Re: Just finished reading a great book
 

I know the books i am about to suggest are nothing like the posts you guys dis.

But these are two books by one man who is my hero.

The first book is called Brain Droppings
The second is called Napalm and Silly putty

The man IS George Carlin. The man is my hero.

The books are some of his stand up routine stuff, and some of it is stuff i havent seen him preform. Yet, if you like...nay....love to laugh, pick up both books. They are not sequential, so either order is fine.

I know whatt eh books say, because i have read them each about 10 times, yet its almost brand new each time you read it.

Give it a go.

Re: Just finished reading a great book
 

Just thought I'd revive this because I'm reading a book for the first time in a long while and it's one of the most interesting and fascinating books. It's Sigmund Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and the first three chapters have all been about the reasons why you forget simple proper names or words. It turns out that the greatest reason is some sort of sub-conscious repression of either something associated with the word or name, or that the repressed item sounds similar to the forgotten word. It's sort of complicated for me to explain since Freud is way way way smarter than me, but if you have any interest in psychology, I reccomend this one.

Re: Just finished reading a great book
 

Speaking of good books...

The Dark Tower Seven: The Dark Tower, will be released the 21st of this month.

*Changes underwear*

;)

Re: Just finished reading a great book
 

Just Started Reading, "A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present", by Howard Zinn. I'm liking it so far.

Re: Just finished reading a great book
 

Is that the just the history of the US? Is it written like a test book, or am I correct in assuming from the title that it focuses more on the people rather than names and dates?

That might be something worth looking into, if so...

Side note: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower? Isn't that a little redundant?


*shrugs and walks away*

Re: Just finished reading a great book
 

It's written from the people's perspective during the events not the historical. I'll type this out:



" My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.

My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as well know that before going on."

Re: Just finished reading a great book
 

Another book I heard of just 5 minutes ago is "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides. Described to me as "its about the Bataan Death March and the POWs that survived in the death camp. it has excerps from there diaries and pictures it was so moving". I think I'll pick this up next time I'm at B&N.