Oh, just realised that Annie Jacobsen will have a new book released in Jan-2021: First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance. Can’t wait!
1 Like
Hey thanks again, I realise now after googling, I had read her Area 51 book! Now my heads up.
2 Likes
I enjoyed - Birdsong - many years ago
1 Like
runs screaming into the night
4 Likes
Strange Title for a book.
It works though 
3 Likes
Don’t Raven’s hop rather than run though, or is it running with a heavy limp 
1 Like
The birds hop, but this Raven is human 
1 Like
I know, I have the first two books 
2 Likes
Just saw the reviews on amazon and now I’m wondering who snowy is
Looking at you @Limiescouse 
3 Likes
He’s a legend:
2 Likes
Ha, fair enough.
I bought a new Amazon Fire pad this week (dont do it if you want a real tablet) and one of the first ads it showed me was book 2 (which I havent read).
3 Likes
My cousin-in-law, Gilbert King, is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I’m reading through his books at the moment which all focus on racial justice in the American South (mainly Florida) between 1910-1960. They are non-fiction with elements of artistic license taken to help the flow - similar to how Stephen Ambrose writes in Band of Brothers.
His Pulitzer Prize winning book is “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America”. I’m about halfway through it right now and it is excellent. Lionsgate bought the film rights to it a few years ago but things have slowed down - at one point they had Jamie Foxx, Tom Hardy, Jennifer Lawrence and Octavia Spencer signed up but apparently these things change all the time. He also has “The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South” and “Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found” which I found equally good reads.
I’ve always wanted to write a book about the Rwandan Genocide, which was my dissertation for my BA, but I’m not sure I would have the time to do it and travel to Rwanda would be very much required to do it any justice in my opinion. African History is fascinating and brutal but often overlooked.
5 Likes
Thats a great post; you could do it if you really wanted to mate. But it is a gargantuan undertaking at the first go. I am trying to write a novella at the moment, about 100 pages, but even that seems like K2 at times.
3 Likes
Ive tried reading Leopold’s Ghost about 3 times and cannot do it.
3 Likes
100 pages is a massive undertaking, I can definitely see how that feels like a mountain! The most I’ve ever written so far is 46 pages, which was the dissertation, and that took me a near full time focus for about 7 months.
I think taking the first steps and seeing a long road ahead is what puts me off currently. I suppose I could just start doing it and see if it went anywhere. My idea is to analyse the causes of the genocide (which has been done before, particularly by Linda Melvern) but then to investigate the psychology of those who committed the killings and what drove them. Why normal people can turn into mass murderers is something I’ve always found interesting.
There is plenty of this kind of research done on the Holocaust but other genocides are not covered as much. Whilst there are similarities in motivations to the Nazis it is definitely not the same.
4 Likes
I read Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Roméo Dallaire, so it’s a different take from the analysis/psychology investigation point of view. I also read several books on Balkan Genocides. However, the one that brought me to tears and broke my heart was The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.
4 Likes
Funnily enough, this was the last non-fiction I read and it may be of interest to you, as Pinker, being a psychologist, does devote a lot of time to the root causes of violence; If I remember rightly he rooted it in a devaluation of the ‘other’ group so that violence of them seems justified; a re-calibration of their ontological significance. Then he seems to drift into game theory and zero-sum games etc, but it was a very informative read. The biggest surprise was the greatest killers of humans, by far, are States. The issue of the book is violence is decreasing in humans, well it was until he wrote it. Yes, there is a lot of discussion around the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide but not very much in respect of more recent abhorrence’s such as Bosnia Kosovo or Chechnya, even Iraq.
My masters was in international law, so Rwanda and Bosnia figured a lot in the course; I must take my hat off to you for daring to go deeper into these atrocities, because it was then I discovered I didnt have the stomach for it, and some of the law reports, even at the level of compression they are, I found traumatising even to read. Give me metaphysics any day!
I did stumble upon an interesting passage in Thoreau’s Walden; he lived in the wilds of America in cabin and gradually found a closer connection with nature. His description of viewing a battle between red and black ants blew my mind. He got down with the spyglass to discover, I cant remember which colour won, that there were dismembered heads placed on sticks and stuff and clear signs of orgiastic and ritualistic violence. Perhaps, it made me wonder, whether mans ideologies are merely postulates in a wild wild universe, something we have to keep working on to avoid deluges of fear based violence. Ive come to conclude there is nothing like justice on the plane of nature. A fashionable question on law course is, are laws made or found: made, all the way.
5 Likes
Dallaire gets a lot of criticism and I can understand why after all a genocide happened on “his watch” but its clear he was set up to fail. His recounting of the Bangladeshi peacekeepers arriving in the country without food or water just sums it.
The Rape of Nanking had a similar impact on me. Chang killed herself and it’s speculated that she suffered from mental illness exacerbated by her research for the book.
3 Likes
I’ve never heard of this before but that sounds absolutely fascinating, will certainly look into this and the Pinker book, thanks!
2 Likes