For those who are new ... we discuss books. I list what I'm reading, and people comment with what they're reading. Sometimes, on Sundays, I post a special edition on a particular genre or topic.
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Book reviews on Yahoo
Just finished
A re-re-read of Shogun A great story about the first Englishman to go to Japan. War, peace, love, hate, duty, honor, betrayal.... and the meeting of two cultures that are both very foreign to us.
Now reading
On politics: A history of political thought from Herodotus to the present by Alan Ryan. What the subtitle says - a history of political thought. But he should add the adjective "Western" or something as he doesn't discuss other traditions or writings.
Leibniz: An intellectual biography by Maria Rosa Antognazza. Leibniz was co-inventor of calculus (with Isaac Newton) but he also made contributions to law, philosophy, physics, economics, chemistry, geology, medicine, linguistics, history and more. This book is good, but fairly dense.
21st Century Science Fiction ed. by David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. A collection of shorter length SF from the first decade of the 21st century.
Leviathan Wakes by James Corey. Recommended here on WAYR a couple weeks ago. Space opera set solely in the solar system. Good fun.
The Yamato Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave. The "secret" history of Japan's emperors, especially during World War II and after. A bleak story of how the Japanese people have been manipulated and how MacArthur made people lie about war crimes.
I play bridge and I decided to start listing bridge books I am reading
Bidding, probability and information by Robert MacKinnon. Appeals to both the bridge player and the statistician in me. Not very well written, unfortunately, and aimed at better bridge players than me, but still interesting.
Card Play Technique by Victor Mollo and Nico Gardner. One of the classics of bridge literature. Subtitled "The art of being lucky". Very well written, intended for that huge class of bridge players called "intermediate".
Just started
Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch. A biography of jazz great Charlie Parker, but Crouch uses Parker's life as a focus with which to examine the role of music and the entertainment industry more generally in Black culture, and much else about Black life in the period from the end of the Civil War onwards. So, we read not only about jazz, but about ragtime and swing; and not just about music but about Jack Johnson and Joe Louis. Well-written and researched; one odd not is that Crouch inconsistently refers to Black people as Negroes and Blacks.
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