My copy should be here on Wednesday. I love his articles, although I was underwhelmed with his last book.
People who love basketball and Simmons-like writing would do well to check out the FreeDarko basketball book. It is outstanding.
What Book Are You Reading? Volume 9
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My copy should be here on Wednesday. I love his articles, although I was underwhelmed with his last book.
People who love basketball and Simmons-like writing would do well to check out the FreeDarko basketball book. It is outstanding.
Simmons articles either engross me or make me hate him. I think a book would be the latter, especially one that is apparently 700+ pages.
Amazon time!
Zack
99% hot gas
I thought his last article was uninteresting.
1889
Mayor of H-Marker Lake
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy. Its old but still good, maybe its a classic by now. All the same considering it was written before the fall of the Berlin Wall I think I'll skip the chaper that covers the years 1980-2000.
Gilder
Deity
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane. It was actually pretty good, even if the way Crane writes gets filled with a few too many similes.
Irish Caesar
Yellow Jacket
Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale has been this semester's light reading for me as well, and I've also found a lot more humor than I was expecting.
Of course, I wouldn't wish it to be any longer. I realize that a whaling voyage had a lot of down time, but I think this book has too much of it. I think the action is starting to pick up, though... I'm five hundred pages in and the excitement is slowly building.
flyingchicken
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Attrition: Forecasting Battle Casualties And Equipment Losses In Modern War by T.N. Dupuy; almost done.
Numbers, Prediction And War (1978) by the same; also almost done but not as almost done as the last one.
Numbers, Prediction And War (1978) by the same; also almost done but not as almost done as the last one.
Julian Delphiki
Anton's key
The Terracotta Army. China's First Emperor and the Birth of a Nation by John Man (no mention of Zheng He, kinda disappointing 
) down. Now A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. Who has read the The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, is it good?
And still need to finish The Inheritance of Rome, Europe afters some little empire. And that book about Spaniards killing themselves.
) down. Now A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. Who has read the The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, is it good?And still need to finish The Inheritance of Rome, Europe afters some little empire. And that book about Spaniards killing themselves.
Finished the book yesterday. The book does drag a little bit (it could be 150 pages shorter and lose nothing), but it is still a *great* book for people who really love basketball. It shows off Simmons' chops as an actual researcher/reporter...he isn't just a comedian who happens to like basketball. The Book of Basketball has a proud spot in the Sports section of my library, along with The Jordan Rules, How Soccer Explains The World, Pistol, The Winner's Manual and FreeDarko.
If you love basketball, you'll like this book.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I finished this the other day. An excellent read. It annoyed me that he trusted Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and he got a few other things wrong, but for the most part a rather middle-of-the-road take on the subject. it was not overly hostile nor overly praising, merely critical where applicable, and rather honest.
I think next I will read On the Shortness of Life, by Seneca, and then Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
My girlfriend read that book and loved it. Apparently there's a class at UPenn that uses that book in its curriculum!
I'm getting her another of the same series: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for Christmas.
Finished Szabo, The Seven Years' War in Europe, today. Overall my impression was that he's probably a bit overly critical of Fred - takes basically any opportunity to get potshots in that he can, really - but that the book in itself, as a repository of facts, is excellent, and the financial aspects of the war, which don't usually receive strong treatment in works on the Continental conflict, were well described.
Going back to Showalter, Wars of German Unification. Waiting anxiously for Herwig, Marne 1914, so I can finish a paper on the historiography of the Schlieffen Plan.
Going back to Showalter, Wars of German Unification. Waiting anxiously for Herwig, Marne 1914, so I can finish a paper on the historiography of the Schlieffen Plan.
1889
Mayor of H-Marker Lake
How would you feel about posting that paper on these forums? Sounds pretty interesting.
BTW I mamaged to find a copy of "Confessions of an Economic Hit man." Granted he was an engineer not an author but still it was amateurish and superficial.
I'll convert it into a history article when I'm done.
Just finished Marx in Soho and am onto The Best of Robert G. Ingersoll.
W.L. Idema, Spiegel van de klassieke Chinese poëzie van het Boek der Oden tot de Qing-dynastie ('Mirror of Classic Chinese Poetry From The Book of Odes to the Qing Dynasty') quite informative anthology. Reading this as background for a selection of poems by Li Po and Tu Fu, T'ang dynasty poets.
Finished, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, by Peter Heather a few days ago. It was a good read, the writing was sharp and to the point, with only the occasional slip. It certainly managed to convey what I thought was an accurate picture of the situation. But, I sometimes felt that the writing style may have detracted from the detail. Although, this may have been simply the result of it being written with an eye to the layman. In any case, it was a certainly worth a read.
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