Latest Books

I've finished four books since my last post:  "The New Lifetime Reading Plan" by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major; "A General Theory of Love" by Dr. Thomas Lewis et al; "The Master of Ballantrae" by Robert Louis Stevenson; and "Almayer's Folly" by Joseph Conrad.

Change Your Attitude, Change Your Life

I've just finished my fifth book, "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.  The first two-thirds, which takes place at Auschwitz and Dachau, reads like a shot.  The final third, which is a good deal more technical than the survivor's memoir which acts as a prelude, is considerably tougher sledding, but ultimately worthwhile.

I suspect that I will be recommending this book to friends as frequently as anything I've ever encountered.  That's a pretty powerful statement about its quality.

Essential.

Speaking Truth to Power

My fourth book of 2011, and my first major achievement, is "Recent American Foreign Policy:  Conflicting Interpretations" by Lawrence S. Kaplan of Kent State.  A college-level textbook dating back to 1968, it covers US policy decisions from 1945 to roughly 1965, through the medium of lengthy contemporary documentation:  excerpts from treaties, presidential and other administration figure speeches, Congressional testimony, articles from the more scholarly press.  Most of the great figures of the day are represented:  Beard, Kennan, Lippmann, Taft, and the full gamut of political names.  As a primer on the nuts and bolts of a generation of Cold war decision-making, the book is superb.

Now I'm ready for Kissinger's "Diplomacy".

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills

My third book is Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country".

I once read a critic who said that the highest compliment that could be paid a novel by a man of taste is "I should be proud to have written it myself."

Brilliant.

The greatest novel ever written about Africa.

Ex Ecclesia Nulla Salus

I've finished my second book, G. G. Coulton's The Medieval Scene:  an Informal Introduction to the Middle Ages, and I had no need of the overseer's rod to spur me on.  Although brief, Coulton is scholarly and well-informed; his judgements are particularly corrective in dispelling popular myths, like the image of monks painstakingly copying manuscripts as the lion's share of their daily toil (When the great scholar St. Bernard left his library to the Church, it contained only twenty-four books).

Thoroughly enjoyable.

Noch Einmal Mit Gefuhl

I've set myself the task of completing 100 significant books in 2011.  Today I finished the first:  Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield".  The novel begins promisingly, but after a long series of increasingly far-fetched coincidences and secret identities, it ends with a denoument that reads more like Act Three of a stage play than the conclusion of a novel.  I could likewise have dispensed with the chapters devoted to recounting whole sermons verbatim.  Frye, in "Anatomy of Criticism", dismisses such comedies of manners as invariably ending "with a rustle of bridal gowns and a sheaf of banknotes"; he must surely have had this novel in mind when he penned those words.

Barely worth my time as a period piece, it lends weight to my suspicion that Goldsmith must have been a tiresome companion to Dr. Johnson et. al.