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    Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
    And it's prompted me to check out David Graeber more generally, starting with his Wiki page. I have to say that both "Debt - the first 5,000 years" and "Bullshit jobs" sound like fascinating books.
    We have a whole thread about him in World--started when he died.

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      Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
      I acquired the much anticipated The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow on Tuesday, it's North American publication date. I've strictly an amateur's interest in anthropology, and this book is being discussed seriously as a corrective to the generally accepted view of early human development propounded by Diamond, Harari, Singer and others. I'm only a few pages in but it's certainly well written and... umm... bracing in its criticisms. More later.
      I can't seem to find the thread in World that was started about him, but there's an excerpt in the NY Times opinion section from the book:

      https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/o...A2Gtyk3C4aM2-U

      Researchers are far from unanimous about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree the logistical challenges were daunting. Residents definitely produced a surplus, and with it came ample opportunity for some of them to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over the others or fight for the spoils, but over eight centuries we find little evidence of warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of these early cities lay in the political strategies they adopted to prevent such things. Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the social freedoms of the Ukrainian city dwellers were maintained through processes of local decision-making, in households and neighborhood assemblies, without any need for centralized control or top-down administration.

      Yet, even now, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up in scholarship. When they do, academics tend to call them “mega-sites” rather than cities, a kind of euphemism that signals to a wider audience that they should not be thought of as proper cities but as villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size. Some even refer to them outright as “overgrown villages.” How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins? Why has anyone with even a passing interest in the origin of cities heard of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro, but almost no one of Taljanky or Nebelivka?

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        I'm about quarter of the way through. It's one of those works that makes you want to grab everyone you meet by the collar and plead "You really gotta read this, you really do!"

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          Just finished Land of Lost Borders. Apart from being totally fascinating it's also beautifully written.

          In need of some fiction again next, so tonight I'll be starting Princess Bari by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell. I only heard of the author very recently (although I imagine that for those of you who were a bit older and more politically aware than I was in the mid-90s his name might ring a bell), but from what I have heard I'm really looking forward to starting it.

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            Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
            I'm about quarter of the way through. It's one of those works that makes you want to grab everyone you meet by the collar and plead "You really gotta read this, you really do!"
            Just started this. Loving the stiletto jabs at Diamond and fuckin Pinker.

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              Harlem Shuffle-Colson Whitehead. Ray Carney is the protagonist around whom a rich and extravagant cast of characters orbit during Harlem in the years 1959-64. Trying to go straight and escape a dysfunctional childhood immersed in his father criminality hes opened a furniture store & married above his background with dreams of escaping the New York streets for a more salubrious residence. Naturally its not that easy and the narrative is built round 3 separate periods when the neighbourhood past & present all collide to imperil his future. Set against historical events & accomodating all the jetsom & flotsam you would expect- bar flies, jive talking chancers and dreamers,bent coppers, local gangsters, fences ,doxys with a conscience,hypocritical civic leaders all in the melting pot-this is a tale told with energy,rhythm,style & talent.

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                Harlem Shuffle has been on, and off, my reading list for some time. I'd be interested in a review.

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                  I looked at a hardback copy of Harlem Shuffle through Waterstones window today. 20 months with no work means it’ll be a library copy I’ll be reading.

                  Just back from taking a Sainsbury’s bag of our unwanted books to the Oxfam book shop.
                  Matthew Collins history of the NYC art scene “It Hurts” was the last one of mine to be put in the bag. I like his semi detached semi amused style. I’m presuming the titles from “So Hip It Hurts”. There ain’t half a load of bollocks surrounding the art world and he acknowledges it while joining in. At the end I discovered he’d written a similar one about the U.K. modern art scene which the Oxfam shop had on its shelves. If it’s still there when the next bag is dropped off I’ll buy it.

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                    Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                    Harlem Shuffle has been on, and off, my reading list for some time. I'd be interested in a review.
                    Heh. This is second time my contribution to thread has subsequently requested a review of book read. Which I thought I had done in original contribution.

                    Enjoyed Harlem Shuffle-much more than Nickel Boys though that could be due to subject matter. The scope was broader and the characters given an opportunity to express themselves rather than being suffocated in misery. It a series of set pieces-two heists sandwiching a tale of retribution which is weakest of three. Mainly because the stoic protagonist is at centre of this one rather than at margins of other two. But yea Whitehead has the ability to draw the reader into an unfamiliar backdrop and make it seem familiar. Likewise his characters seem to be astutely observed-what do I know of Harlem at this tumultuous or indeed any period but if author doing job properly that all you can ask-though most will be familiar from tropes & stereotypes of late 20th-early 21 century culture. Bit like Dickens London maybe. Add absorbing & wit gives a highly satisfactory story. Dont get impression author is trying to push envelope in his writing but what he does he does well.
                    Last edited by ale; 11-11-2021, 17:56.

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                      Cheers. That's very helpful

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                        Never Saw Me Coming-Vera Kurian. Chosen on basis of recommendation by Mrs A who has form for bringing to attention the very best of mystery & thriller genre in which she specialises. Sadly this turned out to be the exception to the rule. Premise is interesting-Washington DC college offering a select group of students established as psychopaths due to behaviour demonstrated as teens a place to study in return for their agreement to complete assessments based on their tendencies and inclinations. And one by one somebody is bumping them off. Three of the group form a unit to catch the perpetrator each for their own individual reasons. The story though doesnt really catch fire beyond this-only one of the trio is genuinely compelling and the denouement is simply anti-climatic & lacking in credibility. It a debut novel to be fair so maybe better to come.

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                          Originally posted by Incandenza View Post

                          We have a whole thread about him in World--started when he died.
                          Inca, I don't know if you're reading The Dawn of Everything, as I and others are, but I found the chapter on the schismogenesis* (a new term for me!) between native bands in California and the Pacific North West fascinating, be interesting to hear your thoughts and that of other Californians.

                          * A hard cultural division. Where societies build themselves in opposition to each other.

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                            I bought TDOE on ebook the other day, and think it'll be either the next or the next-but-one book I start.

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                              Reading Alice Bell's Our Biggest Experiment; A History of Climate Change which is very interesting

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                                The Silence-Don Delillo. The cover proclaims this a novel though at 139 pages it is stretching the understood definition of such to its most elastic point. There are only two scenes and five characters . Comparisons with a play continue with characters randomly (and for seemingly little purpose or intent) leaving the apartment in which all but the first chapter is set. The first chapter is the most intriguing of the whole tale and introduces a married couple flying from France to America for the purpose of watching the Super Bowl in aforesaid apartment. The assumption as the chapter closes is that the plane is about to crash. The following chapter introduces the remaining 3 characters just as a power failure disrupts the Superbowl TV coverage-this failure is national if not global as immediate society melts down. The plot is initially developed by the couple from the plane actually turning up as expected if a little late-though it is left open and unexplained as whether they are survivors. Even before this the whole story is collapsing on itself and never recovers. There is a lot of meandering aimless dialogue and a sex scene that nearly happens. Hazarding a guess at the authors intentions in writing this story is beyond me though it doesnt provoke or challenge or even dismay. Indifference the main response with the saving grace being the lack of time required to read it.

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                                  Gave up Delillo years ago - life's too short for unreadable writers. I took an age over Stepanova's In Memory of Memory (well, about 6-8 weeks), because it was the kind of book worth savouring in short doses, plus I kept falling asleep, which was nothing to do with the book, just my irregular middle-aged sleeping patterns. Am reading Matt Haig's The Midnight Library which is okay, very easy to read, but where you feel the writer thinks he's funnier than he really is. It's reminding me of Sliding Doors and Gwyneth fucking Paltrow and Nick Hornby's terrible novel about the four people wanting to throw themselves off the top of a building (I'd have advised him to cut it to a one-chapter version), and I can feel even early on in the book that we're being very slowly pointed towards a life-affirming conclusion because there's nowhere else for it to go really. Still, it would be untrue to say that I'm not enjoying it.

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                                    We had to read White Noise by DeLillo at university, and I've never wanted to pick up anything by him since. I got, and didn't really disagree with, what he was trying to say with it, and in particular I wish to clarify that I understood that the next thing I'm going to type was the effect he was going for, but the narratorial voice just drove me up the wall. I'll occasionally see that something by him has been released to rave reviews and be tempted to pick it up and see whether my tastes have changed in the seventeen years or so since I last read him, but there's always something more appealing to read, somehow.

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                                      London,Burning-Anthony Quinn. Title is Clash related and more or less covers period Give Em Enough Rope to Cost Of Living EP. Others might see it as period between dog days of Callaghan government & election of Thatcher. It is story telling rather than literature and for most part it works-main characters are are represented by journalism,police force,university lecturer and rather more incongruously the director of a theatre company. The political background is well covered as it should be given it not a contemporary novel of the times. The winter of discontent,the IRA bombing campaign, endemic corruption within the police department. The author manages to allow a sense of ambiguity attach itself to the Irish university lecturer who is unwittingly dragged into centre stage through his friendship with IRA bomber who offers his regrets but denied by his friend within Labour ministerial group. What ultimately lets down novel is the anti climatic conclusion. All wrongs are righted and each man gets his girl who they had previously let slip. While the general shared feeling of Thatcher becoming PM is troublesome-the main characters bar one (the Irish lecturer doesnt give a flying one about English politics) are Labour in legacy but not to extent they are unwilling to give Thatcher benefit of doubt.

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                                        I've started The King in the North by Max Adams. The subject matter is really interesting (6-7th century British and Irish), it's really useful for recalibrating how to think about borders. Dal Riata just sounds Italian to my ear.

                                        It is a period that has sourcing issues, but I don't have enough confidence in the author. There is a section in the first chapter that made me think of a passage in HHhH by Binet which is about filling in the gaps in history as a historian or author. The Binet passage is so much better written and demonstrates so much more thought.

                                        I don't think Adams is a good enough writer for this to be a really good book.

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                                          In my attempts to read more modern SF and Fantasy authors I read NK Jemisin's The City We Became. It's a very interesting premise - that when cities reach a certain cultural weight they become alive and their own independent entities; and this is happening in New York. And some of the imagery is excellently Lovecrafty. But it felt like it was trying a little too hard - both to define boroughs a bit too narrowly: Bronx is fighty, Manhattan is arrogant, Brooklyn is creative, Staten Island is reactionary and nothing to do with New York, really. It was delving deep into cliche and became annoying. In other ways, too, it just felt clunky and heavy and trying to hard - you could feel the author trying rather than the book feeling natural and organic.

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                                            That seems very Gaiman-y.

                                            I'd like to read about Charlemagne I think. I know so little about Europe in that period.

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                                              My girlfriend likes me to read to her as she's dropping off to sleep, and for the last few months we've been going through the Wikipedia pages of the Holy Roman Emperors, starting with Charlemagne. I've gone from having absolutely no idea what a Holy Roman Emperor really was when it was at home to having ... well, something of a grasp, at least. So if anyone has any recommendations they were going to give Levin for proper books on the subject, do throw them my way as well, please.

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                                                Janet Nelson's King and Emperor: a new life of Charlemagne is widely considered the best of the recent biographies

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                                                  Thanks, ursus!

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                                                    How I Learned To Hate In Ohio-David Stuart Maclean. A debut novel and from the author blurb could well include a fair amount of biography. Set in mid 1980s rust belt community that straddles the cultural divide between the academic college and the redneck industry. With a name like Baruch the narrator of this coming of age novel is clearly in the former part of town. He wants to be recognised as Barry. Instead he is bequeathed the sobriquet Yo Yo Faggot. He manages to steer clear of more overt bullying by withdrawal from his contemporaries although this all changes with the introduction of the Singh family into his family life. This triggers a chain of events which see Barry foster unlikely friendships with both the Sikh boy of his age and the hillbilly boy who is repeatedly kept back year after year. It also leads to betrayal from the few people he holds dear in his life. The tale is mainly told in a series of short sharp chapters though when the author extends this rhythm to longer set pieces the results are the most impressive in the book being both challenging & laugh out loud-in particular a scene which uses the countdown to the Challenger shuttle as its backdrop. Prejudices abound-AIDS is just around the corner but by the conclusion set in 1991 the Gulf War is upon the country and the racism is no longer so casual. Tender & intelligent throughout the last chapter is a genuine jolt & causes a re-evaluation of all the previous compassion previously demonstrated. As well as explaining the title. A provocative story well handled. Recommended

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