Review: The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math from One to Infinity

The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math from One to Infinity by Steven H. Strogatz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: Full Moon

Full Moon by Ellen Weisberg and Ken Yoffe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: On Freedom

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On a sunny day in August 1978, Havel eluded the secret police, made for the Czechoslovak-Polish border, and hiked to the top of a mountain. There he and other Czechoslovak dissidents met Michnik and other Polish ones. They built a fire, ate, and drank vodka. In the photographs, they look happy. Michnik asked Havel to write. Three months later, an underground courier delivered Havel's manuscript to Michnik in Warsaw. From a moment of contact at a border on a mountaintop arose Havel's essay "The Power of the Powerless," a profound meditation on freedom.

In the essay, Havel translated the experience of "normalized" Czechoslovakia into general political lessons. "Normalization" meant adaptation to the party line, even though no one believed it expressed anything beyond the convenience of the powerful. Normality in this sense of "normalization" has no substance, only form. It is the habit of saying (and then thinking) what seems necessary, while agreeing implicitly (and then explicitly) that nothing really matters. Life becomes an echo chamber of all the things we never dare to say.

timothy snyder "negative freedom"

predicted Trump's coup attempt

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Review: A History of Philosophy, Volume II: Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern

A History of Philosophy, Volume II: Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern by Wilhelm Windelband
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

Hobbes

Painful separation from magicoreligious superstition

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Review: Dusty: Reflections of an American Dream

Dusty: Reflections of an American Dream by Dusty Rhodes
My rating: 0 of 5 stars




I read the Audible Studios Unabridged Audiobook narrated by Kerry Woodrow.

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Review: Bang Your Head: The Real Story of The Missing Link

Bang Your Head: The Real Story of The Missing Link by Dewey Robertson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a complete autobiography of one of wrestling’s more colorful “heels”, a grappler with the character of a “bad guy.” Bang Your Head is complete in the sense that it covers the arc from Dewey’s childhood to wrestling introduction in Canada to even meeting his co-writer and his current post-career activities. Beginning with an interest in body building and the art of wrestling, a young Dewey Robertson became more and more a 24/7 actor playing the role of The Missing Link, a mysterious and unpredictable actor on a colorful and ostentatious stage.

Anyone interested in making sense of the alphabet soup of wrestling federations and how the WWF/WWE rose from the din can benefit from Robertson’s travels between the federations and insider’s insight. Dewey spent more time out of the WWF/WWE than in it. In comparing the regional and organization differences to the various wrestling organizations there emerges a complete picture of the growth and development of theatrical, “predetermined” wrestling into a popular pastime.

Just as enlightening is Dewey’s frank discussion of his descent into substance and steroid abuse. Robertson does a fine balance in the telling and this becomes neither a tawdry tell-all or a preachy lesson. In so doing, the juicy bits come out in sufficient detail and the moral is clear. What is not clear, and would be a story worth telling is how it looked from the outside. Insights from his children (both sons would go into wrestling) and wife would be especially telling. Mrs. Peterson, especially, emerges as an unknown but pivotal elemental of this colorful life. As The Missing Link took his family from high living to low, from state to state, from home ownership to renting at nudist colonies, the matriarch kept everything together with or without money, with or without a present husband.

In the final summation of it, this is a tale of survival. Surviving self-destructive behavior and gaining self-knowledge, Dewey Robertson appears to be one of the lucky ones and his story takes us down a trail littered with the dead, the broken and the forgotten.

[My review that ran, among other places, on ink19.com]

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Review: The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia by Andrei Lankov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

North Korean literature -

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

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