1. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, by Andrei S. Markovits. Not the usual swill on this topic; sadly the main prediction of this book is that the passing of Bush will not make America much more popular in Europe. Read this short article on the same.
2. Dante, Paradiso, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander. There still is not a gripping English-language Paradiso on the market, as the Mandelbaum translation is flawed as well and don’t ever trust Penguin translations with anything. This one doesn’t elevate me as the text should. But it has the best notes of any edition, is laid out most nicely, and is the best for trying to follow the Italian and cross-reference the translation. If you buy only one English-language Paradiso maybe it is this one. An alternative is the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow edition, lyrical but archaic, on-line for free.
3. Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History, by Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll. The table of contents looks amazing, but my browsing indicated this book to be boring. Still, some of you should read it. It is full of factual substance, slotted into an economic framework.
4. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, by John Chasteen. Every now and then a history book sweeps you up into its world; this one did it for me, most of all the treatment of Alexander von Humboldt but from beginning to end as well. The best and most readable book on its topic.
5. William Gibson, Neuromancer. Wow, this is now twenty-four years old. I’m teaching it next week in Law and Literature class. Upon rereading what strikes me most is how little science fiction it offers and how much it follows in the stylistic footsteps of Hammett and Chandler.
Neuromancer (and the rest of Gibson’s early work) was always about style. To the extent that he was at all visionary, he recognized that the upcoming “wired” class would need an aesthetic, so he built them the bones of one. Since then, he’s been polishing it, in books with less and less action and sf elements as time goes on.
Tyler:
Consider, as well, Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” and its implicit commentary on the internet’s effect on the viral transmission of ideas/information/trends, and the associated economic effects. Although I find his other work to be uninspiring.
Neuromancer not sci-fi enough? Really? Are you thinking about it in terms of today’s reality, the reality of 10 years ago, or really from 25 years ago when it was conceived? For something that pre-dates the web browser (1993), and was genre-breaking near-future sci-fi, it was pretty astonishing. Perhaps it’s not astonishing today, but I think that attests to how effective it was in describing, and even shaping, the near future.
Aron has a point.
Another example of this would be True Names (from 1981) by Vernor Vinge. Anyone reading it today for the first time would be unimpressed; it seems obvious and almost clichéd. But my God the mindblowing effect it had on me when I first read it all those years ago, before I had ever used online virtual worlds or the Internet or e-mail or Usenet or even phone-based BBSs. The best speculative fiction often makes this journey from “that’s so preposterous” to “that’s so obvious”.
Likewise, I suspect that Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea had an effect on the imaginative youth of that era that we can only dimly understand today.
I would like for someone to explain the disconnect between the sentiments expressed in the article linked to the “Uncouth American” and the reality of European politics. The article looks forward to the post-Bush era, but France and Germany have both elected leaders who are much more friendly to the USA and to Bush.
For the argument that Markovits’s “Uncouth Nation” is, in fact, the usual swill on its topic, see:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/23/freedom-cheese/
RE: Item one above, readers may be interested in a very good essay on the topic of why Europeans have “hated” America long before 9/11 and Bush administration published awhile back in the Hudson Review, see:
http://www.hudsonreview.com/BawerSp04.html
passing of Bush will not make America much more popular in Europe
The very powerful are rarely regarded with especial sympathy. It is interesting to compare the view of America today with that of Britain a century ago.
If China becomes the worlds great power, you can look forward to a lot of American Sinophobia.
Mr. Callahan,
your statement does not dissprove my contention that europeans hate americans because they challange the european superiority complex. As an african who has lived in europe and now in the u.s. i have first hand experience of both the european and american superiority complexes, which are equally noxiuos and reviled in many corners of the world.
As to national aggression, no nations, or group of nations, in human history have killed stabbed murdered and tortured other humans on the scale accomplished by Europeans.
A specail prize must be reserved for America’s progenator and mentor, for the english have the singular accomplishement, closely followed by the french, of having wontonly murdered people of every religon, creed, nation, tribe, or ethnic group on the planet.
一家翻译公å¸|秀专业深圳翻译|深圳翻译公å¸|æä¾›åŒå£°ä¼ 译
Comments on this entry are closed.