D. Keith

An extremely thoughtful history

Revisado: 02-03-23

Although I am now retired, I taught US history at the secondary level for decades, and and so I’ve been very familiar with much of the ground covered in this elegantly written book. But by focusing on one county in Alabama, and sketching out the continuing theme running through the Indian removals of the 1830s, the introduction of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Redemption, and the modern Civil Rights movement, Freedom’s Dominion, has given me a very different way of understanding this difficult history.

Most importantly, it provides a way of seeing those who saw (and see) freedom as the right to exclude and to dominate (often to the point of killing) nonwhite peoples free from interference by the federal government. But Cowle does this in a way that humanizes those oppressors and makes their terrible actions seem understandable as one of the dark tendencies that we can carry within us. Yet he also shows pathways that these tendencies can and must be opposed by those of us who believe in the equality and freedom of all people in our nation.

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Heavy slogging at points but worth it

Revisado: 12-06-22

As someone with almost no background in chemistry, and basically being a liberal arts guy, parts of this were Greek to me. Yet even in those parts, I could get a sense of how science and scientists work, and make progress and understanding the world. and the best parts for me were quite lyrical, and gave me a better sense of the complexity of life.

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A fabulous work of historical fiction

Revisado: 07-29-22

This is an intricate tale that is true to the historical era it is set in with lots of surprising twists and turns that nonetheless are very satisfying. The book is chock full of interesting and well developed characters which reveal the authors understanding of the complexity of the human condition. The performance is masterful without calling attention to itself which makes it easy to be immersed in the flow of the story.

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Long but wonderful!

Revisado: 02-08-22

Paul Auster tells us he wrote (and recorded) this book for those who don’t know Stephen Crane. This is not me! I came across some of his poems in an 8th grade poetry anthology in an English class in the mid 1960s and they grabbed me and have never left me. Some time after that I was assigned The Red Badge of Courage which also got under my skin. Somewhat later an older brother read me The Open Boat which was a punch in my solar plexus that I can still feel. Years after that as a secondary school history teacher, who also was asked to teach a sophomore English class, I taught Red Badge which deepened my admiration for Crane and that work. And for decades now I’ve had an expanding collection of Crane poems in my head that I meditate on and sometimes make their way into things I say in the Quaker Meetings I go to. But for all that I already knew, this audiobook introduced me to so much, like The Monster, that I knew nothing of.

Paul Auster has provided me with so much context to better understand and appreciate the things that I have loved about Crane’s work and where he fits into 20th century literature and culture. Taking this audiobook on is not for the faint of heart or ear because of Burning Boy’s length and depth, but for those unfamiliar with Crane you will get everything you need.

Stephen Crane is one of the most bluntly honest modern writers that I have lived with and has shaped my understanding of the world. Auster has clearly put tremendous effort into making it clear why Crane matters to us in the 21st century and has written a book that is worth all the effort it takes to read, or listen to.

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Mesmerizing!

Revisado: 11-23-21

It entices one into a world both familiar strange in a way that made me think differently about intelligence (including the AI variety)!

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Useful

Revisado: 08-07-21

Much more focused than Thinking Fast and Slow, but helpful in understanding individual and particularly group judgments and decision making.

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Essential context for our troubled era

Revisado: 12-14-20

Even as someone who has been pretty familiar with the history Wilkerson admirably covers in this fine book, having studied and taught it for over 50 years, her framing of this as a caste system centered on status helped bring this often terrible history into sharper focus for me. I've seen lynching photographs for many years without being able think coherantly about what might have been going on in the minds of the ordinary-looking men, women and children posed for pictures in front of tortured black bodies hanging behind them. Putting hard historical facts like this together with personal accounts of indignities that the author and others she knows of have experienced in everyday life, and comparisons from the systems in Nazi Germany and India, makes it easier for even an "upper caste" person like me to understand how a caste system operates and protects itself as a human institution that doesn't depend exclusively on inherently evil people to perpetuate it.

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Highly Relevant For A Season of Political and Economic Catastrophe

Revisado: 07-31-20

As a retired history teacher and a lifelong student of economic history, I thought I already knew a fair amount about John Maynard Keynes, but this superb biography greatly deepened my understanding of him as a person, a philosopher and, of course an economic thinker. With a wonderful performance by Robert Petkoff, this book for me was the audio version of a “page-turner.” As I write this in late July of 2020, Congress appears deadlocked over the roll that government spending can and should play to avert an economic collapse and it feels like we are in the midst of a tectonic historical shift. This history from 1914 through 1946 couldn’t be more relevant. The last section of the book explores what happened with Keynesianism, mostly in the US, after he died which moves it past being a biography into Intellectual/political history.

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Very relevant in our age of voter suppression

Revisado: 02-21-20

Clearly presents the complex story of how the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments came to be and how they ultimately failed to protect black rights and freedoms during the Jim Crow era.

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Gripping story well performed but

Revisado: 01-29-20

A very high body count of dangerous, often cold-blooded and sometimes demented Eastern Europeans who always get what’s coming to them.

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