Keith J. Holyoak Ph.D. (Editor), Robert G. Morrison Ph.D. (Editor)
864 pages of pure gold

Victoria
I think you should spend some time with the alternative views. Krugman's latest would give you a taste.NYBoglehead wrote:"The Debt Bomb" by Senator Tom Coburn - another one that will make you cringe
Although The Big Short says the exact opposite. A group of truly clever men (Eisman, Bury etc.) analyzed what was going on and made a lot of money for themselves and their clients by betting against the market-- using publicly available (albeit obscure) information.Also recently finished "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis, another example of why low-cost passive investing will beat the active management from the $3000 suit wearing Ivy League alum in "high finance"
I am more fond of James MacPherson 'Battle Cry of Freedom' which seems more of a historians' book-- informed by current debate. I don't deny Foote's narrative power.FabLab wrote:Finished Shelby Foote's excellent The Civil War: A Narrative - Fort Sumter to Perryville. Thank you randomwalk for the inspiration.
Before I move on to volume 2, Fredericksburg to Meridian, it's time to hit that thickening pile of New Yorker magazines that was put aside. And, my thoughts also are to start Annette Thau's The Bond Book, that was so highly recommended in a previous BH thread.
Cheers
I have never really gotten to the bottom of what Johnson, a bully and a cruel and belittling man, what was genuine concern for the less fortunate and what was pure political opportunism. But he understood perfectly that the New Deal alliance: working class Catholics, northern liberals, blacks, Southern Whites would be torn asunder by what he was doing, and the great Southern Realignment would follow. Yet he did it anyhow.Fallible wrote:The Caro book is on my library list and your comments make me anxious to get started. Being a member of the '60s generation, I well recall Johnson's battles for civil rights and how unlikely it seemed that he would be the one to lead to enactment of the Civil Rights Act. But it was fitting for the '60s, about which everything seemed unlikely.MP173 wrote:Now reading Robert Caro's "Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power".
This is my first reading of a Caro book. It is a well documented biography of Lyndon Johnson's life from about 1955 thru 1964. He begins the book as the "second most powerful man in Washington", a real deal maker as Senate Majority Leader ("Mr. Leader"), loses the nomination to John Kennedy for the 1960 Democratic Presidental hopeful and is then the Vice President in the Kennedy administration.
Two very interesting points are the process which led to him being asked to be the VP nominee (and then the 3 trips in one day by Robert Kennedy asking him to withdraw from the VP nomination) and the complete loathing and ridicule from the Kennedy administration during his tenure as VP.
Not only is this a great insite into the life of Mr. Johnson, but also into the inner workings of the Kennedy Administration and the hatred between Robert Kennedy and Johnson. They truly hated each other.
Right now I am at the summer of 1963 and the Civil Rights issues are front and center. I never realized Johnson's commitment to that issue. He had to walk a fine line between being a "southern Senator" and his feelings about human/civil rights.
This is a fascinating book.
Ed
Yes, James McPherson was a Princeton history professor; Shelby Foote self-identified as a novelist.Valuethinker wrote:... James MacPherson 'Battle Cry of Freedom' which seems more of a historians' book ...FabLab wrote:Finished Shelby Foote's excellent The Civil War: A Narrative - Fort Sumter to Perryville. Thank you randomwalk for the inspiration.
Before I move on to volume 2, Fredericksburg to Meridian, it's time to hit that thickening pile of New Yorker magazines that was put aside. And, my thoughts also are to start Annette Thau's The Bond Book, that was so highly recommended in a previous BH thread.
Cheers
Foote concludes the Bibliographical Note in vol. 1, The Civil War rather charmingly:Valuethinker wrote: MacPherson is usually thought to be more pro Union and Foote more pro Confederate.
One word more perhaps will not be out of place. I am a Mississippian. Though the veterans I knew are all dead now, down to the final home guard drummer boy of my childhood, the remembrance of them is still with me. However, being nearly as far removed from them in time as most of them were removed from combat when they died, I hope I have recovered the respect they had for their opponents until Reconstruction lessened and finally killed it. Biased is the last thing I would be; I yield to no one in my admiration for heroism and ability, no matter which side of the line a man was born or fought on when the war broke out, fourscore and seventeen years ago. If pride in the resistance my forebears made against the odds has leaned me to any degree in their direction, I hope it will be seen to amount to no more, in the end, than the average American's normal sympathy for the underdog in a fight.
In the last chapter, he caustically criticizes what he sees as the United States' laughably inadequate naval defenses of its shores. Hard to know whether he was right, as fortunately it was not tested.When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these homes and the insides of a few score, you begin to understand why the American (the respectable one) does not take a deep interest in what they call "politics," and why he is so vaguely and generally proud of the country that enables him to be so comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty chalet, with smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry curtains, hot and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August evening—how can such a man despair of the Republic?"
Behold now the glorious condition of this Republic which has no fear. There is ransom and loot past the counting of man on her seaboard alone—plunder that would enrich a nation—and she has neither a navy nor half a dozen first-class ports to guard the whole. No man catches a snake by the tail, because the creature will sting; but you can build a fire around a snake that will make it squirm.
The country is supposed to be building a navy now. When the ships are completed her alliance will be worth having—if the alliance of any republic can be relied upon. For the next three years she can be hurt, and badly hurt.
I am reading the second edition, and that has been my experience as well (i.e. taking longer than normal and a bit dry). The book does not seem to hold one for very long.FabLab wrote: At the same time I'm moving, ever so slowly, through Thau's The Bond Book, 3rd ed. Not that it isn't very good, but just a bit dry shall we say. Like a good martini
Our personalities are sometimes quite independent of our ideologies particularly if we tend to absolutist or extremist views.RebusCannébus wrote:A biography of Che Guevara. Why? Have spent some time in Mexico, where he is revered. But that's there. I'm here, and less than 10 percent into the book, the term sociopath comes to mind. I'll forge on, since I'm learning some about the history of U.S. governmental and corporate shenanigans in Latin America, and because the author lacks a discernible political agenda and is therefore credible. But as for Comandante Guevara, I'm squarely in the camp that believes that nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.
"Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home and did cleaning and nursing and washing for a long time before I began to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"
"And do you often go out?"
"As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes and smiling, "because of earning sixpences and shillings!"
"And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"
"To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play you know, and Tom an't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"
"No-o!" said Tom stoutly.
"When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright—almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?"
"Yes, Charley," said Tom, "almost quite bright."
funny quote in the link.Valuethinker wrote:http://greesons.typepad.com/paideia/201 ... -orcs.html
sorry... too good a cheap shot to miss.
I remember a similar 'breath of fresh air' in reading Heinlein (true teenage intellectuals would have read Nietsche, who said much the same things).
Of course adulthood is finding out about how very much more complex and interdependent the world is. I think there is still valuable stuff in Heinlein (the juveniles, I can pretty much dispense with anything written post 1965 or so) but it's that same crashing feeling of discovering the world is not as you would like it.
Tobias Wolfe 'About a Boy' has a devastating visit by the personage to his private school.
not like reading 1040 instructions.gkaplan wrote:Twin Pillars to Desert Storm: America's Flawed Vision in the Middle East from Nixon to Bush by Howard Teicher and Gayle Radley Teicher.
Howard Teicher worked at the Departments of State and Defense under Presidents Carter and Reagan and served on the staff of the National Security Council from 1982 to 1987. Gayle Radley Teicher joined the Office of the Legal Advisor at the Department of State in 1984. While there, she worked on numerous international legal issues, including a nation's right to use force and American counterterrorism policy. She is also the author of a study of covert actions.