Bookstrut...books you just finished
ehuffman
302 Posts
Alright everyone, I just finished this: 
and shit was crazy. Architecture and planning of the Chicago Worlds Fair, mixed with the story of serial killer HH Holmes and his mansion of insanity. Dude had gas pumped into rooms to kill folks, a soundproof gas vault, all sorts of crazy crap. True story like whoa.Here's the official descrip:"Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed."
and shit was crazy. Architecture and planning of the Chicago Worlds Fair, mixed with the story of serial killer HH Holmes and his mansion of insanity. Dude had gas pumped into rooms to kill folks, a soundproof gas vault, all sorts of crazy crap. True story like whoa.Here's the official descrip:"Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed."
Comments
pretty good collection of articles, stories and interviews.
The peasants, goes a tedious old joke about Wat Tyler's mob, are revolting. In JG Ballard's unnerving, prophetic novel Millennium People, however, it's the middle classes that are staging the revolution: blowing up the NFT, burning their books and defaulting on their maintenance charges. Rejecting, in short, everything that they've worked so hard for--The Bonfire of the Volvos, as one rather droll chapter heading has it.
At the forefront of this petit bourgeois insurrection are the occupants of Fulham's Chelsea Marina, (as ever with Ballard) an exclusive housing community. Led by the charismatic Dr Richard Gould, a disgraced paediatrician turned "Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set", Marina residents Kay Churchill, a former film lecturer; civil servant Vera Britain and Stephen Dexter, the parish vicar and an injured airman (another Ballard perennial) have unleashed an arson campaign against targets deemed suitably middle class.
David Markham, a psychiatrist and the book's steely narrator, is drawn into the Marina's inner circle after his ex-wife Laura is killed in an apparently meaningless bomb attack at Heathrow airport, (prime Ballard territory, of course). Meaningless is the insistent motif: Markham's current wife Sally was crippled in a freak accident and the murder of a banal if inoffensive television presenter (loosely modelled on Jill Dando) is one of the seemingly random violent acts unleashed by Gould, precisely because of their apparent randomness. "The absence of rational motive", as he says, "carries a significance of its own".
A master of sustained unease, Ballard has again excelled in fashioning a gripping, psychologically disturbing novel, that, like High Rise or Super-Cannes, is part cultural analysis and part surreal social prediction. --Travis Elborough
"1950s Los Angeles: the City of Angels has become the city of the Angel of Death. Communist witch-hunts and violent killings are terrorizing the community. Three men are plunged into a maelstrom of violence and deceit when their lives become linked as each one confronts his own personal darkness."
Finished this morning. Huge book written from five perspectives at once. The NY Times reviewer didn't like that, but I just don't think he's creative. Kind of book that is so great in the middle but you realize it had to get there and it has to go somewhere from there and that's kind of sad.
I found out recently that the professor whose class I read this in hated it. I liked it, and Tuff, as has been talked about on this board before. I was surprised she didn't like it, and it makes me want to read it again because I don't like disagreeing with her.
that surprises me as well.
i've been reading:
i've only seen a handful of dudes movies, i'm hardly a film buff, but i had to pick it up on the strength of the title. and i generally like reading about semi lunatic artist types. the book doesn't spend too much time dwelling on his work, it's mostly a collection of antecdotes about his childhood, failed orgy attempts and his ability to telepathically hypnotize people.
Age of Propaganda
How was Mexico?
What I just finished (and loved a great deal)?
{ A Long Way Down ?? Nick Hornby }
What I'm drifiting in and out of lately?
{ The Fortress of Solitude ?? Jonathan Lethem }
{ An Interrupted Life ?? Etty Hillesum }
{ How to Breathe Underwater ?? Julie Orringer }
{ Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 ?? Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson }
{ Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch ?? Dai Sijie }
{ we ain't got no car #7 ?? Jack Saturn }
When y'all said bookstrut, I read it as bookslut. Propers to Jessa.
- spidey
good stuff... but not like the other one.
will call you soon..... get your ass out to NY.
WHAT...don't fuck with me and Dumbledore...we're like this:
Kevin Starr
Material Dreams Southern California Through The 1920s.
OK book. Not one of Starr's better CA history books. Goes too much for the middle and upper classes. Will talk about the oligarchy but never explains how it was formed, etc. Too much on culture, architecture, etc. and not enough on the role of power or minorities.
Chris Rhomberg
No There There Race, Class and Political Community In Oakland.
Good history of Oakland and a nice pre-cursor to the excellent American Babylon by Robert Self that I read last year which covers Alameda County from the 1960s to the present. No There There covers Oakland from the 1800s to the 1960s. The KKK actually got a slate of candidates elected to run the city for a short period of time!
Ishamel Reed
Blues City
Walking narrative of Oakland. Has some nice jabs at Mayor Brown as Reed travels around downtown and West Oakland.
California History Taming The Elephant: Politics, Government and Law in Pioneer California
Collection of scholarly articles on post-Gold Rush CA. Good 1st half on the power struggles over the formation of CA's government and the role of racism, but then tapers off in the 2nd half with uninteresting topics.
California History Rooted In Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, And Community In Gold Rush California
Excellent collection of articles on Gold Rush CA that covers art, history, race, etc. in Gold Rush times.
A Golden State Mining And Economic Development In Gold Rush California
Same series of collection of articles about Gold Rush CA. Nice breakdown in how CA was formed during the Gold Rush.
David E. Hayes-Bautista
La Nueva California Latinos In The Gold State
Excellent book detailing Latinos, mostly Mexicans, in CA. Goes a long way in breaking down how discussion of poverty in the U.S. became centered around race in the 1960s-80s and how Latinos don't fit the stereotypes of the poor in the U.S. Latinos have the lowest education rates in CA, and the highest poverty rates yet have the lowest welfare rates and the highest marriage rates in the state breaking the "Culture of Poverty" theories. Lots of good cultural stuff as well on teh differences between Mexicans that grew up int he 1950s and 60s and the huge wave of immigrants that came in the 80s-Present.
Tomas Almaguer
Racial Fault Lines The Historical Origins Of White Supremacy In California
OK book on race in CA. The main probelm I found was that the author drifted away from race too much in the historical backgrounds to issues and basically stuck to the line that everyone not white got screwed in CA history and doesn't spend nearly enough time on anything postive that happened.
As usual...
And now, a couple recommendations:
Peace...
FNM
In the middle of this right now. Really gives you a sense of how raw and totally fucked up things are over there.
Interesting theories in here including how Roe vs. Wade caused the drop in crime in the '90s and not new police tactics and increased police forces. Things like that. It was ok, I was a little disappointed.
yo, postmod-emynd, did you ever read that barthelme i tossed your way year or so back?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1565124847/qid=1125023814/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-5805690-3319142?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
I read it after. Illuminatus! was my intro to RAW. Have you read Prometheus Rising?
How about the fact that the economy was booming in the mid-to-late 1990s with the lowest unemployment in 30 years???
Read Trout Fishing in America at the beginning of the summer and totally felt Brautigan's writing. Hadn't had that happen in a while where I pick up a book by an author and totally want to read everything by him/her. Funny playful writer. Too bad he had to go and kill himself. He alludes to suicide a bit in his last book.
A Scanner Darlky by Phillip K. Dick. Not quite as super crazy metaphysical alternate reality as most of his other books. Lots of drugs in this book. You can totally tell he was influenced by his own drug use and the counter culture movement in the Bay Area in the 70s.
Wacky science fiction reccommended by a friend. Haven't finished it yet. Features Hiro Protagonist a samurai pizza delivery guy. The future where the only thing the U.S. is good at is music, movies, software, and pizza delivery.