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:
“Revisionist History and Slavery as Entertainment at The Black America Show”
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 
Again I have to nibble on your seemingly blanket rejection of “conspiracy theories”. A person should be much more specific when talking about this.
For example obviously Hitler and those around him conspired to attack neighboring countries. We can not say that the policies that they carried out were not a conspiracy just because they occupied positions in government institutions when carring them out. Also the Bush administration went to war based on obviously false information that was presented to the public. A person would have to be a complete fool to believe that they actually believed the information that they were disemmenatng. But their defence to the charge that they conspired to wage a war of aggression is that it was all a big mistake. They were allowed to get away with it.
Then the release of documents by wikileaks that play a role in the so called Russians hacked our election scandel showed that there was a conspiracy to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic Nomination. NO ONE has ever disputed the authenticity of those hacked emails.
So what just these three examples show is that there are plenty of conspiracies at all levels of society. So people should by all means believe in conspiracy theories. They need to reject the ones that are stupid but there are plenty that are REAL. In fact it is only in America that there is some attmept made to be little those who promote conspiracy theories. Here in Europe people are arrested all the time for conspiracy. The people here actually believe that the CIA conspired with Chilean generals to overthrow Allende and many other governments to boot.
In America they make a big deal about Russians hacking the election becuase one of Putins cooks was aledgedly involved in some sort of twitter or facebook campaign while the fact that the democratic party leadership tried to rig its own playing field is forgotten about. It was the Russians because Rubles were used to pay the bills as if the CIA could not do that to give a false impression of who was doing what. It was the Russians because they aledegedly spent some millions or even tens of millions trying to influence Americans in a campiagn in which special intrest groups in the USA spent billions. IN which the enormous election influence of the Israeli lobby, an aledegedly foreign organization, never gets questioned by the MSM.
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I agree to a certain extent, Kurt. I stand corrected. I do think that George Bush went to war in Iraq based on incomplete information. I’m not sure he was a ware of that, but Powell was, and he caved and went in front of the UN to say that the CIA had proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Considering that Dick Cheney had been on the board of a company that stood to gain massive contracts during the rebuilding is more than a little suspicious. And yes, the DNC behaved disgracefully and shot itself in the foot by preventy Bernie Sanders from winning the primary. Although I’m still not entirely sure he would have won from Trump. But who knows, and the democratic process should have been allowed to play out. The Russians did definitely meddle in the elections as well, though. Seventeen separate American intelligence agencies claimed that before the election and we now have cold, hard proof. But yes, I should be careful with blanket rejections of conspiracy theories. The difference though, between many American conspiracy theroies and those in Europe is that if there turns out to be no evidence of one in Europe, it generally fizzles out rather quickly, whereas in America the fact that there is no evidence is then used as evidence that information is being held back, etc. and conspiracy theroies that are based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever can go on for years, decades, centuries. I’m thinking of the American conspiracy theory that there’s a Jewish bankers’ plan to take over the world, or that Obama isn’t an American and that he’s a secret muslim, etc.
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I would like to come back to this subject at a later date. In the mean time I would like to provide a link to another web site. It might seem off topic.
Even if it is off topic it is about a KEY difference between the insane life of the USA and the less insane life of Europe. I am speaking about the treatment of unions for working people.
https://louisproyect.org/2018/02/28/mark-janus-vs-afscme-and-the-need-for-a-real-trade-union-movement/
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Oh, where to begin if you’re going to compare America’s insanity with Europe! I’m not going to read the article right now, becuse I didn’t sleep last night and I’m so tired I’m practically seeing cross-eyed, but yeah, unions are very different in America than in Europe, and they’re treated differently. Which is probably why they behave differently. Chicken or egg? I’ll let you know if I come across the answer in one of my historical reading rummages.
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After I posted I realized that some additional foundational background would be important for future disscussions about conspiracies. Here are some links to the sites of a number of proffesors of economics. Additional reading at these sites could bring you too up to an unrecognized PHD economics level as well
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2018/02/a-comfortable-betrayal.html#more-11219
http://moslereconomics.com/mandatory-readings/the-innocent-fraud-of-the-trade-deficit-whos-funding-whom/
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=38091
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Thanks, again, I won’t read them right away, but there here for anyone who wants to. In return, let me share one of the nuttier American conspiracy theories that have been around for decades now.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory
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Thanks for referencing my article about the Black America Show. I expanded the article into a very short e-book, Slavery on Stage: Black Stereotypes and Opportunities in Nate Salsbury’s “Black America” Show (available on iTunes and from smashwords.com).. In the e-book, I explain more about African-American Billy McClain’s major role in developing and managing the show.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/362832
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