Some Good Books

Reading books is one of two ways to learn significant amounts in both quantity and quality. The Internet is very thin gruel - a starvation diet for the brain. Books and lecture courses are the twin pillars of knowledge.

For fine lecture courses in either CD or DVD, see www.teach12.com - I've listened to dozens of their courses on many, many subjects and almost all are excellent.

For books, read good nonfiction. If you prefer fiction (novels, etc.) try to stick to good fiction that has survived the test of time OR good historical fiction.

I find much rather good current nonfiction in reviews in the Financial Times, the London Review of Books, and TLS - The Times Literary Supplement. I suppose the New York Review of Books has good insight into good books, too, but it's a gloppy blob of big truck and double truck ads (1 and 2 page ads) and has an excessive political bent.

Here are two books that I've just finished which are both highly informative and well-researched accounts of important subjects in history.

Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, by Nick Bunker. This book does an excellent job describing all aspects of the Pilgrims' settlement at Plymouth in 1620. The author, an Englishman, did a huge amount of research in England, and in the US, and puts the Pilgrim migration in economic, historical and religious context in both sides and connect the Pilgrims to the later much larger migration to settle Boston by the mainstream Puritans. There's so much more to that story than the near mythology we all learned as young people. The huge importance of that settlement and why it succeeded are described in this book with much backup material. The one drawback is that it's a bit too generous with the landscape descriptions.

The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, by Timothy Snyder. Look on a map of Europe. The region covered by those nations is a huge part of Europe. Yet knowledge of the history of those peoples and nations and how they came about is almost a void in the "west" (aka US, UK and western Europe). This book explains the crucial historical facts and forces which led to the current nation states. And it explains the current trends and some of their problems and policies. I have read many histories of the nations and peoples of central and eastern Europe and I will unequivocally say this book is a crucial part of achieving some kind of unified understanding of that area and peoples - by unified I mean one that is NOT dependent on "western" myths and patterns of thought which do not necessarily apply. If you are interested in understanding ALL of Europe, this book helps immeasurably.

Word of the Day

"Homologue" - noun [$10]; "Homologous" - adjective [$10]
Homologue means a homologous thing.
Homologous means 1.a. having the same relation, relative position, etc.; 1.b. corresponding; 2. (Biology) (of organs, etc.) similar in position, structure, and evolutionary origin but not necessarily in function (opposite of Analogous); 3. (Biology) (of chromosomes) pairing at meiosis and having the same structural features and patterns of genes; 4. (Chemistry) (of a series of chemical compounds) having the same functional groups but differing in composition by a fixed groups of atoms.
Sentence: (WSJ 6/14/2010) "There are no national parties in Belgium - even the Greens, who focus their energy on saving the environment, are split into French and Dutch homologues."