 Like sausage, you don’t want to see links being made.
Inauguration:
- Josh Marshall sums it up. [Talking Points Memo]
- On Facebook I called the president’s second inaugural the most radical address ever and I stand by that. Kevin Drum argues it was also partisan. [Mother Jones]
Nickel book reviews:
- The Victory Lab, Sasha Issenberg. So good I changed my course syllabus for January 2013 after reading this book in December 2012. Seth Masket [The Mifchiefs of Faction] has more.
- Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of belief, Lawrence Wright. Interesting and well-reported. Clearly chary of lawsuits, Wright’s investigations never cohere to a full-throated examination of the Church of Scientology. Nevertheless, generally recommended.
- Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War, Chris Bellamy. Even at 700 pages, this book occasionally feels superficial. A good overview, sometimes overly chatty. Better on the military than on the social or political side of things. Also recommended (not exhaustive): Death of the Wehrmacht (Citino), Stalin’s Wars (Roberts), Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Montefiore).
- The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office, Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan. Breezy and interesting, but the first several chapters could be easily skipped if you’re familiar with either Coase paper. Useful for an early reading in an undergraduate course on organizational behavior.
And also:
- The “faculty” grade is the lowest rank at Davos [Financial Times, subscription only]
- The Dead Sea Scrolls, academic rivalry, and prison time [Tablet]
- High school never ends, journalistic summary on adolescence and adulthood [New York Magazine]
- “High School Never Ends”, a song [Bowling For Soup]
- The Kanye/West Wing meme phenomenon [Buzzfeed]
1) I haven’t yet read full text of speech, but is there a short way to explain why you think it’s the most “radical” ever? The most remarked-on passages don’t seem that radical to me but no doubt we’re using the word differently. The one decisive break with past inaugurals would seem to be the Stonewall and marriage equality references, but that’s a very small part of the speech.
2) You’ve referred on the Duck to your dissertation-in-progress and your teaching. Thus I assume, given those time commitments, that you are just dipping into or skimming these 700pp WW2 and other books. (Either that or you’re the speed reader of all time.)
Climate change and gay rights are polarizing, especially since “Stonewall” is not the relatively straight-friendly marker that one might expect from this president but rather reflective of a (for the time and possibly still today) much more forthright stance for equality. Lincoln’s call for nice reconstruction may have been more divergent from public opinion but was fundamentally a conservative notion. In general, O was picking fights that he thinks should be fought. Most inaugurals are pabulum. Even Kennedy ’61 was a well articulated but much more “rightist” stance than we think these days.
I read a little more quickly than most people on average but probably no more quickly than most academics. (This list is a partial reflection of two months’ reading; I don’t know if my total pages read for that period are as, more, or less impressive than this snapshot.) I have a lot more time–unmarried, no house maintenance beyond laundry and cleaning, no children–and I can “bill” some of these books to other “accounts” (e.g. Issenberg was originally course prep for me but was so good I decided to assign the whole thing). Also it is much, much faster to read a history book of arbitrary length about a subject you know comparatively well than something you don’t; I have been stuck on Bismarck for about three weeks making desultory progress at best (poorly edited, not much background, tons of confusing primary source documents) but if it were the seventh or twelfth book I’d read about Prussian history I could have finished it in one long plane ride or two weekend afternoons.
I agree that it’s quicker to read something on a subject one already knows well. And writing style (etc.) matters too, of course.
I recently bought a used pb. copy of Vera Brittain’s ‘Testament of Youth’, a well-known WWI memoir (orig. published in the early ’30s) that I’d often seen cited, but never read. I spent about an hour-and-a-half with it one evening and read enough of it, skipping around, to get a good sense of the book (beautifully written, as it happens). Even with an accessible book, unless it’s quite short, that’s generally all I can do in an hour or two, though I suppose a faster reader, with a roughly comparable knowledge of the period, might have read it virtually cover-to-cover in the same amount of time.