This post doesn’t live here anymore. It has emigrated to my other blog:
The Big No-No: An Outsider on American Fascism, where it resides under the title:
What Folks Have Been Reading
WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING
In the late 60s Richard Proenneke built his own cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with only a few simple tools. He spent most of the rest of his life there. Sam Keith fleshed out Proenneke's diary of his first 16 months, when he was making his home by a lake. I love these kinds of books!
An old Oji-Cree healer and her nephew canoe down a river in Canada, away from the world of white people. They both have to come to terms with their past. The woman has lost most of her tribe and the young man is traumatized from his recent experience in the Belgian trenches of World War One. My second book by Boyden. Can't say enough about him.
An incredibly comprehensive history of everything related to slavery in the Southern United States, from the beginning of the colonies to the end of the Civil War. Over 700 pages and I took over 30 pages of notes. I will be sharing over many posts to come!
Hamid's debut novel. I love this author. A young man in Lahore, Pakistan, is the victim of love, drugs, obsession, the class system and his complete lack of self-awareness.
A golem, created in Poland and brought to life on a ship to America, and a jinni who was trapped in a flask a thousand years ago and released in New York -- the most unusual immigrants you'll ever meet.
The only part of her life a Korean woman can control is her body, so she withdraws into it. Harrowing.
Autobiography lightly disguised as a novel about the son of Southern migrants growing up on the streets of Harlem, New York City, in the 1940s and 50s. Written like you're hearing the whole story in a bar. Quite a feat.
The story of a man struggling to make a living in Morocco. No plot, no clearly defined characters, but fascinating in its authenticity.
Pakistani man tells an American about his experience as a college student and employee of an assessment firm in America years ago. Smart, nuanced and pretty darn honest considering the unreliable narrator.
Wow! The answer to the inane platitudes about how all parents love their children and how children should always respect their parents. The protagonist must come to terms with his deeply flawed immigrant parents in order to change himself.
Seven short stories about life during the Kim Il-sung regime, by a writer who still lives and works in North Korea, were smuggled out of the country and translated. Mind-boggling stuff.
A 15-year-old autistic narrator wants to know who killed a neighbor's dog, and ends up much further out of his comfort zone than he planned. Wonderful read!
In politics, education, religion, agriculture, business--it turns out that dumbing down has been here from the start.
Fifty years of Istanbul seen through the eyes of a street vendor who migrates to the city as a young boy. It's also a window into the complicated dance between men and women in Turkey.
Hey, don't laugh, at least I'm trying.
A Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with six other people on a tiny island off the coast of Maine all winter in 1873. A woman in the present researching the Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with three other people on a tiny sailboat. What could possibly go wrong?
A man stuck between two worlds in more ways than one. Fascinating!
Historical novel about early contacts between first nations and the French in Canada. Beautifully written story that doesn't pull any punches. I bought his other two novels right away.
Beautifully written. By my children's favorite English and Creative Writing teacher! It's got rave reviews and we're all very proud of her.
Suki Kim is a Korean-American journalist. She poses as an evangelical Christian posing as an English teacher at a school for the sons of North Korea's elite. Her experience and the information she manages to get via writing assignments are incredible. Definitely a lot more eye-opening that any CNN special.
This. Explains. Everything!!!
Why has Islam not undergone a reformation like Christianity? Why is it so easy for Islamic extremist groups like IS to recruit young muslims? What would it take for Islam in fundamentalist Islamic countries to enter modernity? Does the West have a role to play?
Amazing! A man wanders endlessly through a dreamscape, becoming other people, himself in the past, everything is fluid. Kafkaesque disconnect between people and their different needs.
A multi-layered novel about the history of Libya. A fast read, but one you can repeat and find something new each time.
Twelve Americans go missing in Burma/Myanmar during a tour. Touching and hilarious, but mostly hilarious.
The most unusual murder mystery I've ever read. Incredible writing. It haunted me for days.
The quote on the front mentions that these stories are exhilerating. I couldn't disagree more. They are almost unbearably painful to read, and yet I couldn't put them down. Very well done, apart from the third story, which is written in the second tense. Please let me know if you know of ONE story that works in second tense.
Resident Alien -- Being Dutch in America 
Fascinating! The legacy of that enormous evil, plantation slavery, continues to bedevil the US.
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Yes, and it won’t get any better before everyone learns about it and accepts the truth of it and acknowledges everyone’s role in it and in the building of this country.
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Such a crucial part of American history and modern reality, it stuns me that our schools are shying away from honesty. Thank you for the important post!
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You bet. Yes, the reason they shy away from it is because of the school boards. and the school boards, in the biggest states anyway, also have a big influence on what goes in the school textbooks. This is only going to change if school boards are either abandoned or they have a rule that they don’t interfere with the curriculum and leave that up to the professionals in the fields in question.
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I have serious doubts that leaving it up to the proffessionals will help much.
In the USA people who hold the positions in which one woudl expect to be held by a proffessional are often littel more than politcal hacks. The USA is not the Netherlands or Germany. Remember this is the place that the Police have let people out of jail so that they couild be murdered.
IN the field of history for example AMerican historians have not even figured out the Roosevelt, Churchhill, Marshall, Montgomery, and Eisenhower deliberately prolonged the war in Europe, which resulted in millions of deaths. to allow the Gemans time to kill more Soviet citizens. I have gone in to greater detail about this at other sites. I do not feel like going in to it now.
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I’m glad, because that seems like a conspiracy theory to me. But thanks for reading.
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I am rather surprised that a normal person such as yourself is glad that the second world war prolonged unneccessarily. Of course you are aware that thousands of people, more than usual, died per day during this period.
Of course the allied leadership did not do this because they thought that the Soviet Union was a conspriacy. No they had other very obvious reasons for doing it.
Anyways even if they did not think that the Soviet Union was a conspiracy it is kind of silly to reject all conspiracy theories because they describe a CONSPIRACY.
That is as foolish as acceptiing the idea that the WTC was brought down by a controlled demolition when even though it looked like a controled demolition one can easily explain why the collapse looked like a controled demolition and one can easliy explain that since it would have been really really hard to set up such a controlled demolition before hand one should really not accept the idea of a controlled demolition for what we all saw. No a thinking person will be much more discernng and accept those conspiray theories that make sense. Of course for a conspiracy theory to make sense to any particular person that person has to have the training and expierience to to properly weigh the evidence that they are confronted with.
But just imagine this, if Germany had actually won the war and I were to make the statement that Hitler conspired with his government ministers to start a general European war I would now be accused of being an unpatriotic lunatic conspiracy theorist. I am also sure that you can imagine that if, under this regime, I were to say the Jews of Europe were systematically murdered during the 1940s I might be arrested by Erdogan for libeling the Turkish state and people. But NO, you do not have to imagine that BECAUSE YOU SAW IT FOR YOURSELF. To refresh you memory it was that documentary made with Rutger Hauer in 1994 called Morgenland if my memory is correct.
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I have not seen that documentary. For the rest, I don’t really know where to start, Curt, other than that I of course am nnot happy that the war was prolonged. I’m not happy that there was a war at all. The reasons I suspect it’s a conspiracy theory that the Allies purposely prolonged the war so that the Germans could kill more Russians are 1: a few less Russians would not have done anything to change or destroy the Soviet Union, 2: the Allies would not want to have more of their own people killed unnecessarily, and 3: if the war was indeed prolonged by the Allies for the reason you mention, quite a lot of top dogs would have been in on it and you can’t keep something that big a secret for over 75 years.
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I can see it would be a lot of work to convince you. I am not sure at the moment I want to make that kind of investment. So I guess we can just drop the subject.
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Good idea. 😉
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