Two books I just bought. Want to see 'em?

[BurtWorm]

and



I know not too many have read the first one onnaccouta it just came out. But has anyone read the second one? It looks so tasty!


PS: I don't mean literally "It looks tasty." I am not a cannibal.

PPS: What books have you bought most recently?

[Coexist]

1. I prefer dining on hardcovers

as opposed to paperbacks - a little crunchier, ya know.

I just bought

The Crimson Petal and the White
Running on Empty (our require reading for February)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius


I can't make out the second book - can you help someone with almost 40-year old eyes.

[BurtWorm]

2. The Bog People.

My brother had the first American edition when I was growing up, and it always intrigued me but I never read it. It's about the discovery of a 2,000-year-old perfectly preserved body with a rope around his neck that was found in Denmark in the early 1950s. The police thought it was a recent murder victim. The author of the book is the Danish anthropologist who sorted it all out.

[DemBones DemBones]

3. "The Bog People" is a great book! We read it way, way back

in the day and my husband generously gave it away, which he has often regretted! I should buy him a new copy.

[BurtWorm]

4. It's reprinted by New York Review Books.

I still haven't received it. I'm soooo impatient!

[BurtWorm]

6. Just received my books yesterday! The Bog People Reprint is gorgeous!

Printed on semi-glossy stock. It's based on the original Faber&Faber edition. Lovely, if you like looking at photos of 2,000 year old corpses.

[DemBones DemBones]

7. Well, who DOESN'T like looking at photos of 2,000 year old corpses?

:shrug:

[CrispyQ]

5. Just got two new books:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction

I've thumbed through it & read little bits. Very funny!

Gilgamesh (translation by Stephen Mitchell) This is very good!

[HuckleB]

8. "The Neon Wilderness" by Nelson Algren, plus...

"46 Pages: Tom Paine, Common Sense, and the Turning Point to American Independence" by Scott Liell

and...

"Sister Revolutions : French Lightning, American Light" by Susan Dunn



Alas, ... a jaunt to Powell's for gifts always ends up with me bringing pages home for myself.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

9. i am reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man....all i can say is whooah

and Pol Pot is next

[devilgrrl]

10. Who are these written by?

Nothing like leaving out vital information. Author? where to buy?

[BurtWorm]

13. Pol Pot is by Philip Stone. The Bog People is by PV Glob.

Pol Pot was reviewed by William T. Vollman in last Sunday's NY Times Book Review, if you want to get a bead on it. It was an interesting review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/books/review/27VOLLMAN.html

[Broca]

15. Heard the author of Pol Pot on NPR

today. Definitely sounds good. The U.S. sounds culpable from 1975-85 (if not before) when they supported Pot (one of his many pseudonyms)mainly because he was an enemy of our old enemy Vietnam.

[Broca]

11. I'm too poor to buy new books but

I'm currently reading "No Bone Unturned" by Jeff Benedict which would be in the category of "The Bog People" that I read when it was first printed. You have picked a couple of winners I think.

[BurtWorm]

12. No Bone Unturned?

What's it about?

[Broca]

14. No Bone Unturned is about

Anthropology, politics, a bit of a biography of Dr. Douglas Owsley.
Several chapters are about Kennewick Man ( a contested case among scientists, native American groups, and government bureacracies as they fight over a 9600 year of skeleton). Owsley is the anthropologist that pasted together and helped identify the after effects of David Koresh and followers at Waco. James Chatters also writes one that may be called "Kennewick Man" devoted mainly to that case. Sort of a wholistic historical CSI type account.

[BurtWorm]

16. Interesting.

The idea that humans had been in the New World for x,000 years was pretty constant for most of my life, it seems to me (though I can't recall what that number was--something less than 20,000 I think). Suddenly it seems very controversial. Jared Diamond writes about those controversies in Guns, Germs and Steel, and I think he's sympathetic to the longer time-frame, to give a small band enough generations of descendants to populate the New World from the Bering Strait down to Tierra del Fuego and across to Greenland.

[devilgrrl]

17. 'Frozen in Time' is another good one.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1553650603/qid=1109817161/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/104-8746818-1431937

Graphic and Chilling, June 17, 2001

Reviewer:
Rodney Meek (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
  
While not perhaps a "must-have" for aficionados of the field of polar literature, this is nevertheless a very good book and is well suited as a sort of primer to those who have only a casual interest in the subject.

The book provides a brief outline of disappearance the Franklin Expedition on its quest for the Northwest Passage in the early 1800s and the aftermath of the search conducted by various international parties, government and otherwise. It then relates the events of three research expeditions undertaken by the author, a forensic anthropologist who was interested in finding and reviewing various skeletal remains originally discovered decades after the loss of the Franklin party.

Eventually, he concentrates his efforts on exhuming the frozen bodies of three crewmen who had died in the Franklin Expedition's first icebound season, before they had well and truly plunged irrevocably into tragedy. These men had been buried in well-prepared graves on a small island north of Canada's Hudson Bay. Even to this day, the bodies remain fantastically preserved, and the author was able to uncover intriguing evidence that suggests that the expedition did not succumb in a heroic struggle against the large and grand forces of nature, but rather fell to altogether more pedestrian and minute agents.

The exhumation and autopsy processes are well described, and the theory that later develops is explained simply enough for the layman to follow.

Perhaps the biggest strength of this book is the beautifully composed color photos that show the grave sites and the actual bodies. These pictures are truly stirring and invocative.

The maps are also nicely done. However, the book would have benefited from a timeline and from an additional map showing the location of various Franklin party remains and artifacts. It sometimes becomes difficult to recall who was found where and when, since as it turns out, the expedition members covered a lot of ground and some of them split up. With that exception, though, this is an interesting book and a quick but thought-provoking read.

=====================

Also, thanks for the info on 'Bog People' and 'Pol Pot', I'll have to check them out. :-)

[BurtWorm]

18. Wow! Sounds very interesting.

Do I sound like a ghoul? I find this stuff fascinating, these little views into the preserved past.

[Broca]

19. Just a clarification

of info I gave above. Chatters' book is called "Ancient Encounters."