Current Affairs

The Sunday Salon Rides Again

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Three weeks ago marked my return to The Sunday Salon after a year-long hiatus. It felt good getting back in the swing of things so here’s another post. Hosted by Deb Nance at Readerbuzz this weekly tradition is a great way to check in on other book bloggers and get a glimpse of their lives. 

Once again I’m trying to read four books at the same time. The first one is for a book club, the second for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge, third is part of an ongoing research project and the fourth is well, because I can. 

Summer Reading Challenges. You might have noticed in my earlier posts I’ll be taking part in both the 20 Books of Summer and Big Book Summer reading challenges. Even though I’ll probably fail miserably I can’t wait to start reading! 

Listening. As always I’m up to my eyeballs in podcasts. Here’s what I listened to last week. 

Watching.  Peaky Blinders has been off the charts good and I can’t get enough. Still kicking myself for not discovering it sooner. Last weekend we continued watching 90s space opera Babylon 5. 

Everything else. We’re still experiencing warm, summer-like weather. I’m still spending my mornings and evenings on the cabin porch reading. And yes I’m still joined by a large black cat.  

20 Books of Summer 2023

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Summer is around the corner and that means Cathy of 746 Books will once again be hosting 20 Books of Summer. After lots of thought and second guessing I slapped together a collection of 20 books and five alternates I’d like to read this summer. All 20 are books I own, of which only two are Kindle editions. The five alternates are library books. Of course every year I do this challenge I never end up reading all 20 books and frequently deviate my original list. Fortunately for me Cathy is a forgiving host and lets all of us pretty much do whatever we want. Here’s this year’s intended 20 books. 

  1. On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein (2012)
  2. Travels in Jewry by Israel Cohen (1953) 
  3. 5 Ideas That Changed the World by Barbara Ward (1959)
  4. The Emperor’s Last Island: A Journey to St. Helena by Julia Blackburn (1993) 
  5. Golden Century of Spain 1501-1621 by R. Trevor Davies (1965) 
  6. The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 by Moses Rischin (1977) 
  7. Operation Chastise: The RAF’s Most Brilliant Attack of World War II by Max Hastings (2022) 
  8. Going to Extremes by Joe McGinniss (1980) 
  9. The Outbreak of World War I: Causes and Responsibilities edited by Holger Herwig (1991) 
  10. The Undiscovered Self by Carl G. Jung (1959) 
  11. The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara Tuchman (1985)
  12. The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II by Edvard Radzinsky (1992) 
  13. The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy (2008)
  14. Europe Between Revolutions, 1815-1848 by Jacques Droz (1967)
  15. The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us by Keith Lowe (2017) 
  16. The Knowledge Web : From Electronic Agents to Stonehenge and Back — And Other Journeys Through Knowledge by James Burke (1999) 
  17. Early Modern Europe: From About 1450 to About 1720 by Sir George Clark (1962)
  18. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson (2009) 
  19. The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchick (2017) – Kindle
  20. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (2015) -Kindle, not shown

And five alternates.

  1. The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup (2019)
  2. How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter (2022)
  3. Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life by Amber Scorah (2019)
  4. Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby (2020)
  5. The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian (2012)

This is the perfect opportunity for me to also tackle my to be read pile (TBR) while at the same time participate in other reading challenges like the TBR 23 in ’23 Challenge, Mt. TBR Reading Challenge, European Reading Challenge and Books in Translation Reading Challenge. With a number of these books published prior to 1980 this is also a great chance to promote my Old Books Reading Project.

The Continuing Return of The Sunday Salon

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Last week marked my return to The Sunday Salon after a year-long hiatus. It felt good getting back in the swing of things so here’s another post. Hosted by Deb Nance at Readerbuzz this weekly tradition is a great way to check in on other book bloggers and get a glimpse of their lives. 

Right now I’m reading four books. The first one is for a book club, the second for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge, third is part of an ongoing research project and the fourth is well, because I can. 

Listening. As always I’m up to my eyeballs in podcasts. Here’s what I listened to last week. 

Watching. After finishing the inaugural season of The Diplomat the good people of the farm needed a new show to binge. By accident we discovered Peaky Blinders and oh man is it GOOD! We also watched the recent PBS Frontline episode “Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court.” Highly recommended! 

Everything else. We’re still experiencing warm, summer-like weather but today it’s cloudy and much cooler. Like before I’ve been spending my mornings and evenings on the cabin porch reading. And more often than not a large black cat still joins me. 

The Return of The Sunday Salon

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It’s been almost a year since I took part in The Sunday Salon. I’ve been itching to return so here’s another post. Hosted by Deb Nance at Readerbuzz this weekly tradition is a great way to check in on other book bloggers and get a glimpse of their lives. 

Right now I’m reading three books. The first one is for a book club, the second for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge and third is part of an ongoing research project. 

Listening. Instead of listing all the podcasts I’ve been listening to of late here’s some ones I discovered recently that now I can’t get enough of. 

  • Behind the Bastards – Fascinating and informative deep dives on some of history’s nastiest people. Sick, twisted and highly irreverent it’s quickly become one of my favorite podcasts. 
  • Lectures in History– The audio version of C-SPAN’s weekend history lectures recorded at colleges around the United States. So good even the students ask intelligent questions!
  • Lions Led By Donkeys – Similar format as Behind the Bastards this lively podcast is devoted to “the worst military failures, inept commanders, and crazy stories from throughout the history of human conflict.”
  • Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast – Former New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast now has her own show and it’s just like The New Abnormal. Except better. 
  • Rick Wilson’s The Enemies List – Yet another New Abnormal co-host with a new podcast. This former Republican operative turned anti-Trump/pro-democracy thought leader never fails to make me laugh while keeping me abreast of what’s happening politically. 
  • The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer – You might not think this guy has a voice for radio but give him a chance. The national-affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine is smart, entertaining and has great guests. 
  • Straight White American Jesus– “An in-depth examination of the culture and politics of Christian Nationalism and Evangelicalism by two ex-evangelical ministers-turned-religion professors.” As an ex-evangelical Christian this stuff is right up my alley. 
  • Jacobin Radio – I wasn’t sure I’d like a podcast by a socialist magazine. But so far they’ve done some great interviews covering a wide range of topics including Israel’s creep towards authoritarianism and the recent Hollywood writers’ strike.  
  • Africa Daily – The world’s second largest continent never gets enough news. “One question. One story from Africa for Africa.” 

Watching. We’ve been streaming a lot of cloak and dagger stuff here on the farm and are anxiously awaiting new episodes of Slow Horses, The Recruit and The Night Agent. We also finished up the sci-fi/superhero action series The Umbrella Academy. Like millions of others we’ve been sucked into The Diplomat and can’t get enough. Sunday evenings we’ve gone retro and just started watching the 90s space opera Babylon 5. 

Everything else. We’ve been experiencing warm, summer-like weather so I’ve been spending my mornings and evenings on the cabin porch reading. More often than not a large black cat joins me. 

About Time I Read It: Earning the Rockies by Robert D. Kaplan

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Like I said in an earlier post I’m a big fan of Robert D. Kaplan. Over the years I’ve featured several of his books, including his most recent book Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age. Recently, I decided to take a chance on his 2017 Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World after spotting it on the shelf during on my visits to the public library. I wanted to know what the globe-trotting Kaplan, who’s written about such far-away places as Romania and  the Indian Ocean has to say about his own country the United States.

Kaplan is a deep thinker. Strategically minded and well-traveled he’s also well-read, frequently illustrating his points by referencing older books, many of which have been long forgotten. (This suits me fine because I too have a fondness for titles old and obscure.) His books explore vistas both geographic and literary.

He’s also been called a geographical determinist based on his approach to international politics, believing geography is major factor in shaping how nations around the world conduct themselves. As the book’s subtitle hints for the last hundred years or so America has been able to play a dominant role in world politics thanks to friendly geography. In his book that could be called one part travelogue, one part history and one part political commentary Kaplan asserts once the young nation successfully annexed the neighboring territories of Spain, France and Mexico America would go on to dominate the Caribbean, and in turn the Western Hemisphere. With  the Pacific Coast in United States hands it could in turn dominate the Pacific. First however the lingering problem of slavery would need to be settled through a bloody Civil War. By the dawn of the 20th century the United States was on a trajectory towards global dominance.

Geographically speaking the United States drew a lucky hand. Protected by oceans to the East and West and friendly neighbors to the North and South, for almost all of our nation’s history we’ve been safe from hostile invasion. An extensive network of navigable rivers criss crosses a huge portion of the country, allowing the easy transportation of goods and peoples from across America and beyond. The fertile soil of the American Midwest make it the world’s breadbasket. This embarrassment of riches continues when you factor in America’s generous supplies of coal, petroleum, gold and timber.

As Kaplan made his way across America during the last year or so of the Obama administration he, like other writers and pundits saw the country as two Americas: one richer, younger, healthier, better educated and more hopeful and one poorer, older, less healthy (frequently battling obesity) less educated, pessimistic and fearful of controlling elites both domestic and foreign. Rural areas tend to resemble the later, unless they’re lucky enough to reside within the orbit of a college or university. Large urban areas, on the other hand with their diverse and well-educated workforces connected to the global economy resemble modern day city states.

Even though he can be a bit long-winded at times, especially towards the end of the book Kaplan has done a good job assessing America’s strengths and weaknesses, and based on what he’s read and observed he might even be adept at predicting our nation’s future.

Library Loot

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Same old story. Dropped some books off at the library and helped myself to a few more. Like always, even though there’s a tower of library books near my bed waiting to be read I could not resist grabbing a few more. I’m sure I can apply a few, or even all of them to one reading challenge or another. A nice mix of fiction, politics and memoir always makes for enjoyable reading. 

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading to encourage bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write-up your post, steal the Library Loot icon and link your post using the Mr. Linky on Sharlene’s blog. 

Book Beginnings: Earning the Rockies by Robert D. Kaplan

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Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

To use the words of the poet William Carlos Williams the object is to describe a giant – the United States- out of particulars in this case, a father’s memories of travel, a historian’s geography of hope, a desert of biblical proportions, and an ocean advancing towards China. 

Last week I featured Sam Kean’s 2012 The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code. The week before it was Ramona Ausubel’s 2012 historical novel No One is Here Except All of Us. This week it’s Robert D. Kaplan’s 2017 Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World.

I’m a big fan of Kaplan and over the years I’ve featured several of his books on the blog, including his most recent book Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age. Well-traveled as he is well-read, I’m looking forward to what he has to say about his home country the United States, a different place to say the least when compared exotic locations he’s visited before like Romania or the myriad of nations bordering the Indian Ocean. Here’s what the book’s Amazon page has to say.

In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation of American geography often lost in the jet age. Traveling west, in the same direction as the pioneers, Kaplan traverses a rich and varied landscape that remains the primary source of American power. Along the way, he witnesses both prosperity and decline—increasingly cosmopolitan cities that thrive on globalization, impoverished towns denuded by the loss of manufacturing—and paints a bracingly clear picture of America today.

Book Beginnings: What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank

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Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 22 in 22 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, finally in 2022 I decided to participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

The poorest county in America isn’t in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80 percent.

Last week I featured Robert B. Edgerton’s 2002 The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. Before that it was Josh Hanagarne 2013 The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family. This week it’s Thomas Frank’s 2004 What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. 

I’ve owned this book for over a decade and started it once, only to put in back on the shelf after reading a mere few pages. Even though it’s almost 20 years old I’m hoping this book will help explain the horrible state of our nation’s politics. (Plus, there’s several reading challenges I can apply it towards.) Here’s what Amazon has to say about What’s the Matter with Kansas?

One of “our most insightful social observers”* cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans

With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls the “thirty-year backlash”—the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party’s success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers.

2022 European Reading Challenge Wrap-Up

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Well, another year of Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge has come to a close. Each year I try to read as many books as possible set in, or about different European countries, or by different European authors. With one country per book and each book by a different author, I found myself moving from book to book across Europe, like some post-modern armchair version of a Bella Époque grand tour of the Continent.

Last year I read and reviewed  just 10 books. This year I’m happy to report I doubled my output with 20. Just like in past years, there’s a variety of countries represented, ranging from large counties like Russia and Germany to tiny ones like Vatican City. 

  1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Sweden) 
  2. True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy by Kati Marton (Hungary) 
  3. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island by Lawrence Durrell (Cyprus) 
  4. The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine (Greece) 
  5. The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (Portugal) 
  6. The Sacrament by Ólafur Ólafsson (Iceland) 
  7. The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples by David Gilmour (Italy) 
  8. Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild (Spain) 
  9. Rather Die Fighting: A Memoir of World War II by Frank Blaichman (Poland) 
  10. Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi (Albania) 
  11. I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys (Romania) 
  12. God and the Fascists: The Vatican Alliance with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic by Karlheinz Deschner (Vatican City) 
  13. The Son and Heir by Alexander Münninghoff (The Netherlands)
  14. The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko by Scott Stambach (Belarus) 
  15. A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen (Russia) 
  16. Dancing Fish and Ammonites by Penelope Lively (United Kingdom) 
  17. On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe (Belgium) 
  18. A Hero of France by Alan Furst (France) 
  19. Here in Berlin by Cristina García (Germany) 
  20. Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches From Kiev by Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine) 

Just like last year it was a 50-50 mix of fiction and nonfiction. Five of these are translated works. Two were originally published in Dutch, and one each from German, Russian and Swedish. A number of these books also made my 2022 Favorite Nonfiction or 2022 Favorite Fiction lists. 

As you can guess, I’m a huge fan of this challenge. I encourage all you book bloggers to sign up and read your way across Europe. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

Pan-European Lives: Afropean by Johny Pitts

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Every year during Nonfiction November I discover a ton of good books. This year one of those happened to be Johny Pitts’s 2019 Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. Thinking it might be a nice addition to my European Reading Project I borrowed a downloadable copy for my Kindle. Crazy thing is even after I started reading Afropean I couldn’t remember which blogger introduced me to it. It was only after I featured the book in a recent Book Beginnings that I leaned it was the author of Hopewell’s Public Library of Life I needed to thank for bringing Afropean to my attention. Mystery solved!

Pitts is a British citizen, born in the United Kingdom to an African- American father and a white working class English mother. Growing up in the diverse working class city of Sheffield he rubbed shoulders with immigrants and the children of immigrants from across Africa, the West Indies and South Asia. A writer and journalist by trade, Afropean recalls his travels across the Continent exploring communities of Europeans of African descent. From Paris to Berlin, despite their dark skin they’re almost invisible, quietly work away with their heads down in low-end service jobs, providing vital, yet unappreciated services. But at the same time they’re also creating a vibrant and novel culture proudly both African and European.

Historically speaking, Europe and Africa share deep ties. France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal while no longer colonial powers still attract former subjects from Africa and the Caribbean basin. Scandinavia and Germany, thanks to their strong economies and social safety nets are also popular destinations for immigrants and political refugees from Africa. During the Cold War students from across Africa flocked to Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University and were welcomed with open arms as idealogical brethren committed to building a socialist world. But after the death of Communism and its attendant third-world solidarity the Russians have grown increasingly xenophobic with racially-motivated murders of African immigrants in that country on the rise.

I found Pitts’s recollections of, and thoughts about Portugal the most memorable. An early seafaring nation, it was one of the first in Europe to  establish a colonial empire. As a result it wasn’t long before enslaved individuals were brought from Africa to be auctioned off in Lisbon. Long after the abolition of slavery colonial subjects from across the empire made their way to Portugal after earning Portuguese citizenship by jumping through a series of prohibitive hoops. While attending university in Portugal many become politically active and advocated for the independence of their respective homelands, some of the last colonial possessions left in the world. Eventually, by the mid-1970s their struggles would pay off, winning independence for places like Angola and Mozambique. Some of these former students would go on to serve as heads of state of these newly independent nations.

Of all the cities Pitts visited during his Continental odyssey, Marseille felt the most promising for Europeans of African descent or origin, despite its reputation as a rough town. Situated on the Mediterranean coast, the unpretentious port city is poised perfectly to accommodate transplants from Africa and beyond. Walking Marseille’s streets and interacting with its diverse residents Pitts found the city’s welcoming vibe more Mediterranean than French.

Afropean is more than just good travel writing. It’s a sympathetic as well as insightful look at one of Europe’s most overlooked and under appreciated communities.