Prelude to Revolution, Mother, by Maxim Gorky
"The people are beginning to boil. Every now and then some disorder crops out. Yes! Last night the cossacks came to our neighbors, and kept up an ado till morning, and in the morning they led away a blacksmith. It's said they'll take him to the river at night and drown him. And the blacksmith--well, he was a wise man--he understood a great deal--and to understand, it seems, is forbidden. He used to come to us and say, "What sort of life is the cabman's life?"'It's true', we say. 'The life of a cabman is worse than a dog's.'"
Interestingly, this book--told as a simple fable about an old country woman (known as "Mother" in her village similarly to the way an old woman in an American village might be called "Auntie" by familiars who are not actually related to her) in Russia who comes to join the communist resistance to the Tsar after witnessing oppression--came out right about the time the American book The Jungle, about a similar decision made by an immigrant from Eastern Europe in Chicago. The two works are bookends to the same universal tale of tyranny in governments that serve only the interests of the rich, as told by those who are made to have less so that the rich may have more.
It's a simple tale, but not for the squeamish. There are descriptions of brutal beatings, arrests, and show trials, from which Gorky sometimes steps, Brecht-like, away to gesture and say "See?" Where Jurgis survives his ordeals in Chicago, Mother is not so lucky. The final moments of Mother describe the protagonist being beaten to death in the street by our friends the police, who keep the streets safe from the likes of her, for us.
Harvard Classics: The Story of a White Blackbird, by Alfred de Musset
“Very well!” I cried, indignant at my father’s injustice, “if that is how you feel, so be it! I will take my departure, I will relieve you of the sight of my unfortunate white tail by which you pull me about all day. I will leave you, Sir, I will fly; there will be enough other children to comfort you in your old age, since my mother lays three times a year; I will go far away and hide my misery from you, and perhaps,” I added sobbing, “perhaps I shall find, in our neighbor’s garden or in the gutters, some worms or spiders wherewith to support my sad existence.”
“As you please,” replied my father, who was not at all propitiated by my words. “Only let me see no more of you! You are no son of mine; you are no blackbird.”
a French Emo story, simply told. The blackbird is born with white feathers and is thereby made (or makes himself) an outcast. Nobody understands him! Nevertheless, he persists. He will make his own song, knowing that it is the BEST song, no matter what the other birds think. So there. He will be reviled and thwarted and take pride in it all his life. On the other hand, he just might have real talent. Almost certainly autobiographical.
Science the Hell Out of It: Scientific Autobiography, by Max Planck
I have satisfied my inner need for bearing witness, as fully as possible, both to the results of my scientific labors and to my gradually crystallized attitude toward general questions--such as the meaning of exact science, its relationship to religion, the connection between causality and free will--by always complying willingly with the ever increasing numbers of invitations to deliver lectures before academies, Universities, learned societies, and before the general public, and these lectures have been the source of many a valuable personal stimulation which i shall gratefully cherish in loving memory for the rest of my life.
This one was in the Great Books' 20th century science volume, and I'm not sure why. It's less than 50 pages long, and is one of the most uninspiring autobiographies I've read. It contains little about Planck's life, and even less about his contributions to quantum physics. He does talk about his basic education, name-drops a few major scientists who peer-reviewed his work, and is disappointed that the powers of Europe were so inconsiderate as to allow his research to be disrupted by going to war. He enlightens the reader with such gems as "And then i discovered the law of black body radiation", without explaining what that is.
You'll learn more about him from his wikipedia page.
Does Anybody Poincare? the Foundations of Science, by Henri Poincare
What is chance? The ancients distinguished between phenomena seemingly obeying harmonious laws, established once for all, and those which they attributed to chance; these were the ones unpredictable because rebellious to all law.
I had thought this was a new book; it actually includes Science and Hypothesis, which i read in July, and two other survey works, The Value of Science and Science and Method, which give general descriptions of advances in mathematics, physics, probability and astronomy that, depressingly, were considered helpful to lay readers back in the day but seem very dense to me today. There has been so very much dumbing down of the field since his day.
I've noticed a trend at the turn of the century in science and secular philosophy (Poincare, Planck, James, Santayana, Boquanset), possibly in reaction to earlier Darwinists who denounced religion as idiotic superstitions, asserting that no, science and philosophical reason do not conflict with the belief in a God, provided said God is vast enough and ineffable enough to defy human measurement, and provided that said belief gives useful comfort and inspiration to the human mind without leading it away from common sense. These thinkers were hopefully no longer saying these things under the threat of Inquisitoial torture (though with the scopes monkey trial still to come, one never knows), and so perhaps they were either trying to reassure a public longing for spiritual comfort, or they were religious themselves for form's sake.
The Post-Modern Prometheus: Stronger, Faster and More Beautiful, by Arwen Elys Dayton
"You're missing the whole point! You've changed your mind now because someone you loved died. But--but--kids in hospitals, that little girl in Tshikapa--they've been dying all along. You made us protest removing diseases, making their lives better. You drove them to attack us. You and Mamma kept that hole in Teddy's heart. You told him he needed that hole because that was how extra love got in and out!" They had said that, and Teddy had proudly repeated it to others. "But now it's YOUR loss that bothers you."
With great advances in longevity, genetic engineering, biotechnology promising a great new world of human potential, comes the vital question: What ways will humanity find to fuck up everything this time?
Dayton's book answers that question in a variety of ways. Using a format similar to Asimov's I, Robot, she tells us a linear series of self-contained yet interlocking stories beginning not too long from now and ending in the far future.
Each story is centered on a child or teen who is given the new technology--a life-saving operation, an improved body...and with the new technology comes new bigotry, new hate crimes, new slavery and new war. because this is who we are. High recommendations, but it will break your heart.
Envy is ignorance; Imitation suicide: A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather
”My philosophy is that what you think of and plan for day by day, in spite of yourself, so to speak—you will get. You will get it more or less. That is, unless you are one of those people who get nothing in this world. There are such people. I have lived too much in mining works and construction camps not to know that...If you are not one of those, you will accomplish what you dream of most. Because a thing that is dreamed of in the way I mean, is already an accomplished fact. All our great West has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader’s, and the prospector’s and the contractor’s. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water. All these things will be everyday facts to the coming generation, but to us—“ Captain Forrester ended with a sort of grunt. Something forbidding had come into his voice, the lonely, defiant note that is so often heard in the voices of old Indians.
I saved this one for late in my Cather reading list because it's the one selected for inclusion in the Great Books set...and I've decided they selected this one in particular because it is short. I mean, it's nice, but nothing like the much longer and more famous My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop.
I’m starting to really like Willa Cather. It seemed to me that Mrs. Forrester, the main character, could well have been Alexandra Bergson from Cather’s O Pioneers, a little later in time, while the prairie is transitioning from wild frontier to speed bump on the railroad between the seas, and both the prairie and the capable frontierswoman become the worse for wear. It’s not exactly ose so much as lightly sad, as we watch a model of grace and class become overwhelmed by changing American values and sacrifice what makes her great on the inside, in order to get by in the world. It’s hard to tell whether she comes down in the world because she sacrifices her values, or the other way around—but who cares; it’s a good tale is all.
Racism 101: So You Want To Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo
When I asked a group of people of color what they feared most when talking about racism, their number one concern was retaliation. One friend knows of at least two websites dedicated to smearing her because she called a white woman's language racist. One friend was fired from a job after a Facebook argument in which she said an associate was acting racist. One friend was subject to a months-long campaign to turn her community against her after stating that someone's actions were insensitive to people of color. Countless friends have had emails sent to their employers and educators by white people incensed that someone would insinuate that their actions are racist.
White people trying to figure out how to be a better, nonracist person need to read this. So do people of color trying to find their voice to speak out, or to not offend marginalized races other than their own. Oluo manages to address both groups at once.
The chapter titles are a handy menu to look up what questions you have at any given moment. "What is intersectionality?""What is cultural appropriation?" "Why can't I say the N-word?""Why can't I touch your hair?""But what if I hate Al Sharpton?"
In most chapters, the answers begin with a true story from Oluo's life: Going to a place called the "African Lounge" looking for authentic African cuisine, only to find a burger joint with fake zebra-skin chairs and wall decorations of Zulus with spears. Her brother targeted with over the top discipline for little shit at school, permanently impacting the love of learning he'd always had as a kid. Tone-policing online and off. Microaggressions she endured all the damn time, and how that experience impacts how "one little thing" affects her.
And for all that, and for all the discomfort it may cause in people who look like me, to be confronted with the price other people pay for my privilege, it is not a preachy book. For people who look like me, it's a chance to walk a bit in someone else's shoes, the better to empathize with their experience and to work for a better, fairer, more just world. Highly recommended.