[Decky]

What would a Protestant know about Jesus? Their messiah is Martin Luthor.

[Reichstraten]

Brilliant.

[skinster]

^ I started reading that one but got put off for some reason, can't remember why, but it felt kinda dated, maybe I'll try again. I like Straw Dogs and the one after it with Animals in the title.

[Reichstraten]

I also read Straw Dogs, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, Heresies and Black Mass.
I liked those books, but he's a bit too pessimistic. But he's good at demolishing utopian ideas. Like the philosopher with the hammer, Nietzsche.
"Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet," (Tom Lehrer)

[skinster]

The Silence of Animals is what the other one was called. You'll like it if you like his general schtick. Agreed, he's very pessimistic which is fun to read in-between more hopeful stuff.

[ThirdTerm]

The Oil Kings: How the U.S, Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East Paperback – September 11, 2012
by Andrew Scott Cooper (Author)

Yesterday, I found this book at a local library and spent 30 minutes to read the whole book. One of my theses submitted in Britain was about the Cold War in the Middle East, for which I got a First.

“Relying on a rich cache of previously classified notes, transcripts, cables, policy briefs, and memoranda, Andrew Cooper explains how oil drove, even corrupted, American foreign policy during a time when Cold War imperatives still applied,”* and tells why in the 1970s the U.S. switched its Middle East allegiance from the Shah of Iran to the Saudi royal family.

While America struggles with a recess ion, oil prices soar, revolution rocks the Middle East, European nations risk defaulting on their loans, and the world teeters on the brink of a possible global financial crisis. This is not a description of the present, however, but the 1970s. In The Oil Kings, Andrew Cooper tells the story of how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Drawing on newly declassified documents and interviews with some of the key figures of the time, Cooper follows the political posturing and backroom maneuvering that led the U.S. to switch to OPEC as its main supplier of oil from the Shah of Iran, a loyal ally and leading customer for American weapons. The subsequent loss of U.S. income destabilized the Iranian economy, while the U.S. embarked on a long relationship with the autocratic Saudi kingdom that continues to this day.

Brilliantly reported and filled with astonishing revelations—including how close the U.S. came to sending troops into the Persian Gulf to break the Arab oil embargo and how U.S. officials offered to sell nuclear power and nuclear fuel to the Shah—The Oil Kings is the history of an era that we thought we knew, an era whose momentous reverberations still influence events at home and abroad today.

[Reichstraten]

@skinster,

John Gray is good, but Chris Hedges is even better.

[skinster]

@skinster,

John Gray is good, but Chris Hedges is even better.

I like that one, finishing it made me cry a bit.

[Reichstraten]

[Wellsy]

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with AddictioN

And

The Body Keeps Score

[colliric]

My interest in reading it has returned after re-watching Kubrick's 1980 classic but extremely loose adaptation of the original book(Doctor Sleep is The Shining 2).

And yes I can't wait to see Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson in the film adaptation. Fingers crossed it keeps full continuity with the 1980 film, and given its also "from Warner Brothers", it probably will. Stephen King seems to have finally mellowed to Kubrick's film a bit.

[Decky]

[Wellsy]

The Course of Mexican History

[Wellsy]

Finished The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien and am now reading a newly revised edition of Thought and Language by Lev Vygotskky

[Decky]

[Heisenberg]

I'm about three chapters in, and the main takeaway so far is that Woodrow Wilson was a bell-end of truly epic proportions.

[Wellsy]

The Raggered Trousered Philanthropists.

[Decky]

The Raggered Trousered Philanthropists.

I used to reread it every year before I started working in construction. There doesn't seem much point now that I am living it.

[Red_Army]

I'm reading Les Miserables. Its abridged though so I feel like I'm cheating. So far I like it, which makes me again curse the musical genre.

[Decky]