Welcome to Book Shares1
Author: Erick Keleman
Title: Textual editing and criticism: an introduction
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: How do we go from an author’s rough draft to a final manuscript? What do we do when the author heavily revised his writing between editions? What about the many versions of Emily Dickinson’s poems in her drawer? How do we even detect this sort of thing, let alone work with it?
This covers all of that. Keleman has a useful introduction to textual criticism, which takes up about a third of the book. The next third is a collection of essays (including such classics as A.E. Housman’s ’The application of thought to textual criticism’), and the last third is a collection of exercises for the student.
Keleman focuses almost entirely on English literature, thus avoiding the vexed questions of Biblical criticism or of works in other languages (not to mention the horrific problems entailed in criticism by use of translations), but this is a very good book, clear and readable, and ideal for someone wanting to know what’s involved in editing literary works.
Author: Mary Roach
Title: Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: How do people live in space?
Mary Roach tells us, in full detail from breathing through sex to defecation, with copious notes from astronauts, encounters with chary NASA PR people, and a host of entertaining anecdotes and footnotes.
Author: Alfred Sendry & Mildren Norton
Title: David’s harp: the story of music in Biblical times
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: A nice popular summary of Hebrew music during Biblical times, organized more or less in accordance with the order of the Biblical books.
Useful as an introduction to the topic.
Author: Stuart A. P. Murray
Title: The library: an illustrated history
?
Rating: 4
Summary: A fairly light–weight collection of library history, with many interesting pictures. Much I already knew; much I did not. The picture selection is better than the text.
Author: R. Crumb
Title: The book of Genesis, illustrated
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: I admire Crumb’s epic attempt to tell the story of Genesis in comic–book form. (Let’s face it, “graphic novel” is just a relabelling of “big fat comic book” to appease literary snobs.) There’s obviously a lot of work, and a lot of thought, and a lot of effort to be faithful to the history, and the tale, and the text.
The problem I have is the art. Crumb is obviously a very good artist, with high technical skills. This is not the sort of primitivism that's hard to distinguish from "never learned to draw".
But Crumb doesn’t do beauty. At his level of talent that has to be deliberate. Everything is ugly, almost painful to look at. I admire the effort; I admire the faithfulness; the actual drawings make my eyes hurt.
Worth looking it, but be aware that Crumb is not to all tastes.
Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Title: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: This book won’t make any sense unless you’re aware of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which is a massive late–Victorian collection of primitive (and not–so–primitive) religious and/or magical rituals.
Wittgenstein, the great philosopher of language, read this late in his life and made a few remarks, which were edited and arranged by his disciples after his death.
It’s very interesting to watch 35 pages totally puncture 22 volumes. “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes.”
“All that Frazer does is to make this practice plausible to people who think as he does.”
And many other worthwhile observations.
Author: Ada Rapoport-Albert
Title: Essays in Jewish historiography
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: This isn’t Jewish history; it’s the history of Jewish history. How did they think about their own history and the writers of that history.
Sort of a complicated meta–discipline, historiography, with a tendency to start chasing its own tail in circles around the room. This book is a collection of essays, starting with Josephus’ view of proper history in Against Apion, and ending with consideration of Judaism’s historiography in the modern world.
If you like this sort of stuff, you may find this volume rewarding. If you hate theory and just want to read the good stuff, skip this.
Author: David W. Anthony
Title: The lost world of Old Europe: the Danube valley, 5000-3500 BC
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: While Mesopotamia was growing, and Sumer and Babylon were young, there was another civilization in another river valley. Unfortunately they never learned to write, and so we do not know their names or their stories, and can only write of them clumsily, in the archaeologist’s vocabulary, as the “Cucuteni” culture, or “Old Europe”, in area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the Danube valley south of the Carpathian Mountains.
We know that some of the things they made are beautiful.
We know that they smelted copper, perhaps as early as anywhere in Anatolia or the Near East.
We know that they traded for long distances (for instance, using Aegean seashells for jewelry).
Much of the rest of what we know is summarized in this book, a collection of essays by various archaeolgoists illustrating a museum exhibition catalogue. Figurines, houses, metallurgy, seashells, cemeteries, and some speculations about how it all ended (most likely, destruction around 3500 BC by the first waves of Indo–European horsemen from the steppes to the east).
Fascinating.
Author: Jane Austen
Title: Pride and Prejudice
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: Mr. Darcy.
Elizabeth Bennet.
Mr. Bennet.
Jane and Mr. Bingley.
Lydia and Mr. Wickham.
If you already know these people, you will know that no review could possibly do their story justice. If you haven’t met them, what are you waiting for. Go read the book. NOW. Seriously. NOW.
It’s that good. Insightful, hilarious, wise, dramatic, and did I mention hilarious?
Author: R. Dale Guthrie
Title: The nature of paleolithic art
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: Guthrie started out as a biologist trying to use Stone Age cave paintings to find out things about ancient animals; over the course of a lifetime, he has moved to seeing what Stone Age cave paintings can tell us about the life of our ancestors.
Author: Mary Douglas
Title: In the wilderness: the doctrine of defilement in the Book of Numbers
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: OK, so Numbers is the most boring book in the Bible, right?
Not so fast, says anthropologist Mary Douglas. It only looks that way because we don’t know the structure and the reasons for writing it the way they did, which she then proceeds to explicate in some detail.
I’m not entirely sure I buy her argument that the book is mostly about racial integration in Persian-period Judaism, but she makes a good many points, and two of her footnotes led me to grab other books via LINK+, and her analysis of the book’s structure is extremely interesting. Her perspective as an anthropologist looking at the different ways that communities structure themselves (hierarchy, enclave, individualists) and what it means for how they set boundaries around the group and how they function internally is all extremely interesting.
Oh, and the defilement thing? It’s very interesting to note that in Numbers, defilement is never caused by strangers, by outsiders: it’s caused by the things you do, and the things that come out of your body. This is a major difference between Israel and everyone else: the stranger is welcome in the camp. (If he has the right to approach the altar and offer sacrifices, that means he’s subject to the laws about what defiles you when you get close to the altar, and that means he's also able to access how you get cleansed so you can.)
Thought–provoking.
Author: Joseph C. Harsch
Title: Patterns of Conquest
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: One of my little hobbies as a historian is reading books that were published about the time events took place and seeing how they compare with the story as we know it today. (Ultimately, this helps me calibrate my opinion of books being published about current affairs so I can say “yeah, that sounds about right” or “my God, that reporter is totally wrong in saying US forces are being defeated; every mechanized army in history has run into a logistics pause at 300 miles from the startline”, et cetera.)
This book was written by an American journalist in 1941 (mostly before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union) and Harsch gets much of it exactly right. Not always (despite being cautious, he can’t quite evade getting saturated with Nazi propaganda; he underestimates Himmler and overestimates Goering; production numbers for planes and so forth are quite wildly off), but the overall description is eerily accurate.
Sometimes you can see things coming. The Holocaust is about the only thing he misses, partly because it hadn’t quite started yet, but he does see the preliminary stages of mass murder in operation (the “mercy killings” of those in institutions; the murder of many Poles).
The “feel” of things is slightly different; we tend to think of WW II as the Holocaust, the Eastern Front, and the Allied offensives of 1944-45 crushing Germany. Harsch is writing before any of that happens, and the most notable thing about his writing is the sense in which the Nazis are gangsters more than warlords; fraud, deceit, sharing the loot, and intimidation are their great tools. There’s a repeated thread of “they really are like this, their big tool is simply that nobody believes that they mean what they say. They do, they do!”
And, he thinks, they will collapse if they are ever firmly opposed and stood up to. I think some of this may be him attempting to make a case (“what should we do” was a major, major political debate in the US during 1940–41, and this book is partly a contribution to that debate), and certainly when it came down to it Nazi Germany had to be forcibly torn apart rather than collapsing. So far, not so good in the prediction market.
But the analysis of how the Nazis worked is a very good one, and this book is notable as a reminder that journalists can/i>get things right in contemporary affairs.
Author: Jacob Milgrim
Title: Anchor Bible: Leviticus
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: Superb.
You’d think Leviticus was the most boring book in the Bible (except for Numbers), or maybe the most annoying.
In the hands of a master commentator like Milgrim, it becomes fascinating. There’s a very through look at the laws and how they function, and the various sorts of editing the book has undergone over the years, and the overall worldview and mindset behind the laws and the events recounted.
Admittedly, plowing through three volumes of fine print is difficult, but it’s rewarding.
Superb.
Author: Karl-Heinz Frieser
Title: The blitzkrieg legend: the 1940 campaign in the west
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: A detailed description of the German 1940 campaign, from its origination in a brilliant plan by Erich von Manstein to the successful conclusion of its first part, complete with a detailed analysis of what happened and why, and how later historians (and some people at the time) misinterpreted it.
Very readable (and kudos to the translator, who’s done a remarkably good job), and a major work of history.
If you like military history this is a must–read.
Author: John Marco Allegro
Title: The Shapira affair
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: An brief account of a 19th–century forgery (some fragments of a text a Jerusalem antiquities dealer claimed were an early version of Deuteronomy); Allegro’s valiant attempt to retrieve the forgeries as something similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls does not inspire confidence.
Author: Daniel Charles
Title: Master mind
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: A nice popular biography of Fritz Haber, the guy who discovered how to synthesize ammonia. More of his personal life than the chemical or engineering details involved, but a good intro.
Author: Sanford Schwartz
Title: C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: A superb examination of Lewis’ space trilogy, focusing on the ideas that Lewis was engaged against in each of the three books, and the similarities in their structure. Very enlightening and highly recommended.
Author: Gordon J. Wenham
Title: The book of Leviticus
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: A very good short commentary on the book of Leviticus, focusing on its meaning for today. (Very different from the Anchor Bible commentary, but complementary to it.)
Author: Robert Allan Doughty
Title: The breaking point: Sedan and the fall of France, 1940
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful analysis of the Battle of Sedan in May 1940. If you like acute descriptions of military operations from both sides, then you’ll love this book. Doughty analyzes both French and German reports of the battle, down to very detailed levels, and penetrates through layers of legend and obfuscation afterwards to reveal what happened.
Author: Benson Bobrick
Title: Master of war: the life of general George H. Thomas
LINK+
Rating: 3
Summary: George Thomas is, for Civil War generals of his quality, the least–known. Unfortunately this account is unlikely to change things: while it gives a decent account of his early life, it really fails at describing the deeds that made him famous. (Four pages for his very important role in saving the Union army from catastrophe at the Battle of Chickamauga, compared to more than that blaming Grant for various things? We understand the need to sharpen the moral contrast between your hero and everyone else, but I think Thomas would be the last to want to win renown by being unfair to others.)
A useful intro to Thomas if you know nothing of him or the Civil War; not a valuable book if you do.
Author: Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette
Title: Chemistry: the impure science
LSU
Rating: 3
Summary: I pulled this off the book truck because it looked like a history of chemistry. It turned out to be more about the philosophy of chemistry. Still interesting, but not what I was looking for, and perhaps a bit too inclined to take literary treatments of chemists as serious evidence for what real chemists are up to.
Author: John L. Ingraham
Title: March of the microbes: sighting the unseen
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: A nice guide to the vast variety of microorganisms we might see every day, and how we see their effects –– ranging from a toddler with diarrhea to a gall on a vine to the red color of a salt pool in San Francisco Bay.
Very readable; very fun; recommended if you like biology or the secret causes of things.
Title: Textual editing and criticism: an introduction
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: How do we go from an author’s rough draft to a final manuscript? What do we do when the author heavily revised his writing between editions? What about the many versions of Emily Dickinson’s poems in her drawer? How do we even detect this sort of thing, let alone work with it?
This covers all of that. Keleman has a useful introduction to textual criticism, which takes up about a third of the book. The next third is a collection of essays (including such classics as A.E. Housman’s ’The application of thought to textual criticism’), and the last third is a collection of exercises for the student.
Keleman focuses almost entirely on English literature, thus avoiding the vexed questions of Biblical criticism or of works in other languages (not to mention the horrific problems entailed in criticism by use of translations), but this is a very good book, clear and readable, and ideal for someone wanting to know what’s involved in editing literary works.
Author: Mary Roach
Title: Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: How do people live in space?
Mary Roach tells us, in full detail from breathing through sex to defecation, with copious notes from astronauts, encounters with chary NASA PR people, and a host of entertaining anecdotes and footnotes.
Author: Alfred Sendry & Mildren Norton
Title: David’s harp: the story of music in Biblical times
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: A nice popular summary of Hebrew music during Biblical times, organized more or less in accordance with the order of the Biblical books.
Useful as an introduction to the topic.
Author: Stuart A. P. Murray
Title: The library: an illustrated history
?
Rating: 4
Summary: A fairly light–weight collection of library history, with many interesting pictures. Much I already knew; much I did not. The picture selection is better than the text.
Author: R. Crumb
Title: The book of Genesis, illustrated
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: I admire Crumb’s epic attempt to tell the story of Genesis in comic–book form. (Let’s face it, “graphic novel” is just a relabelling of “big fat comic book” to appease literary snobs.) There’s obviously a lot of work, and a lot of thought, and a lot of effort to be faithful to the history, and the tale, and the text.
The problem I have is the art. Crumb is obviously a very good artist, with high technical skills. This is not the sort of primitivism that's hard to distinguish from "never learned to draw".
But Crumb doesn’t do beauty. At his level of talent that has to be deliberate. Everything is ugly, almost painful to look at. I admire the effort; I admire the faithfulness; the actual drawings make my eyes hurt.
Worth looking it, but be aware that Crumb is not to all tastes.
Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Title: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: This book won’t make any sense unless you’re aware of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which is a massive late–Victorian collection of primitive (and not–so–primitive) religious and/or magical rituals.
Wittgenstein, the great philosopher of language, read this late in his life and made a few remarks, which were edited and arranged by his disciples after his death.
It’s very interesting to watch 35 pages totally puncture 22 volumes. “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes.”
“All that Frazer does is to make this practice plausible to people who think as he does.”
And many other worthwhile observations.
Author: Ada Rapoport-Albert
Title: Essays in Jewish historiography
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: This isn’t Jewish history; it’s the history of Jewish history. How did they think about their own history and the writers of that history.
Sort of a complicated meta–discipline, historiography, with a tendency to start chasing its own tail in circles around the room. This book is a collection of essays, starting with Josephus’ view of proper history in Against Apion, and ending with consideration of Judaism’s historiography in the modern world.
If you like this sort of stuff, you may find this volume rewarding. If you hate theory and just want to read the good stuff, skip this.
Author: David W. Anthony
Title: The lost world of Old Europe: the Danube valley, 5000-3500 BC
LINK+
Rating: 4
Summary: While Mesopotamia was growing, and Sumer and Babylon were young, there was another civilization in another river valley. Unfortunately they never learned to write, and so we do not know their names or their stories, and can only write of them clumsily, in the archaeologist’s vocabulary, as the “Cucuteni” culture, or “Old Europe”, in area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the Danube valley south of the Carpathian Mountains.
We know that some of the things they made are beautiful.
We know that they smelted copper, perhaps as early as anywhere in Anatolia or the Near East.
We know that they traded for long distances (for instance, using Aegean seashells for jewelry).
Much of the rest of what we know is summarized in this book, a collection of essays by various archaeolgoists illustrating a museum exhibition catalogue. Figurines, houses, metallurgy, seashells, cemeteries, and some speculations about how it all ended (most likely, destruction around 3500 BC by the first waves of Indo–European horsemen from the steppes to the east).
Fascinating.
Author: Jane Austen
Title: Pride and Prejudice
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: Mr. Darcy.
Elizabeth Bennet.
Mr. Bennet.
Jane and Mr. Bingley.
Lydia and Mr. Wickham.
If you already know these people, you will know that no review could possibly do their story justice. If you haven’t met them, what are you waiting for. Go read the book. NOW. Seriously. NOW.
It’s that good. Insightful, hilarious, wise, dramatic, and did I mention hilarious?
Author: R. Dale Guthrie
Title: The nature of paleolithic art
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: Guthrie started out as a biologist trying to use Stone Age cave paintings to find out things about ancient animals; over the course of a lifetime, he has moved to seeing what Stone Age cave paintings can tell us about the life of our ancestors.
Author: Mary Douglas
Title: In the wilderness: the doctrine of defilement in the Book of Numbers
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: OK, so Numbers is the most boring book in the Bible, right?
Not so fast, says anthropologist Mary Douglas. It only looks that way because we don’t know the structure and the reasons for writing it the way they did, which she then proceeds to explicate in some detail.
I’m not entirely sure I buy her argument that the book is mostly about racial integration in Persian-period Judaism, but she makes a good many points, and two of her footnotes led me to grab other books via LINK+, and her analysis of the book’s structure is extremely interesting. Her perspective as an anthropologist looking at the different ways that communities structure themselves (hierarchy, enclave, individualists) and what it means for how they set boundaries around the group and how they function internally is all extremely interesting.
Oh, and the defilement thing? It’s very interesting to note that in Numbers, defilement is never caused by strangers, by outsiders: it’s caused by the things you do, and the things that come out of your body. This is a major difference between Israel and everyone else: the stranger is welcome in the camp. (If he has the right to approach the altar and offer sacrifices, that means he’s subject to the laws about what defiles you when you get close to the altar, and that means he's also able to access how you get cleansed so you can.)
Thought–provoking.
Author: Joseph C. Harsch
Title: Patterns of Conquest
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: One of my little hobbies as a historian is reading books that were published about the time events took place and seeing how they compare with the story as we know it today. (Ultimately, this helps me calibrate my opinion of books being published about current affairs so I can say “yeah, that sounds about right” or “my God, that reporter is totally wrong in saying US forces are being defeated; every mechanized army in history has run into a logistics pause at 300 miles from the startline”, et cetera.)
This book was written by an American journalist in 1941 (mostly before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union) and Harsch gets much of it exactly right. Not always (despite being cautious, he can’t quite evade getting saturated with Nazi propaganda; he underestimates Himmler and overestimates Goering; production numbers for planes and so forth are quite wildly off), but the overall description is eerily accurate.
Sometimes you can see things coming. The Holocaust is about the only thing he misses, partly because it hadn’t quite started yet, but he does see the preliminary stages of mass murder in operation (the “mercy killings” of those in institutions; the murder of many Poles).
The “feel” of things is slightly different; we tend to think of WW II as the Holocaust, the Eastern Front, and the Allied offensives of 1944-45 crushing Germany. Harsch is writing before any of that happens, and the most notable thing about his writing is the sense in which the Nazis are gangsters more than warlords; fraud, deceit, sharing the loot, and intimidation are their great tools. There’s a repeated thread of “they really are like this, their big tool is simply that nobody believes that they mean what they say. They do, they do!”
And, he thinks, they will collapse if they are ever firmly opposed and stood up to. I think some of this may be him attempting to make a case (“what should we do” was a major, major political debate in the US during 1940–41, and this book is partly a contribution to that debate), and certainly when it came down to it Nazi Germany had to be forcibly torn apart rather than collapsing. So far, not so good in the prediction market.
But the analysis of how the Nazis worked is a very good one, and this book is notable as a reminder that journalists can/i>get things right in contemporary affairs.
Author: Jacob Milgrim
Title: Anchor Bible: Leviticus
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: Superb.
You’d think Leviticus was the most boring book in the Bible (except for Numbers), or maybe the most annoying.
In the hands of a master commentator like Milgrim, it becomes fascinating. There’s a very through look at the laws and how they function, and the various sorts of editing the book has undergone over the years, and the overall worldview and mindset behind the laws and the events recounted.
Admittedly, plowing through three volumes of fine print is difficult, but it’s rewarding.
Superb.
Author: Karl-Heinz Frieser
Title: The blitzkrieg legend: the 1940 campaign in the west
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: A detailed description of the German 1940 campaign, from its origination in a brilliant plan by Erich von Manstein to the successful conclusion of its first part, complete with a detailed analysis of what happened and why, and how later historians (and some people at the time) misinterpreted it.
Very readable (and kudos to the translator, who’s done a remarkably good job), and a major work of history.
If you like military history this is a must–read.
Author: John Marco Allegro
Title: The Shapira affair
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: An brief account of a 19th–century forgery (some fragments of a text a Jerusalem antiquities dealer claimed were an early version of Deuteronomy); Allegro’s valiant attempt to retrieve the forgeries as something similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls does not inspire confidence.
Author: Daniel Charles
Title: Master mind
LSU
Rating: 4
Summary: A nice popular biography of Fritz Haber, the guy who discovered how to synthesize ammonia. More of his personal life than the chemical or engineering details involved, but a good intro.
Author: Sanford Schwartz
Title: C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: A superb examination of Lewis’ space trilogy, focusing on the ideas that Lewis was engaged against in each of the three books, and the similarities in their structure. Very enlightening and highly recommended.
Author: Gordon J. Wenham
Title: The book of Leviticus
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: A very good short commentary on the book of Leviticus, focusing on its meaning for today. (Very different from the Anchor Bible commentary, but complementary to it.)
Author: Robert Allan Doughty
Title: The breaking point: Sedan and the fall of France, 1940
LINK+
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful analysis of the Battle of Sedan in May 1940. If you like acute descriptions of military operations from both sides, then you’ll love this book. Doughty analyzes both French and German reports of the battle, down to very detailed levels, and penetrates through layers of legend and obfuscation afterwards to reveal what happened.
Author: Benson Bobrick
Title: Master of war: the life of general George H. Thomas
LINK+
Rating: 3
Summary: George Thomas is, for Civil War generals of his quality, the least–known. Unfortunately this account is unlikely to change things: while it gives a decent account of his early life, it really fails at describing the deeds that made him famous. (Four pages for his very important role in saving the Union army from catastrophe at the Battle of Chickamauga, compared to more than that blaming Grant for various things? We understand the need to sharpen the moral contrast between your hero and everyone else, but I think Thomas would be the last to want to win renown by being unfair to others.)
A useful intro to Thomas if you know nothing of him or the Civil War; not a valuable book if you do.
Author: Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette
Title: Chemistry: the impure science
LSU
Rating: 3
Summary: I pulled this off the book truck because it looked like a history of chemistry. It turned out to be more about the philosophy of chemistry. Still interesting, but not what I was looking for, and perhaps a bit too inclined to take literary treatments of chemists as serious evidence for what real chemists are up to.
Author: John L. Ingraham
Title: March of the microbes: sighting the unseen
LSU
Rating: 5
Summary: A nice guide to the vast variety of microorganisms we might see every day, and how we see their effects –– ranging from a toddler with diarrhea to a gall on a vine to the red color of a salt pool in San Francisco Bay.
Very readable; very fun; recommended if you like biology or the secret causes of things.