last Popper book, Alan Greenspan's memoir, half a dozen military books

Karl Popper's last book is a collection of short pieces published in German now translated. There is nothing here that is particularly new, but I ploughed through it so I could say I've read his complete works. I also read Alan Greenspan's memoir. The first 250 pages whizzed by, but when he started in on his long list of opinions on matters economic, apart from China, I was bored. He doesn't even discuss deciding to retire and his comments on the Bush admin are very limited, for all the press they got. I also read the complete works of Saint John Perse. I don't usually read poetry, but this time it was an exception -- he certainly was a learned poet, I couldn't figure half his vocabulary. Also, he writes either in paragraphs or in really long verses. I didn't get why he was so important, but then I hit a few more simple poems, and the power of his voice hit me over the head.

For professional reasons, I read Strategic Theory for the 21st Century, by Harry R. Yargar, along with several other monographs. These are in preparation for writing my own next monograph.

Van Doren's Franklin, Cuelho's Witch of Portobello

I read Carl van Doren's life of Benjamin Franklin because the New Yorker said it was unusually elegantly written. Well, it was, but I dislike biographies full of long quotations from other documents, even the principal's. And this one is full of it, as the introduction warns us. However, it was very interesting to learn all sorts of details about Franklin, including the fact that he invented the harmonica. Paul Cuelho's novel also manages to overcome one of my prejudices, about a changing point of view in a novel. This time, it serves the novel well. It is about an unusual young woman who helps people get in touch with themselves and the transcendent realities of this life, and it ends unusually with her faking her own death. It is well worth reading.

Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason

Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason is a controversial book. It is of course very bold to parallel Kant's most famous work's title, Critique of Pure Reason. The two or three chapters argue philosophically against the dialectic of enlightenment, and then the book moves into a historical description of iconoclasts. It has a long cultural discussion of the Weimar Republic, then the Nazi regime. One could read into this a condemnation of political correctness, which no doubt is the reason for the book's controversy.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, Dean Koontz's Darkest Evening of the Year, Postsecrets

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel is a memoir of her life until she moved the US, where no doubt the American Enterprise Institute was delighted to hire a Muslim woman who thought Islam was evil and dangerous. She discusses many painful circumstances dispassionately, and I almost laughed at the passage where, elected to the Dutch legislature, she loses her citizen ship because she lied about her last name. (She got it back because in Somalia one is entitled to use any name in the lineage.) She also describes her own excision and infibulation calmly. It is certainly worth the three-odd hours it took for me to read it. I wondered about her safety, given what she says about Islam. I grieve for her and all women like her who have been denied by custom and misogyny the joyousness of sexuality.

I also read Dean Koontz's Darkest Evening of the Year, finding it significant to read some bestsellers every once in a while. I found the lack of proper paragraphs tiresome after a while. It was a quick easy read, a long paean to the author's late golden retriever.

I also read the latest installment of Postsecrets, a collection of postcards recounting secrets sent to the author.

Eloquence, Command Performance, Alice

Denis Donoghue's Eloquence is a maddening book for me to read. I'm interested in writing, I'm familiar with the description of elusive concepts, and I'm quite well read. I found him extremely esoteric, and he has the habit of discussing short stories by their titles, and not their authors. It was mercifully short. I also read Jane Alexander's Command Performance, and it was well structured and well written, but I found her naive about the workings of politics. Of course President Clinton would not invest in a fight over gay images in art! He has nothing to gain form it, and at the time he was looking at a lot of other troubles. Finally, I read Stacy Cordery's biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. What an unhappy life that woman led! Her mother died at her birth, her father was shot (after leaving the White House), she married an older man who turned out to be an alcoholic, she bore another man's child who eventually committed suicide...She certainly was a survivor. The biography is a sprint through a large number of events.

DeNardo's Power in Numbers and Lane's Shyness

When I realized James DeNardo's book on revolutions was actually full of graphs and math, I almost didn't read it. Well, I'm glad I did. First, it treats terrorism in a different light (the book is from 1985), saying for example that it can serve as a bulwark against tyranny. Well, the world certainly has changed. Christopher Lane's book Shyness is really a diatribe against the medicalization of psychology, primarily through the expansion of definitions in the DSM. He also points to the evil, evil pharmacological companies. The book is full of pictures of ads for drugs directed at the consumer. Well, it was lightweight, but it was an easy read and a short book.

Jean-Francois Mattei, Le Regard Vide

This is an essay on the spiritual weakening of Europe as an idea. Only I didn't figure out this was about Europe as an idea, as opposed to the West. The author might have said so earlier, since I couldn't figure out his argument didn't apply to, say, the Americas. Once that was understood, it was an interesting pursuit of what constitutes the intellectual armature of Europe, and how various concepts since Antiquity have a role in civilization for a long time, but now the renewal ought to occur.

Bird and Sherwin's American Prometheus

I read with great pleasure this biography of Robert Oppenheimer. It captures the man very well, but it also makes me wonder about him. It appears to be the tragic story of a man of great privilege, born to wealth and gifted with brilliance, going from triumph to triumph in heading the successful effort to build the atomic weapon for the US during World War II, and then going to head the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton. The man, however, was unable to cope with any problems and when he was ensnared by McCarthyism he was destroyed in his soul. Here's to the school of hard knocks toughening you up early. I found the man's life interesting, but a cautionary tale also for the incapacity of the academic to deal with real life or see big things coming. I understand with his reluctance to see the bomb used, but he worked during World War II, what did he think would happen? He married a woman who was the widow of a communist hero killed in the Spanish Civil War -- why should he have contested the withdrawal of his security clearance in that atmosphere? How could he say damaging things about his own former students? Naive is too kind a word for this, but from the vantage point of years, it is merely very sad.