Your current reading list

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Re: Your current reading list

Postby vagabond » Sat May 12, 2012 10:17 pm

Just started this:

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Re: Your current reading list

Postby gnaruki » Wed May 16, 2012 5:58 am

Lost Crusader - John Prados (just got into it last night)

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Air Conditioned Nightmare - Henry Miller (a reread, but last time I read it was on vacation in margaritaville)

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Re: Your current reading list

Postby HockeyGuy » Wed May 16, 2012 3:24 pm

De Toth on De Toth.

I generally only read technical books so I rarely post on this...
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby Kurt » Wed May 16, 2012 6:22 pm

HockeyGuy wrote:De Toth on De Toth.

I generally only read technical books so I rarely post on this...


I wrote one called Kurt on Kurt but the world was not ready for my clone-porn.
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby thewalrus » Wed May 16, 2012 7:17 pm

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Re: Your current reading list

Postby HockeyGuy » Thu May 17, 2012 5:40 am

Kurt wrote:
HockeyGuy wrote:De Toth on De Toth.

I generally only read technical books so I rarely post on this...


I wrote one called Kurt on Kurt but the world was not ready for my clone-porn.

Neither was De Toth...
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby HockeyGuy » Thu May 17, 2012 5:42 am

BTW...when the guy looks like this...he should be part of the BFC memorial:
https://s7-us2.ixquick-proxy.com/do/sho ... 44831c.jpg
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby svizzerams » Sat May 19, 2012 8:24 pm

Sheltering Desert, Henno Martin

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http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Sheltering- ... 321&sr=8-2

A very interesting memoir about living and surviving in the Nambib desert. Two german scientists living and working in Nambia at the outset of WWII rather than face internment to escape and live out the war living off the land. Amazing descriptions of the landscape, the animal life and strategies to survive in an extremely harsh environment. I was unable to find the book in the US, but was able to order through Amazon UK.
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby svizzerams » Sat May 19, 2012 8:30 pm

Angels to Barbarians: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S Wells

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The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only way of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter S. Wells, one of the world's leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known, European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts. This recently recognized culture achieved heights in artistry, technology, craft production, commerce, and learning. Future assessments of the period between Rome and Charlemagne will need to incorporate this fresh new picture.
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby nowonmai » Sat May 19, 2012 9:08 pm

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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38938/38938-h/38938-h.htm

Taster:
This same Dunwich is without exception the most depressing scene on which the eye could rest. Down the hill we swept into a bleak hamlet of some twenty houses and to an inn, where tea was ordered. What time the ladies thawed themselves over a new-lit fire it seemed good to the men to restore circulation, and perhaps stimulate the mind a little, by a tour of inspection, and to ask for guidance beforehand. It was given in grim language. "If you want only to see the ruins you can go by the road; if you want to see the bones you must follow the cliff." So desiring to see everything as quickly as might be, we took the path to the cliff, through a sandy cutting, and soon were close to the evidence of a recent fall into the sea of land, rising perhaps a hundred feet above high-water mark, of which the most reckless speculator would hardly buy the fee simple for any tangible sum. It has been falling—sometimes in large pieces, sometimes in small—since the reign of Edward III; it is falling still, and it will continue to fall. It is of the kind of substance that has no more cohesion, or very little more, than a child's castle of sand, which, having been a broad-based cone in the beginning, has been cut till it opposes a sheer and perpendicular and crumbling obstacle to the advancing tides. Waves and rains—the latter far more destructive than is commonly imagined—are destroying this part of England, even while others are being added to, with remarkable celerity, nor is it easy to see how any protecting works could, even if the enterprise were worth undertaking, be constructed with any reasonable hope of success. The last fall—of part of the churchyard of the derelict All Saint's—was clearly quite recent. The bones, mixed with crumbling débris of the rotten cliff, were being washed by muddy wavelets a hundred feet below the perilous verge of the cliff, a grisly and a saddening sight. The church itself—its west end still standing—hung on the edge of the cliff; it cannot last long. "Murray" writes in 1875: "It might have served till the present day, but was abandoned in the middle of the last century that the townsfolk might sell the bells and lead." He would be a bold man who should say now that the townsfolk were not justly prudent, for it is as plain as a pikestaff that All Saint's is liable at any moment, hurtling down into the insatiable sea, to join St. Peter's and the other five churches, once the glory of Dunwich; it has already sent down[Pg 162] half its burial ground, and the rest, although burials continued after the church was abandoned, is sure to follow soon. Opposite my seat of a Sunday in Winchester Cathedral when I was a boy, was a sepulchral chest on top of a screen bearing the legend "In hâc et alterâ e regione cistâ reliquiæ sunt ossium," and then a handful of kings beginning with Canute were mentioned. It used to seem reasonably grim. But this shallow and relentless sea round the last relics of Dunwich, with its bottom strewn by the contents of six churchyards and a half, is to the chest at Winchester as the earthquakes at San Francisco and Valparaiso are to the slipping of an Irish bog. The scene is depressing, unspeakably sad; but it is necessary to visit it in order to realize that Dunwich was once great and to understand its fall, for it is falling still, and it will go on falling; and you cannot help seeing how it all happened.
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby Royal » Sun May 20, 2012 6:15 am

I'm welling up..............................Image
Image We have no effective screening methods to make sure pilots are sane.— Dr. Herbert Haynes, FAA.
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby Kurt » Sun May 20, 2012 6:08 pm

The Fortifications book looks awesome in the way that only a specific monograph can be.
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby Q » Tue May 22, 2012 1:08 pm

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I am the object of criticism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track.

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Re: Your current reading list

Postby Ultra Swain » Tue May 22, 2012 1:10 pm

Why is someone named jane writing the forward to father and sons? That is like having Dick Richardson write the intro to vagina monologues.
Geez,am I NOT ALLOWED TO BE INTENSE FOR JUST 10 FUCKING SECONDS??!!!!!!!
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Re: Your current reading list

Postby Q » Tue May 22, 2012 1:14 pm

I'm halfway into the book, and I just noticed that after you mentioned it. Great situational awareness there, Q.

Fuckin' books, how do they work?
I am the object of criticism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track.

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