Post: #376

This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach

Extremely in depth book about the Korean war, written from an officers perspective.

Tell how the lack of communication and preparedness allowed the North do invade so far and so fast.
Talked about some of the outstanding acts of heroism and the atrocities.

The book is extremely long. Took me a while to get through with my schedule. But if you read reviews, it's one of the best books in this war.period
You could write a long review of this book..But I feel like there are plenty already written.
http://www.amazon.com/This-Kind-War-Fift...1574883348

Post: #377

I recently read The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics by Anonymous Conservative. Just finished How to Deal With Narcissists by Michael Trust. I got both books when they were temporarily free, which happens occasionally.

The r/K theory applied to politics is very interesting. Definitely worth a read. The narcissist books is not as well put together, but still offers plenty of insights into the psyche of thoroughly screwed up people, and how to deal with them.

Post: #378

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government - Mike Lofgren

http://www.amazon.com/Deep-State-Constit...0525428348

An extremely well written book that provides a former insider's view of how globalist elites have turned the United States Government into an effective oligarchy.
Emphatically recommended for reading by all.

Post: #379

All Out!: An Autobiography by Albert Ellis

Finally finished Albert Ellis's autobiography, after having bought it in December. With school and other stuff going on, I was only able to read it sporadically, and I'm a slow reader so I only averaged about 20 pages per sitting; the fact that it was nearly 700 pages didn't help either. He lived an amazing life. He created one of the greatest forms of cognitive therapy (Aaron T. Beck is often credited as the pioneer of cognitive behavioral therapy, but technically it was Ellis since REBT predated CBT), banged a lot of women (he mentioned about 50 of them by name in the book, and that wasn't even all of them, only the ones he thought were important. He also got married when he was 90 to a woman 24 years his junior. Can you believe this guy? ), always spoke his mind, and though he was a liberal, he was one of those rare liberals who wasn't dogmatic and was willing to change his beliefs. He was also true to his philosophy of REBT and rarely angered or depressed himself about things in life. Do yourself a favor and check out Dusty's REBT thread then buy A Guide to Rational Living. I'll personally refund you if you don't like it. (Joking!)

R.I.P Al, you're a true inspiration.

Post: #380

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

Im personally very interested in the history of the early Americas, whether its about native civilizations, the conquistadors, etc. This book was slightly different, as it discussed British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest to find a rumored city deep in the Amazonian jungle in the early 1900's. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about any sort of expedition or if you are a history buff. Before this book I had romantic views of the conquistadors and other explorers in the region, but this book really gave me a dose of reality.

Post: #381

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis. The Davis translation is the newest, from 2010, and it comes very highly regarded. I haven't had the chance of reading the older English translations, but James Wood, a critic whose opinion I respect, calls it the most successful of them (having read through it with three other English translations and the French original.)

The book is a French novel that predates Tolstoy's Anna Karenina by a good 20 years but sounds like it was written a hundred years later, with less of a culture gap to vault for the Western reader. It's a velvet vortex of intentionally flowery language undercut by some devastating and cutting images to parody romance and fantasy in particular. A very, very nice piece of work which has Red Pill oozing out of its pores, just as much if not more than Tolstoy's work. This was Flaubert's first novel and his best work, famed among literati for its stylistic perfection, attended by legends of Flaubert spending hours poring over the precise wording of a single sentence.

Most of the fawning over it from the literati comes from it essentially being the first successful novel that used realism, as opposed to the romantic style (which Flaubert was out to parody). As a result, the book comes across much, much more like a modern novel than, say, Count of Monte Cristo would -- mainly because Flaubert seems to be recognised as the guy who first made the style work, actually turning Balzac's masturbation into a real, breathing work. The book is also fawned over because it was the equivalent of a SJW text for the time: critical or mocking of the church, the book was deemed immoral by the authorities and Flaubert prosecuted for writing it (which, of course, led to the thing's success thanks to the Barbra Streisand Effect.)

Flaubert targets two things above all: the pretensions of the emerging middle class - slightly-educated country pharmacists thinking of themselves as high intellectuals, for example - and romantic fantasies, which the titular character, Emma Bovary, falls victim to. While Flaubert professed to dislike Emma Bovary a lot, he seemed to me to make her a tragic figure. Emma's early education was in a nunnery, and as a result she had a distinct lack of real world contact with men, and a great deal of exposure to idealistic medieval romance novels which she came to think of as representing reality. This is why the dreary world of the 1850 French countryside is rendered in grand, flowery (but still incredibly readable) language: we are mostly seeing the world through Emma's eyes, through the fantastic filter through which she sees the world. (We are kept grounded and at a distance from her by images that parody and undercut these delusions: imagine a description of a field of wheat under sunlight, rolling and billowing in the warm wind from the Western sea, immediately followed by a blunt footnote that Emma steps over a cowpat left by a fat ox a few minutes earlier. That's the sort of thing you get through half the novel. In any lesser author's hands, this would not work. In Flaubert's, it does.)

So what, you're probably asking. Flaubert had a hard-on against his rural upbringing and wanted to show it. What relevance does that have for today?

Shortest answer is the unintentionally hilarious positive review that was on the dustjacket of my copy:

Quote:Madame Bovary reads like it was written yesterday ... Emma, with her visions of a grander life and resplendent passions, is me ... and you, too, no doubt ... If you haven't happened to read Madame Bovary until now, I suggest you curl up with this edition ... and allow yourself to get lost in another time and place that yet bears a curious resemblance to our own.
--Daphne Merkin, Elle magazine

Do not think this review was just echoing Flaubert's alleged words "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," -- Madam Bovary, she is me. This is an educated, 21st century, feminist woman not just empathising with, but identifying with Emma Bovary, a delusional woman because of the bullshit she's been fed throughout her early education about high romance. And said woman does not for one second appreciate the irony of that statement. Two hundred and fifty years down the line, women have not changed. Women are still susceptible to indoctrination and fantasies that appeal to their feelings, even if those fantasies do not bear any resemblance to reality at all. Rodolphe, the player character of the novel, understands the fantasies of his targets well and uses them to best advantage (Flaubert himself was an "anything that moved, male or female" type, albeit his tastes ran to P4P rather than seduction.) And the hapless activities of Emma's husband Charles and her (later) paramour Leon will also appear very familiar to anyone who's been around betas for a while.

The only difference is that, 250 years ago, those fantasies were of knights sweeping women off their feet, of grand proclamations of love and devotion. Today, the fantasies are of equality, controlling one's own "narrative", having career and child without sacrifice, and getting 'a good man' when the ride on the cock carousel is over. There is a very good reason why this book feels similar to our world today: because it is, with only the window dressing changed.

And that's only a part of the reading experience I had with this book. The book manages to convey the, well, equivocation of life, the way joy seems mixed with sorrow, the sublime with the ridiculous, the most banal impulses with the sweetest desires.

Put it this way - if you assaulted Anna Karenina and got frustrated dealing with characters with literally four different names, try this one by Flaubert. The Davis translation also has a number of (unfootnoted, which was annoying) historical notes as an appendix.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #382

Game of Thrones Book 1,2,3,4 all in the space of a month. Just started the fifth.
Shit is addicting yo

Post: #383

(05-01-2016 08:13 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

Quote:Madame Bovary reads like it was written yesterday ... Emma, with her visions of a grander life and resplendent passions, is me ... and you, too, no doubt ... If you haven't happened to read Madame Bovary until now, I suggest you curl up with this edition ... and allow yourself to get lost in another time and place that yet bears a curious resemblance to our own.
--Daphne Merkin, Elle magazine

Hilarious. Women can miss the point of anything.

Post: #384

(05-01-2016 01:21 PM)debeguiled Wrote:  

(05-01-2016 08:13 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

Quote:Madame Bovary reads like it was written yesterday ... Emma, with her visions of a grander life and resplendent passions, is me ... and you, too, no doubt ... If you haven't happened to read Madame Bovary until now, I suggest you curl up with this edition ... and allow yourself to get lost in another time and place that yet bears a curious resemblance to our own.
--Daphne Merkin, Elle magazine

Hilarious. Women can miss the point of anything.

I got curious and went to look up the review from which the extract is taken. You can find the full, knee-slapping review here: http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relati...us-519322/

Some notable extracts:

Quote:The truth is that Emma, with her visions of a grander life and resplendent passions, is me, as well—and you, too, no doubt. She is every woman who has felt that prosaic reality isn't quite what she bargained for, that marriage is a letdown, and that her specialness goes unappreciated. ("If my book is good," Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet, "it will gently caress many a feminine wound: More than one woman will smile as she recognizes herself in it.")

Again, the irony in this statement is incredible.

Quote:How a 30-year-old bachelor—one who led a mostly hermetic existence with his widowed mother in provincial Rouen in nineteenth-century France, agonized over every word, and read his work-in-progress aloud to himself as well as to a small audience of attentive male friends—came to invent a woman who is recognizably one of us, whose every gesture and passing thought strikes us as quintessentially female, is among the great artistic mysteries, a literary act of gender-bending if ever there was one.

Yeah, it's called understanding women after seeing them in action. Flaubert didn't lead a "mostly hermetic" existence. He suffered from various venereal diseases most of his life. He had a relationship with Louise Colet for six years, visited prostitutes a lot, and more or less fucked his way across Egypt over a two year period, contracting syphilis for his pains.

Quote:The sense of boredom, of time hanging heavy, that afflicts Emma from the start of her life as the wife of Charles Bovary, a good-hearted but rather obtuse doctor ("Charles' conversation was as flat as a sidewalk") whose adoration of Emma blinds him to her growing discontent, is almost palpable. It's not that different from the anxiety of choice that plagues many women in their twenties and thirties today—the idea that there might be someone better out there than the man you happen to be with, that if you go on just one more date, you might find Prince Charming.

You could pull this female habit right out of any manosphere text. The "anxiety of choice" we all know by another name: hypergamy. Husbands can and often do pursue strange pussy, but it's a lot less frequently sought on a continuing basis. (Indeed Flaubert understands and portrays how an affair can easily turn into an unsatisfying marriage of its own: when Emma takes her second lover, the affair lasts for several months ... during which time she gets bored with said lover, and he gets tired of her continual emotional exaggeration.)

Quote:Views of the novel's message have changed along with the times, from seeing it as a condemnation of bourgeois society to an exposé of women's constricted role in a patriarchal culture. Emma Bovary has been regarded variously as a hysteric (the prevailing nineteenth-century diagnosis), a nihilist (reflective of nineteenth-century diagnosis), a nihilist (reflective of Flaubert's own conviction of ultimate futility), and a depressive with an ongoing death wish. By today's standards, she might also be regarded as a manic-depressive and a borderline personality—unable to connect to other people in a sustaining way, incapable of giving or receiving love, and thus doomed to loneliness.

Emma's condition is actually a lot simpler to diagnose these days because it's common in both men and women alike: chronic narcissism.

Emma believes in essence that she's the main character in a drama with everyone else as a supporting character. When the real world, and other people, don't play up to their parts, she suffers narcissistic injuries -- a deep disquiet resulting from the mismatch between her self-image and what other people think about her. Indeed what prompts Emma's suicide is the prospect of losing all of her material possessions, the things that she uses to hide from herself that she's a fortysomething wife in a one-horse town among people that she considers rubes.

Unsurprisingly, Daphne Merkin herself has been in therapy for a good portion of her life. Therapy, as the Last Psychiatrist tells us, is a petri dish for narcissism, since it literally invites you to talk about yourself and not actually do anything to solve the problem.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #385

(04-17-2016 06:03 PM)Sourcecode Wrote:  This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach

Extremely in depth book about the Korean war, written from an officers perspective.

Tell how the lack of communication and preparedness allowed the North do invade so far and so fast.
Talked about some of the outstanding acts of heroism and the atrocities.

The book is extremely long. Took me a while to get through with my schedule. But if you read reviews, it's one of the best books in this war.period
You could write a long review of this book..But I feel like there are plenty already written.
http://www.amazon.com/This-Kind-War-Fift...1574883348

A good read.

If you wish more on the Korean War, the standard is <b> The Forgotten War</b>, by Clay Blair. Highly recommended.

Post: #386

Glad I could point you in a helpful direction. Since you enjoyed it, I would also recommend his work Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time.

Post: #387

"Demons" by Dostoevsky.

Too long. Too slow paced. This and The Idiot are my least favourite works by this dude. BrotherS Kazmarazov is the standout piece of work by Dostoevsky IMHO. Crime and Punishment also gets a look in for its comparative brevity.

This book was hard work. Save yourself the effort and stick to Karamazov or Crime and Punishment.

Post: #388

"Beasts, men and Gods" by Ferdinand Ossendowski

This is one remarkable book. It really explores every subject that is of great spiritual importance to men, and yet it presents whole narrative through a real life story. It is quite possible that Ossendowski added some artistic touch to this real-life account, but to see trough what kind of trials were men at those days ready to put themselves in order to reach their destination and survive intact, truly amazing. Makes you momentarily start hating this soft, nauseating modern existence. Great and very insightful exploration of eastern religions and traditions. And above all, truly captivating description of an otherwise very mysterious and not quite documented figure - Baron Ungern Von Sternberg, an eccentric dictator of Mongolia of White Russian-German origin in 1921. Whole account is set into a time in Russian and Mongolian history of non-stop violence and struggle (Bolshevik rise and subsequent anarchy in that region)

I was overwhelmed with it. It's like reading an encyclopedia in a format of a captivating novel. It also makes many questions that are VERY relevant today.

Post: #389

Mohammed and the Unbelievers by Bill Warner. Nice condensed version of the Sira. As Islam is such a big issue nowadays, I decided that it's time to start reading about it.

Post: #390

The Game - Neil Strauss

I finally got around to read this classic. There were a few things I didn't know and field tested with positive result (from 1 to 10 how much of a good kisser you are, and the smell and bite hands thing, I am yet to test the dual induction massage). I didn't enjoy all the drama in the later part of the book and the boring Courtney Love parts. Overall a good read, although as learning game goes obviously nowadays they are better sources. Overall a decent and useful read, especially if you are curious to learn more about how the pua industry started.

I am not sure about Style's skill level, he seems to underestimates himself in the beginning and overestimated at the end. Also he's depiction of Tyler Durden of Real Social Dynamics sounds a bit too obsessive at times. Almost like when you meet someone in whom you see parts of yourself you hate, you start hating them too. I feel Strauss himself in Tyler, expect Tyler seems to be even more analytical (and good).

Post: #391

I finally went around and finished "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Overall a very enjoyable read. He clearly has very strong conversational skills and lived an interesting life. He hit the town in Vegas, lived in Brazil for as a professor for a good while, worked in the Manhattan project and caused all sorts of mischief, and dated hot women. If you want a glimpse into how a Nobel-prize winning physicist lived life to the fullest, this book is for you.

(05-24-2016 07:07 AM)Legend Wrote:  I am not sure about Style's skill level, he seems to underestimates himself in the beginning and overestimated at the end. Also he's depiction of Tyler Durden of Real Social Dynamics sounds a bit too obsessive at times. Almost like when you meet someone in whom you see parts of yourself you hate, you start hating them too. I feel Strauss himself in Tyler, expect Tyler seems to be even more analytical (and good).

I was perturbed by the fixation on Tyler as well so I had to check up on some of the fellow shit-talking the other guys have against Neil Strauss. Apparently Neil came off as a weird, constantly snickering and fairly smug dude. Color me shocked.

I did not much care for the constant dick-riding of RSDs business style - so what if they copy somebody else's business model? That's basically how capitalism works. If nobody else walked in to saturate the game market after Mystery he'd still be charging maybe three grand per seminar and have a waiting list of 18+ months, which is frankly insane. Let the customers decide if they wanted new or 'experienced' gamesmen to teach them.

Furthermore, all those fairly lame accusations rang hollow once Neil Strauss set up his StyleLife academy, which uses the exact same marketing gimmicks he probably found upsetting. "Review my product/services right away!, 5-stars!, Sign up for my email list!, "Check out my crowdsourced podcast! etc".

All fair in business but if you're going to smear somebody since they're competing with your buddy and have it immortalized in a book, keep the future in mind in case you end up pulling the exact same shit.

Neil Strauss was instrumental to mainstreaming the game community and we all owe him one (I probably wouldn't be here without that book) but I'll be glad when PUA finally dies.

Post: #392

(05-24-2016 07:07 AM)Legend Wrote:  The Game - Neil Strauss

I finally got around to read this classic. There were a few things I didn't know and field tested with positive result (from 1 to 10 how much of a good kisser you are, and the smell and bite hands thing, I am yet to test the dual induction massage). I didn't enjoy all the drama in the later part of the book and the boring Courtney Love parts. Overall a good read, although as learning game goes obviously nowadays they are better sources. Overall a decent and useful read, especially if you are curious to learn more about how the pua industry started.

I am not sure about Style's skill level, he seems to underestimates himself in the beginning and overestimated at the end. Also he's depiction of Tyler Durden of Real Social Dynamics sounds a bit too obsessive at times. Almost like when you meet someone in whom you see parts of yourself you hate, you start hating them too. I feel Strauss himself in Tyler, expect Tyler seems to be even more analytical (and good).

That book is a classic between the oldschool PUA materials (Mystery Method by Erik Von Markovic and How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed by Ross Jeffries were some of the earliest PUA books; the first is focused on a mixture between traditional game techniques and routines and second one is seduction focused on hypnosis and NLP). Excluding the cheesy routines and openers, this book provides some game value, given that book came out almost a decade ago, when the game was a more underground knowledge.

By the way, if you want to read updated game advice, read the game forum of RVF, heartiste's blog when he was known as Roissy, Roosh's personal blog and pickup books (I haven't read any of Roosh's books yet, for that reason I can't give an opinion)

Post: #393

I re-read Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Good book. The near-1000 pages went by quickly at about 100 pages in.

The basis is an alternate world where the secular and religious world is divided in an opposite way as to how its been historically on Earth. The monks are the non-believers, and live in cloisters. There are several layers of cloisters, and since they have contained all human knowledge, including history, science, and philosophy, most all educated people pass through the cloisters as a form of school/college. There are 1 year, 10 year, 100 year, and 1000 year cloisters, with no communication allowed in and out except in very special circumstances.

A lot of things happen, but as it's a Stephenson book, it all has basis in hard science in one way or another. It's very interesting from a science fiction standpoint. Some of the conversations are quite tedious, but I realized that they were simply an analog for some of the tedious conversations I have in technical discussions in my own life.

Post: #394

Last book I read was: "How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes" by Peter Schiff - he uses illustrations like a kid's book and fish in place of money so you get the idea about value - some of the analogies don't work very well and at times I wished he'd just call it money so I'd know what the hell point he was trying to make! (you'll know what I mean if you read it) - recommended despite that.

   

Post: #395

I read a couple of Aaron Clarey's books recently:

Worthless - I wish this book was available 12 years ago when I was graduating high school. In this book Clarey breaks down how your wages are determined, what to major in, what not to major and refuting myths about college, picking a college major and so on. It is a great book. It can be read in roughly 2 hours. Also, since it is largely directed at young adults picking it is easy to read. Clarey has a great sense of humor and this was an overall excellent read. This book is recommended for people that are choosing a college major but it would also be useful for anyone that is interested in changing their career.

The Black Man's Guide Out of Poverty - Although this book is directed to young black men who want to improve their socioeconomic situation, aside from the first couple of chapters, I think the advice is applicable to all young men. The book goes into detail about what to study, what to do for a career, starting a business and finding a wife and starting a family. I thought the advice was excellent. I think if you are familiar with Clarey's other work, not much of the advice he says will be new to you. But if you are unfamiliar with his other books, this is a great read.

Post: #396

First Things First, Stephen Covey.

Put it this way, I'm getting good value out of this book. It contains much of the same material out of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is one of the more prominent self-help books out there. (Covey is the guy who first coined the term 'abundance mentality', which is still used in the manosphere to this day.)

That said, I'm finding it much more accessible because Covey dials back the more idealistic elements of his 'philosophy' and focuses a little more on time management. Covey's take on it is that in order to really be managing your time well you need to have a very clear vision of what you want to do with your life, a vision that is consistent with your most inner nature, your conscience. Once you know what those goals are, you then prioritise those tasks which fall into 'Quadrant 2': tasks which are important given your goals in life, but not urgent. (Quadrants 1 through 4 basically divide all tasks into four types of task: important versus non-important and urgent versus non-urgent.) Most people tend to spend most of their time doing stuff which is urgent and important, urgent but not important, or not urgent and not important.

One penetrating observation he offers which is still relevant (the book is circa. 1991) is that in the West we suffer from an urgency addiction. We tend to look up to people who solve shit when it goes wrong, who can solve a crisis in a moment or two. We get little doses of endorphins when we solve an urgent and pressing problem, so as time goes on, we get more and more inclined to solve urgent problems and not think about how to stop those problems occurring in the first place (this sort of work being not urgent but nonetheless very important).

I immediately hearkened back to an insight that some of us have made here in respect of video games: video games give you little faux achievements which, giving you a small dose of endorphins, drug you against going out to do anything bigger with your existence. And consider the phenomenon of free, online, boundless porn, which many in the manosphere theorise kills the desire to go out and talk to women.

But I'm persuaded that this urgency addiction can be seen throughout our culture: we idolise crisis managers, guys who offer quick-fix solutions, guys who can come in and stop problems when they happen. We don't idolise anywhere near as much the guy who solves the problem far upstream so it never happens, or comes up with a solution that deals with the problem permanently. We're too addicted to the little endorphin rush that comes from solving a small crisis.

As said, the book was written in 1991. Things have gotten a lot worse since then. I think the Internet and smartphones have weaponised our urgency addictions, especially in women.

Another observation that rang true to me, related to urgency addiction: many people live their entire lives as if they're still cramming for final exams. In theory you can learn enough when cramming to pass a test. But the cost is that you never have extended contemplation of the subject and therefore never a real, deep knowledge of that subject. And as a result you usually don't retain what you crammed for.

This does not just hold for education. It's a natural law that applies to the physical, professional, spiritual, and emotional spheres of our lives as well. I realised this when I remembered something TravelerKai observed about the Bigger Loser fraud competition the other day in the Everything Else forum: real weight loss cannot be done by crash and smash like that TV series does. The body does not put on all that weight in 8 weeks, and it sure as fuck doesn't come off permanently in 8 weeks either. It takes a long, sustained change in behaviour for obesity to be turned around. And then I remembered Josh Waitzkin's approach to learning, in the ROK-reviewed The Art of Learning: depth beats breadth any day of the week, and the correct attitude for learning is to consider it a lifelong process of gradual but continual change and improvement. Consider Malcolm Gladwell's theory of mastery of a discipline only being possible after investing ten thousand hours into that discipline. Shit, consider Roosh's ultimate approach to gaming: you only get better by failing and failing and failing again and considering what you did wrong each time.

The point being:
(1) Cramming, like crash dieting, like all quick fixes, do not work. Human existence doesn't work that way.
(2) From the book: "No gardener, no garden." You cannot expect to have a beautiful garden if you're never there to tend it. The other way I have heard this expressed is the saying "The best fertiliser for a crop is the shadow of the farmer." Consistent attention to one's goals, in other words.

There is a whole other half to the book, which is much more addressed to Covey's particular philosophical viewpoint. I will not go into that since it's just going to piss people off, but I do recommend the book is worth a read since -- I suspect moreso for the older guys -- it does echo and lock together some of the disparate themes on how experience, learning, and peace of mind work. And its theory of time management does seem to work: I've been trying it out for a week and among my significant relationships it has registered some improvements already, although not monumental ones as yet. It's a worthwhile book to take a look at.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #397

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Gritty, raw tale of life in the wild west. You're following a band of scalphunters. Here's a few passages that I copied down.

McCarthy's vivid and grisly descriptions are really something.

Quote:They had but two animals and one of these had been snakebit in the desert and this thing now stood in the compound with its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine ideation out of an Attic tragedy. It had been bitten on the nose and its eyes bulged out of the shapeless head in a horror of agony and it tottered moaning toward the clustered horses of the company with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bridge of its nose and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough

Random, but here's another passage I liked.

Quote:The truth about the world, he said, is thcat anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analog nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Dark stuff but captivating

Recommended

Post: #398

Just finished The Art of the Deal by Trump. What an incredibly perceptive man, whether it be the vignette of how he snagged his 727 on the cheap, to his leverage of NBC's impending relocation in building (now sold) Television City.

He demonstrates how important it is to be an expert in your craft when he recounts his renovation of the public Wollman Rink. This is shown particularly in his deliberation between using Freon and brine in ice-making; he's able to decide upon brine quickly (where it took NYC six years, 12 million, and one non-functional ice rink later to consider that Freon may not have worked out). Month ago, Trump said he knew nothing about running an ice rink, but he did have the wherewithal and the drive to become an expert in the craft.

He's still the same guy we see in his campaign today, loyal to good friends and harsh on enemies. Initially white knighted (Trump's words, hehe) for a businessman named Barron Hilton when the latter was in some dire straits. Hilton's organization was uncomfortable with details in a deal Trump made to buy a property off Hilton. Trump and Hilton originally planned to meet in person to talk and smooth out the details. When Hilton's company slapped Trump with a lawsuit and Hilton himself played dumb, Trump no longer felt inclined to share goodwill with this guy.

Trump references media coverage many, many times in The Art of the Deal, from the USFL story to the Wollman rink Ice Capades. No wonder he's playing the MSM today like a fiddle. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.

Post: #399

A light read, I whizzed through it in a couple of days. I think the only Eels song I owned before reading this was 'That look you give that guy' but that didn't matter. The story stands on it's own and E is hard not to like as he describes the highs and lows of his life from childhood to fairly recent past. Pretty funny in parts but brutal in others, he also disses John Legend at one point which I particularly liked.

Post: #400

(03-30-2016 09:50 AM)Patriarch Wrote:  

(03-30-2016 09:27 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:  Theodoric the Goth by Thomas Hodgkin. It tells the epic story of the rise and fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, built upon the ruins of the western Roman empire.

Now this sounds like it's right up my alley. What did you think of it?

It was awesome. The history is very interesting and the book is well written, the author's passion for that period of history comes through.

It's in the public domain, so download a free copy off the net onto your ebook reader, if you have one. Librivox also has a free audiobook.