J. Cuddy

An ethnography of oligarchs reveals the seeds of fascism in humanity

Revisado: 02-18-25

I don’t like the way that my better than average vocabulary is so insufficient for describing the rhythm, breadth, depth, color, and energy of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

I am humbled, not only by what this is, but also by what it tells me about that which I think of as my secret self and Mann does that with such pure humanity toward his subjects who are a class of persons that is in no way part of my background. We see them and ourselves whole, good and bad, without cheap explanations. Framed by just enough time and place context to orient our experience of them, but, again, not as excuses for how and why they are as they are. They just are in the dynamic physical phenomena that we have labeled “life” and “death”, words that we made up, and all of that bearing Mann’s astounding powers to create flashes of truly intense beauty and ugliness, all the more pure for their artless randomness among the structurally elemental visual hallmarks of the mysteries he is motivated by.

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Wow! This is an astounding work of Art.

Revisado: 01-05-25

This is the best book I have ever known. I don't feel like my words here can add anything about it for you. Thomas Mann says things about human life and death, mind and heart, that I didn't think could be said and, yet, you will recognize these truths. His vision is comprehensive and acutely focused on details without being obtuse. Diverse character perspectives brought together without an author's message agenda, so the characters are whole and they say extraordinary things that are appropriate to their situation, which is something like "Ship of Fools" writ with maximum social and individual dimensions.

David Rintoul does a perfect narration that brings the situations and characters expressively alive without inserting himself into what happens. He has inspired me to buy a hardcopy of Mann's book, so that I can read and re-read it myself.

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The challenges of Quantum Mechanics applied to forecasting rise or fall of a galactic empire

Revisado: 03-07-24

The logic of this story is the story, Asimov makes it surprisingly clear despite how densely packed with probabilities the plot is and, yet, he doesn’t try to justify his astounding ambition by delivering a soporific “answer”.

The multi-dimensional Foundation stories don’t end; they just stop and we’re still standing there, with that “box” containing Asimov’s version of Schroedinger’s cat, as you wonder if the past can measure the future without killing it.

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Detailed History made socially relevant & personal

Revisado: 11-11-23

This is an important part of OUR story. My parents were young adults when all of this was happening. My papa was on his way to WW II to maintain airplane engines as close as the bases could strategically get to the front lines in Europe. Later, after his nosey offspring discovered a certain cigar box full of black-and-white photographs of bad things, hidden to the back of a big drawer in a very tall chest of drawers, at the dinner table in the evening, he began to tell us little stories about the people of Europe and what happened to them when their homes were invaded by Nazis.

My father sometimes used to say, “It is not unpatriotic to ask questions about your country.” For many decades, I never wondered why he said that, because it was so obvious that the Nazis were evil.

Now, I know Papa was thinking about what had happened at home, when he was a boy, in the USA in the decade before the US entered WW II. I meditate now on what that intelligent AND emotional war experience was, for early-20s young American adults, as they wrestled with the challenges in their lives, to do their duties in such a deep personally and socially challenging and utterly strange context.

My heart-felt thanks to you, Rachel, for giving all of us what we needed to more authentically understand a generation of imperfectly perfect Americans, who are so very close to us still, even though most of them have passed on.

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Primary sources tell their story in Meacham’s voice

Revisado: 10-14-23

Though Meacham focuses on the specifics of the diverse complexity in Abraham Lincoln’s life and that of others in those times, he ultimately extracts what he understands to be President Lincoln’s personal perceptual substrate for living through the infinitely painful dialectic of that particular space-time in U. S. History.

Meacham shows, through sources, that, though Lincoln himself held the exquisitely personal dimensions of what was happening closely private in matters of policy, there is no way to live but personally, so Lincoln was also aiding personal truths in these matters in all others in his role as President in that unique social context.

From this book, I learned many “small” details of what happened in our country about 170 years ago. Not the least of which traits are the similarities between Abraham Lincoln’s mind and my own, especially on issues associated with the fundamentally existential differences between the assumed powers of divine right aristocracy, of white or any other skin color, and the absolutely essential authentic responsibilities of self-determination in democracy.

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Geometrically progressed far above mature Fantasy

Revisado: 03-25-23

This is Magical Realism in the rich vein founded by authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The Hidden Palace is hardly a thing that can even be talked about accurately, so I am given to support hypotheses about what an aural experience uniquely adds to the experiential dimensions of the best storytelling there is.

That makes this storytelling a thing to be experienced for what it is, in itself, in all of its perspicacious acuity of focus in specific word choices, relative to not only times and places in cultural and social histories, but also in its thematic allusions to human language constructs themselves.

Helene Wecker's work refreshes my belief in authentic, personal and collective, intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, social, and pleasurable potentials of language arts. As the poet R.M. Rilke said of such works of humanity, ". . . You built a temple, deep inside their hearing."

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Great story-telling in every sense of that domain.

Revisado: 03-03-23

Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni has all of the fully developed scale of mature fantasy literature found in works like Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but with a softer more humanistically affectionate edge given to the rich ensemble of characters. Very finely focused personality details fit the more contemporary pace of Wecker's dynamic story, while maintaining continuity in an impressive visual sweep of times and places that also transmutes extremely well into the story's aural experience as an Audible book. I don't say this often, but I look forward to listening to this story again.

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A great match of substance and performance

Revisado: 06-18-22

Conrad’s focused settings and psychological acuity meet the articulate resonance of Stefan Rudnicki’s timbre in unexpected moments to add emotional dimensions to Conrad’s complex portraits. Listen for the jewel-like moments when Rudnicki surprises you with this ear-candy that adds emphasis to Conrad’s architecture.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

I was excited by this author, until now . . .

Revisado: 11-19-21

Previous listening to Adrian Tchaikovsky motivated me to listen to most of this, hoping Tchaikovsky would surprise us with something that makes this more than the soap-opera with creepy critters that it is. My time was never rewarded with anything that was cognitively and emotionally engaging enough to rate more than a "meh . . . ."

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

I'm not sure why I listened to so much of this.

Revisado: 05-04-21

Perhaps I was wondering if it really is that bad. It is. & I can't stand it anymore.

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