Thread: What book are you reading right now?

No big lists of books please, just a heads up on what you are currently enjoying.


Author is: Pat Gilbert

Passion is a fashion.. one of Joe Strummer's better known witticisms,
I never knew that his real name was John Mellor though... .

This is an updated copy that take into account Strummers death. Previously the only biog worth it's salt was Donn Letts' film 'Westway to the world' but this goes much deeper into the backgrounds and the influences of the band... I picked it up for £3 in HMV.. total bargain and I'm still reading it..

Mao's Great Famine, by Frank Dikotter.



Review

`Frank Dikötter has written a masterly book that should be read not just by anybody interested in modern Chinese history but also by anybody concerned with the way in which a simple idea propagated by an autocratic national leader can lead a country to disaster, in this case to a degree that beggars the imagination ... The book is extremely clearly written, avoiding the melodrama that infused some other recent broadbrush accounts of Mao's sins ... Dikötter's superb book pulls another brick from the wall.' --Jonathan Fenby, Observer

`A work of brilliant scholarship finally reveals the full extent of the horrors visited on the Chinese people by Mao during the Great Leap Forward ... Meticulous ... It is hard to exaggerate the achievement of this book in proving that Mao caused the famine.' --Michael Sheridan, Sunday Times

'Gripping ... Dikotter's painstaking analysis of the archives shows Mao's regime resulted in the greatest "man-made famine" the world has ever seen.' --Daily and Sunday Express


Product Description

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. Access to Communist Party archives has long been denied to all but the most loyal historians, but now a new law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era. Frank Dikotter's astonishing, riveting and magnificently detailed book chronicles an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented. Dikotter shows that instead of lifting the country among the world's superpowers and proving the power of communism, as Mao imagined, in reality the Great Leap Forward was a giant - and disastrous - step in the opposite direction. He demonstrates, as nobody has before, that under this initiative the country became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history (at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death) but also the greatest demolition of real estate - and catastrophe for the natural environment - in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned to rubble and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. Piecing together both the vicious machinations in the corridors of power and the everyday experiences of ordinary people, Dikotter at last gives voice to the dead and disenfranchised. Exhaustively researched and brilliantly written, this magisterial, groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Of the work in embodied philosophy and cognitive linguistics, this by far the most careful, cogent, and through exposition. It is not light reading--it assumes a high level of education and a high degree of familiarity with Western philosophy, but it is profoundly rewarding.

Johnson develops a theory of image schemas as the preconceptual links between our embodied experiences and our sophisticated abilities to use language, including the theory of conceptual metaphor he codeveloped with George Lakoff. He offers many different sources of evidence ranging from gesture to studies of epistemic modality in logic and linguistics to phenomenology to aesthetics and art. The second half of the book largely explores the philosophical, historical, and psychological elaborations of the notion of a schema.

Amazon.com: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (9780226403182): Mark Johnson: Books

Just finished "The Upside Of Irrationality" by Dan Ariely, and "What Do You Care What Other People Think" by Richard Feynman.
Just started Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue: English And How It Got That Way" which is really very interesting.

Just about to buy "Political Ponerology, A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes" by Andrzej Łobaczewski.
Currently I'm reading about this book on the web, and I think it's one of the most important works of out time......and I don't say that lightly ! Previously I used to avoid books that had anything to do with "evil", but this book is very different. If you are wondering at how people like Mao Tse Tung and Stalin came into power, here is an explanation, and a possible solution. Basically, these people are sociopaths, or psychopaths. Here is what a Swiss psychiatrist said about the book Political Ponerology:

I have never read anywhere else the things Łobaczewski speaks about. No other book has treated the subject in this way. It was immediately useful for me in my work. The things he affirms about perverse/pathological behaviour - in conflicts in business as well as in the political sphere where we see more and more conflicts and more and more people of this type - immediately helped me to better understand, for example, the functioning of these individuals who create conflicts in their work and who, wherever they go, pollute the atmosphere.

"When psychopaths are the policy makers in government and the CEOs of big business, the way they think and reason - their 'morality' - becomes the common culture and 'morality' of the population over which they preside. When this happens, the mind of the population is infected in the way a pathogen infects a physical body. The only way to protect ourselves against this pathological thinking is to inoculate ourselves against it, and that is done by learning as much as possible about the nature of psychopathy and its influence on us. Essentially, this particular 'disease' thrives in an environment where its very existence is denied, and this denial is planned and deliberate."
Read a review of it here: The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade: Make Us Believe that Evil Comes from Others -- Science of the Spirit -- Sott.net

Yes....generals are still only human beings suffering from the human condition.
To complement your reading about battles in Africa in WW2, you might like to read about Jasper Maskelyne (1902–1973). He was a British stage magician in the 1930s and 1940s. He was one of an established family of stage magicians.
He worked for British military intelligence during the Second World War, creating large-scale ruses, deception, and camouflage.
His largest illusion was to conceal Alexandria and the Suez Canal to misdirect German bombers. He built a mockup of the night-lights of Alexandria in a bay three miles away with fake buildings, lighthouse, and anti-aircraft batteries.
In 1942 he worked in Operation Bertram, before the Battle of El alamein. His task was to make German Field Marshal Rommel think that the attack was coming from the south when British General Montgomery planned to attack from the north. In the north, 1,000 tanks were disguised as trucks. On the south, the Magic Gang created 2,000 fake tanks with convincing pyrotechnics. There was a fake railway line, fake radio conversations, and fake sounds of construction. They also built a fake water pipeline and made it look as if it would never be ready before attack.
See article in Wikipedia:

Jasper Maskelyne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There is some controversy about his role though.