Books – The New Modern

If These Walls Could Sprechen

I’m delighted to share this recently published story of a small German country house that stood witness to nearly a century of history, two totalitarian regimes, and several generations of ordinary people. Humans will do remarkable (and sometimes terrible) things to persist and survive as wars, empires, and borders change around them.

A few miles west of Berlin, a little house sits on Groß Glienicke lake, a quiet eye in the storm of Europe’s worst century ever.

Nazi bureaucrats arrived at their Final Solution at nearby Wannsee. The Red Army poured through at the end of World War II. Churchill and Truman drove past on their way to meet Stalin in Potsdam. The Berlin Airlift rattled the cupboards as planes landed at and left Gatow airfield. Secret policemen lurked as the Berlin Wall rose. The house endured the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, the fall of the Wall, and the reunification of Germany.

…Josef Stalin supposedly quipped that one death might be a tragedy but a million deaths are a mere statistic. Harding’s work stands in defiance of that heartless calculation. Against the No Life Matters ethos of the 20th century, The House by the Lake proves that history’s lethally impersonal forces, mass displacement, arbitrary borders, marching armies, and totalitarian dictatorships cannot fully erase the private joys and sorrows of individual lives.

The monsters that torment us – All your fears are well-founded

On Halloween The Wall Street Journal published my review of two books of cultural history that connect our horror stories with very real phenomena.

Haunted by Leo Braudy and Ghostland by Colin Dickey show us that our horror stories are not trivial entertainment, but expressions of profound human emotions and indirect responses to very tangible realities. Both authors make clear that folk tales, urban legends and ghostly visitors carry heavy burdens of historical, spiritual and even theological significance—and they suggest that by analyzing them we can learn a great deal about ourselves.

…from the Sirens that tempted Odysseus to the demons Sarah Michelle Gellar faced down in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” “Each age has its own particular fears,” Mr. Braudy writes, “and the history of horror is the history of the disquiets of the soul, the inner life, made public, taking on the colorations of the era in which they appear.”

If you are a subscriber, you can read the full review of Haunted and Ghostland in The Wall Street Journal.

Bridging Kindle books and print

This seems like pretty big news for those of us who are still heavily invested in print. Of course, I will always collect quality hardcovers of classic literature and other “keepers.”

Amazon’s Kindle MatchBook will let you buy cheap digital editions of print books you already own
Summary: Amazon’s new service, Kindle MatchBook, will let users buy discounted digital versions of print books that they’ve already bought from Amazon. But the service isn’t available for every book.

Lucky Jim reissue is great news for alcoholics and academics

Everyone who has had a brush with academic life and/or is an alcoholic, will relish every page of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.

Take, for instance, his description of the main character’s hangover:

“[Jim] Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way… He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning… His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad”

Return of the Kingsley | The American Conservative
Prayers have been answered: Kingsley Amis’s novels Lucky Jim and The Old Devils are being reissued in the United States. The New York Review of Books Press has printed the new editions…

An Interview with Anya Kamenetz about student loans, higher education, and her book “DIY U”

Anya Kamenetz is the author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. She’s also the subject of our very first (and very beta) video interview:

DIY U is about the future of higher education:

It’s a story about the communities of visionaries who are tackling the enormous challenges of cost, access, and quality in higher ed, using new technologies to bring us a revolution in higher learning that is affordable, accessible, and learner-centered.

For more, be sure to visit the DIY U website and follow Anya on twitter @anya1anya.

We’ll soon post a continuation of this discussion in audio form.

Karen Armstrong’s Case for God

Religion poisons everything… God is a delusion… the end of faith… these are phrases lately found among the burgeoning supply of books by “new atheists” who take arms against a sea of holy rollers and jihadis. In an age of faith-based politics, resurgent creationism, and religious terrorism, aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have become bestselling authors.

A new book attempts to take a stand against both the religious fundamentalists and their militant atheist foes. The Case for God is a landmark work of intellectual and theological history by the renowned scholar of religion Karen Armstrong.

The book is nothing less than a comprehensive history of human religion in just over three hundred pages. From painted traces of Paleolithic hunter-shamans on the Lascaux Cave walls to hip postmodernist theology, Armstrong offers a lucid narrative of humanity’s relationship with the divine. In her telling, the story of God and man unrolls like an ancient tapestry richly embroidered with scholarly insights and references from the world’s many religious traditions.

It is a compelling story, but it isn’t clear that many people—secularists or religionists—will find it persuasive.

Read the rest of my review of The Case for God at The Book Studio.

Ted Gioia on the Birth and Death of the Cool

Has coolness runs its course? Are we living in a post-“cool” culture?

Musician and writer Ted Gioia talks about his new book, The Birth and Death of the Cool in episode 102 of The New Modern podcast. You can listen using the embedded player above or via iTunes. Please consider leaving a review and subscribing (for free) to future New Modern podcasts in the iTunes store.

Renowned for his important books about music, especially his History of Jazz, Ted Gioia is a prolific culture writer and literary critic.

Scott Timberg, the Los Angeles writer (and a pretty cool guy), recently posted a Q&A with Gioia on his new book. Though many will find much to disagree with in Gioia’s arguments, there’s a unquestionably a new fashion for authenticity and sincerity.

Whether that spirit marks the death of “cool” in the sense that Ted Gioia means it, remains to be seen. Listen to our interview, read the book, and decide for yourself.

[Watch this space for additional links and a full transcript.]

Tyler Cowen: Information Revolution, Autism, Digital Fragmentation, and the New Cultural Order

[powerpress]

Huffduff it [huh?]

Episode 101 of The New Modern podcast is an interview with Tyler Cowen about his fascinating new book Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.

In addition to his renown as a professor of economics at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen is familiar to many habitual web surfers through his always absorbing blog Marginal Revolution.

A behavioral economist, Tyler is also deeply interested in culture, technology, and the arts. His latest book combines all these subjects in one absorbing read.

Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World is loaded with provocative ideas and surprising claims. I still haven’t wrapped my mind around a number of Cowen’s big ideas and insights, but (like it or not) I think he has identified some profound truths about our increasingly fragmented culture. Continue reading Tyler Cowen: Information Revolution, Autism, Digital Fragmentation, and the New Cultural Order

Louis Armstrong: Terry Teachout’s stirring new biography of the jazz icon

Pops, Terry Teachout‘s new biography of Louis Armstrong, gets a rave review in the New York Times:

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom.

The full review of Pops by Michiko Kakutani is well worth reading. This is a book about a great musician and performer, but it’s also a story about race, American history and identity, and the nature of genius.

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Hear Teachout read from the book–passages on Armstrong’s love for marijuana and his bold denunciations of segregation–in this Vanity Fair “Writers Reading” podcast.

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And enjoy this 1956 performance in London… “Mack the Knife.”