read, read, read

another year of indiscriminate reading, not quite as prolific as in some years past, mainly because of the time spent working on the woodruff chronicle ---

 

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years” War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistence, 1917-2017 (2020)

Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (2023)

***Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story (2023)

Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues (2023)

**Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, and their race to save the world’s most-precious manuscripts (2016)

**Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (2020)

*Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention (2020)

Adam Rutherford, How to Argue with a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and don’t) Say About Human Differences (2020)

**Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (2022)

***Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War (2023)

**Hugh Howard, Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces (2022)

**James Crawford, The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World (2022)

Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About our Past (2022)

*Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra, A Life (2010)

**Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972)

happy holidays

so, smiley left today for another stupid cruise, which they have styled a cruise to antarctica, which is on the big guy's bucket list, so they're taking a cruise to antarctica --- i'll see him again a couple of days after epiphany next --- in the meantime . . . . .

i have five pounds of delicious catholic fruitcake from the trappist monastery in kentucky and an endless supply of vodka from mac's down the street, and dog, and a shitload of books to read, so i will survive
 

passages redux and done

one of the only bits of monumental sculpture salvaged when st paul's cathedral in london burnt down in 1666 was this of john donne, which had been installed within a few months of his death in 1631

as of today, i have a living will, a dead will, and beneficiaries installed for this and that, but have not yet arranged for disposition of my "remains," as it were, nor for any death mask or monumental sculpture ---