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Friday, June 17, 2005
  books - check 'em out.

Delayed a day, but here's my response to this, via Hillary.

Total number of books owned:

I don’t know, a couple hundred or so. Periodically the wife makes me get rid of some. I dumped probably half of what I had when we moved to Boston, including most of the college textbooks I’d been hanging on to. As is not the case with most media I own, it’s not enough to require alphabetization, but as is the case with most media I own, even if it were, they would not be organized in any coherent fashion.

Five books what influenced me:

Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. My introduction to alchemy and esoteric (ie fake) history. Good primer on Nazi occultism, and marginally more credible than The Spear of Destiny. Persuasively argues that Atlantis was nuked by India 9000 years ago.

The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Wherein I learn life's most crucial lesson: NEVER fuck with Juno.

A Whore Just Like the Rest, by Richard Meltzer. Excellent proof that a record review can have absolutely nothing to do with the record in question, as long as the writing is entertaining enough. Also a good essay on professional wrestling, one that I feel I agree with despite being far too young to have any experiences around which to frame an opinion.

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. I had already shaken off the incorrect beliefs picked up throughout the years from inaccurate textbooks and various family members by the time I read this (right, it wasn't about slavery, of course), so maybe it didn’t quite influence me that much. It is useful to remind ourselves how colossally fucked up race relations have been in America since, well, forever, though, and how biased or timid textbooks contorted and distorted the facts to justify our shameful behavior, and also how those with power and money control the flow of information to maintain their prominence. Probably fills the same role here as Zinn’s book for Hillary, and although I’ve owned that one for years, I’ve never actually, you know, read the damn thing.

A Harvard Education in a Book by the editors of the Harvard Lampoon. Along with Letterman, The Simpsons, and The Tick, one of the primary influences on my sense of humor. I used to think I could maybe do this shit for a living, which just goes to show how deluded and idiotic I was in high school.

Last book I bought: Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Frauds – American History From Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellisles, Ellis, And Goodwin, by Peter Charles Hoffer. Picked this up at the Borders at Logan Airport before flying out for the Mind Zap. Hoffer teaches at Georgia, and was my primary instructor my first semester of grad school. He was sort of a prick at times, but that’s the kind of shit you expect and deserve out of grad school, I guess. Anyway, this book is both a look at how history became a professional, peer-reviewed quasi-science, and how the profession’s credibility was damaged by a series of scandals in the early part of this decade. He goes hard after Ambrose and Goodwin, both of whom he dismissed in class as popular historians, and of course Bellisles, who’s ideologically motivated evidence cooking was pretty egregious. He takes it relatively easy on Ellis, but his actual history work was mostly on the level anyhow. As a dude with an interest in history, I thought the book was pretty fascinating, and a pretty quick and easy read.

Last book I read for the first time: Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe, by Charles Seife. Just finished this up on the train this morning. Makes me wish I was a scientist. Seife talks about the three great cosmological revolutions: the first involving Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, and the refutation of Aristotle and the Ptolemaic system; the second with Einstein, Hubble, and the Big Bang; and, most recently, the discovery of dark matter, supersymmetry, M-theory, the ability to read the cosmic background radiation, etc. Seife makes everything clear and easy to understand, and also provides me with about four albums worth of France song titles.
 

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