What book are you reading?

Discussion in 'Music, TV, Movies & other Media' started by Panzerkampfwagen, Sep 2, 2012.

  1. Seth Bullock

    Seth Bullock Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I just finished "Sea Stories - My Life In Special Operations" by Admiral William McRaven.

    Good book. Doesn't bog down. Gives the reader an inside look at deliberations at the highest level in advance of Special Ops operations. McRaven was the commander in charge of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

    sea stories.jpg
     
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  2. Talon

    Talon Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Just finished Peter Ackroyd's Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (good book, but it would have been better if Ackroyd had given John Lilburne and the Levellers more attention) and now I'm picking up where he left off with this book on the Glorious Revolution:

    [​IMG]

    I'm also thumbing back through John Locke's Two Treatises of Government which was written and published during the 1680s.
     
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  3. The Rhetoric of Life

    The Rhetoric of Life Banned

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    I'm sorts' reading
    [​IMG]
    A Briefer History Of Time
    By Stephan Hawking with Leonnard Mlodinow who the book says wrote for Star Trek The Next Generation.

    I found it in a mass collection of books I inherited when I inherited somebody's library.
    I'm on chapter 3 wondering if I should continue to read.
     
  4. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    Is it any easier to understand than a brief history of time?
     
  5. The Rhetoric of Life

    The Rhetoric of Life Banned

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    It's pretty easy to follow, but I've not read A Brief History Of Time; confession time, I up until chapter 3 thought I found a copy of and was reading A Brief History Of Time.
     
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  6. ThelmaMay

    ThelmaMay Well-Known Member

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    Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
     
  7. JET3534

    JET3534 Well-Known Member

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    Last edited: Sep 10, 2020
  8. clg311

    clg311 Well-Known Member

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    War with Russia- Stephen Cohen

    Analysis of the Obama-Clinton regime's reckless aggression towards Russia and infantile Russia-gate conspiracy theories promoted by the media and bottom feeders like Rachel Maddow.
     
  9. Talon

    Talon Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Thucydides' epic

    HPW.jpg
    https://www.amazon.com/History-Pelo...+War+Thucydides&qid=1601920937&s=books&sr=1-2

    Fascinating insight into the people and events of the war that tore Ancient Greece apart in the 5th Century BC.
    Thucydides' account ends in 411 BC when he is thought to have died seven years before his native Athens surrendered to the Spartans.

    Over the past 2400 years many historians and writers have noted the timeless themes and similarities between their own times and that of the Peloponnesian War.
    The best example I have read is Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other, which was written in 2006.

    [​IMG]
    https://www.amazon.com/War-Like-Other-Athenians-Peloponnesian/dp/0812969707

    Bonus Historical Fact: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is thought to be modeled after Pericles' Funeral Oration, which is documented in Thucydides' History:

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    Pericles, who presided over the Golden Age of Athens and the construction on the Acropolis that we still marvel at today, was one of the many victims of this tragic and avoidable conflict.
     
    Last edited: Oct 5, 2020
  10. undertheice

    undertheice Well-Known Member

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    right now i'm about three quarters of the way through the gormenghast novels (titus groan, gormenghast and titus alone). once every decade of so i read these books and it usually takes me about six months, but i'm going on twelve months because i don't have the time to read like i used to. these books take me into a place that almost couldn't exist, but might very well be right next door. i've always been surprised that no one has ever at least tried to make a series of movies based on these books, but i can see why it would be almost impossible to market in this age of quick fixes and special effects extravaganzas. there is a dreariness to them that might very well only appeal to those willing to accept the dreary nature of life in general. they are neither happy nor sad, they merely exist. the love stories are simple and just this side of tragic. the conspiracies are futile and doomed and the intrigue is tawdry. just like real life, only in a world far beyond what you would accept.
     
    Last edited: Oct 31, 2020
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  11. Aleksander Ulyanov

    Aleksander Ulyanov Well-Known Member

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    This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

    I've meant to read this for literally most of my life but something always came up. I read an excerpt from "And Call Me Conrad", the magazine serialization when I was young and was very impressed with it. Zelazny had this thing about Immortals and Gods as his protagonists and I think this may have been the first
     
  12. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    You haven’t sold me.
     
  13. Sallyally

    Sallyally Well-Known Member Donor

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    No Country for Old Men. Is there any hope for the future?
     
  14. Talon

    Talon Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    [​IMG]

    Just started Xenophon's Hellenika, which picks up where Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War leaves off in 411 BC and then continues for another 50 years.

    I really like the Landmark edition of this and Thucydides' and Herodotus' histories. There are more maps and photos and the notes are located on the same page so you don't have to thumb back and forth to the back of the book.
     
  15. Badaboom

    Badaboom Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Presently reading: Scott 2020 Stamp Catalog, all 12 volumes, trying to evaluate the worth of my collection. Also Qt5 GUI C++ and Python
    manual from Packt.
     
  16. Grey Matter

    Grey Matter Well-Known Member Donor

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  17. Talon

    Talon Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    What's your opinion of that book, Scotsman?

    We've got a relief of the Earl in the U.S. House of Representatives but most Americans don't have a clue who de Montfort is.

    (Sadly, that goes for Algernon Sidney and John Lilburne, too...)
     
    Last edited: Jan 18, 2021
  18. MJ Davies

    MJ Davies Well-Known Member

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    Just finished Mary Trump's book "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man".

    2.jpg
     
  19. Talon

    Talon Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Almost finished reading this book....

    [​IMG]

    The most interesting section deals with the rise of Medieval towns and cities during the High Middle Ages and the insurrections that led to the enfranchisement of European boroughs and communes. It was here where democracy in the West was reborn.
     
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  20. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    :roflol:
     
  21. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    [​IMG]

    What's the point of reading anything else when big tech & Democrats tells you what to think
     
  22. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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  23. Talon

    Talon Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    [​IMG]

    The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150-1625
    https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/th...ts-brian-tierney/1131983935?ean=9780802848543

    Groundbreaking research into the origins of our Natural Rights that can be traced back hundreds of years beyond the philosophers of the Enlightenment to the work of 12th and 13th Century canon lawyers and decretists exploring the various meanings and uses of the term ius naturale (natural right and/or natural law) in Gratian's compendium of the first millennium of Church law (the Concordia Discordantium Canonum, or Decretum).

    Sadly, Professor Tierney is no longer with us but the accomplishments of this great Medievalist live on...
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2021
  24. Talon

    Talon Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This is one of the most brilliant and disturbing books I've read since Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West. I think every middle class American on the Right and Left would do well to read it:

    NEO-FEUDALISM.jpg

    The Coming of Neo-Feudalism
    A WARNING TO THE GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS
    BY JOEL KOTKIN

    Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.

    The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates.

    Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population.

    The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.


    More here:
    https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/coming-neo-feudalism/


    This is an extremely well-researched book and anyone who has studied the Middle Ages will find Kotkin's thesis extremely compelling.
     
  25. Wynn Sayer

    Wynn Sayer Newly Registered

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    I think I'll be reading "Slow Burn" next. Have heard good things.
     
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