Sunday Morning Book Thread 11-29-2020

Kresge Law Library, Notra Dame University

Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, crétins sans pantalon (who are technically breaking the rules). Welcome once again to the stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, a weekly compendium of reviews, observations, snark, witty repartee, hilarious bon mots, and a continuing conversation on books, reading, spending way too much money on books, writing books, and publishing books by escaped oafs and oafettes 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 look so fowl that not even mashed potatoes and gravy and a side of cranberry sauce would be able to save them.


Pic Note:

The fightin' Irish:

The Kresge Law Library holds more than 420,000 print volumes of legal texts, along with digital access to millions of journal articles, cases and other documents through our numerous digital database subscriptions. But perhaps what the Law Library is most known for is its grand Reading Room, which awes with its two-story open archways and third floor wrap-around balcony.

Filled with study carrels and large tables, the library serves as an academic hub for the Law School.

It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®

Attack of the Angry Snowflakes

If there's one person who really gets under the skin of progressive snowflakes (other than President Trump, of course), it has to be Jordan Peterson. They hate him with an insane passion. It's really quite bizarre, that a mild-manner Canadian clinic psychologist could inspire such mindless hatred.

I mean, get a load of this: Penguin has scheduled the publishing of Peterson's next book for March of 2021, and of course we know that the publishing industry is awash with progressive snowflakes, so the in-house staff at Penguin Random House Canada aren't at all happy. So management held a meeting to see if they could get them to calm down and act like grown-ups, but I don't think it worked. Listen to their boo-hooing:

One employee told Vice News that “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” One contended Peterson radicalized their father, and another insisted that if the book is published it will negatively affect their non-binary friend.

A different staffer said that Peterson is “an icon of hate speech,” “transphobia,” and “white supremacy.” Another claimed Peterson is responsible for “causing this surge of alt-right groups, especially on university campuses.”

“We publish a lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community and what is the company going to do about making sure these authors are still feeling supported by a company that is supporting somebody who denies their existence?” one employee asked.

So Peterson is a racist, a bigot, an alt-right white supremacist, and a homophobe. Yeah, yeah. Of course, he's none of those things.

Meanwhile, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life is available for pre-order on Amazon. In this book, Dr. Peterson

...warns that too much security is dangerous. What’s more, he offers strategies for overcoming the cultural, scientific, and psychological forces causing us to tend toward tyranny, and teaches us how to rely instead on our instinct to find meaning and purpose, even—and especially—when we find ourselves powerless.

While chaos, in excess, threatens us with instability and anxiety, unchecked order can petrify us into submission. Beyond Order provides a call to balance these two fundamental principles of reality itself, and guides us along the straight and narrow path that divides them.

There's no preview available (yet), but I will bet the rules Peterson proposes will be much like the ones in his first book. It'll be things like "clean up your room", or "finish your peas", or "comb your hair, "or, (and this one will be a fun one), "wait 'til your father comes home." Of course, most snowflakes have daddy issues, anyway, so it'll really send them into orbit.

By the way, Peterson's first book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is going for $2.99 on Kindle. And I can see why it would make progressives weep and gnash their teeth. Like this rule:

Rule 7: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

Because progressives are all about criticizing the world. Their own houses, not so much.

Who Dis:

The Amazing Holiday $0.99 Book Sale

ÆtherCzar (moron author Hans Schantz) has the details:

Celebrate Thanksgiving Weekend by topping off your library. Select from over eighty titles each priced at $0.99, including more than a dozen that are absolutely free.

These appear to be mostly science fiction and fantasy books. Selected authors include authors like C.J. Carella, Larry Correia, Jon del Arroz, David Drake, Eric Flint, Declan Finn, Amie Gibbons, Sarah Hoyt, Daniel Humphreys, Tom Kratman, Andre Norton, Richard Paolinelli, John Ringo, Adam Lane Smith, David Weber, David J. West, Michael Z. Williamson, John C. Wright, and others.

More details at this link. Here's a direct link, thanks to commenter 'Ranten N. Raven'.

Moron Recommendations

One of our oldest and dearest friends e-mailed about The Warwolf: A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War. She told me:

A Christian friend here at work recommended this. I’m going to get it. You’re welcome to borrow it. He said it starts slow, then ropes you in. His friend recommended it, said everything you need to know about guerrilla warfare is in it. My friend said the main character’s struggles with what God would want vs. protecting his family were moving, agonizing.

So, let me see if I get the chain correct: I heard about The Warwolf from a friend who heard it from one of her friends who heard about it from his friend, so we're, like, 3 deep here. And now all of you morons are hearing about it from me, so you're fourth in line. That's pretty dodgy, even for the book thread. But even so, it does sound like it might be an interesting read:

Originally published in 1910 and still in print in Germany, The Warwolf is available for first time in English.

The Thirty Years War, fought between 1618 and 1648, was a ruthless struggle for political and religious control of central Europe. Engulfing most of present-day Germany, the war claimed at least ten million lives. The lengthy conflict was particularly hard on the general population, as thousands of undisciplined mercenaries serving Sweden, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and various German principalities, robbed, murdered, and pillaged communities; disease spread out of control and starvation became commonplace. In The Warwolf, Hermann Löns's acclaimed historical novel, the tragedy and horrors of war in general, and these times in particular are revealed. The Warwolf, based on the author's careful research, traces the life of Harm Wulf, a land-owning peasant farmer of the northern German heath who realizes after witnessing the murder of neighbours and family at the hands of marauding troops that he has a choice between compromising his morals or succumbing to inevitable torture and death. Despite his desire for peace, Wulf decides to band with his fellow farmers and live like "wolves," fiercely protecting their isolated communities from all intruders. Löns's brilliant portrayal of the two sides faced by any person in a moral crisis—in Harm Wulf's case, whether to kill or be killed—continues to resonate.

I just can't imagine the scale of this kind of war.

The Kindle edition is $10.49.

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A recommendation via e-mail:

I finished The Changewinds last night--when I want to read, I READ! (roughly 200+ pages in a single evening) Great ending, more than makes up for the minor flaws within the story otherwise. Has that ever been a topic for discussion? How much are readers willing to forgive in an otherwise "meh" story if the ending/payoff at the end is off the charts amazing? We already know what happens when a good story is derailed by terrible endings (see: the Star Wars sequels and the last season or so of Game of Thrones).

Also, Jack L. Chalker manages to be both timelessly relevant and extremely dated. He starts and ends the story at a shopping mall, the natural habitat of the 1980s white middle-class teenager, but the overall conflict is about the age-old balance between order and chaos. Great stuff. Not too many authors can do this successfully.

It's a Baen Book, but available only in paperback. The Amazon blurb tells you pretty much nothing, other than the author's name, Jack L. Chalker.

Although it's not his best work, I have yet to find a Chalker series I didn't enjoy on some level. The premise is that changewinds with the power to alter reality on a fundamental level periodically sweep through the multiverse with no rhyme or reason. Anyone or anything caught in the path is changed forever, leading to bizarre creatures and environments. A group of powerful sorcerers are seeking to control the winds through the Storm Princess, the one being in all reality who *might* be able to actually control the changewinds. Naturally, not all sorcerers have the same goals in mind.

If you are not familiar with Jack L. Chalker, the defining characteristic in pretty much all of his works is people get transformed into other genders/species at some point. Depending on the work, they might be transformed multiple times (sometimes within the same chapter!). It's one of his most common themes, but he pulls it off pretty well. If you like 80s-90s era science fiction, I'd definitely give him a shot.

If you want to give your money directly to Baen, the price is $15.00 for the paperback.

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146 I've been reading William Freehling's two volumes Secessionists At Bay and Secessionists Triumphant, a very long and detailed history of the South before the Civil War.

We tend to think of the antebellum South as a monolithic entity, but there were many Souths: a Border South, and Upper South and a Lower South, as well as an Eastern South and a Western South. The tensions among these and their attitudes toward slavery are almost as striking as the conflicts between the North and the South as a whole.

Posted by: Hadrian the Seventh at November 08, 2020 09:49 AM (mht8P)

The Amazon blurbs are way too long for me to even to begin to figure out how to pare them down, so you can read them for yourself at these links:

The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854: Volume I

The Road to Disunion: Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861

The Kindle edition of each book is available for $9.99.

Freehling has another book about the South that might be of interest, The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War:

Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? Most historians point to the larger number of Union troops, for example, or the North's greater industrial might. Now, in The South Vs. the South, one of America's leading authorities on the Civil War era offers an entirely new answer to this question.

William Freehling argues that anti-Confederate Southerners--specifically, border state whites and southern blacks--helped cost the Confederacy the war. White men in such border states as Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland, Freehling points out, were divided in their loyalties--but far more joined the Union army (or simply stayed home) than marched off in Confederate gray. If they had enlisted as rebel troops in the same proportion as white men did farther south, their numbers would have offset all the Confederate casualties during four years of war...

Also $9.99.

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Books By Morons

Long-time lurker Alma Boykin has just published the 16th installment of her Familiar Tales urban fantasy series, Knowingly Familiar:

A Mesopotamian curse sends ripples through the magical community of Riverton. Mages André and Lelia Lestrang find themselves fighting ghosts from their past. The battle draws them closer to Master Saldovado and the clans, closer perhaps than Lelia's heart dares to go. How long before Patrick Lee and Riverton's other magic users demand answers about the clans? The Familiars are keeping the secret. For now.

But breaking ancient spells comes easily for shadow mages. Juggling parenthood, budgets, car repairs, school schedules, and a six-year-old daughter's desire for a pet unicorn? (Or a house dragon, preferably pastel pink.) That's difficult!

Available on Kindle for $3.99.

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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

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