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4thace

4thace@books.theunseen.city

Joined 1 year, 8 months ago

I try to review every book I finish. On Mastodon: noc.social/@Zerofactorial

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Isabel Wilkerson, Robin Miles: The warmth of other suns (Paperback, 2011, Vintage Books) 5 stars

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the …

One of the biggest shifts in American society in history

5 stars

This is a big scholarly work written in such a way that the reader can forget how much information is being transmitted. It was quite different from this author's other book, Caste_ The Origins of Our Discontents, which took a more impersonal approach to many of the same issues, more scholarly and less emotional in effect. The migration of millions of American Blacks over the middle decades of the twentieth century transformed both the Jim Crow states and the ones they moved to. It wasn't organized by any one person but came from the life choices of thousands of free Blacks facing lives often only a little better than under slavery when they heard about the opportunities available to them if only they could abandon the place of their birth. They took much of what they knew from the South to inform their new lives and those of their children. …

Elizabeth Enright: Then There Were Five (The Melendy Quartet) (Paperback, 2008, Square Fish) 3 stars

A summer that promises to be eventful turns into something extra special when the four …

A comforting story frozen in time

3 stars

This was the third of the Melendy books, in the same country setting of the second one, during World War II. It is a period piece to us today, with the family doing their weekly chores by horse-drawn carriage and grocery purchases subject to rationing. The kids are 90% of the story with a new addition alluded to in the title. This wasn't a baby, which would have been difficult without a mother in the cast, but a local neighbor boy they take in when in one of the two episodes described he finds himself unhoused. The mood of gratitude the boy has for his new home reinforces the cozy, orderly feeling of the books. The rest of the world is far away, intruding only by radio broadcasts and rare long distance telephone calls to Father who spends most of the book away doing Pentagon work. For a week, the …

Timothy Snyder: On Tyranny (Paperback, 2017, Crown) 5 stars

In previous books, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder dissected the events and values that enabled the …

It's short because there's no time to waste

5 stars

This short book is having its moment with the dismantling of government institutions in the United States as a backdrop. The pattern of takeover by authoritarian forces happens like the way Mike Campbell describes how his ruin happened in The Sun Also Rises "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." There is first an erosion of norms, a bad actor gets a foothold in a place where they can exert influence, then there is a pivotal event like the fire at Germany's Reichstag and then the machinery of free government is taken away. The author organized this book in twenty chapters with titles that encapsulate the whole message. A person alarmed by the threat of state capture can read more context and a justification in the body of each chapter.

At the present time I think the United States hasn't yet blown through the entire process of takeover so I think the …

Elena Ferrante: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Paperback, 2020, Europa Editions) 4 stars

Characters grow and mature but end up menaced by circumstances

4 stars

In the third volume of this series the long friendship between the characters of Lenù and Lila is changed as they lead divergent lives in different parts of Italy. There are significantly long sessions where one or the other does not appear but then they reconnect after the tumultuous events, usually by telephone, and it is as though these sections convey the real significance of what just happened. Each manages to reach a certain kind of success but has to navigate stresses in their other relationships and from the larger society. Politics plays a pretty big role in this book, larger than I would expect to see in one by an English speaking writer concentrating on the lives of women in the West. The story is complex with many characters and events from the previous two books impinging on the characters' lives, and I had to work hard more than …

The government has been on fire for some time

4 stars

It took a long time to get through this audiobook, not because of any fault with the writing but because of the harrowing facts dug out of private archives and nationally televised hearings which describe how the bulk of American society has been made irrelevant by organized crime and its friends. The Trumps are in it, of course, but they were covered in the author's previous book so here they just sit on the sidelines, chummy with the likes of Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy. There is no hypothesis advanced for why this country is such fertile ground for these conspirators and the ones who advance conspiracy theories, maybe because we don't currently have a good perspective on the immunity other places have had (though not all). The tone of the audiobook is a little breathless as though the burden of telling horrible truths that get ignored, Cassandra-style, is …

By the founder of the largest gang rehabilitation program

5 stars

The author's message is that there are sicknesses and brokenness that cause people to behave in destructive ways, but in the eyes of God there are no truly bad people, ever. He is not shut away from the real world, either, but has spent his life creating the largest ministry to assist former gang members to try to turn their lives around, and has seen hundreds of his community die from overdose, chronic health problems, or violence. His previous book Tattoos on the Heart is on my list of books to be read. Through a family connection I knew about the work the author was doing before we wrote his two books.

He follows a faith tradition informed by mystic and contemplatives going back hundreds of years at the same time living alongside the kinds of challenges the modern world throws marginalized communities. These include the Covid19 pandemic, extremist racism, …

Bart D. Ehrman: Heaven and Hell (EBook, 2020, Simon & Schuster) 4 stars

A New York Times bestselling historian of early Christianity takes on two of the most …

An unbiased account of theories of the afterlife

4 stars

In this book, it is not the author's intention to come up with a single correct formulation of what happens after death. He gives a summary of what the source documents state and lets the reader decide what to accept or reject. The one stance he takes is against uninformed preaching and writing which rely on misunderstandings of what the historical record contains. I believe he sees himself as one who applies methods used by historians to interpret primary sources to infer what people believed at the time they were recorded. He does not venture into doctrine or philosophy of religion.

There is no one place that sets forth what the afterlife will be like and what milestones, but only scattered bits through the various sources. All of this literature was developed long before the formulation of creeds and confessions which is what the majority of Christian churches now use …