Fred's Reading List

What I've been reading lately …

(See also the Reading Wish List— stuff I haven't gotten around to yet)

updated 2008-07-20

James Howard Kunstler, World Made By Hand (Atlantic Monthly, 2008)
A dystopian yet somehow hopeful novel of the none too distant post-oil future, wherein local townspeople - survivors of a massive flu epidemic - contend with a religious cult, a gang of ex-bikers, and a neofeudal landlord to keep their upstate New York village just barely liveable.

James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Grove/Atlantic, 2005)
"Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food." —Booklist

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Overlook Press, 2008)
Volume 3 of Crowley's Ægypt tetralogy, "a journey into the very mystery of existence: what is, what went before, and what could break through at any moment in our lives." Bookforum says “We may one day look on Ægypt’s publishing history with the same head-scratching curiosity with which we now regard Melville’s tragic struggles and André Gide’s decision to turn down Swann’s Way.”

Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Lawrence Hill, 2008)
“The destruction of buildings in 2005 was fearful, but so was the loss of something intangible: African America took a blow when the collective knowledge of black New Orleans was scattered to the four winds. Dispersing that population was like tearing up an encyclopedia in front of an electric fan. This book is dedicated to the people who are trying to put that book back together.” —author Ned Sublette

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends (McSweeney's, 2008)
Makes a passionate defense for the "borderlands" of literature, "the spaces between genres," "the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore." A diverse assortment of writings, including serious literary criticism, some autobiographical sketches and a few more opinionated polemics, all of which in one way or another endeavor to counter the "disdain and neglect" Chabon finds too often heaped upon "nonliterary" fiction.

Stephen Budiansky, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox (Viking, 2007)
"In his vivid, fast-paced narrative of the era now known as Reconstruction, Stephen Budiansky illuminates the lives of five remarkable men—two Union officers, a Confederate general, a Northern entrepreneur, and a former slave—whose idealism in the face of overwhelming hatred would not be matched for nearly a century. The Bloody Shirt is a story of violence, racism, division, and heroism that sheds new light on a crucial time in America’s history." (publisher's blurb)

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, 2007)
Assesses "the dysfunction of the entire American industrial food complex. The situation is a lot worse than most of us dare imagine, for Americans are some of the most specialized eaters on earth. At the base of the national food chain is a single species of grass—corn—and its growth, processing, and sale constitute a titanic industry which is focused on increasing profits rather than health and well-being."

John Crowley, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (William Morrow, 2005)

Linebaugh, Peter, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (University of California Press, 2008)
"Peter Linebaugh ... traces one path of liberty back to the forests and the economic independence they represented for medieval Britons, another path to recent revolutionaries, another to the Bush Administration's assaults on habeas corpus, the Constitution, and liberty and he links the human rights charter that Magna Carta represented to the less-known Forest Charter, drawing a missing link between ecological and social well-being." —Rebecca Solnit

Guy Debord, Panegyric (Verso, 2004)
"A rare combination of poetry and precision, it tells of something even rarer: a life that refused to adjust to the dominant malignancies of its time." (Publisher's blurb)

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Overlook Press, 2008)
Volume two of Crowley's Ægypt tetralogy, out of print until quite recently. Bookforum says “We may one day look on Ægypt’s publishing history with the same head-scratching curiosity with which we now regard Melville’s tragic struggles and André Gide’s decision to turn down Swann’s Way.”

Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets (Penguin, 2008)
"A lot of writing about the poor tends to reduce living, breathing, joking, struggling, sensual, moral human beings to dupes who are shoved about by invisible forces. This book ... shows, day by day and dollar by dollar, how the crack dealers, tenant leaders ... cops, and Venkatesh himself tried to construct a good life out of substandard materials." —Stephen Dubner

Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (Verso, 1997)
"... a postcolonial revision of conventional travel literature. In her passage through Ireland, Rebecca Solnit portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Travel itself produces its own versions of memory and identity, and travel's transformation into the information age's pre-eminent industry – tourism – comes under close scrutiny." (publisher's blurb)

Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War (W.W. Norton, 2007)
"Robb describes a land of secrets slowly divulged, a nation in name only for most of its history, fragmented by mutually incomprehensible dialects and deeply rooted regional cultures. France ... dissolves under close inspection into a vast cabinet of curiosities, an endless series of counterexamples to the myth of a culturally unified nation and people." —New York Times

Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008)
"Suze Rotolo’s firsthand, eyewitness, participant-observer account of the immensely creative and fertile years of the 1960s, just before the circus was in full swing and Bob Dylan became the anointed ringmaster. It chronicles the back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the folk music explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him." (Publisher's blurb)

Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (University of California Press, 2007)
"For Solnit, walking the earth, placing words on a page, and standing up for her beliefs are symbiotic acts. Following in the footsteps of her guiding light, Henry David Thoreau, Solnit contemplates our sense of place, an ever-shifting mix of nature and culture. [She] presents a potent collection of nearly 40 essays sophisticated in thought, elegant in expression, and catalyzing in impact." (Booklist)

Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (Basic Books, 1997)
"What a fresh and vital book this is, one that will change the terms of many debates. Bring back the beaver, bring back the prairie dog, and with them will come the water 'clear as dew' that once distinguished this continent.' —Bill McKibben

Jonathan Gould, Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (Harmony, 2007)
"From the Beats in America and the Angry young Men in England to the shadow of the Profumo Affair and JFK's assassination, Gould captures the pulse of a time that made the Beatles possible—and even necessary. As seen through the prism of the Beatles and their music, an entire generation's experience comes astonishingly to life." (from book jacket)

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Overlook Press, 2007)
Volume one of Crowley's Ægypt tetralogy—out of print until quite recently—in which "we are introduced to Pierce Moffett, an unorthodox historian and an expert in ancient astrology, myths, and superstition. The land that Moffett studies is not the real, geographical Egypt but Ægypt, a country of the imagination. When Moffett discovers the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, his course is charted. Kraft’s books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, young Will Shakespeare, and Elizabethan occultist John Dee—stories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffett’s real and dream life in 1970s America." (Publisher's blurb)

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking, 2006)

Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (Oxford University Press, 1991)
Before the market revolution: Americans grew food and made things for themselves or to barter with neighbors; they were humble but happy, rallying around “enduring human values of family, trust, cooperation, love, and equality.” After: they grew food and made things to sell, for cash, to cold, unfeeling, and distant markets; they were frantic, alienated, untrusting, competitive, repressed, and lonely.

Susan Freinkel, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (University of California Press, 2007)
"In prose as strong and quietly beautiful as the American chestnut itself, Susan Freinkel profiles the silent catastrophe of a near-extinction and the impassioned struggle to bring a species back from the brink. Freinkel is a rare hybrid: equally fluid and in command as a science writer and a chronicler of historical events, and graced with the poise and skill to seamlessly graft these talents together. A perfect book." —Mary Roach

Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History (Yale University Press, 2005)
"Avenue of the explorers, battlefield for empires, easel for artists, and dump for industry—the Hudson has been a stage for epics since its namesake dropped anchor in 1609. ... Spanning armies and aesthetics, the versatile, fluid Lewis writes with affection for the river and its history."—Booklist

Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007)
"McKibben's animating idea is that we need to move beyond 'growth' as the paramount economic ideal and pursue prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. He shows this concept blossoming around the world with striking results ..."

Oakley Hall, Warlock (New York Review Books, 2005)
"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. ... Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with -- the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power -- the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels." —Thomas Pynchon

Locke, Searls, Levine and Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Perseus Books, 2000)
"...show[s] how the Internet is turning business upside down. ... Thanks to conversations taking place on Web sites and message boards, and in e-mail and chat rooms, employees and customers alike have found voices that undermine the traditional command-and-control hierarchy that organizes most corporate marketing groups. 'Markets are conversations,' the authors write, and those conversations are "getting smarter faster than most companies.'"

Sophie Howarth, ed., Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs (Aperture, 2005)
"Even though art photography has been well surveyed in recent years, individual works have rarely been written about at length. Each of these essays focuses on the uniqueness of one particular image—a uniqueness illuminated in highly personal ways by each of the essayists, whether in terms of the artist’s intention, the writer’s response, the work’s technical complexities, its historical context, or a purely formal analysis."

Larry McMurtry, Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West (New York Review Books, 2001)
"McMurtry casts a keen and elegaic eye not only on the often harsh truths of the West, but also on the power of western illusions, of what he calls 'that other, endlessly imagined West, the West that can never be fully believed or wholly denied.'"

Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, 1995)

Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, 1999)
"... far more than a clever retelling of Cinderella. Even if readers were somehow ignorant of the fairy tale, they would still encounter a resonant and gripping narrative, with much to say about gender politics, children's rights, the beauty of art, class bigotry and the oppression of conformity."

Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3000 B.C. - 1603 A.D. (Miramax, 2000)
"Schama can characterize like Tacitus, narrate like Macaulay, quip like A. J. P. Taylor. He should set a fashion for the revival of the art, almost forgotten by professional academics, of good storytelling. ... It might just pass muster as an old-fashioned History of England. As a History of Britain, it is laughable."—Patrick Wormald

Timothy Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (Yale University Press, 1985)
Part 1 of the authoritative biography of John Ruskin, among the most influential nineteenth-century critics of art and society. It draws on the complete text of Ruskin's diaries and many thousands of unpublished letters and other documents to provide fresh insight into the background and content of Ruskin's extensive writings.

Nicols Fox, Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives (Island Press, 2004)
"Resistance to technology is a thread running through Western culture for the past 200 years, always present though always a dissenting view. Beginning with the Luddites, who smashed machinery in British textile mills in the 1810s, she traces literary, artistic and philosophical expressions of antitechnological thought up to the present. And she describes more-direct efforts to derail technology or to construct low-tech ways of life."

Thomas Rinaldi and Robert J. Yasinsac, Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape (University Press of New England, 2006)
Images and commentary on more than 50 ruins in the Hudson Valley, including the remains of the never finished Dunderberg Spiral Railway in Rockland, Greene County's hamlet of Smith's Landing, the Dutch Reformed Church in Newburgh, as well as such aging Dutchess County gems as Rhinebeck's Wyndclyffe Mansion, the Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie, and the renowned Bannerman's Castle on Pollepel Island.

Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions, 2006)

Roberto Bolaño, Nocturno de Chile (Anagrama, 2000)

Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star (New Directions, 2004)

Roberto Bolaño, Monsieur Pain (Anagrama, 1999)

China Mieville, The Scar (Del Rey, 2002)
"There can now be no doubt that there's no one in contemporary fantasy writing quite like China Miéville (the good but overrated Neil Gaiman pales most in comparison), and we should all be delighted that a talent like his has come along at the turn of the century to inject life into a genre stuck for so long in a creative cul-de-sac." (SFReviews.net)

Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job (HarperCollins, 2006)

Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio, 2006)
"Millions of media buffs now use blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and personal broadcasting to add their voices to a vociferous stream of dialogue and debate called the 'blogosphere.' Employees drive performance by collaborating with peers across organizational boundaries, creating what we call a 'wiki workplace.' Customers become 'prosumers' by cocreating goods and services rather than simply consuming the end product. ... Smart companies are encouraging, rather than fighting, the heaving growth of massive online communities—many of which emerged from the fringes of the Web to attract tens of millions of participants overnight. ... Indeed, as a growing number of firms see the benefits of mass collaboration, this new way of organizing will eventually displace the traditional corporate structures as the economy’s primary engine of wealth creation."

Roger Morris & Sally Denton, The Money and the Power:The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000 (Random House, 2001)
"In a sense it is misleading in Las Vegas, and even in much of America, to draw that old distinction between criminal and legal. The system we are describing in the nation and the city is so profoundly and inextricably enmeshed, the old criminal ethic of exploitation and greed is so much the ethic of corporate "legal" America, that the distinctions are difficult to make when it comes to understanding power, the way things really work in America." –Roger Morris

Gerard Helferich, Humboldt's Cosmos: Alexander Von Humboldt and the Epic Exploration of Latin America that Changed the Way We See the World (Gotham, 2005)

Anne Winters, The Displaced of Capital (University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Loren Goldner, Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne And the Antemosaic Cosmic Man: Race, Class And the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer (Queeqeg Books, 2006)

David Kehlmann, Measuring the World (Pantheon, 2006)

John Crowley, Little, Big (HarperCollins, 2002)

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (Del Rey, 2000)

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (Ballantine, 1989)

Robert Bly, The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War (Ally Press, 2006)

Geraldine Brooks, March (Penguin, 2005)

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
See also this commentary.

John Battelle, The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (Portfolio/Penguin, 2005)

Doctorow, E. L., The March (Random House, 2005)

Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of Macdougal Street: A Memoir (with Elijah Wald) (Perseus Books, 2006)

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (Vintage, 1997)

Peter Linebaugh & Markus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000)
Perhaps the best nonfiction work I've read in the past 10 years (or more).

Annie Proulx, That Old Ace in the Hole (Scribner, 2003)

Barnet Schecter, The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (Walker, 2006)

Mike Davis & Justin Akers Chacon, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Haymarket Books, 2006)

Silvia Nazario, Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother (Random House, 2006)

Hector Tobar, Translation Nation: Defining a New Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (Riverhead, 2005)

William T. Vollman, Europe Central (Penguin, 2006)

Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl : A Compact History (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton, 1992)

Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Harvard University Press, 1991)

Reza Aslan, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (Random House, 2005)

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf, 2005)

Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 2000)