{"id":3665,"date":"2005-03-06T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2005-03-06T20:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/?p=524"},"modified":"2005-03-06T12:00:40","modified_gmt":"2005-03-06T20:00:40","slug":"sundays-reading-list-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/2005\/03\/06\/sundays-reading-list-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday's Reading List"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have the time, read the first two articles <\/a> from the March 24th edition of The New York Review of Books: Very Bad News and Welcome to Doomsday. In Very Bad News, Clifford Geertz reviews two books : Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond and Catastrophe: Risk and Response by Richard A. Posner.
\n\u00c3\u00acWhether societies waste away in ecological neglect or are destroyed by foreseeable disasters they have failed to prevent, for both writers vigilance and resolve are the price of survival. Awareness is all. However much they may differ in style and method (and they occupy the poles of the social sciences\u00c3\u00b3dogged, fact-thick empiricism on the one side, model-and-calculate political arithmetic on the other), these are consciousness-raising books, tracts for the time. It is later than we think. Later even than we have thought to think. \u00c3\u00ac
\nFrom Welcome to Doomsday by Bill Moyers : \u00c3\u00ac There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power.\u00c3\u00ae<\/p>\n

\n

Maybe even before we landed in Evansville, or was it while we weren\u00c3\u00adt waiting for our luggage because we had only carry-ons, Brian brought up Salinger\u00c3\u00ads short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish <\/a> (click and download a Word.doc). As an example of near-perfect dialogue. That day, I downloaded it, Diane read it out loud in the living room on Bellemeade and we all discussed it off and on until we got back on the plane. One question, that we couldn\u00c3\u00adt answer, that is only tangentially related: Why did we read it in the first place? Why did every high school student read Catcher in the Rye? And other books that are now classics – A Separate Peace for instance. Were they assigned? I don\u00c3\u00adt think so. Did we all simply read more then? Are there not comparable authors? Are the Harry Potter Books comparable? Matt reads, but claims most of his friends do not. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have the time, read the first two articles from the March 24th edition of The New York Review of Books: Very Bad News and Welcome to Doomsday. In Very Bad News, Clifford Geertz reviews two books : Collapse: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}