Reviews and Comments

This book has funny, impressive, dark, and bizarre incidents on nearly every page for 316 pages. I didn't want the book or good times to end.

A few of the stories are famous even to non-baseball fans, like Ten Cent Beer Night, Dock Ellis's no-hitter on LSD, and Disco Demolition Night. But there are dozens and dozens more. (A 10 watt amateur radio station with exclusive broadcasting rights? The future MC Hammer spying on ballplayers? Fistfights in the team showers? Hot Pants Patrol? Wife-swapping pitchers? Oversized helmets for guys with afros?)

Besides the colorful anecdotes, the book highlights a lot of great but non-Hall of Fame players who don't get talked about as much these days. So the baseball content is just as good as the cultural material.

If you ever wonder if the United States has real culture of its own - whether the US is merely a site for other nationalities to bring their stuff while capitalism ruins everything fun - read this book.

It's not elegantly written, but straightforward with a neutral tone. I already knew bits and pieces about the Revolutionary era - Porfiro Diaz, Zapatistas, resentment of foreign privilege, and ultimately President Cárdenas. But this book put it all together.

Almost every chapter - which are chronological, proceeding from about 1900 through 1940 - gives updates on the issues that sparked the revolution: land reform, political centralization, church-state relations, and economic nationalism.

Worth reading!

The author would be the first to agree that European sources are almost all we have to chronicle the thousands of native American individuals who ended up in Europe between 1492 and the 19th century. Even those sources are quite thin when it comes to the intentions, ideas, and feelings of the Americans. That's one of her main points, in fact.

As a result, the bulk of this book is the historian doing her best to weave the fragments with ideas from modern native writers, anthropological and contextual information, and a very correct anti-colonial perspective.

I think I've read all 15 books in the Night Soldiers series. This one has some really distracting flaws:

• not just similar, but identical sentences from when characters are introduced and then reintroduced later (which happens often in spy novels)

• the hero is known by name to the Gestapo, and wanted for arrest, yet he lives in the same apartment the whole time and is even LISTED IN THE TELEPHONE BOOK. Nevertheless the bad guys tell a bounty hunter they will pay $ for the hero's capture, "if you can find him"

• no twists or surprise betrayals

• unlike the other Furst books, no honest acknowledgement of the ultimately small, almost negligible effect that local spies and resistors had on the outcome of the war

I don't know. Furst seems to have mailed this one in. He even made the protagonist a professional spy novelist.

It's a truism that to point out "all P.G. Wodehouse's plots are the same" is to miss the point by several miles. He was a virtuoso. You probably can't catch all the layers of humor and nimbleness in his prose in a single read-through anyway, so what's the difference if you read the plot more than once?

This particular book about Uncle Fred a.k.a. Uncle Dynamite was published more than seventy-five years ago, and I still laughed out loud.

One noteworthy bit is that Wodehouse, who is the omniscient narrator here (unlike in the Jeeves novels which are in Bertie Wooster's first-person perspective), freely uses the editorial "we" and gets a bit meta. One passage near the end heaps praise on the high moral fortitude of publishing houses. Another aside seems to describe his own sentence as "clever." Who could argue?

A content warning: this story, which was written right after WWII but set in the vague earlier heydey of the British upper class, refers frequently to "the natives" of colonized Africa and the Amazon jungle. The colonizer / "explorer" characters are ridiculed along with everyone else - but it's pretty dated, and something to be aware of.

The bottom line is stated early in the book: almost all we know about the pre-Christian Irish was written down by Christians, and the original cultural context of those surviving (and distorted) details is lost. For a historian there is no way around these facts.

The author here uses a lot of linguistic evidence, looking at cognates between Irish names/places and their possible Celtic or Indo-European roots. When necessary, he discusses beliefs and practices from Gaul (roughly France) or Wales instead, because they are better-sourced and presumably similar because of the shared Celtic origin.

There is plenty more to say, but overall I'm glad I read it. Reasonable and convincing claims are mixed with pretty tenuous inferences. That's probably the best that can be done with this topic.

Published in 1999. I'm not an archaeologist or anthropologist, but the Introduction's reference to "primitive" cultures is a sign that terminology has changed in the meantime; but that doesn't mean its whole analysis is outdated. We'll see. I'm expecting 95% speculation that may be well reasoned.

I was skeptical after the first few pages, because I thought the author was yet another Californian writer who'd "discovered" mindfulness ideas that are 2,500 years old. But there were several passages and at least one chapter that made me put-the-book-down and reflect. I even wrote a couple pages myself just to think through her concept of "maintenance" before I could continue reading.

Some sections could have been trimmed, but there are enough convincing - and extremely relevant / applicable - ideas in this volume that I'm very glad to have read it.