Like many people, I've got a list of books I'm just dying to read if ONLY I had time. My top ten right now are:
Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations on the Americas before Columbus
Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
Alfred Doblin, November 1918 and Karl and Rosa
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina or maybe...
_______, War and Peace (did you hear that DN piece on the WBAI marathon read?)
Brandt Goldstein, Storming the COurt
Graetz and Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts
Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran Contra Affairs
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons
Jonathan Kozol, Shame of the Nation
Oh well, let's make it a baker's dozen
I got more than half way through, but haven't finished:
Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation (maybe THAT's what I'll do today)
I've just GOT to read
Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah
and I know I will spend forever reading:
Fisk's new one, The Great War for Civilizatiion
and what's on YOUR list, readers?
6 comments:
Anything by Harold Pinter, after his speech last week at the UN:
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
LINK
Whoops - not speech at the UN - speech at the Nobel Foundation 12/7
Want to finish Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson. Its all about military forts around the world and their replacement of embassies as the face of and venue for official interactions between the US and the world. That we have crossed the Rubicon from being a Republic to being an Empire. Very topical with the Romanian military agreement in the news.
I wish I had time to read Karl and Rosa too. I tried--no less than two times.
Committment fear on my part?
Chris K
You really should check out the Döblin books. Berlina Alexanderplatz was impossible in English, but his two-volumes on the German almost revolution of 1918 is one of the great historical novels ever written.
Oh -- and if you haven't made time for Tolsoi, it's nothing like you imagine it will be. It's fast-paced and dramatic. His essays and theological writings are another thing... plus, don't forget his novela Hajdi Muraj about the initial Russian conquest of Chechnya.
thanks, Burning Man. I'm about 200 pages through the first of the Nov. 1918 book, but had to set it aside while I was teaching my courses. Now, I'm going back to it over the holiday.
Post a Comment