Sunday Morning Book Thread 10-21-2018

Copenhagen University Library
(click to embiggen)

Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, and everybody who's holding your beer. Welcome once again to the stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, a weekly compendium of reviews, observations, and a continuing conversation on books, reading, and publishing by people who follow words with their fingers and whose lips move as they read. Unlike other AoSHQ comment threads, the Sunday Morning Book Thread is so hoity-toity, pants are required.

Even if it's these pants, which appear to be part of some decadent soccer uniform fashion ensemble. Probably a big hit with eurotwinks.

Saving Babies

This book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel, came to my attention earlier this week via a review on a Catholic web site. It's about this guy who acquired babies born prematurely and exhibited them as part of his circus freak show. Now that sounds disgusting (it probably *is* disgusting), but the end result is that he saved many children's lives and pioneered the use of incubators in neonatology. This was during the Depression when preemies mostly just died. From the review:

Raffel discovered that alongside the sword swallowers, shooting galleries, and freak shows prevalent in sideshows of the early 20th century, there was Dr. Couney, inviting passersby into “an exhibition of live, premature infants in incubators. It was almost like a mini-hospital right out on the midway. You could pay a quarter and go look at the premature babies in incubators.”

It wasn’t the incubators alone that made the difference between life and death, but also the “skilled nurses” that Dr. Couney had caring for the babies around the clock. They knew exactly how to operate the incubators, kept the exhibit cleaner than many hospitals at the time, and were skilled in feeding the children in the only way they could really take in food: via a spoon-to-nose technique.

What a world we live in. God used a circus showman to save the lives of thousands of infants and to advance the science of neonatology. Just like He gave us a president who hammers the progressives and all their works who has never been known to be "of the (conservative) body." He gives us benefits in ways we do not expect.

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®

(mild NSFW link for sideboob)

KNOUT: (in imperial Russia) a whip used to inflict punishment, often causing death.

Usage:

288 People who leave shopping carts in parking spaces should be flogged with a knout or given canal duty.

Posted by: Hadrian the Seventh at October 14, 2018 11:43 AM (LsBY9)

Judge For Yourself

During the national freak-out over Trump's latest SCOTUS nominee, orchestrated by the Democratic Party), one of the figures mentioned by Christine Ford as having been in the room while she was being dry-humped by the evil Brett Kavanaugh is a guy named Mark Judge. In his written statement, Judge denied being in the room during the so-called rape and even being at the party at all. Kavanaugh mentioned that Judge was a friend of his back then who "struggled with addiction", i.e. he was a drunk. From the hearings, you might get the impression that Judge is a witless boob, like Kato Kaelin, who just happened to be standing close by when some notorious historical events unfolded around him. But this is wrong. Judging (heh) from the books he has written, he has some intellectual heft, and conservative at that.

First up, there's God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling

In this account, the author explores the role of Catholicism in Catholic institutions, presenting three Catholic universities and discussing their lack of religious conviction, arguing for more Catholic theological education and less secularism.

The problem, from what I've heard, is that many Catholic colleges lack any actual Catholicism, opting instead for, hold onto your hats, the usual matrix of SJW grievance theologies.

This book has a lot of one-star reviews, but most of them are recent, and contain no actual criticism. They're just a lot of yelling at Judge for not "coming clean" during the Kavanaugh hearings.

Then there's A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll, which

Without sensationalism, Judge is candid here about his personal journey from the playgrounds of the sexual revolution to his eventual belief in the need to combine sexuality with love and commitment to another person, not as an end in itself but rather as a particularly direct means of opening oneself up to God’s love. He also sees support for the Christian theology on love in a seemingly unlikely place: rock music. He delves into the Church’s teachings on sexual matters, going back to the time of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint John of the Cross, and Pope John Paul II while also acquainting us with more contemporary voices from within the Church—as well as from the pop charts.

He also wrote of his own battles with alcoholism, Wasted: Tales of a Genx Drunk, another book that has been poisoned by 1-star reviews by disgruntled Kavanaugh-haters.

Moron Recommendation

This being the book thread, highly recommended: Jay Winik's April 1865

He paints a picture of Lee that is both fair and true. Lee was by all accounts, one of the greatest men America ever produced. Any so-called historian who thinks otherwise is a sonofabitch who doesn't know jack, and doesn't deserve to be called an American.

Posted by: BurtTC at October 14, 2018 12:04 PM (cY3LT)

There was another orchestrated national freak-out a few days ago over President Trump saying nice things about Gen. Robert E. Lee because slavery. But actually, Trump's main point was to praise General Ulysses Grant, and his use of Lee was a means to that end. Of course, such nuance, as minor and as rudimentary as it is, is apparently beyond the comprehension of our betters in the media who think it is their duty to tell us rubes what to think and how to think it.

April 1865: The Month That Saved America. It was a month that saw

...the frenzied fall of Richmond, a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare, Lee's harrowing retreat, and then, Appomattox. It saw Lincoln's assassination just five days later and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation.

Jay Winik offers a brilliant new look at the Civil War's final days that will forever change the way we see the war's end and the nation's new beginning. Uniquely set within the larger sweep of history and filled with rich profiles of outsize figures, fresh iconoclastic scholarship, and a gripping narrative, this is a masterful account of the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United States.

The Kindle edition is $9.24.

___________

It's good to see Spurwing Plover back at the HQ. He checked in last week with a few non-recommendations:

Liberal books aimed at kids like THE KID ENVIROEMNTAL BOOK and A EARTH BOOK FOR KIDS as well as 50 THINGS KIDS CAN DI TO SAVE THE EARTH and a book written by Laure David GLOBAL WARMING THE SOLUTION IS YOU all should in the fiction self

Posted by: Spurwing Plover at October 14, 2018 12:05 PM (FLiOE)

I Am Earth: An Earth Day Book for Kids is packed full of junk science:

I Am Earth introduces kids to the basic concepts of earth science while also encouraging the importance of taking care of our special planet through environmental awareness and sustainability...I Am Earth is a great way to start children at an early age to care for the environment by understanding why the environment is so important and what they can do to help keep nature in balance, like recycle, reuse and conserve. For all living creatures that call planet Earth home, every day is Earth Day!

This one isn't so bad. The ones by Laurie David are just straight-up "How to train your kid to be an environmental activist" agitprop.

___________

11 Finished a pulp bio Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III

Owsley is the inspiration for Kid Charlemagne, a polymath drop-out and a key figure in the 1960s counterculture. When LSD was still legal and mostly only made by big pharmas, Owsley figured out to make it on his own in huge batches of half a million or more.

With his profits, he bank-rolled the early Grateful Dead, ran their sound systems and came up with the Dead's famous logo. He hung with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, crossed a diamond with a pearl, and turned it on the world.

Posted by: Ignoramus at October 14, 2018 09:13 AM (1UZdv)

Yes, it's true, at the bottom of the hippie era, that which drove everything else in the 60s, was high-quality LSD. And much of it was manufactured by

Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known by his nickname, Bear, [who became] one of the most iconic figures in the cultural revolution that changed both America and the world during the 1960s.

Owsley's high octane rocket fuel enabled Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to put on the Acid Tests. It also powered much of what happened on stage at Monterey Pop. Owsley turned on Pete Townshend of The Who and Jimi Hendrix. The shipment of LSD that Owsley sent John Lennon resulted in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album and film.

It's weird that for a brief period of the LSD was legal. But it was. It was accidentally invented by a Swiss chemist in the late 1940s, and he accidentally inhaled a microdose. It was his practice to ride to and from his job on a bicycle and apparently, on that day, it kicked in while he was pedaling home. The rest of the trip home that evening was, well, psychedelic.

The kindle edition of Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III is $7.99.

Before the hippies got hold of it, LSD was an experimental drug that they thought they might be able to use to cure mental illness. For example, they gave it to this one guy, an alcoholic, and after he came down off his trip, he no longer had the urge to drink. So they thought it had potential. This is detailed in the book Storming Heaven; LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens, which discusses

...how LSD evolved from a psychiatric tool to a force that changed a generation, from the first tentative explorations of Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts through Timothy Leary and the "Summer of Love".

I haven't read the Owsley book, but I did read this one, and I recommend it as interesting social history. $7.49 on Kindle.

Eventually, of course, they discarded LSD as a psychiatric tool because the results were too erratic and unpredictable.

___________

If you like, you can follow me on Twitter, where I make the occasional snarky comment.

___________

Don't forget the AoSHQ reading group on Goodreads. It's meant to support horde writers and to talk about the great books that come up on the book thread. It's called AoSHQ Moron Horde and the link to it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175335-aoshq-moron-horde.

___________

So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, insults, threats, ugly pants pics and moron library submissions may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.

posted by OregonMuse at 09:00 AM

| Access Comments