Being naturally unobservant, I may have missed one if there is one here, but I thought that if there's some folks out there who still read books then they might like a forum where they can recommend some to read. So, here it is.

My first recommendation is one that I just started reading, so I can't say if I'm going to like it all of the way to the end. My sweetheart is the office manager at a psychiatrist's office and I saw it on the bookshelf in one of the offices. <u>Man's Search For Meaning</u> by psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl is both an account of the author's horrendous imprisonment in Nazi death camps during World War II and, as a consequence of it, his developing a psychotherapy called logotherapy. I'm less than sixty pages into the book and it's pretty compelling. Why do we do such terrible things to one another?

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Presently I'm reading Broken Music by Sting, which was a birthday gift from my wife. It's pleasantly surprising. He's a helluva writer. If I was his manager, I woulda had him writing books instead of performing music---and I like his music. The focus is on his life before he got famous.

Maybe I like it coz of my natural affinity for "starving artist" books. Some of the best in that category:
Jack London, Martin Eden
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer or try his trilology of Sexus, Plexus & Nexus.

Also recently read Namath, the bio by Matt Kriegel, & it's terrific & thorough. When I was growing up, Joe Namath was like Muhammad Ali or Wilt Chamberlin---the larger-than-life athletes that you didn't pretend to be in your backyard, coz what they had was unattainable---in Namath's case, the football skills, the women, the mink coat, his own talk show. But I disgress.

I always recommend Rider Haggard's She or Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al as the best books nobody ever heard of. You just can't read those 1st 15 pages of She without getting hooked & wondering what's in the box. I've already discussed Al in the baseball thread.

(Edited to meet my usual high standards.)

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Reading Time, The Holy Grail!

I read a lot of biology (my corporate reality and personal interest). There are some amazing new data emerging from genomics (the power of the Carl Woese influence). In science recently there was a special edition on the "Inner Tube of Life" and last week in Atlanta (I love that town) I got to see Ruth Ley present some of the data in person on "Host-Bacterial Mutualism in the Human Gut." Long story short, humans are walking culture systems carrying an incredible diversity of organisms in there gut and we really should think about our "internal ecology" or eat oatmeal and feed your bifido's (a popular example, bifidobacteria are the original colonists of the healthy human gut with an interesting interaction with breast milk so interesting artifical formula's are changing there composition). It was exciting because they are now calling again for people who can grow these bugs (like me) instead of Molecular Biologist (who got all the research money and sent me to a corporate reality in the 90's.)

My daughter, the teenager, talked of being an artist (something I didn't discourage of course but I would hope she would be an artist naturally anyway). She has recently turned her interest to Alternative Economics and started reading the Jefferey Sachs books on subjects like "The End of Poverty; Economic Possibilities in Our Time". I wanted to see what kind of liberal propaganda she had latched to so I picked it up and read it on the plane to Atlanta and found it interesting. I was at a dinner at a little spot on Highland Avenue with a group of Tuberculosis researchers. THese are people who spend their entire lives working in places like Africa or Uzbekistan and dealing with endemic TB (often endemic multi drug resistant TB)also known as the poverty stricken man's disease and I spoke with them about the Sachs principles in places like Ghana etc. They essentially confirmed the concepts.

I read history. An interesting account I read recently was by Marie Vassiltchikov it is called "Berlin Diaries: 1940 to 1945". Interesting decriptons of life in Berlin during a rather Apocalyptic period. When I was in Berlin I had to go stand on the Bunker, I hear they are building a hotel on that spot (I am sure it will be haunted).

I also like to read of the Conquest of America. One of the best in this variety is "George Catlin's Letters and Notes on the North American Indians" which describes his travels through America ca. 1820 to 1840. I believe I quoted from it in the He Said She Said zone.

Aside, Blind Willie's is still the best Blues bar in Atlanta. I saw Butch Trivett and the Rich and Famous Blues band there in the 80's and it is as classy as ever today (I have visited every time I am in Atlanta). The chairs have built in Boogie Wobble. Once I went in around 9 (the music begins at 9:30) and all the tables were reserved. I asked, "What's up?" and they said just hang out by the bar and wait a bit. A bus pulled up promptly at 9:25 and in single file, Japanese Businessmen types walked in and stood at the tables. They all sat down in unison. The music started promptly at 9:30. Each Japanese fellow recieved a double scotch. They drank their Scotch and took all kinds of pictures. Then at 10pm, they all got up and left (in single file). Bizarre!

Oh well, still the best Juke box anywhere as well (if you like blues and R&B they have an incredible collection of 45's they rotate through that thing). but this is reading list and I digress?!?!

It Aint Easy Being Sleazy! (Blind Willie's Moto)

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also, if you know anyone with Crohnes disease I believe the data is compelling (I know both Sally Nasr (who presented new data in Atlanta this year) and John Herman-Taylor personally) that it is caused by Mycobacterium paratuberculosis and they should try to get into antibiotic treatment studies if possible (Talk to INfectious Disease people as well as other doctors).

http://www.shafran.net/crohn/

I have had a few inquiries about Crohns

Check out this site!

Hmmm.... I meant books as far as recommended reading goes. Although, if you do have Crohn's disease, then you'd spend a lot of time on the commode which is, historically speaking, one of the most frequented sites for reading. So, I guess there may be a connection there after all!

I did forward the web addy on Crohn's to a friend who suffers from the malady. He's in there so often he's thinking of getting cable tv installed in his bathroom, never mind reading!

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sorry, I spaced again. too much in my youth! there is reading in there somewhere

to try and make it up may I recommend
The R Crumb Handbook, The story of R Crumb by R Crumb and Peter Poplaski, Its a fascinating tale of a neurotic tormented artist whose weaknesses include social alienation and sexual obsession and he just happens to be one of the more bizarre characters that sprang out of the "Summer of Love". Includes many of his best strips including my personal favorite "Whiteman" and an R Crumb music sampler (if you have not heard his music, it is killer!).


"you jus' a nigger like evva body else! no mo, no less, mutha" excerpt from Whiteman

<u>Other Ways of Knowing</u> by John Broomfield suggests that maybe science has too narrow a perspective and that perhaps we should start looking at things more as a whole. He comes down on Western science and gets into an assortment of pretty alternate subjects, like how time is, or can be, perceived (multi-directional/dimensional rather than linear), alternate realities/dimensions, etc. and concludes on how we have to turn cold, mechanized scientific thought around to include some sort of spirituality (without getting preachy or proselytizing any particular path) that includes a reverence and respect for nature. It's been awhile since I read it and my memory suffers, but it was a good read and, if I recall properly, brought up a lot of good points and ideas as well as some stuff that would best be appreciated by readers with fairly open minds. He touches on a lot more stuff than I've listed here, some of it with backing data and some with personal (if not somewhat extraordinary) "experiences" (Yep! I can get a bit skeptical about some of it.). But, in the end, it's the intent that's the important aspect and, with this author, the intent is quite honorable.

It seems humanities attempts at dialogue with Nature have greatly improved in the last 4000 years! First, we developed the ability to organize stimuli in thought, imprint that imagination in the "mind" and develop processing recall resulting in the sense of time. Intellect and abstract thought can not be the product of mental masturbation, it soothes but can not satisfy, and so, intercourse with other humans was essential. The communication and legacy of knowledge is a two edged sword that brings both comfort and fear. The human can consider time and space as variable concepts dependent on universal constants (ie speed of light and gravity). Slight changes within the error of our ability to measure these constants can transfigure our frame of reference to another time, another dimension, the twilight zone (imagine that sound now!). The potential that our time may suddenly shift to a Place of Dead Roads. It is the ability to conceptualize such non sense that separates humans from beasts and fosters such beliefs as "intelligent design". Oh, if only the Chimpanzee would contemplate that base matter were Dancing Strings. The ascetic turns away and escapes via circuits to the minds images that allow freedom from compassion and responsibility by conjuring a world called Nirvana, Eden, where there is no need for such things to exist. Of course it is fear of such musings as I write here that result in bonfires to cleanse our collective conciousness of such sacreligious notions that God is not a crafted watchmaker endlessly winding the clock of time (the other edge of the sword). The dialogue with nature that I pursue is that life is but a struggle, a concerted push against the ultimate affect of time, equilibrium. However, the great cosmic humor is that in the end the time to equilibrium will be vastly reduced by the fact that life exists.

Reading that resulted in this mindless spewage:

The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs
Order out of Chaos (Mans new dialogue with Nature) Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
The Order of Things (An Archaeology of the Human Sciences) by Michel Foucault
Primitive Mythology (the entire Masks of the Gods work actually) by Joseph Campbell
and nearly anything by Will Durant especially the History of Philosophy.

and I also read Rumi (although I obviously don't agree with the ascetics that much, I feel social reponsibility is to important and I can't see rejecting the notion as say Jesus and Gotama did).

I also read microbiology, microbial ecology and pathogenic interactions with mammalian systems if any one is interested, I have opinions there!

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Who Murdered Chaucer? Fascinating account of politics and religion (and how they mix) in and around the year 1399! What is it about Kings named Richard and Henry. It is much better than Soloman and David (well maybe not, I mean, when your old and dying and suffering from the chills of continuous fever what other book than the Bible would think of supplying a young beautiful virgin for your bed to keep you from the chill). back to Chaucer,

and its by a Monty Python Alumni, Terry Jones. I thought it well done!

I'm now reading <u>Noa Noa</u> by Paul Gauguin

<u>Salt</u> by Mark Kurlansky. Puts "oil" into historical perspective.

Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival