On Aug 31, 10:05 pm, "Mac the Nice"
bigstring.com>
wrote:> "Marko Amnell"
hotmail.com> wrote in message
[...]
>> Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Had to get this. Reveals
>> the full details of Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili's seedy and
>> sordid underworld youth.
>
> So, the subject of Kater Moggin, makes a biography of Stalin the 'obvious
> book' to get for a further expansion of the topic. Hm. Guess I better get
> right over to the library.
>
>> A unique combination of intellectual and brigand.
>> Hailed as a Romantic poet in his youth.
>
> So it's been said of him. Well, it could have been worse. At least he
> wasn't painting romantic little picture postcards of cartoonishly
> hook-beaked Hasidic looking pigeons kibitzing over crumbs in a Viennese
> square like some other intellectual brigands of romantic artist/dictators of
> which we've read.
The phrase "armed Bohemians" used by Hannah Arendt to describe
the kind of people the Nazis recruited, comes to mind.
I find Stalin much more interesting than Hitler. He is much smarter,
for
one thing. People still study his theory of the nation state in
political science
courses. It's a pretty good theory; Stalin opts for the method that a
putative nation must meet several different criteria simultaneously
for it to be a "real" nation. He was Commissar of Nationalities in
the
first Bolshevik government. I always thought his Georgian background
gave him some insight into the problem of defining the nation and the
nation state. He originated from a region with a great mixture of
ethnic
groups.
Hitler's Mein Kampf doesn't reveal the author to be much of a thinker.
The style is greatly influenced by the German newspapers of the
time, and the content is purely polemical. I did find it funny,
however,
that even in the 1930s Hitler was sometimes listed as a "writer" in
the official documents on his residence.
Montefiore's biography reveals that Stalin was a criminal before
he became a Bolshevik. He led a gang of street urchins in Georgia
in his early teens. Later he moved on to bank robberies, extortion,
murder, and so on. It was his talent for getting things done in the
underworld that attracted Lenin's attention. Stalin was able to
finance the Bolsheviks through his gansterism. Given all that, the
person he reminds me of most is Saddam Hussein. Recall that
when the American soldiers discovered Saddam's library, they
found the two main kinds of books were: the novels of Tom Clancy,
and books about Stalin. Apparently, Saddam modeled himself
on Stalin. Saddam wasn't as smart as Stalin but he did write
poems and a Tom Clancy-like military adventure novel.
>> Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski. This is about his
>> first travels abroad. As he died recently, my local bookstore
>> ordered many of his classic books, which I bought earlier this
>> year, including Another Day of Life, The Emperor and Shah of
>> Shahs.
>
> ObBook: Faces in the Mirror--autobiography of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, twin
> sister of the last late Shah of Iran.
>
> I must confess that I'm enjoying it immensely, it's kind of--well, looking
> forward toward the opportunity to turn the next page is like anticipation
> for the next episode of your (or somebody's) favorite soap opera, only it's
> all about Iran and what it was like there (for both the powerful and the
> powerless, the potent and the impotent, rich and poor), not only before the
> revolution, but before the first modern Shah, Reza-Pahlavi's father. The
> romantic adventures of Princess Pahlavi are the best part, though. And she
> was really, very, very pretty and sexy and funny.
Another good book about the Iranian revolution is _The Unthinkable
Revolution in Iran_ by Charles Kurzman. The title alludes to a
statement
by the American ambassador to Iran that a revolution is "unthinkable".
What makes the book interesting, however, is that (by making use of
Elias Canetti's ideas in Crowds and Power) Kurzman, a sociologist,
argues that a revolution cannot be explained in hindsight by reference
to any one factor. Instead, one must simply analyze the great
confusion
of actors and events in totality. To quote him: "I propose an anti-
explanation".
By the term "anti-explanation" he means "abandoning the project of
retroactive prediction in favor of reconstructing the lived
experience
of the moment." It's an interesting approach for a sociologist, who
might be expected to propose a theory.
>> I read Imperium earlier, when it was first published and
>> have been hooked on him since then.
>
>> Also, finally got a copy of Titchmarsh's The Theory of the Riemann
>> Zeta-function. Half price from Amazon, a used book but a trade
>> paperback in near perfect condition. Just have to live with an
>> ex libris name plate of some Japanese mathematician. But I
>> can live with that. Better than paying the full price of 120 euros.
>
> That sounds like music to somebody's ears. Wish I had the ear for it, but
> when I got to the part in Einstein's book where he was getting down with
> that way abstract geometrical jazz, I just had to whistle and say, "Of all
> the dumb luck!"
Titchmarsh was a math professor at Oxford University. He wrote a book
that summarized virtually everything that was known around 1950 about
Riemann's Zeta function, the function used in the famous Riemann
Hypothesis about the distribution of prime numbers. His book was
updated in the 1980s so it's still by far the best book on the
subject.
The best popular account is _Prime Obsession: Berhard Riemann and
the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics_. It's a really good book
and explains very well what the problem is about. Even some
mathematicians,
such as Harold Edwards (author of a well-known book on the subject)
said
they learned some things from it. See his review here:
http://www.olimu.com/Riemann/Reviews/MathematicalIntelligencer.htm
Edwards's own book _Riemann's Zeta Function_ is the best book to read
if you have some background in math. It focuses on Riemann's original
1859 article "
