Recent reading

[bunrab]

Charles Stross, Merchants War - fourth volume in the series, and it's a muddled mess. Has devolved entirely into milfic, bows and arrows against machine guns, who's got the nuke, and bunches of ridiculous CIA abbreviations. Stross is better when he's being funny; this series started taking itself too seriously, and there's too much action - can't even keep track of how many characters there are any more, let alone who is on whose side and who is spying on whom. Difficult to finish - and it's still not done, either.

Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes that Run Our Government by Dana Milbank - done in a hokey anthropological study manner, it's really just an excuse to retell all the scandals that have happened inside the Beltway in the last 30 years. There's not really anything new here, nor any deep insight - mildly amusing, at best. Does include dirt on all sides of the political fence - it's not just against the current administration.

Gastroanomalies by James Lileks - making fun of horrible food from the '50's. Very funny. No redeeming social value, just fun. His new captions for pictures from old cookbooks are wonderful.

Conscientious Objections by Neil Postman - I remember being quite impressed and provoked to thought by this when it first came out in 1988, so when I spotted it on the library shelves, I thought, what the heck, let's reread it. It hasn't aged all that well in 20 years - parts of it are quite dated; Postman did not have an accurate forecast of what computers would do to us or how much stranger politics would become. His insights on why teacher education sucks are still valuable, though.

Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy - the answer is: in a thousand ways, no; in a couple of very important ways, yes. Murphy makes the point that pretty much every civilization since Rome fell (which he puts at AD 476) has compared itself to Rome, and pretty much every one comes to the same conclusion: "yes, but we're better! And we're not going to make the mistakes they did!" and that there are still plenty more mistakes to make. History repeats itself, but not exactly. His comparisons include social, cultural, political, and military, and for each he points out what's different, what's similar.

In the Ellipse just south of the White House stands a granite Zero Milestone, intended to be Washington's version of Rome's Golden Milestone, the symbolic central reference point from which all things are measured. Well, it isn't our central reference point at all - no one has ever heard of it, though you could argue that modern America began on this very spot. This was the place from which Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1919, set out to lead the army's "transcontinental motor convoy" across America. By the time Eisenhower reached San Francisco, sixty-two days later, he understood that America needed what Rome had possessed, a network of good public roads. When he became president, he created the interstate highway system. Tourists pay no attention to the Zero Milestone at all, and yet our own descent into hell started right there. [emphasis his]

---

That whole stretch of the Italian shore was vacationland for the Romans. Museum drawers are filled with ancient beachtown baubles of glass or clay: "Souvenir of Neapolis, " they might as well say, or "This Mule Climbed Mount Vesuvius." Villas crowded the lush volcanic hillsides, Sluice gates brought the renewing sea into the teeming fishponds that each great estate would have; the truly rich were known as piscinarii, "the fishpond set."

(And he then continues to call the rich among the Washington crowd the piscinarii.)

---

It will be a while, I hope, before tourists stroll among weeds poking up through the Map Room and the Oval Office, or pose before the scenic remaining columns of the South Portico. In Rome today you see leathery men in cheesy centurion's garb posing with tourists in front of the ruins. I'm not sure I want to know what the Washington equivalent will be - Green Berets, maybe, or TV reporters or special prosecutors.

I bet you can tell which of these books I liked best.

Comments

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

I live to serve :D

There's more today! I think I'm doing pretty well on my New Year's intent to increase the ratio of non-fiction to fiction.

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed the first two books of Stross's Merchant series, and I seriously hated the rest. I've had no trouble with who's who, but the levels of plot-based stupidity rose to approach the level of me wanting to throw the book across the room had I been the sort of person to indulge in such gestures.

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I liked the first two volumes too. Discovering new worlds, new timelines. That was good. My own thoughts on volumes three and four were more tearing the book in half down the spine, were I the sort of person...