Raritan2002

Ambitious but disappointing history of the Arabs

Revisado: 04-04-21

We need a good popular English language history of the Arabs that goes back farther than Albert Hourani's classic History of the Arab Peoples and brings the history up to the present. This book, which is well written and well read, purports to be that book. Regrettably it isn't. The author's attempt at pushing the history back before rise of Islam is mostly tendentious speculation. He cannot decide if he writing a history of ethnic Arabs, speakers of the Arab language, or Muslims and slides among these possible subjects. His account of the response of Arabs to western modernism is very generalized and omits the detail that makes that history so complex and paradoxical. Worst of all, the author embraces a single-theory version of history: all of the history of Arabs can be explained as a recurring conflict between tribes and settled towns. There is a speck of insight to this theory, but the author's attempt to inflate this speck into the single explanation for the history of Arabs is an insult to the Arabs and the thoughtful listener.

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esto le resultó útil a 14 personas

Okay, not great

Revisado: 11-12-19

This is a Teaching Company course on the history of Spain.

The lectures are fluent, well organized, and interesting.

Nonetheless compared with other similar Teaching Company courses (as well as similar lectures available on the internet), the content seemed superficial and lacking in analysis. Not bad if what you want in the audio equivalent of the history section of a good tourist guide to Spain; disappointing if you expect more than that.

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An intimate account of American foreign policy

Revisado: 11-12-19

This is an intimate biography of the Richard Holbrooke, whose career in the State Department made him an observer or a participant in many of America's most significant foreign policy issues during the period between 1962 and 2011. It is very well written and very well read. Although it appears to stick very closely to its sources, it feels like a novel.

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Sociology as gripping as a novel

Revisado: 01-20-18

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

This book is a repackaged sociology PhD thesis. It sets forth the results of research by a white, female student who embedded herself for several years in the world of young African-American men living in a poor urban neighborhood, many of whom are on probation or parole or have outstanding arrest warrants. She seeks to understand how their lives, and the lives of their families and neighborhood, are affected by this fact.

Some parts of the book are dense. True to its form, the book is organized thematically rather than as a continuous narrative. Moreover, the author devotes some space to a careful and sophisticated consideration of how problematic the project is. So, it requires some initial patience and persistence on the part of the reader. It cannot be listened to (or read) in a single sitting.

But as we get to know the principal characters and their stories, the book acquires the resonance, narrative arc and momentum of a tragic novel. The final chapter--a methodological appendix in which the author merely explains how she tried to embed herself in this world and to function as an invisible observer--tells the most powerful and shocking stories of all.

The artfulness of this book--and it is very artful and well written--lies in its appearance of artlessness. It presents itself as a PhD thesis that just happens to grip the reader with the power of a novel.

Any additional comments?

This book is a very good companion to Jill Leovy’s ‘Ghettoside,’ which is also available as an audio book. The two books describe the same phenomenon but from opposite sides of the blue line. Curiously, Leovy, a journalist who set out successfully to write popular true crime non-fiction with police officers as heroes, is the more analytical of the two. She provides an explanation of how wrong-headed policing values and policies have had bad consequences and how different values and policies might have different consequences. Goffman, the academic, has told the more affecting set of human stories, stories that illustrate the consequences of the values and policies that Leovy describes

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Good reading of a great 19th Century novel

Revisado: 01-20-18

Would you listen to Germinal again? Why?

This is great novel that seems to be virtually unknown to American readers. It is both a vivid and convincing account of the everyday lives of miners, as told from within, and the tale of a heroic, doomed strike and a catastrophic mine disaster. Although it is quite long, it is beautifully written, full of complex and engaging characters, and carries the reader forward with great momentum. In this production, it is well read. Among other things, the reader handles the French names comfortably.

What other book might you compare Germinal to and why?

I can think of no 19th Century novel in English that is comparable. It delves more deeply into the texture of everyday lives of working class men and women then anything by Dickens and with fewer illusions. It treats sex, both good sex and bad sex, simply as another fact of the lives of the characters without either euphemisms (other than those used by characters themselves) or prurience. There are no artificial happy endings, but the novel is not dreary.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

A polemic

Revisado: 09-22-17

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

This is not an exposition of a field of science; it is a polemic. Rarely distinguishes among hypotheses, models, speculations, suggestive results, and well corroborated results. Okay if you are eager to make a point and don't care about the difference.

Has The Blank Slate turned you off from other books in this genre?

Pinker has written better books, and there are better popular books on the subject of the possible biological bases of behavior.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Annoyance. Also dismay that I could not return it.

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Well told history resonates with current events

Revisado: 08-17-14

Would you listen to The Burglary again? Why?

This history reads like a novel. It is well written and tells a great--and historically important--story: the secret FBI program to suppress civil rights groups and others whom J. Edgar Hoover disliked and how it was disclosed to the public by the burglary by anti-war activists of files from the FBI's Media PA office--a burglary that was never solved. The moral dilemmas faced by those who organized the burglary and the journalists to whom they distributed the stolen files resonates powerfully with the current Snowden affair.

What did you like best about this story?

The author tells the story from both sides-- both from the point of view of the activists who organized the burglary, who spoke with the author after maintaining silence for 40 years, and and also from the point of view of the FBI, based upon interviews with agents who participated in the investigation of the burglary and 30,000 pages of newly disclosed FBI files.

It also explains the surprising links between the burglary of the Media FBI office and other contemporaneous events that did not seem connected at the time.

Which character – as performed by Bronson Pinchot – was your favorite?

NA

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I remember the Media FBI burglary as it was reported in the newspapers at the time. The full history, which has not previously been reported, astonished me again and again.

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