Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

[Snerk]

Recently started Caesar: Life of a Colossus, by Adrian Goldsworthy.

It's very interesting but just too much information for me to really remember all that much of it.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I just finished All Other Nights, a fascinating tale of Jewish espionage in the Civil War. Next read will be either The Year of the French, about the Irish rising in 1798, or Dixie's Forgotten People, about white poverty in the south.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 by Kershaw. It is quite seminal but not for anyone without a good background on the subject.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Revolt Against the Modern World by Juliu Evola. Challenging work so far.

 

[cardgame]

Just started Honesty by Seth King. 45 (100%) 5-star reviews can't be wrong, eh?

 

[Cutlass]

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
by David McCullough

This is on my reading list, love the author.

Let me know what you think of it.

I liked it. Much of it is about the people and the situation surrounding the work, rather than about the work itself. So it's kinda light on the engineering and construction, heavy on the politics and people.

Spoiler :

Among other things, the author spends a substantial time on the factors of disease and race. Disease was a major factor in the construction of the canal, as during the French years there was a wrong concept of the vectors by which disease spread. Particularly in failure to grasp that the mosquito was the vector for yellow fever and malaria. And even in the early American years, while this was after the theories had been put forward, and successfully tried out in Cuba, many disregarded those factors, and the death toll was higher because of that.

Also not commonly known, during both the French and American periods, most of the labor was actually blacks from the West Indies, not whites. And their story was largely untold, and unremembered.

Everyone involved wanted a sea level canal. But the location chosen, and chosen based on what was really very incomplete surveys, made that essentially impossible. When working around a river which routinely flooded 30-40 feet higher than it's dry season height, and went 100 yards outside of its banks, that limits options.

The canal itself is one of the wonders of the world, and should have been included in Civ as a modern wonder. It's 100 years old, and it's still working as built, without a major rebuild. And this is concrete and steel in water. Any other project, and deterioration would have long since been a major issue. The final product was a brilliant success.

 

[Ajidica]

Finished William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive. Despite being a fan of Gibson and counting Neuromancer as one of my favorite books, I never previously got around to finishing Mona Lisa Overdrive. After finishing it, I'm not super impressed with it. While Gibson does an excellent job with developing the world; he does a terrible job explaining it so I spend more time than I should trying to recall the rather complicated relations between the loa, veves, Angie Mitchell, and Wintermute from Count Zero.
Plus the ending, in true Gibson form, makes no sense whatsoever. I actually was so confused by it I did some googling to see if I missed something and nope, the ended is just that opaque.

 

[JohannaK]

The canal itself is one of the wonders of the world, and should have been included in Civ as a modern wonder. It's 100 years old, and it's still working as built, without a major rebuild. And this is concrete and steel in water. Any other project, and deterioration would have long since been a major issue. The final product was a brilliant success.

Well that isn't entirely true. There is quite a major build currently going on in the Canal, although it's an ampliation rather than a renovation or something of the sort.

 

[Cutlass]

Well that isn't entirely true. There is quite a major build currently going on in the Canal, although it's an ampliation rather than a renovation or something of the sort.

An expansion project isn't the same thing as having to rebuild in order to keep it functional. It's fully functional now, and will be for an indefinite time into the future. The project you are talking about is the plan to make the canal capable of handling larger ships. It doesn't effect the canal's ability to handle ships of the existing Panamax size.

 

[Takhisis]

It's very interesting but just too much information for me to really remember all that much of it.

Sounds like that school thing people go through in childhood.

 

[Snerk]

Sounds like that school thing people go through in childhood.

Indeed. So far the only thing I'm able to clearly remember from this book is that life as a politician in the roman republic was well complicated. And all poor people got shafted by the elite, as usual.

 

[Arakhor]

Of course. People haven't changed that much in 2000 years.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Finished William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive. Despite being a fan of Gibson and counting Neuromancer as one of my favorite books, I never previously got around to finishing Mona Lisa Overdrive. After finishing it, I'm not super impressed with it.

It's nowhere near as good as Neuromancer, Count Zero or Pattern Recognition.

Currently working through Bujold's Curse of Chalion. Before that I banged out most of the top-shelf Philip K. Dick that I hadn't gotten around to - Martian Time-Slip, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly and Ubik. All well worthwhile.

 

[Borachio]

Blue notebook no. 2

Once there was a redheaded man without eyes and without ears. He had no hair either, so that he was a redhead was just something they said.

He could not speak, for he had no mouth. He had no nose either.

He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach either, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and no intestines of any kind. He didn't have anything at all. So it is hard to understand whom we are really talking about.

So it is probably best not to talk about him any more.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

The canal itself is one of the wonders of the world, and should have been included in Civ as a modern wonder. It's 100 years old, and it's still working as built, without a major rebuild. And this is concrete and steel in water. Any other project, and deterioration would have long since been a major issue. The final product was a brilliant success.

You honestly think they don't do maintenance work on the locks and channels?

Anyway, Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology, edited by Walter S. DeKeseredy and Molly Dragiewicz. In one sentence, critical criminology is those disciplines of criminology that look at how the context of a crime contributes to its emergence. It is more focused on the societal aspects that shape crime as opposed to the individual pathologies of criminals.

 

[Cutlass]

You honestly think they don't do maintenance work on the locks and channels?

I'm sure they do. But they never had to rebuild part of it to the point where they had to take it out of service to do so. And that's impressive.

 

[warpus]

I'm still making my way through Fall of Hyperion, and it's getting really good, major crap is happening, story lines are converging, stuff that's been building up over the last book and a half is all coming together, it seems, I was not feeling great about this sequel for the first 100 pages or so, and in fact had to re-read the first 70 pages because I put down the book for too long last fall... but now on page 200 and beyond, the buildup makes more sense and my interest is back, for now I'm just reading this thing on the bus, but now I'm going to make a lot more time here and there to get a couple chapters a day in, I really want to see what happens here, it's a complex setup and I'm not really sure where he's going with this

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I just finished the Raven's Shadow trilogy and I really enjoyed it, even though the ending could have been a bit more satisfying. The author deserves a lot of credit for writing a trilogy that wraps the story up in three books, which is a major accomplishment in the fantasy genre.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Finished Ubiquitin-Proteasome Protocols, edited by Cam Patterson and Douglas Cyr.

Now, The Kurds: A Modern History, by Michael Gunter.

 

[Ajidica]

About halfway through Adam Tooze The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order. I'm liking it a lot as Tooze does an excellent job of laying his facts, arguments, and counterarguments out while making it very readable. The only downside is that I was expecting a greater economic focus of the book, like Wages of Destruction, as opposed to a largely political book with a limited economic scope. While good political writers are pretty easy to come by, I've encountered few economic historians who are easy to read and I wish Tooze had spent more time on that area and done a "Wages of Destruction for the Great War".