en-US Fri, 04 Jul 2025 15:48:19 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Friend1424942552 Fri, 04 Jul 2025 15:48:19 -0700 Review7703981750 Wed, 02 Jul 2025 10:51:55 -0700 /review/show/7703981750 Erik gave 5 stars to How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island (Paperback) by Egill Bjarnason
bookshelves: history
This is a popular history of Iceland covering the period from the first settlers (Irish monks) through the Covid epidemic and told through a series of tales illustrating Iceland's place among world events. The author has a fine sense of humor and the stories he tells are interesting. I'd previously read another history of the nation. This was far more entertaining.

I have been to Iceland several times thanks to their national airline, Icelandair, most recently in 1984. In each case it was a brief stopover enroute to Oslo where much of the family lives. The last trip, however, allowed us a few days of free hotel accomodations. During that, my only real visit, I stopped at the headquarters of the Socialist Womens' party, hoping to obtain some of their campaign buttons for my collection. They wouldn't let me, a male, in until they noticed that my wife was deaf. I got the buttons. It is noteworthy in this connection that Iceland had the first popularly elected female head of state in the world and continues to lead the world as regards gender equality. ]]> Review7689374341 Fri, 27 Jun 2025 10:16:59 -0700 /review/show/7689374341 Erik gave 4 stars to Anne Frank: a Portrait in Courage (Hardcover) by Ernst Schnabel
bookshelves: biography
This an odd and rather touching book. It's more an impression, or a number of impressions, of Anne Frank than a biography. The author, during the decade after the war, found and interviewed scores of people who had known Frank and her family, including, of course, their one survivor, her father. A roughly chronological narrative is punctuated by some of Anne's writings. ]]> Review7678867470 Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:02:00 -0700 /review/show/7678867470 Erik gave 3 stars to Frauds, Myths, Mysteries (Paperback) by Kenneth L. Feder
bookshelves: sciences
I've read a lot of fringe literature and, so, have been exposed to much of the material Professor Feder debunks. An archaeologist himself, Feder focuses on claims in that area of study. Beyond that, however, he addresses the scientific method in general.

What I liked most about this book were the case studies whereby Feder describes a hoax (e.g. the Cardiff Giant, the Piltdown Man), then shows how it was exposed. I also enjoyed the section about the Mound Builders of North America, a subject I'd not much studied. However, the attacks on believers in Atlantis, Von Daniken, Ignatius Donnelly, Edgar Cayce, Shirley MacClaine etc. seem hardly worth the effort--though the popularity of their writings may suggest otherwise.

Written in 1996, I would have expected something about Graham Hancock, but that was disappointed. Granted, Hancock's popularity has grown over the decades. ]]> Review7678842443 Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:51:57 -0700 /review/show/7678842443 Erik gave 4 stars to It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (Paperback) by David Cay Johnston
bookshelves: political-social-science
I've read a lot of books about Donald Trump. This one, though confined to the first half of his first term, was the most upsetting, its recounting of his actions being unmitigated by humor or personal scandal (except, perhaps, Melania's illegal status as a nude model). Instead, subject area by subject area (e.g. Education, Veterans, Race, Immigration, Guns etc.), author Johnston recounts how what Trump has said to garner popular support has, in many instances, been contradicted by what he has done against the interests of many of his supporters. Throughout, Johnston writes like a lawyer presenting an indictment, much of it dealing with matters economic. ]]> Review7672614764 Sat, 21 Jun 2025 10:15:35 -0700 /review/show/7672614764 Erik gave 3 stars to For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (Hardcover) by Jonah Raskin
bookshelves: biography
I have one outstanding memory of Abbie Hoffman. I was downtown with a friend during the weekday afternoon rush hour near the courthouse. The Conspiracy Trial must have concluded for the day as Abbie and Jerry Rubin, both colorfully dressed, appeared at the corner across the street. Cars were piled up, bumper to bumper, through the intersection. Rather than wait for the light to change, the crosswalk to clear, the two of them clambered over the cars in all four lanes. Still in high school, I was impressed.

Other than that, I saw Hoffman more as a comedian than as a political figure. Three of us had exchanged and read his first book with high hilarity as teens, but otherwise, until the Conspiracy Trial, I didn't take him seriously and even then it was the government that had given him the spotlight. Personally, I prefered the others, two of whom I got to know pretty well, to Abbie and Jerry, both of whom were, while sometimes funny, embarrassing.

This biography, written by one who had known him, displays the contradictions of Hoffman's life: Free! and capitalist drug dealer, manic and depressive, street person and bourgeois, feminist and abuser, etc.--the psychiatric diagnosis explaining, perhaps, a lot. ]]> Review7653926817 Sat, 14 Jun 2025 10:33:44 -0700 /review/show/7653926817 Erik gave 3 stars to On Pagans, Jews, and Christians by Arnaldo Momigliano (1987-11-01) by Arnaldo Momigliano
bookshelves: history
The essays in this collection are very diverse, there being no central theme beyond the author's historiographical focus. They are also very academic, which is to say dry, erudite and well-cited. Some, such as those for the Review of Books, would be accessible to the well-educated reader, others would be more appropriate for the specialist. A few were published in English, but many are translations.

The over-riding impression I obtained was of the author's great caution. He here spins no grand theories, paints no large canvas, but reminds us, again and again, of how little we know of antiquity.

I studied Latin in high school, worked with koine Greek in seminary, edited and wrote for the 'Ancient World' journal, and received two degrees in religion--and lots of this book was beyond my capacities. ]]> Review7641471428 Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:48:03 -0700 /review/show/7641471428 Erik gave 5 stars to My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience (AARP®) by Juan Williams
bookshelves: biography, history
Having just finished Branch's three-volume history of the civil rights movements in the South and a substantial history of the movements in the North, I picked up this collection of memoirs by a sampling of those who participated in such. Although most of the stories are from southern blacks, some are by Chicanos, some by whites and even one by a Japanese-American. Although most are about racial movements, the womens' movement is addressed as well.

I don't recall being so moved, so often by one book, most of the stories told being quite poignant. What most impresses me about the movement is the extraordinary heroism of what otherwise would be considered ordinary persons. ]]> Review23140030 Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:30:07 -0700 /review/show/23140030 Erik gave 4 stars to The Myth of Sisyphus (Paperback) by Albert Camus
bookshelves: philosophy
By the end of high school I was a very unhappy person and had been so since our family moved from unincorporated Kane County to Park Ridge, Illinois when I was ten. At the outset the unhappiness was basically consequent upon leaving a rural setting, small school and friendly, integrated working-class neighborhood for a reactionary suburb, large school and unfriendly upper middle-class populace whose children were, by and large, just as thoughtlessly racist and conservative as their parents were. By fifteen, however, the quality of the unhappiness had begun to change as I had made, really made, some friends in the persons of Richard Hyde and Hank Kupjack. By the end of high school, thanks to them and to the rise of the sixties counterculture, I actually had many friends, some of them from the political left, some identified with the avant garde world, some just plain disgruntled teen potheads. But by then unhappiness had become character and had been elevated from an emotional to a philosophical state of being.

On the one hand, it had a lot to do with not having had a girlfriend since Lisa in the first grade. On the other hand, and this was more prominently to mind, it had to do with the reasons, the serious reasons, for not having one. They were that I was unusually slow in physical development and unusually short in stature. In my mind, I was uncontestably unattractive. If any girl would like me it would be because of personality and intelligence,

I had no insecurity about intelligence as a teen, but quite a bit about personality. Feminism didn't become an issue until college, but I was ashamed about thinking of women sexually when it seemed clear they would be offended or disgusted were they to know of it. I developed the practice of not looking at females unless speaking with them. I walked with my head down, eyes to the ground, in order to avoid such guilt-ridden gazes. While other guys played around with the girls in our circle, I maintained a generally grave persona, holding "serious" conversations or reading while they flirted. A feeling of superiority was confusedly mixed with strong feelings of inferiority to these other, more comfortable, persons. While it was easy to dismiss most of the "straight" kids at school as mindless, this was not possible with many persons in our circle, particularly some of the older ones whom I admired for their learning and critical intellects.

The other, philosophically deeper, dimension of this unease was that I myself was so "critically intelligent" that I had no ground upon which to stand. I had strong moral feelings but I was unable to convince myself that they were more than personal tastes. My early public school education had emphasized the sciences. While I could understand human values as having some meaning in terms of biology and evolutionary theory, I could not fit myself positively into that picture. I certainly wasn't biologically "fit". Thoughts of suicide were frequent.

Thus I was drawn, upon being exposed to them, to the existentialists, particularly Camus. They alone seemed to be trying to speak openly about the actual human condition

I recall reading "The Myth of Sisyphus" while seated in our family's red Opel Cadet station wagon across from City Hall, at the curb of Hodge's Park on a beautiful spring day. Our friends were all about this area between Bob Rowe's Evening Pipe Shop, Park Ridge's Community Church and the Cogswell Dance Studio (our indoors hangouts), but I was avoiding their frivolity, engaged in serious study, while, obviously, inviting an invitation to join in--which, in my moral confusion, I might well have declined.

Just as I was concluding this essay of the collection, the part about Sisyphus being happy with his absurd work, Lisa Cox walked in front of the car, headed west towards the church. Now, Lisa was just another pretty girl in our group, not the particular object of any attention from me. Indeed, she was too young, being two years behind in school. But, not being an intimate friend, she was one of those girls I would tend to guiltily objectify as sexual.

Here, however, it happened differently. She was beautiful, simply beautiful. Her long, tightly waved brown hair and matching corduroy pants, all bathed in sunlight dappled by the new leaves of the elms filling the park, were lovely. I didn't feel guilty for thinking this. I noticed the absence of guilt feelings. It seemed quite paradoxical, just as Camus' comment about Sisyphus had appeared, but true.

I'd call this an ecstatic experience. It didn't last more than a few minutes at most, though the memory of it, and experiences like it, remains clear and cherished. ]]> UserFollowing328330355 Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:08:23 -0700 /user/show/160913234-taylor Erik Graff is now following Taylor ]]>