Book Nerds Unite!

The Education of Henry Adams - Discussion

Jesse — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:53:50 +0000

Official discussion thread for Henry Adams’ “The Education of Henry Adams” (Amazon)

Non-Fiction book of the month, February 2008

Description:

Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation’s history–and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent. It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics–he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. “The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,” we are told,

revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother’s birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.

Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there’s also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement–and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world. Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn’t do much for him. (”The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.”) Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained–bogged down in “the same rude colony … camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads”–had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father’s private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process–a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.

He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: “He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism…” (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the “melancholy function” his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams’s book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success.Please leave your comments below. Be sure to include your reading progress as you post.

Stiff - Discussion

Jesse — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:44:18 +0000

Official discussion thread for Mary Roach’s “Stiff” (Amazon)

Non-Fiction book of the month, February 2008

Description:

“Uproariously funny” doesn’t seem a likely description for a book on cadavers. However, Roach, a Salon and Reader’s Digest columnist, has done the nearly impossible and written a book as informative and respectful as it is irreverent and witty. From her opening lines (”The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back”), it is clear that she’s taking a unique approach to issues surrounding death. Roach delves into the many productive uses to which cadavers have been put, from medical experimentation to applications in transportation safety research (in a chapter archly called “Dead Man Driving”) to work by forensic scientists quantifying rates of decay under a wide array of bizarre circumstances. There are also chapters on cannibalism, including an aside on dumplings allegedly filled with human remains from a Chinese crematorium, methods of disposal (burial, cremation, composting) and “beating-heart” cadavers used in organ transplants. Roach has a fabulous eye and a wonderful voice as she describes such macabre situations as a plastic surgery seminar with doctors practicing face-lifts on decapitated human heads and her trip to China in search of the cannibalistic dumpling makers. Even Roach’s digressions and footnotes are captivating, helping to make the book impossible to put down.

Please leave your comments below. Be sure to include your reading progress as you post.

So… Have you started yet?

Jesse — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:30:45 +0000

Well, 2008 is upon us and it’s time to get going! Of course this is a bit hypocritical as I haven’t actually started myself yet, but tonight’s the night! I’ll be starting with “Stranger in a Strange Land“.

What has everyone else decided to start with?

Stranger in a Strange Land - Discussion

Jesse — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:28:07 +0000

Official discussion thread for Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” (Amazon)

Science Fiction book of the month, January 2008

Description:

Stranger in a Strange Land, winner of the 1962 Hugo Award, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth’s cultures or religions. But he brings turmoil with him, as he is the legal heir to an enormous financial empire, not to mention de facto owner of the planet Mars. With the irascible popular author Jubal Harshaw to protect him, Michael explores human morality and the meanings of love. He founds his own church, preaching free love and disseminating the psychic talents taught him by the Martians. Ultimately, he confronts the fate reserved for all messiahs. The impact of Stranger in a Strange Land was considerable, leading many children of the 60’s to set up households based on Michael’s water-brother nests. Heinlein loved to pontificate through the mouths of his characters, so modern readers must be willing to overlook the occasional sour note (”Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault.”). That aside, Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the master’s best entertainments, provocative as he always loved to be. Can you grok it?

Please leave your comments below. Be sure to include your reading progress as you post.

Brave New World - Discussion

Jesse — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:25:18 +0000

Official discussion thread for Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (Amazon)

Science Fiction book of the month, January 2008

Description:

“Community, Identity, Stability” is the motto of Aldous Huxley’s utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a “Feelie,” a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today–let’s hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren’t yet to come.

Please leave your comments below. Be sure to include your reading progress as you post.