Yesterday 8:59 am
A few...JohnnyYou » 18 minutes ago » wrote: ↑ Let me guess.. you have walls and walls of books...
I couldn't get past page 47... Thanks for sharing.. Maybe I should try..
A Cool Million, as its subtitle suggests, presents "the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin," piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire's Candide, which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical "schlemiel", stumbling from one situation to the next; he is robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot, Betty Prail, Pitkin's love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel, Pitkin loses an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end.Pitkin's troubles, however, do not end with his death. He is exploited as a martyr by the National Revolutionary Party, a political organization led by right-wing populist Shagpoke Whipple, a failed banker and manipulative former American president. Pitkin's birthday becomes a national holiday, and American youths march down the streets singing songs in his honor. Whipple speaks out against aliens and calls for a rejection of "sophistication, Marxism and International Capitalism."[1] The novel ends with a series of roaring "hails" from the crowd.
We may be in Savannah soon.. I might be able to dig into this. Erik Larson is my favorite author.. He was one of the few that distracted me from the internet..
Erik Larson’s latest book is The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. It details the intense five months between Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860 and the bombardment of Fort Sumter
When people stop reading good fiction, we'll all become idiots...
My neurologist friend argues that it is a primary indicator of "cerebral fitness"....he should know, "brain mapping" is his business.
(Apparently, in baseball terms, writing non-fiction is like the minor leagues in terms of skill and difficulty while fiction is the major leagues, and literary fiction is like the World Series.)
https://markmanson.net/read-fiction
He was a Classics major, to honor his father and heritage...and refused to declare pre-med, though he satisfied all requirements....
33 out of 33 med schools declined his application. So he took a year off and reapplied..
Good thing for Neurology....here he is, returning to his alma mater where he held an endowed chair....
These 90 minutes will make you much smarter.....and consider that he is the one who insisted we had to watch the Sparx Brothers movie...
https://youtu.be/RMTAM9O3WwA?is=3tMKbXird0zzIg6m