Books

BOOKS....For reasons I can't really explain, a couple of days ago I picked up Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind and started reading it. Ugh. What a whiny, petulant little book it turned out to be. Did people really take it seriously when it was first published? Am I not giving it a proper chance by giving up after a hundred pages? Did it seem more relevant in 1987 than in 2008? Or what?

Anyway, time to put it down and read Jane Mayer's The Dark Side instead. I've been putting it off because I know it's going to be wildly depressing, but hey — I'm a professional, right? This is what you guys pay me for. So I guess I better buckle down and read it.

And as long as I'm on the subject of books, a few days ago I finished Brendan Koerner's Now The Hell Will Start, a pretty good book that suffers from a bad title (though, of course, YMMV on whether the title grabs you). Once you get past the title and a clunky first few pages, though, it's a helluva good read about how black soldiers were treated during WWII and what one of them did about it. Recommended.