Review: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory

The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory by Kenny Fries
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disalbed from birth

Throughout my life, friends and strangers have asked me "What happened to your legs?" There was a time earlier in my life when I, too, could not stop asking why at birth I was missing bones in my legs. Chance, the fuel of natural selection, was not at that time a satisfactory explanation.

Disability studies theorist Lennard J. Davis echoes Bagemihl, showing how, when we speak of disability, we associate it with a story, place it in a narrative. A person became deaf, became blind, was born blind, became quadriplegic. The impairment becomes part of a sequential narrative.

By doing this we think of disability as linked to individualism and the individual story. What is actually a physical fact becomes a story with a hero or a victim. Disability becomes divorced from the cultural context, and becomes the problem of the individual, not a category defined by the society. The dialectic of normalcy-for someone to be normal, someone has to be not normal is kept intact.

Gilded age

The global economic recession of the 1870s encouraged the view of societies in competition in a hostile world. In the United States, business leaders such as Andrew Carnegie believed that unrestrained competition was natural selection at work. Human intervention could not mitigate the struggle for existence.

In the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, Social Darwinism transformed into eugenics. Whereas Spencer and the Social Darwinists advocated a laissez-faire policy, sup-porting the status quo of the economic and social hierarchy, eugenicists advocated an active governmental and institutional role in "purifying" society of perceived "weakness."

In 1881, Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, researched deafness in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. He concluded that deafness was hereditary. In "Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race" he recommended a marriage prohibition for the deaf. He warned that boarding schools for the deaf could become breeding grounds for a deaf human race. In 1896, Connecticut became the first state to prohibit the marriage between anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded."

By the 1880s, European studies stressing the heredity of criminality had become the basis for "criminal anthropology" in the United States. In 1887, the superintendent of the Cincinnati Sanitarium issued the first published recommendation of sterilization for criminal activity.

Race increasingly became a focus for eugenics. Darwin rejected the idea that different races were different species.

....

After the stock market collapse of 1929, it became difficult to believe the correlation between economic status and intelligence. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, social scientists shifted their emphasis to the social causes of human difference.

...

After the war, when asked why eugenics declined so quickly in the United States, Popenoe admitted "the major factor ... was undeniably Hitlerism." But as early as the 1880s, reformers such as Powell and Boas spread Darwin's message that no one stayed on top, because change and adjustment were the order of nature. Boas, invoking the Darwinian notion of constant change, asked: Was it possible that traits thought to be desirable today, would be viewed otherwise in the future?

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Review: Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance

Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance by Susan Simensky Bietila
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

biography start

Bessarabia

1920s

Palmer raids,, ice Bondi raids

Family fled 1921 year of second 1919 1921 pogrom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_H...

"TRUMP FLAMBOYANTLY PROCLAIMS HIS IRRATIONAL WHIMS LIKE A TRUE CZAR.

HE COMMANDS TOADIES TO SCAPEGOAT IMMIGRANTS, MEXICANS & MUSLIMS, IMPRISONING EVEN CHILDREN.

WHEN HE WAS MADE AN HONORARY COSSACK IT WAS CLEAR THAT THEY RECOGNIZED ONE OF THEIR OWN."

"chose Brooklyn College and started there in 1964.

The summer before college, I worked at a racially integrated summer camp in the Catskills run by communist-influenced, antiracist organizers from my neighborhood. I learned about people a year or two older who had joined civil rights marches and voter registration drives in the South, as well as some guys who were moving to Canada to avoid the military draft. At night, after the campers were tucked in, the camp counselors sat around a campfire, where I learned that the US was at war with Vietnam. I felt physically shaken by the realization that the US was not a democracy but instead the number-one imperialist power after World War II's destruction of Europe. One of the other counselors was in the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and gave me the name of the student who was starting a chapter...

The New Left introduced me to unvarnished history and critical thinking. This changed my life."

Chapter worth of text interspersed graphic novel like panels

Brooklyn College Vietnam antiwar student demonstrations

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Review: Understanding Islam, Revised Edition: An Introduction to the Muslim World

Understanding Islam, Revised Edition: An Introduction to the Muslim World by Thomas W. Lippman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Narrated by Nadia May

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Review: Chicken Little: The Inside Story: A Jungian Romance

Chicken Little: The Inside Story: A Jungian Romance by Daryl Sharp
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The "American Journal of Chickle Schtick" isn't a real academic publication but a humorous, fictional reference used in texts about the folklore of Chicken Little, often cited with fake volume/issue numbers (like Vol. 17, No. 3, 1964) to add satirical weight to discussions about paranoia or "sky falling" narratives, highlighting the absurdity in seriousness

It's a joke or trope, not a legitimate scholarly journal, used in books like Chicken Little: The Inside Story to playfully mock serious analysis of simple fables.

You'll find it cited in footnotes for comedic effect


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Review: Eat the Rich: And Other Interesting Ideas

Eat the Rich: And Other Interesting Ideas by Peter Werbe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Still, increasingly conservative though Friedkin sounded, The French Connection was far from a conventional picture. He was comfortable with the documentary idiom and used it, giving the film a loose, handheld feel that anticipated Hill Street Blues by a decade. Often, he wouldn't bother to block a scene, just told the cameraman to follow the actors. Moreover, the moral landscape of the film was dark, complicated, and European. "In those days, Coppola and I and other guys, we'd sit around and talk about which way film was heading," he recalls. "You know, Godard or Fellini, documentary and street reality, or formalism and works of the imagination. They were not, it seemed to me, diametrically opposed. I had seen Z by Costa-Gavras. It made me realize you could take an actual story and make it as exciting as good fiction. I thought, I know how to do that. Fuck, that's like introducing documentary technique. It was a big influence on The French Connection."

Jaws

How Steven Spielberg's Jaws made the world safe for blockbusters, BBS enjoyed its last hurrah, while Bogdanovich's bubble burst, and Paramount and Warners turned over, slamming the door on the New Hollywood.

"Jaws was devastating to making artistic, smaller films. They forgot how to do it. They're no longer interested."

PETER BOGDANOVICH

Nashville
Sylbert's distribution of Altman's 'Nashville' and Kael's screening invitation led to a delayed release, highlighting the film's critical acclaim and its eventual box office underperformance, which was attributed to the lack of blockbuster appeal.

One of the first things Sylbert did was pick up Altman's Nashville for distribution. Kael created something of a scandal by accepting the director's invitation to a screening of the rough cut, reviewing the picture off that screening, thereby jumping the release date - and all the other reviewers - by months. It was a typical Kael move, calculated to prevent Paramount from recutting the movie and to goad the studio into putting some marketing muscle behind it. Her piece was full of the excitement of discovering a great work. She called it "an orgy for movie-lovers," and wrote, “I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness." Nashville was Altman's best film, and the studio had high hopes for it. With its large, ensemble cast of character actors, wandering narrative, and refusal of genre, it was an echt New Hollywood creation. Its failure to perform at the box office, despite the blitz of good press, was not only another indication that the passions that animated the first half of the decade were on the wane, it also underlined the limits of Kael's power. When Altman was asked why it hadn't done better, he said, "Because we didn't have King Kong or a shark."

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