|
Post by nowhereman on Aug 20, 2019 14:18:37 GMT -5
Just finished Lew Paper's story of Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Simply titled "Perfect"...
I've said in other threads that baseball is far from my favorite sport, but once upon a time, I lived and breathed it and I guess I don't become completely baseball illiterate overnight.
Anyways, I recommend it.
|
|
|
Post by Wolfgang on Aug 20, 2019 14:30:08 GMT -5
Just finished Lew Paper's story of Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Simply titled "Perfect"... I've said in other threads that baseball is far from my favorite sport, but once upon a time, I lived and breathed it and I guess I don't become completely baseball illiterate overnight. Anyways, I recommend it. I used to just throw baseballs into a "strike zone" cardboard box as a kid. Hundreds of throws per night, every night. Actually, it wasn't a baseball. It was a homemade ball that's made from a balled-up newspaper all covered in masking tape. And I threw the ball indoors along a hallway to the front face of a cardboard box. I had use the balled-up homemade ball because my mom said I couldn't throw a real baseball indoors. All this despite the fact that I didn't follow baseball.
|
|
|
Post by nowhereman on Oct 17, 2020 23:46:53 GMT -5
Over a year has passed since the last post in this thread. Anyways, Just wrapped up "separate" the story of plessy v. Ferguson and america's journey from slavery to segregation by Steve luxenberg. 512 pages not including notes and index. Aldo this year finished John Lewis's memoir "walking with the wind" (503 pages before index) and "rage"- woodward's book on trump.
|
|
|
Post by mikegarrison on Oct 18, 2020 0:21:34 GMT -5
I read most of "We Were Eight Years In Power", but I didn't finish before the library yanked it back. It was good, though.
|
|
|
Post by BearClause on Oct 18, 2020 0:39:32 GMT -5
Maybe some older stuff.
Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis. Fascinating how juvenile they were at Solomon Brothers in the 80s.
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. I read that for high school but I liked it so much that I re-read that over the years and even bought another copy when I couldn't find my old one. Disney+ has a new version. Of course I saw the 80s movie version, but that left out so much. Part of the book was devoted to Pete Conrad, who wasn't one of the Mercury Seven. A lot of the stuff he did was attributed to others in the movie version.
|
|
|
Post by mervinswerved on Oct 18, 2020 9:57:42 GMT -5
Nonfiction I'm currently working my way through:
"Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough. A deep look at the radical underground in the '60s and '70s. Weatherman, the Black Liberation Army, and the other groups that came out of the old SDS. Really interesting piece of American history.
"Capital in the Twenty-first Century" by Thomas Piketty. I'm not an economist, but I find his work fascinating and incredibly relevant right now.
"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. It's a classic.
(Reading over this, I swear to God I'm not this pretentious and I balance all of this with a whole bunch of trashy science fiction interspersed with Crusader Kings III.)
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Oct 18, 2020 10:06:28 GMT -5
The Right Stuff movie may have left out a lot, but it was a very good movie, imo.
Once upon a time I read and really liked The Last Place on Earth, about South Pole expeditions of Amundsen and Scott. I should read it again. There was a TV series.
|
|
|
Post by kro2488 on Oct 18, 2020 10:59:36 GMT -5
Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age by Marcus Redicker. Back in college this book was one of my reading assignments in my theory of history class, and was very interesting. If you like Pirates and want to find out more about their history it's a good read.
Also I have a book on the history of the CIA I have never finished but what I read was interesting.
The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda. Spycraft.
|
|
|
Post by BearClause on Oct 18, 2020 11:39:49 GMT -5
The Right Stuff movie may have left out a lot, but it was a very good movie, imo. As a movie it was great. It was fine as a movie independent of the book. The book just went into ridiculous detail and even a 3+ hour movie couldn't cover it. The fear of death by the wives of test pilots was handled pretty well. It didn't quite capture that reporters and the media were seen as the enemy. It didn't have enough time to cover the difference between being a test subject in a capsule and an actual pilot controlling a spacecraft like the X-15. t also made it seem like Chuck Yeager's crash in an NF-104 came from a joyride rather than a scheduled and carefully planned flight. But Pete Conrad didn't make it into the movie even though they attributed a lot of what he did to the characters in the movie.
|
|
|
Post by Phaedrus on Oct 19, 2020 18:41:26 GMT -5
- The Theory of Poker by Dan Sklansky. On mervinswerved recommendation.
[/b], which I recommend highly. [li] The Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chem and Jerrod Ankenman. Again on mervinswerved recommendation[/li] See above. [li] Consider the Lobster And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace[/li] DFW is a brilliant writer, really and truly. Very funny. [li] Prepared: Unlocking Human Performance with Lessons from Elite Sports by Paul Gamble[/li] I picked this up after reading he wrote about training performance. Goes against the flow of the mainstream thinking. [li] Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Majorie Garbor[/li] I will admit, this I bought because I read a really interesting book review. This book is not for the faint of heart. Fascinating history. [li] What is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins [/li] A classic book that tries to explain mathematics in a big picture way. Very challenging. [li] Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky[/li] Barbary Tversky is the widow of Amos Tversky, he was the research partner to Daniel Kahneman of Thinking Fast and Slow fame. She is a well known researcher in her own right. [/ul]
|
|
|
Post by nowhereman on Dec 1, 2020 0:59:58 GMT -5
Just finished a couple more in November. Crazy horse: strange man of the oglalas by Mari sandoz and the longest day by Cornelius Ryan. The former was a slog. Took me over 5 weeks to read it. The longest day was a breeze.
|
|
|
Post by mikegarrison on Dec 1, 2020 10:40:33 GMT -5
The longest day was a breeze. Well, not so much if you were actually part of it.
|
|
|
Post by joetrinsey on Dec 1, 2020 12:20:55 GMT -5
Nonfiction I'm currently working my way through: "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough. A deep look at the radical underground in the '60s and '70s. Weatherman, the Black Liberation Army, and the other groups that came out of the old SDS. Really interesting piece of American history. "Capital in the Twenty-first Century" by Thomas Piketty. I'm not an economist, but I find his work fascinating and incredibly relevant right now. "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. It's a classic. (Reading over this, I swear to God I'm not this pretentious and I balance all of this with a whole bunch of trashy science fiction interspersed with Crusader Kings III.)
I don't know if you've seen any of Daryl Cooper's "Martyrmade" podcast, but he has a 7-part, 20+ hour series on Jim Jones and the People's Temple. If he had an editor, it would make an amazing 10-hour audiobook, but a lot of his side tangents (including one full episode which basically doesn't mention Jones at all) hit the 60s revolutionary groups and provide some interesting context. I didn't know much about Jonestown and always thought it was more of a religious cult rather than a socialist movement turned anti-religious cult.
(FWIW, his series on the Zionist movement and Israel-Palestine conflict is also great.)
If you liked Piketty's book you might enjoy Daniel Markovits', "The Meritocracy Trap." I think the social analysis is similar to what you might draw from Piketty, but the economic conclusions are a bit different. In short, Piketty highlights how much top earners draw from returns on capital rather than income, while Markovits points out that the "1%" (and increasingly, the 0.1%) actually draw a smaller share of their earnings from return on capital than they did in 1900 and the real difference is that wealthy families today invest an incredible amount in education (formal or otherwise) for their children and there is an increasing productivity gap between upper and lower classes. In 1900, the 1% worked fewer hours than a median earner. In 2020, the 1% work far more hours than the median.
To draw a volleyball analogy (which I always do), in 1900 (and even the 1970s), rich parents donated to the booster club so their kid would have a spot on the team and used political influence to ensure them being in the starting lineup. In 2020, rich parents start their kids in club volleyball at age 9, hire personal trainers and skills coaches, and teach them that long hours in the gym are the key to getting a scholarship. While this sounds (and is, in many ways) good, it means that the lower-income kid who starts playing volleyball in 9th grade is overmatched by more skilled, more experienced, and harder working kids from an upper class background. (And indeed, anybody who is involved in club volleyball sees this phenomenon quite a bit.) How do you navigate a sports system where the rich kids actually ARE more "deserving" of the spot than the poor kids?
Since you're a sci-fi fan, you may have read Adrian Tchaikovsky's, "Children of Time," which, aside from being an amazing book that is 95% unrelated to this topic, does have an interesting take on a futurist Earth society, where education science is so advanced, and so widely available, that genetic determinism takes over. Everybody is developed to their full potential, so genetic potential becomes the only relevant value. And then the book moves past that into exploring what a world run by a society of super-intelligent giant spiders would be like. So that's fun too. But I thought it shined a light on the tensions of meritocracy in a different light.
|
|
|
Post by mervinswerved on Dec 1, 2020 13:01:26 GMT -5
Nonfiction I'm currently working my way through: "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough. A deep look at the radical underground in the '60s and '70s. Weatherman, the Black Liberation Army, and the other groups that came out of the old SDS. Really interesting piece of American history. "Capital in the Twenty-first Century" by Thomas Piketty. I'm not an economist, but I find his work fascinating and incredibly relevant right now. "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. It's a classic. (Reading over this, I swear to God I'm not this pretentious and I balance all of this with a whole bunch of trashy science fiction interspersed with Crusader Kings III.) I don't know if you've seen any of Daryl Cooper's "Martyrmade" podcast, but he has a 7-part, 20+ hour series on Jim Jones and the People's Temple. If he had an editor, it would make an amazing 10-hour audiobook, but a lot of his side tangents (including one full episode which basically doesn't mention Jones at all) hit the 60s revolutionary groups and provide some interesting context. I didn't know much about Jonestown and always thought it was more of a religious cult rather than a socialist movement turned anti-religious cult.
(FWIW, his series on the Zionist movement and Israel-Palestine conflict is also great.) If you liked Piketty's book you might enjoy Daniel Markovits', "The Meritocracy Trap." I think the social analysis is similar to what you might draw from Piketty, but the economic conclusions are a bit different. In short, Piketty highlights how much top earners draw from returns on capital rather than income, while Markovits points out that the "1%" (and increasingly, the 0.1%) actually draw a smaller share of their earnings from return on capital than they did in 1900 and the real difference is that wealthy families today invest an incredible amount in education (formal or otherwise) for their children and there is an increasing productivity gap between upper and lower classes. In 1900, the 1% worked fewer hours than a median earner. In 2020, the 1% work far more hours than the median.
To draw a volleyball analogy (which I always do), in 1900 (and even the 1970s), rich parents donated to the booster club so their kid would have a spot on the team and used political influence to ensure them being in the starting lineup. In 2020, rich parents start their kids in club volleyball at age 9, hire personal trainers and skills coaches, and teach them that long hours in the gym are the key to getting a scholarship. While this sounds (and is, in many ways) good, it means that the lower-income kid who starts playing volleyball in 9th grade is overmatched by more skilled, more experienced, and harder working kids from an upper class background. (And indeed, anybody who is involved in club volleyball sees this phenomenon quite a bit.) How do you navigate a sports system where the rich kids actually ARE more "deserving" of the spot than the poor kids?
Since you're a sci-fi fan, you may have read Adrian Tchaikovsky's, "Children of Time," which, aside from being an amazing book that is 95% unrelated to this topic, does have an interesting take on a futurist Earth society, where education science is so advanced, and so widely available, that genetic determinism takes over. Everybody is developed to their full potential, so genetic potential becomes the only relevant value. And then the book moves past that into exploring what a world run by a society of super-intelligent giant spiders would be like. So that's fun too. But I thought it shined a light on the tensions of meritocracy in a different light.
Children of Time was excellent. The follow up, Children of Ruin, is also pretty good. Both borrow heavily from Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, which is a great thing to borrow from. The new Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future is fabulous, as is most stuff from KSR.
|
|
|
Post by joetrinsey on Dec 1, 2020 13:05:09 GMT -5
I'll check those out; thanks for the recs! (Didn't even realize there was a sequel to Children of Time.)
|
|