Thursday, November 15, 2007

Walt Giersbach '61 has recently published ...

He writes:

I’m very happy to let you know that Wild Child has just published Cruising the Green of Second Avenue. My collection of short stories centers on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1960s. Klein the Biker, Straight Charlie, Sammy the Madman, Frank and the Chick from Canarsie romp through the pages in the dawning of a new age. Their highs and lows are covered with humor and insight through the eyes of Jake, the narrator. The collection updates a rich heritage of vernacular story-telling in the genre of O. Henry’s Collected Stories and Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls.

Cruising the Green of Second Avenue is available as an e-book

--Walt Giersbach '61

http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Addy Najera '10 is reading and recommends.....

Dry: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs. New York: St. Martin's Press: 2007

She comments that this book is horribly depressing, but in a good way!

This book is on order.


Thursday, November 8, 2007

The End of History and the Last Man

Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992

Reviewed by T. Hatch

This is one of those books that are often mentioned en passant that through repeated and casual use comes to represent a facile shadow of itself (much like Gibbon’s Christians running the Roman Empire into the ground or Weber’s Calvinists single-handedly launching modern capitalism). Accordingly, the demise of the Soviet Union signaled the triumph of capitalism and the end of history.

Fukuyama is at his core a conservative Hegelian. As such he attempts to rescue Hegel from the Marxist mob that had held the venerable philosopher hostage for a century and a half; the Marxists ran roughshod with Hegel’s all ready radical notion of historicism. As victims of the Enlightenment both Fukuyama and the heroic Hegel see history as the progress of humanity towards higher levels of rationality and freedom. Following this path of reason history ended with the establishment of the modern liberal state (an event that arguably occurred long before the 1989-1991 epoch). Nonetheless Fukuyama attempts to establish a “coherent and directional universal history of mankind.” Metanarratives seem to die hard.

What distinguishes Fukuyama from many conservatives, especially the Natural Right crowd associated with the late Leo Strauss a.k.a. the neoconservatives, is that he does not display an overt animus to either modernity or political liberalism. In this he violates the ideology inherent in the weltanschauung of the Weekly Standard orbit. It may be merely coincidental then that Fukuyama broke with the neocons on the righteousness of the US invasion of Iraq. Perhaps a more felicitous title might have been The End of History and the Lonely Man.

2nd floor D16.8 .F85 1992

Find other books by Fukuyama at the Grinnell College Libraries

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Angela Winburn is reading J. M. Coetzee ...

Angela writes:

I am currently reading Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee and Splendid Solution by Jeffrey Kluger. I am reading Where the Lilies Bloom by Vera and Bill Cleaver to my son, Sam. This was a favorite, childhood movie of mine.


The libraries edition of Slow Man was published by Viking in 2005.
PR9369.3.C58 S56 2005

Splendid Solution : Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 2004. There are two copies in Kistle Library. QR31.S25 K58 2004. This was the 2007 all Iowa Reads title.