User Profile

mouse

mouse@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 11 months ago

it's me, I'm the creator and admin of BookWyrm. buy me a book!

try me at @tripofmice@friend.camp for non-reading content and @bookwyrm@tech.lgbt for technical stuff

This link opens in a pop-up window

mouse's books

Currently Reading

2024 Reading Goal

73% complete! mouse has read 38 of 52 books.

Hans Zinsser: As I Remember Him (1940, Little, Brown and company) No rating

This work is an autobiography told in the third person, and includes coverage of his …

stick with Rats, Lice, and History

No rating

Zinsser writes his autobiography in the third person, playing both the somewhat disdainful biographer of "R.S." and R.S. himself. The conceit is characteristically weird, unnecessary, and extremely well done and funny, but I think it also is a distancing device for a man who doesn't really want to share anything personal about himself. Which makes for a frustrating autobiography!

In the rare moments when he does talk concretely about his life, the book is extremely fun (his account of his abortive attempt at a private medical practice, for example, is laugh-out-loud funny). But he spends most of the book and in long discursive discussions of the issues of his day, which unfortunately tend to end up either boring (unless you are very interested in his views on the state of medical pedagogy in 1940), or euphemistically "of their time." While the book is not surprisingly racist, sexist, or eugenicist for …