The Last Book You Read...

Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt by Aida D. Donald. It's a short biography of (you might have guessed) President Theodore Roosevelt. The book is succinct and well-written, and provides some insight as to how he came from an aristocratic family yet became the foremost progressive politician of his era.
 
"Kennedy and Nixon" by Chris Matthews.

Very good read that explores the complicated relationship between the two men who became president.
 
I'm starting with Cujo by Stephen King, only 15 pages and wondering why I haven'r read anything by him before
 
Stephen King is really good at what he does. :)

I read a two-fer. It was "The genealogy of morals" and "Ecce Homo" by Nietzsche. Good stuff, I really liked Ecce Homo because it was an evaluation of his own work broken down by book, and it was his last book as well.

Ecce Homo Preface:
The last thing I should promise would be to "improve" humankind. No new idols are erected by me; let the old ones learn what feet of clay mean. Overthrowing idols (my word for "ideals") -- that comes closer to being part of my craft. One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world.
The "true world" and the "apparent world" -- that means: the mendaciously invented world and reality.
The lie of the ideal has so far been the curse on reality; on account of it, humankind itself has become mendacious and false down to its most fundamental instincts -- to the point of worshipping the opposite values of those which alone would guarantee its health, its future, the lofty right to its future.

Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it. Otherwise there is no small danger that one may catch cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous -- but how calmly all things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself!
Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains -- seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence...
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Naked Economics, although that was really just me derping around the bookstore and reading the first few pages. Seems like a promising read though, may try to find it in the library or buy a copy sometime in the future.
 
Currently reading: Gods of guilt (a Mickey Haller character novel) by Michael Connelly.

My favorite crime novelist. I feel Connelly may even have a slight edge over Grisham
 
Alunya:
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser.

>^,,^<
Alunya
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Democratic Donkeys:
Oooo, I have wanted to read that one. Would you care to include a thought or two?
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If you are particularly interested in the incident at LC 374-7, you'll need to locate and read just those chapters in the book, otherwise you'll have difficulty in reconstructing events as they unfolded. I would recommend reading the book through from cover to cover, then re-reading the 374-7 chapters to follow the incident.

I found the chapters on weapons deployment in the European theatre to be of greatest interest. Diplomatic tact, however, compels me to withhold my opinion. I would only suggest that the reader consider what he Schlosser reports with some deep reflection. The author is accurate and fair.

He did correctly describe the one Broken Arrow site that he and I have both visited (though at different times, of course.) Now I know where the topsoil was deposited.

If you are expecting a discussion of safety, security, command and control of nuclear devices other than those belonging to the United States, you'll be disappointed. The author did not have the requisite sources, nor the scope, to cover such topics. Do realize that although what he has to report is bad enough, there are likely similar or even worse incidents elsewhere, and the lack of reporting about them is just that -- a lack of reporting. None of which excuses the incidents he has covered.

One should also realize that his reporting is limited to nuclear devices and their delivery systems. As such, the incidents in the United States involving nuclear devices is, of necessity, a subset of all incidents involving nuclear material. Some of those (military) incidents have left their own mark on America's geography yet are often less well known. You would be surprised at how readily accessible many of them are.

>^,,^<
Alunya
 
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf:
But proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own.
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I got a recommendation for a good biography of Caesar, thanks to the person who recommended! (They know who they are, and to them I say meerrrrooww)

In the mean time, while I wait for the print version to arrive, I read Man as machine and Man as plant by La Mettrie. There were some elements of general philosophical insight that I quite enjoyed in Man as machine, otherwise most of the realizations he had about the body are taken for granted in this age. Man as plant was very strange and quite abrupt. The analogy between the reproductive organs of the flower and humans was :blink: "alrriiiiighty then" as another great philosopher was known to say.
 
Alunya:
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Birth of the Pax Americana by Peter Clarke.

>^,,^<
Alunya
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Nice!

If you like that one, get a copy of Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

The original four volume set included the titles:

The Birth of Britain
The New World
The Age of Revolution
The Great Democracies

I have an autographed five volume set that includes the book Their Finest Hour.

Absolutely brilliant.



My most recent two books:

Washington - A life by Ron Chernow
(A great unvarnished and authoritative biography of George Washington)

And

Paris 1919 - Six Months That Changed The World by Margaret MacMillan
(An interesting book about the Versailles Treaty - should be called Six Months that led to WWII. :P )
 
Romanoffia:
Washington - A life by Ron Chernow
(A great unvarnished and authoritative biography of George Washington)
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:D

That is a great biography. Very unflinching in its treatment of glossed over history. Lets just say "Hercules".

Washington was a savvy man, and one hell of a first President for a fledgling nation.
 
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
I would say that this book was a very good one.
Dickens did a great job of describing the plight of the French commoners by the aristocrats.
He also describes the French Revolution precisely and in a manner that engages readers.
So overall, this was a good book.

~Tomb
 
Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics by Heather Busch and Burton Silver.
Why Paint Cats: The Ethics of Feline Aesthetics by Burton Silver and Heather Busch.

>^,,^<
Alunya
 
Alunya:
Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics by Heather Busch and Burton Silver.
Why Paint Cats: The Ethics of Feline Aesthetics by Burton Silver and Heather Busch.

>^,,^<
Alunya
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:lol:
I've read Why Cats Paint a while back - a very funny book. Often I can't tell the difference between what the cats created and what abstract artists have done. There are at least two possibilities - either these abstract artists are crap, or those cats are amazing artists. :P

I recently re-read the science fiction novel Excession by Iain M. Banks.
 
Robinson R44 Pilot's Operating Handbook by Robinson Helicopter Company, Inc.

I read it like my life depends on it. Because it will.

>^,,^<
[me]
 
I believe the last book I read was re-reading Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Always loved that book. Other than that it might've been one of two short story books by Kurt Vonnegut which I also enjoyed.
 
Killing Floor by Lee Child (Jim Grant). His first novel in a series about former Major in the United States Army Military Police Corps.
 
The Forgotten History of America by Cormac O'Brien was great, as it told me a lot about a bunch of different conflicts in my home country from the early sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries that I was oblivious to. A couple days later, I finished The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which was an autobiography of William Kamkwamba written with the help of Bryan Mealer. Kamkwamba was a boy in Malawi when famine hit. His family, along with many others' in his nation, nearly starved, and he had to drop out of school because they needed all their money to buy food. Kamkwamba, however, self-taught himself, especially science, and gained fame when he built a windmill from scratch to light up his house. He worked on other projects, too, such as a water pump, irrigation, and a radio station, some of which worked, and some of which did not. That was a really good book, too, because it's simply a great story.
 
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