatening situations by four Central American immigrants and their families as well as the political ecosystems in all affected countries which push and pull immigration policy in one direction or another. It‘s an absolute must read for anyone who wants to grasp the how and especially the why of the ongoing crises in Central America.

I both loved this book and hated it. I consume a lot of academic history and this did not scratch that itch. While it does contain some interesting narrative on the evolution of writing and books which is what I came for, it‘s clear that the author is a novelist by trade and not a historian. As others have noted, this reads more like a long form personal essay that happens to meander through the history of books among other topics. Beware.

This novel is okay; I‘m not sure how else to pinpoint my feelings about it. As a late Gen Xer myself, I couldn‘t resist reading the novel that lent the name. The main characters seem to convey big ideas in parables to each other, the aim of which is to commiserate on the feeling of living in a future of diminished career prospects, boomer criticism, apocalyptic war and ecocide, rampant ads and commercialism. Can confirm; I relate well.

This graphic novel adaptation to Eric Cline‘s book on the collapse of eastern Mediterranean civilizations in the late Bronze Age was quite well done. Traditionally, blame is cast on the Sea Peoples referenced in Egyptian monuments, but archaeological and textual evidence points to a complex picture as to the who, when, why and the scope of the impacts on a local and international scale. The art and storytelling bring history alive in a fun way.

As others have said, Chuck may not be the greatest writer, but I‘ve still enjoyed his more serious work, this being the second after Camp Damascus. I was fortunate to go to an event last year at a local book store where he put on a bit of a show and then later got to meet him. He is hilarious in person and I‘d highly recommend going to one of his events. He‘s got another one coming up in August for his new book, Lucky Day. I‘ll be there.

This reads as a sort of diary of the author‘s investigation and interviews with those who lived in East Germany and whose lives were forever altered by the ever present Stasi and their hordes of informal agents. She also interviews former Stasi agents and former GDR propaganda mongers to understand how they feel about their work behind the wall and whether it was all worth it. I enjoyed reading this. It‘s beautifully written which was unexpected.

While I was in Berlin, I met a British tour guide who referenced this specific book as a great introduction to the advent and dissolution of East Germany or the German Democratic Republic. Funny enough, I was already reading it. Hoyer does a particularly nice job with the format relating individual experiences of citizens of various locales, backgrounds, industries, dissenters and true believers and builds the historical narrative off this device.

I read this on the plane en route to and from Germany and I couldn‘t put it down. I‘ve read quite a bit of non-fiction and fiction which deals with possible collapse scenarios for civil society in the United States and I think this book written in the 90s envisions the most realistic one -a slow deterioration of municipal and legal institutions, rotting physical infrastructure, rampant unemployment, climate change issues and roving gangs.

I read this little book at a bar in Berlin from where I just returned. There‘s nothing political in it nor any in-depth analyses of the historical roots of the wall. It is pure infographics and quite well done. Now having seen remaining portions of the wall myself, this tiny book really filled in some gaps and gave me a better understanding of what I was looking at and how the wall evolved.

I picked up this short novel on a whim. The author‘s descriptions of emotions and interactions are interesting; I think I enjoyed the first part of the plot, but then I think the arc was made too obvious with blatant hints and the ending was just kind of abrupt, mysterious and vaguely unsatisfying. I really don‘t know how to characterize this love story of a desperate widower staging a fake film audition to find a girl who tries to murder him.

There‘s a lot going on this novel and events as metaphor abound, especially on tensions between the colonized and colonizer, fear and presumptuousness, contempt and patronization, meaninglessness and the absurd to revelation. It reminds me quite a bit of the works of Paul Bowles who wrote just twenty years later about the clash of cultures, encountering alienation and the endless search for the real Morocco or India or wherever. It‘s a good read.

I finally finished this massive tome. I‘ve neglected learning much about WW2 over my lifetime, so this was quite the journey through history, but well worth it. I realize that some modern academic historians are critical of Shirer‘s work in that as a journalist, they view him as an amateur who failed to research and analyze in a rigorous manner. I‘m in no position to weigh in on that, but I can confess that I did enjoy this book quite a bit.

This is another one of those woo woo past lives books, so I don‘t have much to say about it that can‘t be found in another Michael Newton style book. I do find the whole topic rather fascinating. I think it‘s one of few theories or phenomena that adequately address why you are you right now having this experience and not someone else in a different body having a different experience in a different time and place. For me, it‘s a central mystery.

This novel is essentially what I take to be Joyce‘s own coming of age story in which he ultimately sets out to free himself of Irish revivalism, language and politics, his early forays into sexual addiction which he then overreacted to by immersing himself in the Catholic faith and then later discovering that he believed none of it and that his college friends were full of shit. I can appreciate the project, but I didn‘t much care for this book.

This is Seymour‘s follow-up to The Twittering Machine and I believe a must read just like its predecessor for understanding the current economic, social and political climate not just in the US, but in places like Brazil, Hungary, India and Israel. Seymour calls Disaster Nationalism “not-yet-fascism” in that it sprouts from similar social roots as classical fascism, but exhibits its own unique fetish for humiliation of opposition and death-urge.

This is a must read for anyone interested in or horrified by the ways in which social media has disrupted how we write, communicate with each other and conceive of ourselves, politics and society. Moreover, this essay in book format reads as part philosophy, psychology and history to deliver a thorough analysis of the present danger posed by the “social industry” especially in relation to conspiracy theories and political campaigns. Great read!

Possibly one of my favorite non-fiction authors has written another important book, this time part memoire, part investigation of how social media creates doubles of fact based political movements, these doubles based on wild conspiracy theories. The phenomenon is explored through the COVID pandemic, First Nations reconciliation movements in Canada, autism and anti-vaxxers and genocide in Palestine.

To be sure, I adore Kafka, but mostly in novel form such as The Castle, Amerika and so on. While I can appreciate some of the stories in this volume, including the famous Metamorphosis and dark, comedic, absurd takes such as Description of a Struggle and In the Penal Colony, I admittedly did not connect to much of the volume; many of the stories meander on like H.P. Lovecraft, but pretending to be a dog or a mole. Not bad. Not amazing.

As far as Graham Greene novels go, I‘d say this one ranks somewhere in the middle of his oeuvre. While no Greene novel is complete without some Catholic or faith theme, this one‘s protagonist is seemingly lacking that faith, yet the question of whether it‘s important or whether he ought to at least believe in something is a constant undercurrent. As usual, another novel of colonizers and their intrigues amongst the colonized; an okay read.

This author‘s work is reminiscent of that other western historian, Richard White, and more generally both of these were perhaps forerunners of the Howard Zinn style of historical narrative with a focus on the experience of the people who lived it instead of the deeds of conquering Europeans and later US officials. One of the great tasks of this book is to dispel the mythical western imagery from film and literature that became historical stand-in.

I finally read this after it sat on my shelf for several years. I used to live in Cyprus in the 90s and remember a period of tension, incidents on the Green Line, Turkish fighter planes buzzing my city, car bombs. I was aware at the time of the basic story of how the island came to be partitioned and the grievances of the Greek and Turkish communities, had visited the Green Line in Nicosia, but this was the first time I read about it in depth.

I normally love books about ocean science and I really wanted to delve into this, but the author‘s writing style was rather drab, unsophisticated and read almost like a college sophomore essay. I just couldn‘t stand it after three chapters. And that‘s a shame because I‘m sure there are great ideas and information in this book concerning our planet and hydrodynamics, how ocean forces affected historical events, etc. But I just couldn‘t do it.

This is what I can best describe as a “cute” and funny little intro to philosophical ideas for the uninitiated. Because of the format -little sections expanding on an erudite quip or a snarky zinger- the author sometimes leaves out really important premises or objections to various arguments, but I suppose that was baked into the plan for this book. It‘s a good little book for light reading at the hotel bar like I was doing in Halifax recently.

As a big admirer, it took me too many years to get around to reading this. No Logo is an account of how corporations began selling brands instead of products, ideas, lifestyles and symbols instead of commodities. With that came the focus group and brands marketed to specific demographics like urban youth who integrated Nike swag into gang culture. Into the 90s, public outcries against sweatshops and environmental degradation awoke a resistance.

This was a great follow up read for the last book I reviewed here about “le grand dérangement.” It certainly helped fill in more blanks for me regarding family lore. It turns out that Acadians were shipped not only to other British colonies, but to Britain itself with many migrating to find lost family members in other colonies, migrating to France and then migrating out again as part of some ill-fated colonial endeavor…

As a descendant of the Acadians myself, I waited far too long to learn about this pivotal event in history. When I was small, my Cajun family had always told me about how we as a French offshoot came to be in Louisiana, the expulsion from Canada, “le grand dérangement,” but it was so distant in collective memory, it was a sort of legend and was in a tl;dr format. I hadn‘t thought much about it, but I finally decided I‘d like to know the details.

This is another one of those American classics I wanted to read, but ended up not liking too much. From what I can gather, the protagonist is a lady of high society who fails to marry the right man, doesn‘t take care to maintain appearances of being proper, ends up getting scammed, takes the fall for some other society lady in a scandal, gets kicked out of the clique, destroys her only method of retribution and then overdoses on sleeping drugs.

While academic in some places, this little book was fun and fascinating if like me, you find different cultural conceptions of the world worth attempting to understand. While perhaps not fully understood, the author journeys through the landscape and tales of the Western Apache in Arizona to map local places, their historical Apache names and the historical as well as their social significance -a geography of stories and inherited wisdom.

This novel, about a servant girl who escapes from the Jamestown colony to strike it out on her own in the woods of Virginia was simply okay. The description of the ordeal of survival became repetitive as well as the over-use of the word “piss;” this story‘s lasting impression in my mind lies in phrases such as, “the brown, sick piss.” The story also seems to have some kind of spiritual eco-consciousness message towards the end, I think at least.

I didn‘t hate it. I didn‘t love it. As others have said, this novella is essentially a highly descriptive inner psychological struggle in a civil war battle setting. I can appreciate it for what it is, but it wasn‘t terribly satisfying as drama or thriller or historical fiction. The 19th century penchant for writing dialogue in dialect isn‘t particularly appealing to me either (like Dickens novels and Huck Finn).

I suppose you could say I sometimes read classics just to say I‘ve read them and it definitely was the case this time around. Perhaps if I was 14 years old in 19th century America, this would speak to me, but I‘m afraid at this distance and life stage, it‘s more of a curiosity of history. I don‘t have much to say about it other than it can be a long slog of dialect, racist themes and cartoonish antics. Relating to any characters is impossible.

This is a history of conspiracy theories centered on the United States, from the founding to the war on terror. It is highly disturbing, interesting and amusing, entertaining even, to see the lengths and mental acrobatics humans will go to in order to make sense of their world in a way which plays to their pre-established fears. While it‘s focused on the US, that‘s not to say that US culture produces more conspiracy theories than any other.

Was stream of consciousness the fad of the 1920s? I get that it might have been new and innovative and a tool to convey perspective, but I absolutely loathe it. I didn‘t like To The Lighthouse for that reason and this is worse. The first two chapters are written this way and are very difficult to follow. The third chapter is written in first person and the fourth and final chapter is written in third person. Each follows a different character.

This book is nine years old now and at the time of writing, the insidious nature of social media, ads and the invasion of privacy were scary enough, so I can only imagine what wondrous changes in apps and tactics these same companies and governments are employing now. To be sure, I think we‘re all aware of the adage that if the service is free, the product is you, but this book lays out in horrific detail the evolution of data and you as product.

This is a dark, haunting, existential novel which evokes similar feelings as Kobo Abe‘s The Woman in the Dunes with a bit of 1984 thrown in. The story conjures questions such as: What is a memory? What is it good for? Does existence depend on memory or in other words if no one remembers a thing any longer, does it exist? As things are forgotten and slip out of existence, does it even matter? Or should efforts be made to preserve what can be?

This is a collection of essays that reads essentially as a memoir, wherein Zweig details his life as a writer in Vienna and traveling abroad and his meetings and reflections on other artists and their work whom he had struck up friendships with (many it seems). But the real allure of this book for me was to read a first-hand account of culture, politics and daily life in Belle époque Europe, during WWI, the inter-war period and the start of WW2.

I‘m a history junkie and I‘ve always been acutely interested in the inner machinations of government, the media environment and propaganda, especially since 9/11, I suppose since that happened while I was in college, a rather formative time. Blumenthal is a reporter that provides a meticulous, yet wide scope of the underbelly of government, politics and media that often relegates him to the fringes because he challenges the official narrative.

I‘m not sure how to describe this book. It‘s both fascinating and frustratingly nebulous. The author claims he has access to higher realms of experience through recollections of life before he was born or the “between lives” time although it‘s never made quite clear how. The book is like a serious of aphorisms arranged by topic and then a FAQ section. Much of it is interesting life philosophy; some of it reads like Spinoza or Heidegger. Meh.

Finally, after a failed start on this tome back in 2012, I started over eleven years later and finished it. Jensen, if you don‘t know him, is a prolific writer whose work typically concentrates on the rampant destruction which industrial civilization inflicts on us and the planet. This particular book is a little off beat in that he explores dreams and those who may be working and informing us “from other sides.” Not his best, but decent.

This book was impressive. I‘m originally from AZ where the border has always loomed large, where cries for a wall and undue discrimination toward Mexicans and anybody who vaguely looks Latino is a staple. Grandin does an impeccable job tracing the origins of the current anti-immigration, anti-social rights, neoliberal economic, militarist order expressed currently through Trumpism in the disappearance of the frontier or subsequent frontiers.

I‘m going to be one of those people that appreciates the idea of the story and the theme of the maniacal, self-destructive quest, but wish to never read this again. I understand that Melville felt the need to expand the work by 70% with essays on whaling and whale anatomy and sailing and philosophy and that has its place, but I didn‘t care for it. After 300 pages, I just wanted this long slog to be over. But I was on team Dick, for sure.