My last name may mean “writer” in Yiddish/German but before you can write you need to learn how to read. I’ve been a reader for literally as long as I can remember, ever since my mom gave me a copy of Fun With Phonics when I was three or four years old. It doesn’t matter so much what it is, cereal boxes, antique instruction manuals, modern non-fiction, if it has words, I’ll probably at least give it a glance.
Here are the books that I’m currently reading. Some are new to me, others are longtime favorites that I’m rereading. Just about all of them are recommended.
The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel - Genius Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I - by Douglas Brunt. I found out about this book when Brunt was a guest on evolutionary psychologist and marketing professor Gad Saad’s podcast on YouTube (something I also recommend). Rudolf Diesel mysteriously jumped, fell, or was pushed overboard while traveling at sea. At the time of his death, Diesel was a wealthy man with ties to captains of industry around the world, and Brunt proposes that he was the possible victim of unrelated conspiracies by two of the most powerful men in the world, German Kaiser Wilhelm II and petroleum monopolist John D. Rockefeller. The Kaiser because Diesel was working with the British on diesel powered submarines and warships and Rockefeller because Diesel’s compression ignited engine could run on non-petroleum based fuels. Over at Hagerty, I expressed some skepticism about that part of Brunt’s story.
Bob Dylan - Mixing Up the Medicine - written and edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel. A gift from my son and older daughter. Published in 2023 and based on the archives of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it’s a review of the man and his career from Hibbing until his current tour. With over 1,110 photographs from notable photographers like Richard Avedon and Annie Liebowitz, and 30 original essays from prominent historians and cultural critics, along with images of original manuscripts and other ephemera and memorabilia, I’d say that it’s suitable for your bedstand, other than the fact that the large format 608 page book would fit better on a coffee table.
Not Stolen - The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World- by Jeff Fynn-Paul. You’re not likely to find this book in the syllabus for an ethnic studies course at Harvard. About as politically incorrect as one might imagine in current year, Fynn-Paull takes up the argument that the Spanish, French, and British explorers, traders, and colonizers were not, in fact, racist slavers bent on genocide and exclusively focused on conquest and exploitation of the New World’s people and wealth. In short, he doesn’t think that Christopher Columbus was a monster and that the United States was not conceived in original sin. To begin with, the concepts of race and racial superiority were developed long after Europeans began to explore and colonize the Americas. For the most part, European explorers and colonizers dealt with the nations they encountered in the Americas much as they dealt with other nations in Europe, the Levant, and north Africa.
Garcia - An American Life - by Blair Jackson. Jackson, who published a Deadhead fanzine and a couple of books about the Grateful Dead, wrote this comprehensive biography based on over a hundred interviews with Jerry Garcia’s family members, friend, lovers, bandmates, and the man himself. For someone who spread a lot of joy, Garcia’s life was marked by repeated tragedies - his father drowned to death when he was a small boy - and he struggled with his own demons and poor health based on his eating and drug habits. Still, if my kids allow there to be music at my funeral, I want them to play Uncle John’s Band and Ripple.
Judaism and Christianity: A Contrast- by Rabbi Stuart Federow. A gift from my younger daughter, who is a friend of Rabbi Federow. Federow is the rabbi of a Conservative synagogue in Houston and is the co-host, with a Catholic priest and Protestant minister, of a call-in talk show, A Show Of Faith. I wonder if they ever walk into a bar together. I haven’t yet gotten far into it, but this is more of a comparison than an apologetic, though Rabbi Federow does address the topic of “Messianic” and other Christian missionary efforts that deliberately blur lines between the two faiths in order to proselytize Jews.
Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land 1855-2005- by Nora Flaires and Nancy Hanflik. Authors Flaires and Hanflik are academic historians and their book is a history of the Jewish community of Flint, Michigan. Many histories of Jews in America focus on large cities. This book looks at how Jews in a smaller city like Flint, established their community and its institutions, against the backdrop of both rapid industrialization and then economic decline as the region’s dominant automotive industry was affected by increased gasoline prices and international competition.
Indigenous Continent- by Pekka Hämäläinen. European countries may have claimed much of North America, and the United States established a government here, but Hämäläinen argues that it was the “native” tribes that actually ruled much of the continent, at least until after the Battle of Little Big Horn. Rather than regarding them as primitive tribes, Hämäläinen’s position is that they were nations, capable of waging both war and conducting diplomacy long before the first Europeans arrived. My biggest beef with the author is in the title. There were no people indigenous to the Americas. The nations that the Europeans encountered were descended from people who migrated over the Bering Land Straight from Siberia, which explains the rather Asiatic ethnic features many “native Americans” have. I’ll note that the dictionary definition of indigenous has changed to include whatever folks happened to be in a place when Europeans showed up, even if they weren’t the first to be there.
Comanche Empire- by Pekka Hämäläinen. A companion volume to Indigenous Continent, Comanche Empire, makes it pretty clear that not all of the folks who were here when Columbus, Cortez, deSoto et al showed up were peace-loving. The Comanche’s may have sat around fires but they weren’t singing Kumbaya. They were fierce and brutal warriors who dominated and enslaved enemy tribes and decimated the Apaches before white folks ever showed up on the Plains. It wasn’t all Chief Dan George, guys.
Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust - by Yaffa Eliach. I started rereading this on October 8th, after the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. In the first new collection of Chassidic stories since Martin Buber, Eliach essentially, though never explicitly, deals with the concept theodicy, faith in the face of genuine evil. Eliach was a professor at Brooklyn College. In 1974, she founded the Center for Holocaust Studies, Documentation and Research in Brooklyn, New York, which collected over 2,700 audio interviews of Holocaust survivors, including many Chassidic Jews whose stories formed the basis of this book. Though Eliach doesn’t mention it in the book, studies of Holocaust survivors indicate that a larger percentage of those who were secular before the Shoah became religious as a result of their experiences than the percentage of religious Jews who lost their faith and became secular.
Palestine Betrayed- by Ephraim Karsh. Another politically incorrect book. Karsh’s thesis is that it was the behavior and attitudes of the Arab leaders, both within and outside of Palestine that lead to both conflicts with the Jews starting in the 1920s and the refugee issue after 1948. In many ways the struggle between Zionism and Palestinianism was the fight between Zionist Jews and a handfull of land-holding effendi Arab families, including the Husseinis (Grand Mufti), Khalidis (Obama’s buddy at Columbia, Rashid), Nuseibahs, and Nashashibis. Those names pop up in a lot. The success of the Zionist enterprise threatened their power. The Effendis played a double game, selling land to Jews and then agitating the fellahin, the peasants against the Jews. When push came to shove and Arab armies invaded the newly declared country of Israel, the effendis ran away, leaving the Arab population leaderless, and spurring masses of Arabs to run away as well.
Wow thank you for sharing. There are a few I am putting in the que to read and appreciate your list. Pretty serious reading. Anything read for fun? Have heard A Show of Faith you mention and thought the same thing. Is they the start of a joke..... Having only listened to a few (I could only find them on Spotify and dont use it much) the content was good.
Your funeral music is spot on, but hopefully that is long in the future. Enjoy the rest of the year and a toast to a happy and healthy 2024.