Ah, books. Who could possibly get through a winter without them? Lots of people you say? Something about television, you say? But books touch a different part of the mind, and the soul. Watch TV, sure, but always make room in your heart and soul for books.
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World
by Laura Spinney, Paul Hodgson
Because nothing cheers you up more than realizing nothing changes. Urg, why do I do this to myself? Great book though, regardless of my existential dread.
In 1918, the Italian-Americans of New York, the Yupik of Alaska and the Persians of Mashed had almost nothing in common except for a virus–one that triggered the worst pandemic of modern times and had a decisive effect on the history of the twentieth century.
The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I.
In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind’s vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted–and often permanently altered–global politics, race relations and family structures, while spurring innovation in medicine, religion and the arts. It was partly responsible, Spinney argues, for pushing India to independence, South Africa to apartheid and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It also created the true “lost generation.” Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology and economics, Pale Rider masterfully recounts the little-known catastrophe that forever changed humanity.
Literary Pursuits: The mysteries behind 9 classic books by Sarah Dillon & Corin Throsby
I believe this was a TV show they released as an audio book. Sound quality is television-ish with an overenthusiastic host and the sounds of walking thrown into the mix. Interesting, but not really mysterious.
The not mysterious mysteries are: Why did it take just under 10 months to write Great Expectations, and why did Dickens change the ending right at the last moment? Why did Jean Rhys take 27 years to publish Wide Sargasso Sea? What’s the story behind Jane Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion? What’s the story behind James Joyce’s struggles to publish Dubliners? Why was EM Forster’s gay love story Maurice, passed hand to hand from Cambridge to America by men who risked prosecution for possessing it? Was RL Stevenson’s tale The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, inspired by a dream? Was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables inspired by adultery, revolution and exile? How did Truman Capote meet and befriend two psychopathic murderers to create In Cold Blood? How was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies saved from the reject pile by lucky chance?
Wow, No Thank You: Essays by Samantha Irby
Fantastic when I was feeling bitchy and angry and pissed of at the whole world. Which is justified.
But sitting here, a couple of drinks under my belt, watching a storm move in (and secretly hoping the guys playing soccer in the field next door get soaked), I’m not in the mood. Life is good for a second. I love her stuff but hope I don’t get in the mood to listen to her again.
Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
Following a run of new year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. For Smith – inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing – this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.
Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the Western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, “Anything is possible. After all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.” But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the listener: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.
Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes by Elizabeth Lesser
What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers?
Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories – stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence.
Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too – when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human.
Lesser has walked two main paths in her life – the spiritual path and the feminist one – paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The best-selling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book, she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate.
