Finishing what I started in the previous post. . .
Before I get back to the book list ‘proper’, I’ll take a quick detour to mention a few authors for whom I’ve had various and sundry ‘fetishes’, and read large numbers of their books, just because I enjoyed their style, or content, or whatever. . .
When Molly and I were first married, a friend recommended that I read James Michener, so I picked up a copy of The Source, and I was hooked. Michener’s epics of historical fiction just absolutely grabbed my brain for a few years, to the point that Molly took to referring to Michener as my ‘other woman’ – I’ve probably read close to a dozen of his tomes. A Michener novel is quite a commitment – most of them are upwards of 1000 pages – but by the time you’ve finished one, you’ve just about had a college course in the history of wherever the subject of the novel is. The Source (on Israel / the Holy Land) is probably my favorite of his novels, although The Covenant (South Africa) and Hawaii are also tremendous.
I also went on a Michael Crichton jag for a while. I read Jurassic Park (before the movie came out, thankyouverymuch), which I really enjoyed. Just the whole premise of cloning extinct pre-historic critters was intriguing (dinosaurs are quite a stretch, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see a cloned mammoth before I die. . .), but his comments on the possibility of ‘destroying the planet’ were pretty insightful, I thought. From there, I read The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, and The Lost World before the impulse waned. Crichton is very adept at getting his readers to keep turning the page, but his books (at least, those that I’ve read) have in common that, after a certain point, the author seems to lose interest and just wrap up the story as quickly as he can. Especially for an author with Crichton’s story-telling gifts, his books have some of the worst, most clichéd endings I’ve ever read.
Going back to the beginning, when I was a kid, I read pretty much everything by Dr. Seuss that I could get my hands on. And what I didn’t read as a kid, I read to my own kids. My favorites are what I call his ‘imaginative’ books, especially McElligott’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra (‘because most people stop at the Z; but not me’) and If I Ran the Zoo (which has gotten credit for coining the word ‘nerd’, and thus is pivotal for my own life). One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (which is like an ‘early reader’ version of McElligott) and Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! are also among my kids’ favorites. And the books starring Horton the Elephant hold a special place in my heart – Horton Hears a Who! (‘a person’s a person, no matter how small’) and Horton Hatches the Egg (‘I meant what I said, and I said what I meant – an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent!’). And pretty much anything else he wrote. . .
Lewis and Chesterton and Kreeft, whose books I mentioned in the previous post, would also fall into this category of ‘Authors of Whom I’ve Read Everything I Could Get My Hands On’. But, since I already mentioned them, I won’t repeat myself here. . .
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Returning to the book list, a few books on science and mathematics (just to give a bit of air to my Inner Nerd) –
Faith of a Physicist, by John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne is a world-class particle physicist, and also an ordained Anglican priest. This is one of the best books I’ve come across, as far as presenting the deep harmony between the Christian and ‘scientific’ worldviews. Polkinghorne’s Belief In God In an Age of Science is also excellent. I’ll also mention a couple other books – The Road of Science and the Ways to God, by Stanley Jaki, develops the idea that the intelligibility of the universe points to its Creator. And Genesis and the Big Bang, by Gerald Schroeder, is especially interesting; the author is a world-class physicist, and an Orthodox Jew, and his Jewish presentation of ‘natural theology’ is wonderfully fascinating.
Fermat’s Last Theorem, by Amir Aczel. A stimulating account (OK, maybe just ‘stimulating’ to a certain type of mind. . .) of Andrew Wiles’ solution of one of the great, long-standing ‘unsolved problems’ of mathematics, which, by the time it finishes, provides a pretty comprehensive tour of mathematical history.
Beyond the Third Dimension, by Thomas Banchoff. I first engaged the concept of ‘four-dimensional space’ (or space-time) when I was in high school, and found it to be very ‘mind-expanding’ (sort of like LSD, without the flashbacks). I have carried that fascination with me through most of my life. Banchoff’s book is a solid, comprehensive account of four-dimensional (and higher-dimensional) space, and what it might mean, and how to think in (or through) it. . .
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A few history books -
History of the English-Speaking Peoples, by Winston Churchill. This four-volume set fed my Inner Anglophile, and helped me understand my cultural heritage from even before Jamestown and Plymouth. It also helped me to better understand my 'cultural kinship' with folks like Aussies and Canadians (did you know that there were 17 British colonies in North America? But only 13 of them joined the 'rebellion'; the four that didn't formed the basis for what would become Canada), as well as to have a 'wider perspective' on history than is typically afforded students in American high schools (eg, the fact that England had a little thing going on with a fellow named Napoleon, might've had something to do with why the fledgling USA could successfully prosecute the War of 1812 against the 'superpower' British. . .)
The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin. A fascinating account of innovation and creativity, which wanders into a multitude of really interesting discussions, on mankind's growing understanding of time, space, the world, the universe, etc, etc. The history itself is simply fascinating, but Boorstin also develops a thesis of 'Illusions of Knowledge' - that when we think we know all there is to know about something, it becomes an obstacle to innovation and creativity. (As a footnote here, I’ll include To Engineer Is Human, in which author Henry Petroski gives a fascinating account of the role of failure in successful engineering design, including how the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster led to the design of my beloved Mackinac Bridge).
The Conquerors, by Allan Eckert. Eckert has written a six-volume set of 'narrative histories', which read like novels, but are in fact solidly documented histories, generally focused on the 'European conquest' of the United States (and not at all in a 'Euro-centric' manner; his respect and sympathy for the Indians are obvious, and he does not hesitate to present the dark side of the history we learned in school). The Conquerors (third in the series) covers the events that have come to be called Pontiac's Uprising, and so large chunks of the story take place in Michigan - most particularly Detroit and Michilimackinac, places I've been to, and so I can more-or-less easily imagine the settings for the stories Eckert tells. Any of the other volumes of the set are also excellent. . .
The Rise of Christianity, by Rodney Stark. Stark's 'sociological history' of early Christianity is a fascinating account of how a small sect of a few dozen people in Palestine grew to the point of comprising a majority of the Roman Empire within barely three centuries. Stark's research methods are quite unique, and he ends up telling a fascinating story on a much more 'mundane' level than typical 'Names-and-Dates' histories. I'll try not to spoil it for you, but basically, Christians did two things significantly better than their pagan Roman neighbors - they took care of the sick (which, in a day of periodic pandemic plagues, was no small thing), and they welcomed children into their families (often taking in children who had been abandoned by their neighbors). Which seems like it might have pertinence to the present day and age. . .
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And finally, a few of my favorite books of fiction –
Love In the Ruins, by Walker Percy; with this book, Percy earned a place on my short list of favorite authors. For having been written in 1971, this is a remarkably ‘current’ book; sort of the Culture War a generation in advance. Percy writes with wickedly wry humor, and he makes some sharp commentary on a wide range of topics, including sex, race, wealth, marriage, Christianity, etc, etc (which just happen to include several of my own favorite topics). . .
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky; maybe the greatest of all ‘Russian novels’, but even more probably the greatest of all ‘Christian novels’ (if there can be said to be such a thing). Dostoevsky presents deep insights into the ‘Problem of Pain’, and the ‘Mystery of Evil’, and the ways in which we’re all sort-of ‘walking blind’ through our lives in this world. . .
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller; James Michener actually put me onto this book in probably my least-favorite of all his books I’ve read (Space, if anyone’s wondering). On the face of it, it’s a fairly typical sci-fi book about the rebuilding of society in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, but it’s full of solid thoughts on human nature and some really sharp bits of tongue-in-cheek humor.
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain; I’ve long considered this to be the absolute greatest of all American novels, by the greatest American writer. I’ve had a few arguments with folks at my kids’ school, who want to ban it over its use of the ‘N-word’. Try as I might to convince them that that radically misses the point, some folks are just hard to convince. . .
The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien; this almost feels like what I said in the previous post about the Bible – it’s almost too ‘obvious’ a choice. But from the first time I read it, I’ve been blown away by Tolkien’s invention of entire languages and histories. And Frodo has always been the least bit ‘emblematic’ for my own life – much as I might personally despise ‘adventures’, they keep coming to me, whether I want them or not. . .
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; often paired with Orwell's 1984 under the heading of ‘Future Dystopias’, I’ve thought that BNW is a sharper statement directed at the modern West, and where a society motivated purely by pleasure, enabled by technology, leads. And what real Humanity looks like, in contrast. . .
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And one more book - Another Sort of Learning, by JV Schall, a delightfully odd book (I mean, in the preface, he seamlessly connects Eric Voegelin, EF Schumacher, and Mad magazine), for people like me who got all the way through college without really getting 'educated'. It contains 21 essays, on an eclectic range of topics, and 37 associated book lists. Probably the book that got me started on the whole 'book lists' idea in the first place. . .
So there you have it. Books that have formed my mind, books that I liked, books that I recommend to my friends, whatever. Way more than fifteen, by the time it’s all said and done, but it is what it is (and, in the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. . .). And the thing is, a month from now, I'll probably think of a dozen other books that I should've included. Oh, well; for here and now, anyway, this is what you get. . .
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Friday, September 4, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Where Were You. . . ?
This post started out as a quick follow-up to my February post about Growing Up In the 60s, but life, and other things, intervened. . .
And today being the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, it seems an opportune time to bring it back up. . .
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The Kennedy assassination was one of those 'definitive' events in US history. As I alluded before, it is almost the marker for the beginning of 'The Sixties', in terms of the broad social/cultural changes that people associate with that period. For people of my generation, it is a huge, bright marker of time in our lives. Ask anyone over 50 where they were, and what they were doing when Kennedy was shot, and they will almost certainly be able to tell you, in great detail. It was a little disorienting when, in the 80s or so, I started running into young adults who, when the question came up, could only say, "I wasn't born yet."
The president was shot on a Friday, in the early afternoon, and I was walking home from school (2nd grade), laughing and goofing around with a few of the neighborhood kids. When we got close to my house, my mother (the one who recently died) burst out of the front door and yelled for me to get in the house, that the president had been shot, and this was no time to be goofing around. Which sort of set the tone, right off the bat.
As it turned out, my dad had just taken a new job, and our family was moving Up North that very weekend. The president's funeral was the following Monday, and I remember going to my uncle's house to watch on TV, before beginning the long drive to our new home. So, for me, the Kennedy assassination was a marker of all kinds of changes in my young life.
For folks of my parents' generation Pearl Harbor was a similar 'watershed' event - the kind of thing where you remember where you were when you heard the news, and you know instantly that this is something huge.
Just like September 11 was, in more recent days.
And the first moon landing, as I mentioned in the earlier post (and today, as already noted, is the 40th anniversary of that auspicious event. . .)
The King and Robert Kennedy assassinations in the spring of 1968 were also huge events. I remember my mom waking us up in the morning (it had to have been one of the last school days of that year), telling us that 'Kennedy was killed last night', and, in my groggy 12-year-old state, I said, "Mom, that was five years ago. . ."
It's funny, but in the comments to the previous post, FTN mentioned the Challenger explosion, and I do think that it was a similar 'I remember' event for quite a few people, even though it hardly portended huge, world-changing events. But I remember very clearly, being at work, as the word began to go through the office, and a bunch of us gathered around the TV set in the lunchroom to watch the coverage. The thing is, for most of us, at least of my age, the space program was sort of one of our 'engineering idols' - these were the best of the best, the guys who epitomized the best of what it meant to be an engineer. So watching that shuttle explode into a million tiny fragments was like watching one of our heroes dying in a car crash.
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I have an aunt whose birthday is December 7, 1931; so she was having her tenth birthday party when Pearl Harbor happened. Her daughter, my cousin, was born on November 22, 1963 - the day of the Kennedy assassination. Which was all weird enough. But it became spooky when we realized that my grandma's birthday - the mother of the same aunt - was September 11, 1902; the towers fell on what would have been my grandma's 99th birthday. (Should I be glad that my cousin has no children?)
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So - what are the 'watershed' events of your lives - the things that stand out in your memories, that you remember where you were, and what you were doing when you heard?
And today being the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, it seems an opportune time to bring it back up. . .
-------------------------
The Kennedy assassination was one of those 'definitive' events in US history. As I alluded before, it is almost the marker for the beginning of 'The Sixties', in terms of the broad social/cultural changes that people associate with that period. For people of my generation, it is a huge, bright marker of time in our lives. Ask anyone over 50 where they were, and what they were doing when Kennedy was shot, and they will almost certainly be able to tell you, in great detail. It was a little disorienting when, in the 80s or so, I started running into young adults who, when the question came up, could only say, "I wasn't born yet."
The president was shot on a Friday, in the early afternoon, and I was walking home from school (2nd grade), laughing and goofing around with a few of the neighborhood kids. When we got close to my house, my mother (the one who recently died) burst out of the front door and yelled for me to get in the house, that the president had been shot, and this was no time to be goofing around. Which sort of set the tone, right off the bat.
As it turned out, my dad had just taken a new job, and our family was moving Up North that very weekend. The president's funeral was the following Monday, and I remember going to my uncle's house to watch on TV, before beginning the long drive to our new home. So, for me, the Kennedy assassination was a marker of all kinds of changes in my young life.
For folks of my parents' generation Pearl Harbor was a similar 'watershed' event - the kind of thing where you remember where you were when you heard the news, and you know instantly that this is something huge.
Just like September 11 was, in more recent days.
And the first moon landing, as I mentioned in the earlier post (and today, as already noted, is the 40th anniversary of that auspicious event. . .)
The King and Robert Kennedy assassinations in the spring of 1968 were also huge events. I remember my mom waking us up in the morning (it had to have been one of the last school days of that year), telling us that 'Kennedy was killed last night', and, in my groggy 12-year-old state, I said, "Mom, that was five years ago. . ."
It's funny, but in the comments to the previous post, FTN mentioned the Challenger explosion, and I do think that it was a similar 'I remember' event for quite a few people, even though it hardly portended huge, world-changing events. But I remember very clearly, being at work, as the word began to go through the office, and a bunch of us gathered around the TV set in the lunchroom to watch the coverage. The thing is, for most of us, at least of my age, the space program was sort of one of our 'engineering idols' - these were the best of the best, the guys who epitomized the best of what it meant to be an engineer. So watching that shuttle explode into a million tiny fragments was like watching one of our heroes dying in a car crash.
-------------------------
I have an aunt whose birthday is December 7, 1931; so she was having her tenth birthday party when Pearl Harbor happened. Her daughter, my cousin, was born on November 22, 1963 - the day of the Kennedy assassination. Which was all weird enough. But it became spooky when we realized that my grandma's birthday - the mother of the same aunt - was September 11, 1902; the towers fell on what would have been my grandma's 99th birthday. (Should I be glad that my cousin has no children?)
-------------------------
So - what are the 'watershed' events of your lives - the things that stand out in your memories, that you remember where you were, and what you were doing when you heard?
Monday, October 9, 2006
And Now For Something Completely Different. . .
I've generally organized this blog around the general themes of marriage and family life. But today, partly in the interest of full disclosure, and partly because I'm just so giddy about it, I'm going to do a 'sports post'. With apologies in advance to those of you who are wondering, "What the heck is up with that?"
Mr. Husbland has been posting in recent days about the Detroit Tigers and how exciting this baseball season has been in Tigertown (I've already told you all that I live in Michigan, so I don't suppose that I'm 'blowing my cover' by admitting this). But, I thought a more, uh, seasoned treatment of the subject might be helpful for you all (ie, I'm a whole lot older than he is).
I started following the Tigers when I was a little kid - we used to try to imitate Rocky Colavito's stretching exercises when we played pickup games. I was 12 when the Tigers won the World Series in '68, which I think is just about the perfect age to take on a passionate, lifelong commitment to a favorite sports team. Al Kaline was my boyhood hero, and I've come to learn that a boy could do a whole lot worse than emulating Al Kaline (in all sorts of ways). Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Mickey Lolich, Denny McLain (well, OK, a boy could do a whole lot better, but come on, he went 31-6 in '68) - these were the ballplayers who were at the very front of my youthful consciousness.
I was older (married, with one daughter and another 'in the oven') when the Tigers won in '84, but I had been a college classmate of Kirk Gibson, and that whole group of guys - Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell, Lance Parrish, Jack Morris - were all about my age, so I had a certain, more 'peer-ish' identification with them.
After the World Series that year, a buddy of mine came over to my house and handed me a baggie with a small hunk of sod in it. "Thought you might appreciate this," he said. I looked at it, thinking, what the heck? until it slowly dawned on me what it was - he had been down to the stadium for the final game of the Series, and afterward, had torn up a hunk of sod, which he divided into smaller chunks and gave them out to his buddies. And that little piece of sod - about three inches square - grows in my back yard to this day.
The thing that's so cool about this year's Tigers is how they just absolutely came out of nowhere. Three years ago, they set the American League record for losses (and ten guys from that season are still on the team!). We were hoping that this year they'd be better than they had been, but nobody expected them to be anywhere near this good. So it's been just an astounding baseball season. I've just been shaking my head all season - they can't really be this good, can they?
Saturday, I was with a group of 20 or so guys at a buddy's house, ostensibly to watch our alma mater play a football game against our hated in-state rival, but before the first quarter was over, we had switched over to the Tigers game. Jeremy Bonderman is getting a special place ready for himself in all-time Tigers lore (and, I'm not gonna lie - it was all the cooler for beating the Yankees). When the game ended, and the players were running along the stands, spraying champagne on the fans, it was one of the most incredible moments I've ever seen at a sporting event - you don't see players and fans bonding like that very much these days. It was very cool.
There is a cool, trans-generational thing that baseball has that none of the other sports can quite duplicate. I can talk about Al Kaline and Willie Horton, or Jack Morris and Kirk Gibson, and my kids can talk about Justin Verlander and Pudge Rodriguez, but my dad can also talk about Charley Gehringer and Tommy Bridges and Schoolboy Rowe, and you've got 70 years of Tigers history spanned by three generations of our family.
So, thanks for induging my bliss for the moment - I promise we'll get back to our 'normal' topics as soon as possible. And I do realize that we've still got to play the A's, whose pitching is just about as good as ours, and even if we beat the A's, then we have the World Series. But in the context of recent years, it's all a gratuitous gift.
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Also, the other day Emily was asking for our favorite jokes, and this seemed a fitting time to tell my own personal favorite:
Two guys in the men's room do their business at the urinals. When they finish, one guy goes to the sink, while the other guy heads for the door.
The guy at the sink calls over his shoulder, "I see you went to Michigan State."
The guy at the door stops, and says, "Why, yes I did. How did you know?"
Sink-guy says (in telling the joke, it really helps if you can affect a Thurston-Howell-type accent at this point), "Well I went to the University of Michigan, and we were taught to always wash our hands after urinating."
Door-guy says, "Oh; that's a really good idea. But at Michigan State they taught us not to piss on our hands."
And with that, I will leave you until next time. . .
(8 comments)
Mr. Husbland has been posting in recent days about the Detroit Tigers and how exciting this baseball season has been in Tigertown (I've already told you all that I live in Michigan, so I don't suppose that I'm 'blowing my cover' by admitting this). But, I thought a more, uh, seasoned treatment of the subject might be helpful for you all (ie, I'm a whole lot older than he is).
I started following the Tigers when I was a little kid - we used to try to imitate Rocky Colavito's stretching exercises when we played pickup games. I was 12 when the Tigers won the World Series in '68, which I think is just about the perfect age to take on a passionate, lifelong commitment to a favorite sports team. Al Kaline was my boyhood hero, and I've come to learn that a boy could do a whole lot worse than emulating Al Kaline (in all sorts of ways). Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Mickey Lolich, Denny McLain (well, OK, a boy could do a whole lot better, but come on, he went 31-6 in '68) - these were the ballplayers who were at the very front of my youthful consciousness.
I was older (married, with one daughter and another 'in the oven') when the Tigers won in '84, but I had been a college classmate of Kirk Gibson, and that whole group of guys - Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell, Lance Parrish, Jack Morris - were all about my age, so I had a certain, more 'peer-ish' identification with them.
After the World Series that year, a buddy of mine came over to my house and handed me a baggie with a small hunk of sod in it. "Thought you might appreciate this," he said. I looked at it, thinking, what the heck? until it slowly dawned on me what it was - he had been down to the stadium for the final game of the Series, and afterward, had torn up a hunk of sod, which he divided into smaller chunks and gave them out to his buddies. And that little piece of sod - about three inches square - grows in my back yard to this day.
The thing that's so cool about this year's Tigers is how they just absolutely came out of nowhere. Three years ago, they set the American League record for losses (and ten guys from that season are still on the team!). We were hoping that this year they'd be better than they had been, but nobody expected them to be anywhere near this good. So it's been just an astounding baseball season. I've just been shaking my head all season - they can't really be this good, can they?
Saturday, I was with a group of 20 or so guys at a buddy's house, ostensibly to watch our alma mater play a football game against our hated in-state rival, but before the first quarter was over, we had switched over to the Tigers game. Jeremy Bonderman is getting a special place ready for himself in all-time Tigers lore (and, I'm not gonna lie - it was all the cooler for beating the Yankees). When the game ended, and the players were running along the stands, spraying champagne on the fans, it was one of the most incredible moments I've ever seen at a sporting event - you don't see players and fans bonding like that very much these days. It was very cool.
There is a cool, trans-generational thing that baseball has that none of the other sports can quite duplicate. I can talk about Al Kaline and Willie Horton, or Jack Morris and Kirk Gibson, and my kids can talk about Justin Verlander and Pudge Rodriguez, but my dad can also talk about Charley Gehringer and Tommy Bridges and Schoolboy Rowe, and you've got 70 years of Tigers history spanned by three generations of our family.
So, thanks for induging my bliss for the moment - I promise we'll get back to our 'normal' topics as soon as possible. And I do realize that we've still got to play the A's, whose pitching is just about as good as ours, and even if we beat the A's, then we have the World Series. But in the context of recent years, it's all a gratuitous gift.
-------------------------
Also, the other day Emily was asking for our favorite jokes, and this seemed a fitting time to tell my own personal favorite:
Two guys in the men's room do their business at the urinals. When they finish, one guy goes to the sink, while the other guy heads for the door.
The guy at the sink calls over his shoulder, "I see you went to Michigan State."
The guy at the door stops, and says, "Why, yes I did. How did you know?"
Sink-guy says (in telling the joke, it really helps if you can affect a Thurston-Howell-type accent at this point), "Well I went to the University of Michigan, and we were taught to always wash our hands after urinating."
Door-guy says, "Oh; that's a really good idea. But at Michigan State they taught us not to piss on our hands."
And with that, I will leave you until next time. . .
(8 comments)
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