![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
UBC: books read while sick
Jun. 27th, 2009 12:54 pmThis may become a Continuing Series, as I am, in fact, still sick. However.
Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.
( cut tag behind which there is a slight rant )
And now, just to give you whiplash:
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.
This is a low-key book, sympathetic to its subject matter as many books about the Puritans are not. I found it useful for explanations of a number of things about the Puritans' conception of the family which I had not known (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala tells me this is because I didn't grow up in New England); it dovetailed nicely with Entertaining Satan in clarifying certain aspects of Puritan communities.
Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.
Although I don't agree with Starkey on many points, The Devil in Massachusetts makes a good point at which to begin one's reading about Salem. It is interested in forming a narrative of the witch trials, which means that it is clear and easy to read and compelling in ways that, for instance, Salem Possessed is not.
That said, I do disagree with Starkey, and if you begin with The Devil in Massachusetts, you would be ill-advised to end there. Starkey forthrightly blames the afflicted girls, and she does so with a misogyny that I find distinctly repellent. Moreover, making a narrative out of history inevitably warps the history around the narrative and encourages the selection/creation of heroes and villains.
Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.
This was one of those frustrating books that I agreed with but was not convinced by. Which is to say, I completely agree with Allert's thesis that the Hitler salute both reveals several very important things about Nazi culture and was (a very small) part of the formation of the culture of indifference in Germany which (again in part) allowed the Holocaust to happen, but Allert never showed me the links between his evidence and his ideas in such a way that I really believed him.
His evidence is fascinating. It includes Hitler figurines with movable right arms; illustrations for Sleeping Beauty in which the prince salutes Beauty as he wakes her; pictures of vacationers saluting a sand-portrait of Hitler, of a vaudeville performer teaching his chimpanzee the salute, of Richard Strauss caught in a moment of miserable ambivalence. He has wonderful anecdotal evidence of how the salute permeated German life. And I think he could have done a good deal more with why the Nazis imposed their salute on Germany (I found myself thinking about that more than once while reading The Psychopathic God [see below]). But he never manages to persuade me that his evidence connects to his abstract and abstruse sociological theories about the meaning of greetings.
Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.
This is a collection of primary source material from the Russian investigation into Hitler's death, including the reports from the soldiers who found the bodies and reports of the interrogations of various witnesses. I found it almost more interesting for the insights into the Red Army's bureaucracy than for its ostensible subject matter.
Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
This book has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. It is also very definitely a product of its times, as Waite's careful, literal, by-the-book Freudian psychoanalysis shows. I don't think anything he says about Hitler's childhood can be trusted (except that, yeah, the household of Alois Hitler was seriously weird), whether it's his speculations about the "primal scene" he thinks Hitler witnessed or his speculations about Hitler's monorchism or his putatively Jewish grandfather or any of the rest of it (including the coprophilia). Freud is least useful when you take him literally. But Waite's analysis of the adult Hitler I found very enlightening, in particular his [Waite's] patient refutation of Hitler's lies about his years in Vienna and the connections he makes between Hitler's private neuroses and his public performances.
Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.
( cut tag behind which there is a slight rant )
And now, just to give you whiplash:
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.
This is a low-key book, sympathetic to its subject matter as many books about the Puritans are not. I found it useful for explanations of a number of things about the Puritans' conception of the family which I had not known (
matociquala tells me this is because I didn't grow up in New England); it dovetailed nicely with Entertaining Satan in clarifying certain aspects of Puritan communities.Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.
Although I don't agree with Starkey on many points, The Devil in Massachusetts makes a good point at which to begin one's reading about Salem. It is interested in forming a narrative of the witch trials, which means that it is clear and easy to read and compelling in ways that, for instance, Salem Possessed is not.
That said, I do disagree with Starkey, and if you begin with The Devil in Massachusetts, you would be ill-advised to end there. Starkey forthrightly blames the afflicted girls, and she does so with a misogyny that I find distinctly repellent. Moreover, making a narrative out of history inevitably warps the history around the narrative and encourages the selection/creation of heroes and villains.
Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.
This was one of those frustrating books that I agreed with but was not convinced by. Which is to say, I completely agree with Allert's thesis that the Hitler salute both reveals several very important things about Nazi culture and was (a very small) part of the formation of the culture of indifference in Germany which (again in part) allowed the Holocaust to happen, but Allert never showed me the links between his evidence and his ideas in such a way that I really believed him.
His evidence is fascinating. It includes Hitler figurines with movable right arms; illustrations for Sleeping Beauty in which the prince salutes Beauty as he wakes her; pictures of vacationers saluting a sand-portrait of Hitler, of a vaudeville performer teaching his chimpanzee the salute, of Richard Strauss caught in a moment of miserable ambivalence. He has wonderful anecdotal evidence of how the salute permeated German life. And I think he could have done a good deal more with why the Nazis imposed their salute on Germany (I found myself thinking about that more than once while reading The Psychopathic God [see below]). But he never manages to persuade me that his evidence connects to his abstract and abstruse sociological theories about the meaning of greetings.
Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.
This is a collection of primary source material from the Russian investigation into Hitler's death, including the reports from the soldiers who found the bodies and reports of the interrogations of various witnesses. I found it almost more interesting for the insights into the Red Army's bureaucracy than for its ostensible subject matter.
Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
This book has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. It is also very definitely a product of its times, as Waite's careful, literal, by-the-book Freudian psychoanalysis shows. I don't think anything he says about Hitler's childhood can be trusted (except that, yeah, the household of Alois Hitler was seriously weird), whether it's his speculations about the "primal scene" he thinks Hitler witnessed or his speculations about Hitler's monorchism or his putatively Jewish grandfather or any of the rest of it (including the coprophilia). Freud is least useful when you take him literally. But Waite's analysis of the adult Hitler I found very enlightening, in particular his [Waite's] patient refutation of Hitler's lies about his years in Vienna and the connections he makes between Hitler's private neuroses and his public performances.
