Alchemical Thoughts

Once more, I have enough items on this post to share it with my two readers. This time I will start with a small list of titles I jotted down as I was browsing the new book section at the local public library. I did not check any of them out at the time because I had a few other books I was already reading. However, these struck me as interesting and as possibilities to read at a later date. So, here they are, in no particular order:

• Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Helped Beat Hip-hop Culture. True, it sounds like yet another feel good memoir of poor/bad kid making it out of the ghetto or similar, but the description did sound intriguing. We’ll see.
• Leopold Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America. Alexis de Tocqueville’s book is one of those that is on my perennial TBR list. Books that discuss the Frenchman’s travels interest me too, so I am adding Damrosch’s book to my list.
• Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. (Update note, 3/25/11: A review of the book at the Powell’s blog).
• Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk.
• Jorge Ramos, A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto. This is by the Univision anchor and reporter.
• M. William Phelps, The Devil’s Rooming House: the True Story of America’s Deadliest Female Serial Killer. I am not a big reader of the true crime genre, but this title caught my eye. I think it was mostly the turn-of-the-century setting.
• Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
• Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: a Biography of the Roaring Twenties.

Other items I have come across around the World Wide Web:

• The Anecdote blog points to and reviews the book The Power of Positive Deviance.
• Via Inside Higher Ed, an interview with the author of Sex and the University: Celebrity, Controversy, and a Student Journalism Revolution. The book is out in the fall, and it deals with student journalists that write sex advice columns on campus newspapers. I am thinking it may be worth a look. Certainly it is a book our library should likely purchase for the communication and journalism classes.
• The Manga Critic is recommending the ES:Eternal Sabbath manga series.
• Guys Lit Wire suggest The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans.
• Bookslut recommends Baghdad Journal: an Artist in Occupied Iraq. Folks who liked The Photographer, which I read, may like this one too.
• From The London Review of Books, a review on Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France.
• The Daily Beast suggests that not all summer reads have to be the usual thick volumes of fluff. They are suggesting some smart summer reads. I am particularly interested in the book A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities.
• Guys Lit Wire have reviewed William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome. They find that, in spite of it being published in the 1980s, it still holds pretty well. I read it many years ago, and the review has prompted a desire to revisit the book at some point soon.
• Guys Lit Wire also review Walter Dean Myers book Sunrise Over Fallujah. I got an ARC copy at a conference a couple of years ago, but I never got around to reading it. I may finally get around to it as this review does make it sound like something worth reading.
• Via Texas Monthly, this is one of those books about some small part of history. This time its the story of Harvey Houses. This is something I did not know existed, but it sounds really neat, so I am going to see if I can find the book. The book in question is Stephen Fried’s Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West.

Some recent reading lists which may have items I want to read:

• From The Daily Beast, “The Barrack Obama Book Club.” According to the article, this list “is the entire Barrack Obama Book Club—as culled from newspaper archives and peeks into Air Force One tote bags since the beginning of the 2008 campaign.” The interesting thing about the article is how some of the authors of the books he reads have their doubts whether the President reads the whole book or not. I will admit I may be a bit skeptical: how does he find the time to read, especially given some of the heavy stuff (in terms of weight and substance), given all the things he has to do? Anyhow I am posting in case anyone else is interested and hoping maybe someone has read a book or two from the list and would tell me about it.
• Passport, the blog of Foreign Policy journal, has come up with “Summer Reading: Latin American Edition.” This is a list of books, fiction and nonfiction, so you get to learn some more about Latin America and its history, a topic that Americans (I am referring to U.S. dwellers in this case) are sorely ignorant about.From the list, I have read La Fiesta del Chivo (yes, I read it in Spanish, the way it was intended. For my non-Spanish reading friends, the English title is The Feast of the Goat).

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