Some Comments About Books I Have Read
My main interests, as far as reading is concerned, are: Current Events, Fiction, History, History of Art, History of Science, Jazz, and Politics.
I particularly like to browse through the bookshelves of bookshops, in the good old style, but in this Internet Age I cannot avoid, and actually I do welcome, the use of a good online bookshop, or the publishers' web pages, to locate and acquire the books I want to read.
Here follows a commented list of the 706 books that I read from cover
to cover since the fall of 1998 until today
in alphabetic order of titles. The last posted comment was written on Septembre 17, 2024, about the book
Ulaanbaatar Beyond Water and Grass: A Guide to the Capital of Mongolia.
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1066: The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry by Andrew Bridgeford Harper Perennial, London, 2004 Before reading this book, in February 2006, I had never heard of the Bayeux Tapestry, and if I had not stumbled over it in Westminster Abbey's bookshop, it would have been very unlikely I would ever noticed its existence in a normal bookshop, medieval English history being as far away from my interests as the grammar of ancient Phoenician... Having said this, I can only be thankful for having discovered this book and the marvelous story it unfolds. Well known to all Britons, the Bayeux tapestry is a fragile and exquisite embroidery (reproduced in the book in full colour and in its entirety), remarkably large (about seventy meters long by circa half a meter wide), and whose very survival, from the date of its creation in the second half of the eleventh century, has being nothing short of miraculous. It depicts the story of the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, and this book is about the tapestry, the conquest, and much else. Written in a lively and engaging style, it starts by telling the story of the tapestry itself (or what is known of it), from the first unequivocal reference to its existence in 1476 (some four hundred years after its creation) through the dangerous times of the religious wars in France, the Revolution, the 2nd World War and the Nazi occupation, until its present day location in a museum in Bayeux. After this, the book turns into the story depicted in the tapestry, telling what seems to be a rather consensual reading of it, and finally it gives the author's interpretations of certain more obscure aspects of the tapestry (Count Eustace's role, Turold the dwarf, Ælfgyva's episode, Wadard and Vital's significance) in a way that does make sense in relation to the rest of the story told by the tapestry, which is shown by the author to have several reading layers and to be rather removed from the linear piece of Norman propaganda that more conventional readings have postulated. An enticing book about a marvelous work of art, and historical document, whose close observation would by itself be a very good reason to visit Normandy! |
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1917 A Rússia em Revolução by Nicolas Werth Colecção Descobrir-História Quimera, Lisboa, 2003 Translation of the French original first published in 1997 in the acclaimed Gallimard book series, this small and lavishly illustrated volume is a very welcome addition to the literature in Portuguese about the Russian revolution aimed at the general public: apart from the books published by the Portuguese Communist Party press (that for obvious reasons do not count as serious scholarship) this is, as far as I'm aware, the only such book currently available in Portugal in the Portuguese language. And it is a wonderful, although rather brief, introduction. Certainly not complete, and not displacing such classics as Chamberlain's, Ferro's, or Pipes' general works (to say nothing about some of the excelent specialist's studies by Brovkin, Rabinowitch, or Shapiro) this is nevertheless an excellent introduction to one of the most transcendentally important historic events of the 20th Century. And a beautifully illustrated one! |
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A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East by John M. Steele Saqi, London, 2008 Astronomy is, together with mathematics, the oldest science in existence. It is also one of the very few instances of a scientific activity that inspired a huge respect and support in a wide variety of civilizations in spite of the fact that its real practical contributions were almost nil (of course its contributions on a psychological and symbolic levels, through religious observance and astrology, and on the philosophical level, were hugely important). This tiny little book, hardly one hundred and forty pages long, is a very nice introduction to the astronomical achievements of the middle eastern peoples from the Mesopotamia's cultures in the third millenium BCE, the Greek and Roman contributions (most notably Ptolemy's, working in Roman Egypt in the second Century CE) up until the medieval Islamic contributions culminating with Nasīr al-Tūsī's and Ibn al-Shātir's improvements on Ptolemy's planetary theory and their possible (indirect) influence upon European scholars such as Regiomontanus and Copernicus. A very interesting book indeed. |
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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007 The main argument of this book is a brilliant thesis on the origins of the Industrial Revolution and economic development. The author argues that it was not the stability of political, economical, and legal institutions in seventeenth century England that was behind the onset of the Industrial Revolution, for those characteristics existed way before in England and elsewhere in the world. Clark, an economist at UC-Davis, argues that the main reason for the onset of the Industrial Revolution where and when it did, as well as for the many failures of industrialization in third world countries to catalize self-sustainable development, was a very gradual (kind of) natural selection by which economically more successful families were also reproductively more successful, and passed on to their descendants a culture of foresight, inventiveness, and hard work ethics. He even ventures the idea that this process (for which he shows some supporting statistical data) could even left some genetic imprints in the target populations. The slow workings of this process, through the millenia, and particularly, since the English Middle Ages (where long series of economic data are available to give some support to the conjecture), created the conditions for the onset of that economic phase transition usually referred to as the Industrial Revolution. Be that as it may, the thesis is certainly bold and fascinating, deserving to be subject to a serious scientific investigation. |
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A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album by Ashley Kahn Viking, New York, 2002 A Love Supreme is one of the most important and influential jazz albums of all times, and, certainly, one of Coltrane's most praised records. This book is a kind of biography of that record, presenting, in Chapters 3 and 4, the history of the recording sessions of December 1964 (with recollections of, among others, Elvin Jones) and also describing the surrounding context (musical and otherwise): the early play of Coltrane, including his work with Miles, the formation of his Quartet with Tyner, Garrison and Jones, and the contract with Impulse, and the aftershocks of the album release, describing the influences the album had in the avant-garde jazz scene at the time and in the larger world afterwards. This is a excellent book and a fit tribute to a unique jazz masterpiece. |
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A Luang Prabang Love Story by Manisamouth Ratana Koumphon River Books, Bangkok, 2020 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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A Macao Narrative by Austin Coates Echoes: Classics of Hong Kong Culture and History Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2009 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar Viking/Penguin, 2019 Hisham Matar has a love affair with the Sienese School of painting since his youth but only recently did he visit the city, staying there for a whole month. This book is the result: a beautiful work about his life in Siena during that month, together with his reflections on history, art, life, love. Accompanied by sixteen beautiful colour reproductions of some of the paintings he ponders in the text I found this book, which I bought in my favorite Cape Town bookshop in the last day of my stay in that city in 2019, the perfect companion for the long flight back home. |
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A Művészet Forradalma:
Orosz Avantgárd az 1910-1920-as Években / A Revolution in Art: Russian Avant-garde in the 1910s and
1920s edited by Mariann Gergely Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest, 2016 The first three decades of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily intense and creative period for modern art in Russia and a time where it had a real influence in European and World art. The vigorous modern art activity of young artists continued and even intensified in the decade after the rise to power of the Bolsheviks: in spite of the difficult and perilous internal Russian situation (with civil war, red and white terror, general lawlessness, and a desperately violent grip to power), the new Bolshevik government created institutions within the People's Commissariat for Education to promote the arts (to "educate the masses") like new art schools and an extraordinary array of provincial museums and a programme to buy works of art to stuff them. Those in charge of these initiatives were young enthusiastic artists (Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, Popova, Rodchenko, Tatlin, among many others) and so, the art bought for the new art galleries (both provincials and in the capitals) was modern art produced by hundreds of contemporary artists. By the end of the 1920s, with the stiffening of the Soviet regime in cultural terms (in political terms it was stiff from the very beginning...), these works, and their creators, were denounced as formalists and the works were removed from view to be seen again only after Perestroika and the end of the Communist regime. One of the institutions to which modern art was sent was the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Art and this book is the catalogue of an exhibition of avant-garde works from their collection that took place (and I was lucky enough to have attended) in Budapest in the first half of 2016. The book is a jewel: with very interesting chapters about the history of the collection and the avant-garde movements in Russian art, both illustrated with historical photos and with colour and black and white reproductions, followed by the catalogue with excellent reproductions of the 40 paintings that were on display, and a very useful and informative chapter with short biographies of 32 artists. A chapter on turn-of-the-century Russia and a chronology complete the volume. I very much enjoyed seeing the paintings at the exhibition in 2016, and now remembering them while reading this gorgeous book six years later. |
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A Nation on Trial: the Goldhagen Thesis and Historical
Truth by Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Birn Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1998 Everybody should read this one before, after, or (still better) instead the one of Goldhagen... |
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À Noite Andamos em Círculos by Daniel Alarcón Nova Delphi, Funchal, 2017 The story turns around the reposition, fifteen years later, of a three actors play ("The idiot president") and its tour to Peru's countryside. Two of the three actors, Henry and Patalarga, were part of the original tour, the third one, Nelson, is a young actor who got the unexpected luck of working with his hero, the actor and playwright Henry in the reposition of his most famous play. The novel is divided into several parts, and its action takes place in "the city" (which we can guess it is Lima), in the countryside (the Andes, the tropical lowlands, again in the mountains), and the final denouement back in Lima. An interesting feature of the narrative is that the narrator, who at first sounds like an impersonal, omniscient, literary voice, becomes progressively more alive and ends up being an additional character in the story. Although the story is somewhat slow paced (at times maybe too slow) I found it a rather nice mixture of love stories (two, maybe three of them), friendship, social critique, and the love of Art, with a nice characterization of persons and atmospheres along the way. |
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A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1998 This is one of the best account of the Russian Revolution I have read. It is a brilliantly written book, organized in four parts, and giving a panoramic view of the Revolution. It starts with a description of the social actors at the end of the Old Regime (Part 1), and then proceeds with the history of the last phase of the tsarist autocracy, in particular the two great crisis at the turn of the century: the 1891 famine and the 1905 revolution (Part 2). The remaining two thirds of this 900+ pages work deal with the core events of the 1917 revolutions until the signing of the Teatry of Brest-Litovsk in March of 1918 and the start of the one party dictatorship (Part 3), and the civil war years and the first phase of the Communist regime up until the death of Lenin in 1924 (Part 4). This great overview is not only a monumental piece of scholarship but also a remarkably sensitive one, in which the author make us understand the events and their participants in their own terms, although not refraining from pointing out the short sightedness, callousness, or sheer cruelty, of some of their actions. A piece of historical writing of the highest caliber about the most important and seminal historical event of the twentieth century. Compulsory reading! |
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A Perfect Hoax by Italo Svevo Hesperus, London, 2003 This short book, translated from the Italian original Una burla riuscita, tells the story of a mediocre man, with no literary or business (or, it seems, any other) skills, who believes to me a writer of merit, and cherishes the dream of public recognition based on a novel he wrote forty years earlier and has remained completely ignored by everyone. The practical joke of an acquaintance who convinces him that the representative of an important Viennese publisher is in town to meet him and negotiate the contract for the reedition of his book, generates a flurry of activity in an otherwise monotonous and balanced (although rather gray) life which ends in the return to that sadder state of affairs, only that much bitter, after the hoax has been disclosed. An interesting, almost cruel, story about self-delusion and the human need for some kind of immortality and recognition. |
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A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics by Thomas Riha International Studies of the Committee on International Relations University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1969 Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov (1859-1943) was an important russian liberal politician of the last phase of the tsarist regime and the leader of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party. A prominent personality in the pre-revolutionary Dumas, he became Russian's foreign minister in the first provisional government after the February 1917 revolution. An old style imperialist, he shared most, if not all, of the deposed monarchy's war aims and was forced to resign his government post in May 1917. After the Bolshevik coup and the failure of the counterrevolution he emigrated to the West where he died, in Aix-les-Bains, at the age of eighty four, as an uncompromising foe of the Soviet regime. This book length biography of Miliukov is an interesting read for everyone with any interest in the Russian Revolution and in its origins. |
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A Sangre y Fuego; Héroes, Bestias y Mártires de España by Manuel Chaves Nogales Austral Narrativa, vol. 631 Espasa, Madrid, 2010 In a series of nine short stories inspired by real events of the Spanish Civil War, Nogales left us what others have considered maybe the best literary testimony of those tragic events. The authors' prescient prologue also become a classic, and his phrase "Yo he querido permitirme el lujo de no tener ninguna solidaridad con los asesinos. Para un español quizás sea éste un lujo excesivo" is clearly transparent as to his standing. I would say that, unfortunately, it is not only for a Spanish person that that position is an excessive luxury... |
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Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources
and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability by Peter Pesic The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2003 The formula for the solution of the general equation of the third degree by the Italians Del Ferro, Tartaglia, and Cardano, in the 16th Century, was one of the triumphs of Renaissance mathematics, and one that was a clear improvement upon the achievements of the Ancients. Soon thereafter Cardano's student Ludovico Ferrari obtained the solution of the quartic equation. And at this point matters rested, with repeatedly failed attempts to get a formula for the solutions of the general equations of the fifth and higher degrees, until the 1824 paper by the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, then twenty one years old, settled the matter for good, by proving such a formula cannot exist. This great little book tells the story of this intellectual quest from the very beginning, with the Pythagoreans shocking discovery of the irrationals, and proceeding with the work of the Arabic and Italian algebraists on the solution of equations and other algebraic problems, not least among them the introduction of appropriate notation. The slow but steady development of ideas, with contributions by Viéte, Descartes, Newton, Gauss, Lagrange, and Ruffini, among others, resulted in the brilliant result by Abel (a translation of which is printed in Appendix A.) Also covered in the text is the aftermath of Abel's work, in particular his 1828 paper on the relation between solvability and noncommutativity, and the immense extension of this idea by Galois, with the development of the concept of group and the explanation of the solvability of algebraic equations in terms of the commutativity properties of certain quocient groups derived from the equation. The centrality of certain abstract algebraic notions subsequently introduced by Hamilton, Grassman, Gibbs, Sylvester, Cayley or Boole is also touched upon in this book. In short: this is a remarkable work that, although written for the educated lay person, is not shy to present and comment upon "real" mathematics (mainly in the boxes scattered throughout the text and in the appendices) and could very well serve as the backbone of an advanced course in the History of Algebra, guiding the study from the earlier examples of Babylonian mathematics to the development of several concepts of number (integers, rationals, reals, complex, quaternions,...), the notion of unsolvability, the development of mathematical notation, the gradual creation of the objects and concepts of present day linear and abstract Algebras. All of these themes could be introduced by starting with an appropriate part of this little gem of a book, and then take off from there, exploiting exciting events in this part of the intellectual history of mankind, and then get back again to this great little book to gain context and take off again a little later, and a little wiser... |
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The Absolute at Large by Karel Čapek Bison Frontiers of Imagination Series University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2005 This book is the English translation of Továrna na Absolutno ("the factory of the Absolute"), a science fiction novel written in 1922 by the famous Czech writer Karel Čapek. A brilliant scientist invents the Karburator, a kind of reactor that destroys matter and produces energy cost free. However, the process has a side effect, which was recognized from the very beginning: in destroying matter it liberates the Absolute, i.e., the essence of God, and this results in everyone who comes close to those reactors to become imbued with prophetic attributes and miracle capacities. With so much religious frenzy around, utter chaos soon ensue... |
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Acabem Com Esta Crise Já! by Paul Krugman Sociedade Global, vol. 50 Editorial Presença, Queluz de Baixo, 2012 This is the Portuguese translation of the original End This Depression Now!. Krugman argues that the our present (2012) economic troubles, which are part and parcel of the 2008 crisis, are of our own making and the medicine for them are essentially known since the 1930's and have been laid out by Keynes. Resistance in accepting those solutions to end the crisis and the adoption of austeritarian economics (with the consequent deepening of the recession, increase of mass unemployment, and the aggravation of the state deficits) are basically due to an ideological frame of mind that keep frozen in failed theories our politicians', and mainstream economist's, bounds of acceptable thought and action. Let's just hope that when they overcome those ideological bounds it will not be too late for Europe... |
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Acerca de Roderer by Guillermo Martínez Sextante Editora, Lisboa, 2010 A novella with most of the usual ingredients (love, friendship, envy, achievement) but that happens to have a kind of intellectual plot, turning around the confrontation of two very gifted youths (the narrator and a newcomer to town, Roderer) with different types of intellectual goals and of, we may say, different kinds of intelligence: the narrator a brilliant, but kind of otherwise normal, high school student, and Roderer a profound but obsessed mind that, in his quest for absolute knowledge (the Logos), dismisses all worldly interests and ends up (literally) self-destructively after having, according to him, triumphed in his quest. The book makes a very quick read and captured my interest until the end. Even its more intellectual parts, like the digressions on mathematics (on a so called Seldom's Theorem, a fictional generalization of Gödel's Theorem) and literature (as in the discussion about the apocryphal book "La visitación de Holdein", about the faustic myth), are very attention grabbing. |
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A Acompanhadora by Nina Berbérova Biblioteca Ambar de Bolso, vol. 16 Ambar, Porto, 2003 The inner conflicts of a Russian émigré pianist working for a famous lyrical singer, and their friendship-envy-hate relationship amid the loneliness of exile life in 1920s Paris. When this novel was first published in French translation, in 1985, it achieved for the author instant (although, considering she was born in 1901, rather belated) recognition as one of the greatest Russian writers of the century. |
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Afirma Pereira by Antonio Trabucchi Colecção Mil Folhas, vol. 26 Público, Porto, 2002 This book is the Portuguese translation of the Italian original Sostiene Pereira, arguably the most famous novel of Trabucchi, an Italian author who is also a world authority in Fernando Pessoa and Portuguese literature. The story of a few summer months, in 1938, in the live of doutor Pereira, a middle aged journalist responsible for the weekly culture page of the newspaper "Lisboa." The contact with two youths involved in clandestine political activities against the fascist regime, and in support of republican Spain in the civil war across the border, starts by disturbing Pereira's daily routine, and end up changing his whole future. A very good reading. |
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Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times by Robin D. G. Kelley The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2012 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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After Nature by W. G. Sebald Penguin Books, London, 2003 This book is the English translation of the first literary work of Sebald, Nach der Natur. Ein Elementargedicht. It is an extended prose poem divided into three parts. The first is about the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, opening with his triptych on the alter of Lindenhardt parish church. The second part centers on the German naturalist Georg Wilhem Steller, a member of the Vitus Bering second Kamchatka expedition that landed in Alaska in the summer of 1741. The last part is centered on Sebald himself. The common theme that seems to run through the three parts of the book is that of human suffering, but also of the efforts of people in their quest for meaning, from which an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance. A difficult book. Beautiful. |
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The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism by Haynes Johnson Harcourt, Orlando, 2005 This is a very interesting book about the times of McCarthysm: the grim years of 1950-1954 when American politics was dominated, nay paralyzed, by the anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Being not the first time, nor indeed the last, that scare tactics and the politics of fear was paramount in American life (the Red Scare following the revolution in Russia and the present day tactics of the Bush administration are the two most notorious examples) the McCarthy era stuck in the collective memory not only of the United States but worldwide as the most infamous example of the misuse of power in a democratic society. In an era when a new ''age of anxiety'' has settled in, this stupendous history of those bygone years, written with the verve and insight of Haynes Johnson, provides an understanding of the past that is likely to be vital in interpreting the present. |
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The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri Penguin, New York, 2012 This story starts with a seemingly casual encounter, caused by a storm, between inspector Montalbano and a mysterious woman asking questions about a yacht soon to arrive at Vigàta. When the ship arrives it happens to have on board a disfigured dead man they claim to have encountered in a dinghy close to the harbor's entry. This, and the almost simultaneous arrival of a luxury boat with a shady crew, arises some doubts in the inspector's mind about the story told by the yacht's crew. On a different setting, other doubts, of a sentimental kind, are planted in Montalbano's mind by his acquaintance with the young and beautiful Lieutenant Laura Belladonna, from the Harbor Office. Another very fine mystery story of Camilleri's hero, where the dread of old age and the loss of faculties that comes with it is ever so present. |
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Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police by Alexander Vatlin; edited, translated, and with an introduction by Seth Bernstein University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI, 2016 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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La Agonía de Francia by Manuel Chaves Nogales Libros del Asteroide, vol. 63, Barcelona, 2010 Manuel Chaves Nogales was a Spanish journalist active in the late 1920s and 1930s. In November 1936 he left war torn Spain for Paris where he stayed until the fall of France, in 1940, when he left for London, dying shortly afterwards. In this short essay he sharply analysis the reasons behind the French defeat in front of the Nazis' armies. His thesis is that the French people (or at least important sectors thereof) did not want to fight to save his country and the democratic regime because they came to believe in the superiority of the enemy's authoritarian regime, and that anything they could do was doomed to failure at the end. In more ways than one, a self fulfilling prophecy! |
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Águas-Fortes Portenhas by Roberto Arlt Colecção Avesso, vol. 6 Exclamação, Porto, 2020 This is a lovely book! Roberto Arlt worked in the argentinean newspaper El Mundo from 1928 to 1933 and wrote many hundreds of chronicles. A selection of these was first compiled in book form in 1933 and this book is the Portuguese translation of about fifty of them. Each chronicle is about four pages long and in such a short space Arlt give us a portrait of Buenos Aires life at the beginning of 20th Century second quarter with wonderful pieces such as "o homem da camisola caveada", "o vesgo apaixonado", "a tristeza do sábado inglês", "o irmãozinho venal", or the very last one "a inutilidade dos livros". These are chronicles that are much more than just a portrait of Porteño life about 1930, and, because of that, they are still enjoyable and relevant to an European reader like myself almost a century after they were written. |
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Al-Qaeda: the True Story of Radical Islam by Jason Burke I.B. Tauris, London, 2004 For a really illuminating account of that loose network of networks generically called Al-Qaeda this is considered by many as the most trustworthy and lucid work. Written in an engaging prose, this history of the emergence and evolution of present day Islamic radicalism is really unputdownable! |
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All the Shah's Men: an American Coup and the Roots
of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJ, 2003 This is the history of the first American intervention in Iran: the 1953 CIA coup that ousted the popular and democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh and enabled the implementation of the quarter century brutal regime of the Shah Resa Palavi. This coup tarnished , almost single handedly, the up to then pristine U.S. reputation in that part of the world and it left a deep scar in the collective memory of Iranians up to the present day. At a time when the western powers (and the U.S. in particular) appear to have forgotten the way Iran (or Persia, as she was then known) was treated by them in the first half of the 20th century, this is a very welcome addition to the non specialist literature. |
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Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada Penguin Modern Classics Penguin Books, London, 2009 This book is based on a real life event that occurred in Berlin during the War. In 1940, upon receiving the notice that their son has been killed in action in France, a couple of middle aged working class Germans, with no political activity until then, decide to start their own "war" against the regime that killed their son, by writing every week one or two postcards that they will leave in buildings throughout Berlin, in the hope of raising other fellow Germans to resist the Nazi regime. They somehow manage to evade police for more than two years but finally run out of luck, are arrested, interrogated (and tortured), submitted to the inescapable trial in the People's Court, and finally executed. Written in a terse style, the book manages to convey the atmosphere of deep fear that one lived under Nazi rule, the many small and not so small voluntary collaborations with the authorities, but also the enormous courage of people doing even the smallest acts of resistance or solidarity. An incredible book that I much enjoyed reading. |
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Alterworld. Lo Saben Todo de Ti by Antonia Huertas Off Versátil Thriller Ediciones Versátil, Barcelona, 2015 This book is a nice thriller for the present age: in a fast paced writing of thirty one chapters for thirty one days (each chapter takes place essentially in a single day and the story unfolds between 31 May and 30 June 2015) the book's female hero, a cybercrime expert in Europol, investigates three apparently unrelated events that turn out to be not so unrelated after all, travels widely in the virtual "alterworld" (a kind of Second Life) where lots of informations and dangers awaits her, commutes frequently between the Venice region where she lives and the Europol headquarters in The Hague, ends a love affair and starts a new one, and gets herself in real danger from real mafias acting both on the web and in the real world. A very entertaining story by someone who knows her way in the cyberworld: Antonia Huertas is a professor at Universitat Oberta de Catalonia, expert in Logic, e-learning, artificial intelligence, virtual environments and the like, and a dear collaborator that I meet regularly in an academic annual workshop that we jointly organize since 2009. |
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A América Latina na Era do Fascismo by António Costa Pinto Lugar da História, vol. 91 Edições 70, Lisboa, 2021 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera by Gabriel García Márquez Mondadori, Barcelona, 2002 A beautiful love story by the great Colombian writer, with a rather lovely poetical end. |
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Amor, Matemática e Outros Portentos by Jorge Buescu Ciência Aberta, vol. 241 Gradiva, Lisboa, 2011 This book is another book by Jorge Buescu on the popularization of Mathematics (and Physics). With thirteen chapters this slim book manages to grab the attention of the reader from beginning to end with stories about the Gömböc, the toys of prof. Tokieda, or the phase contrast microscope, others more directly related with Mathematics, like the one on optimal transport, or on Fisher’s pioneering work on experimental design, and a few centred on mathematicians, like the one about the 2022 Fields laureates, the Bernoulli dynasty, about Legendre (the mathematician without face), or about the married couple of mathematicians William Henty and Grace Chisholm Young, a fascinating story that partly inspired the title of the book. As usual with Buescu’s book, this one is a delight to read. |
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The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, a Personal Memory by Telford Taylor Bloomsbury, London, 1993 The author was a member of the American Prosecution staff at the International Military Tribunal that was held in Nuremberg in 1945-6 with the purpose of judging major Nazi war criminals. The book, as the subtitle states, is a personal description of the trial, including its pre-history, that is, the negotiations between the Allies in the last part of the War that resulted in the decision of constituting the IMT and holding the trials (largely an American idea) instead of some other methods of dealing with the imprisoned Nazi top leadership (such as shooting them without trial, as Churchill defended, or prosecuting them in national courts). The problems and frictions encountered in drafting the Charter of the IMT, the Indictments, and the selection of the defendants is covered in detail in the first fourth of the book. The remaining deals with the trial itself. What makes this a very interesting book is that it not only describes the public part of the trial but also the backstage, and even some developments that would probably never been known if the author had not been himself personally involved in the works. Near the end of the trial the author was made Chief U.S. Prosecutor for the ensuing war crimes trials that took place in Nuremberg for the next three years. It would have be interesting to read his account of those ones. |
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And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger Bloomsbury, London, 2005 I found this book, given to me by my good friend Michael Grinfeld, a strange mixture of poetry and essay, a personal digression into time and space, into love, history, art... I guess each time I will reread it I will do it from a different perspective, and came back from it with a different impression. Is it not this what makes a book great? |
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Antes É Que Era Bom by Michel Serres Guerra e Paz, Lisboa, 2018 A manifesto against the old sport of blaming the present and praising the past, this book is a pleasant reading, although at times the author looks like unduly optimistic about the present. (The original French edition was published in 2017, the same year that Trump arrived at the U.S. presidency, but we have no words about the dangers of misinformation and fake news made very real by the manipulation of social media, a real thing of the present that we need to blame...) |
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The Anti-communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War by John V. Fleming W.W. Norton, New York, 2009 This is a book about books. In four chapters the author discusses four anti-communist books that were important in shaping the West's perception of Soviet Union's regime at the time of Stalin: Arthur Kostler's Darkness at Noon, Richard Krebs' (aka Jan Valtin) Out of the Night, Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom, and Whittaker Chambers' Witness. All these authors have been Communists, active in the struggle to foster Communist ideas in Europe and the US, but become disillusioned with Soviet's internal and international policies either at the time of the Great Purges, the Spanish Civil War, or the Hitler-Stalin pact. The tale they tell is by now a very well known: the Gulag camps, slave labor, arbitrary detentions, and so on. What can be somewhat surprising is the resistance these disclosures got, mainly in France but also in the US during World War II, vigorously promoted by Communist Party members, sympathizers, and fellow travelers. A very interesting and illuminating book. |
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Antologia de Cuentos de Bolivia: Un Tejido Possible edited by Anabel Gutièrrez León Océanos y Libros, vol. 5 Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, 2023 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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Apologia de Sócrates by Platão Colecção Filosofia & Ensaios Guimarães Editores, Lisboa, 2002 This book is a Portuguese translation of the famous Plato's work Απολογία Σωχράτους. The only philosophy book I have read three times (so far) and a very enjoyable short digression about justice, truth, and a moral way of living. |
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Arabesques by Anton Shammas NYRB Classics New York Review Books, New York, 2023 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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Archangel by Robert Harris Hutchinson, London, 1998 Another good thriller by the author of Fatherland. |
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As Areias do Imperador, Livro 1: Mulheres de Cinza by Mia Couto Fundação Fernando Leite Couto, Maputo, 2018 This book is the first volume of a trilogy inspired by the fight between the African chief Ngungunyane and the Portuguese in the last decades of the 19th Century in the South of Mozambique. The main characters are Imani and Germano de Sousa. Imani is a young native girl with an European education who belongs to a people menaced by Ngungunyane and, although allied to the Portuguese, it is not defended by their army which only visible presence is the sergeant Germano, posted alone in Imani's village. The structure of the novel is rather interesting: chapters where Imani is the narrator alternates with chapters that are letters written by Germano to his superior officer. Along the way a progressively more dangerous atmosphere is induced by the approximation of the African troops and the lack of any effective opposition by the Portuguese, at the same time that some mixed loyalties grow in Imani's family and a hidden attraction between the main characters takes form. |
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Arithmetic by Paul Lockhart The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2017 This nice little book is another of those enlightning works by Paul Lockhart that are written for the general public but are well deserving a readership as wide as possible. Although, to my taste, his previous book Measurement is far more interesting, this one is also a very well written and precious introduction to central parts of elementary Mathematics: the rational numbers, the elementar arithmetic operations, and the art of and counting. The slow construction and explanation of the algorithms for the four arithmetic operations is particularly interesting. Both this book and Measurement should be attentively read by those thinking to become Elementary School teachers, and also by those already in the profession. |
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Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut Putnam, New York, 2008 A collection of short stories round the theme of war/violence and peace. Written with Vonnegut mordant irony, his aversion to violence is clearly present. Some of the stories deserve to be revisited from time to time: the nonfictional recollection of the destruction of Dresden ("Wailing Shall Be in All Streets"), the story about three privates talking about their first meal upon returning home ("Guns Before Butter"), the tale of the disappearance of a Norman knight in a unicorn trap ("The Unicorn Trap"), or the one that gives its title to the whole volume: a letter, telling the insane story of an institution called the Pine Institute, devoted to the study of the existence of the Devil on earth, and signed by its chairman, who has the telling name of Lucifer J. Mephisto... |
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Las Armas Secretas by Julio Cortázar Punto de Lectura, Madrid, 2004 This book of short stories by Cortázar contains two that are widely considered to be masterpieces, "Las Babas del Diablo" and "El Perseguidor", this last one inspired by the life of Charlie Parker. They are, indeed, very good. |
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O Aroma da Goiaba by Gabriel García Márquez and Plinio Apuleyo Mendonza Ficção Universal Dom Quixote, Lisboa, 2005 Based on an extended interview with García Márquez and first published in 1982 (so, when he was already quite famous but had not yet received the Nobel prize), this book contains very interesting informations for García Márquez's readers, mainly in the discussions of his motivations and inspirations for some of the characters of his books, and in contextualizing them in his life experiences'. Some (although not much) of the history and life of the man also comes to light, and one that surprised me was his manias and superstitious character (nobody is perfect!...). In spite of being in the interview format (a style that I really do not appreciate) I found this book to be a very interesting and informative work, whose reading I recommend to all lovers of García Márquez's oeuvre. |
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The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers by Noah Charney Phaidon, London, 2015 The subtitle of this book tells us all about its contents. What it does not tell us is the sheer beauty of the book: illustrated by a vast number of color reproductions of works of art, and by some black and white and color photographs, this book is not only written in a very lively style about an extremely interesting phenomenon of the art world, but is also visually delightful. The world of art forgery is indeed a murky world in which several potent interests and motivations (which include, but is not limited to, money - lots of it!) meet and crisscross each other. This book, that is mostly about forgeries in painting, but also has extended information of cases in sculpture and a more limited (although also very interesting) set of other type of forgeries such as wines, literary manuscripts, maps, religious relics, and even scientific (the infamous Piltdown Man remains), details very many cases in depth and analyzes their history, as well as presenting the forgerers, who are typically technically very gifted artists themselves, in a light that is, if not positive, at least compassionate. A delightful book! |
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The Art of Jazz: A Visual History by Alyn Shipton Imagine, Watertown, 2020 (I've finished reading this book. A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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A Arte da Ressurreição by Hernán Rivera Letelier Alfaguara, Carnaxide, 2011 Apparently based on a real life story, El Arte de le Resurrección tells the story of the "Christ of Elqui", a man who preached the imminent apocalypse in the 1930s Elqui Valley, in Chile, and believed to be Jesus Christ reincarnate. At some point he finds out that a prostitute named Magdalene is living in the town of Providencia, and he sets out to find her, so that she may become his disciple and lover. Together they proceed with their duty to spread the apocalyptic message. A book that, like others by Rivera Letelier, takes place in the harsh conditions of the Atacama desert, in northern Chile, portraying an inhuman landscape where humans can, almost miraculously, cling to life; and doing so with an evocative beautiful language, full of humor, sometimes downright hilarious, as when the "Christ" quotes the following phrase from one of his former disciples: "El cuerpo, hermanos, si se trata bien, puede durar toda la vida"! Priceless! |
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A Arte de Pensar com Clareza: 52 Erros de
Raciocínio que não Devemos Cometer by Rolf Dobelli Temas e Debates/Círculo de Leitores, Lisboa, 2013 This is the Portuguese translation of the gGerman original Die Kunst des klaren Denkens, an important (and nicely illustrated) book made up of fifty two short chapters, each of them about a different kind of thinking flaw in a three pages long story. Most of the cases are not exactly surprising, but are unfortunately way too common in both personal and professional lives to deserve a bit of our attention, which this book calls for in an entertaining way. |
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As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977
by Val Wilmer Serpent's Tail Classics Serpent's Tail, London, 2018 First published in 1977, this book by the British writer and photographer Valerie Sybil Wilmer is a classic about (as the subtitle states) the Free Jazz revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Divided into five parts, about diverse aspects of the free jazz scene, it provides a very good panoramic about it in its several dimensions: from fulls chapters about the life of some of its most important musicians (Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and the AACM) to shorter references to others, less prominent but also very relevant ones, like the drummers studied in two chapters (Rashid Ali, Andrew Cyrille, Ed Blackwell, Elvin Jones, Sunny Murray,...), or jazzmen like Bill Dixon, Jimmy Lions, Frank Lowe, Marion Brown, and many, many others. Some other aspects, maybe surprising at first, like two chapters about the role of women in free jazz, both as supporters and companions of their jazzmen husbands, and as musicians themselves and what they had to battle against the resistance of male jazzmen. Other chapters, such as one about the politics of recording, are also very enlightening. An appendix with more than 160 biographical vignettes of jazzmen relevant to free jazz is also an extremely useful resource. In short: this is a very good, very readable book that everyone interested in jazz (in any style of jazz!) has to read and, after reading it once, they will almost surely return to it from time to time. A true classic! |
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El Asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya Andanzas, vol. 644 Tusquets, Barcelona, 2011 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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Os Assaltos à Padaria by Haruki Murakami Casa das Letras, Alfragide, 2015 Two connected short stories revolving around two assaults to a bakery to quell a tremendous hunger. In the first, the narrator and a friend want to assault a bakery but are persuaded by its Wagner lover communist baker to a deal: he will give him all the bread they want in exchange for them to listen to Wagner with him. In the second story, the narrator has been married for two weeks and he and his wife simultaneously wake up at 2.00 a.m. with an excruciating hunger and nothing in the fridge besides six cans of bear, a couple of onions, a nugget of butter, and a flask of vinaigrette salad dressing... Telling his wife of the first bakery assault, the narrator is baffled by her reaction, and surprised to find them both driving through late night Tokyo with a shotgun in hand trying to find an open bakery... |
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O Assassinato da Minha Tia by Richard Hull Coleção Vampiro, vol. 33 Livros do Brasil, Porto, 2019 This is a nice mystery story, the first the author published, in 1934, and by which he become instantaneously famous in Britain. Except for the last chapter, the book is written from the point of view of a young man in the process of planning the murder of his aunt. The last chapter is written by the aunt herself. The “hero” (if we can call it that) is someone rather naïve, a bit stupid, with an inflated ego and a poor opinion of others. His various attempts at murdering his aunt give rise to some ridiculous and humorous situations, but it is better to stop this comment now before I write some spoiler. |
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O Assassinato de Tutankhamon by Bob Brier Bertrand Editora, Venda Nova, 2000 This is the translation of The Murder of Tutankhamon. It is a very curious mixture of ancient Egyptian history, detective story, and popular science inquiry. The author, an Egyptologist and paleopathologist at the University of Long Island, suspects that Tutankhamon was murdered. The possible supporting evidence was obtained from analysis to the x-ray images of the king's mummy. Half of the book is taken by a description of Egypt, particularly during the 18th Dinasty, close to the end of which Tutankhamon reigned. Also included are good short descriptions of the expeditions that led to the discovery of the tomb, and also of some important archaeological discoveries with connection with the author's argument, such as the el-Amarna ruins, and the progressive discovery of the existence and importance of Akhenaton, the father of Tutankhamon. The book is well translated and it seems that the plot to murder Tutankhamon could indeed have taken place (although I was not convinced neither way...), but I am not going to reveal here who's the most likely culprit! An enjoyable book. |
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Assim Lhes Fazemos a Guerra by Joseph Andras Antígona, Lisboa, 2022 This book collects together three short stories about human cruelty and exploitation of animals. The stories are based is real cases: the Brown Dog Affair in Britain, in the first decade of the 20th Century, the raid to an animal experiments laboratory of the University of California at Riverside, in 1985, and a the killing of a runaway cow in Charleville-Mézières, France, in 2014. A book about a real problem that should be more seriously addressed (the maltreatment of animals) that is sometimes (as it happens in some places in these stories) conflated with vegetarianism or veganism. You don't need to be either to defend a humane treatment of animals. And you can love eating a steak or a smoked sausage and still enjoy this book. |
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The Assumptions Economists Make by Jonathan Schlefer The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2012 This is a wonderfully informative and elegantly written book. The author travels through the main currents of macroeconomics, starting with Adam Smith and Ricardo, and continuing to Marx, Keynes, the neoclassical, the structuralists... Although the author clearly endorses a more Keynesian/Structuralist approach (as opposed to a neoclassical/neoliberal one) he is very careful at avoiding partisanship. The main assumptions of the models are carefully explained and discussed in a non mathematical way as free from technical jargon as possible. Although not a book about the current crisis, it does not avoid the issue completely, discussing, when appropriate, several of its causes in the theory and practice of current mainstream economical thought. After reaching the final page, every non economist (and, I venture, a lot of economists too) have gained a far deeper understanding of the assumptions underlying the public discourse of economists and policy makers, assumptions that often do not seem to be taken by them as such, but as God given truths immune to any rational discussion. A very good book, deserving repeated visits. |
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Atrás dos Tempos: Declínio e Queda das Vanguardas do
Século XX by Eric Hobsbawm Campo das Letras, Porto, 2001 The Portuguese translation of Behind the times: the decline and fall of twentieth-century
avant-gardes. It is a very short essay about the failures of last century's artistic
avant-gardes, mainly painting avant-gardes, in attaining their objective of creating a
new art for a new century. Comparisons with more successful artistic enterprises such
as photography (and photomontage), cinema, and industrial design (Bauhaus' kind of activities)
are referred to. Given the scope of the subject, one is left with the impression this book
should have been a lot longer.
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August Heat by Andrea Camilleri Penguin, New York, 2009 Another inspector Montalbano story. In this one the popular detective tries to discover the killer of a sixteen years old girl found dead inside a trunk in a clandestine basement build six years previously in a villa near Vigàta. The mission is not easy but Montalbano slowly progresses through the case only to be tricked out of the final arrest, at the very end, by the dead girl's twin sister. |
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Aulas de Literatura, Berkeley, 1980 by Julio Cortázar Cavalo de Ferro, Lisboa, 2016 This book consists in the transcriptions of eight lectures on literature given by Cortázar in the University of California, Berkeley, in October and November of 1980. It provides a very interesting way to look at (mostly) Cortázar's books through the eyes of its author, but also at other Latin American works and authors through the eyes and mind of a major writer. |
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Aulas de Marie Curie Anotadas por Isabelle Chavannes em 1907 by Isabelle Chavannes Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2007 This book is the Portuguese translation of the French original Leçons de Marie Curie: Recueillies par Isabelle Chavannes en 1907. It collects the lessons of (very) elementary physics taught by Marie Curie to her daughter Irène and to other kids of the same age. In ten short experimental lessons performed with simple devices, Marie Curie explains to the children, all of them about ten years old, how do we distinguish air from vacuum, or how the water gets to the tap, or how to measure densities of objects, or how ships float, etc. A delightful book, beautifully produced, in a nice translation by Waldyr Oliva, a former Rector of the Universidade de São Paulo and a renown senior mathematician I have the privilege to meet regularly in the research center we both belong to. |
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Auschwitz Report by Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti Verso, London, 2006 This book is the English translation of the italian original Rapporto sull'organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz-Alta Silesia), and was written by the famous italian writer and a fellow inmate of Auschwitz for the Soviet authorities soon after the camp liberations. As the Italian title indicates, it is a report on the hygienic-sanitary conditions in the camp. |
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Austeridade: Breve História de Um Grande Erro by Florian Schui Sociedade Global, vol. 63 Editorial Presença, Queluz de Baixo, 2015 This is the Portuguese translation of Austerity: the Great Failure, a timely essay by an historian of Economics at St. Gallen University, Switzerland, about the idea of austerity in the last two and a half millenia. As this book describes, austerity was never a concept distinctly from Economics, but its proponents and defenders were always worried with moral and political aspects much more than mere economic ones (sometimes even at the expense of these), but even those arguments concerning the superiority of austerity for morality or freedom's sake turned out, with hindsight, and as many of their opponents argued at the time, to be bogus. In fact, as the author clearly points out at the end of the book, there are no convincing economic arguments, neither a strong moral or political reason, for abstinence: to put it simple, austerity in its present form is a great failure. |
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Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald Penguin Books, London, 2002 A great work by the late German writer Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, killed in a tragic car accident in December 2001, in England, where he had been living, writing and teaching since 1966. In this long book, with only three paragraphs and a number of beautiful photographs, the narrator tells of his conversations with Jacques Austerlitz over the years, and of Austerlitz struggle to uncover his roots. Written in a contemplative mood, and progressing through a series of disquisitions about art, architecture, military constructions, town planning, botany... the book let us picture the slowly growing inner doubts of the retired architectural historian Austerlitz about his own origins and the discovery of his past. This turns out to result in a long journey into traumatic events in recent European history, of which Austerlitz was part as a boy of five, transported from Prague to England in one of the kindertransport in the last days of peace in 1939, already after the invasion of Checoslovakia by the Nazis, as he now rediscovers in his inquires in Belgium, London, Prague, Marienbad, Terezinbad, and Paris. Not a light reading, but certainly a compulsive one! |
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Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2004 (I just read this book. A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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A Aventura de Miguel Littín, Clandestino no Chile by Gabriel García Márquez Ficção Universal, vol. 248 Dom Quixote, Lisboa, 2003 A narrative of the stay in Chile, in 1985, of the Chilean film director Miguel Littín, who was barred from entering his own country by the Pinochet's regime, but nevertheless was able, with the help of Chilean underground organizations, to enter and stay for a number of weeks directing three international crews filming a documentary about life in Chile twelve years after the coup. The book is a showcase for Márquez the journalist (not the novelist) but the author's brilliancy shines through all the same! |
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La Azotea by Fernanda Trís Originales Charco Press, Edinburgh, 2021 La Azotea (in English: the Rooftop) is a claustrophobic and (to me) a disturbing novella. The main character, Clara, lives with her father, his canary and, after the birth of her daugther (assisted by a neighbour midwife), her baby daugther (whose father we never know who was), and forces everyone to a reclusive existence in their apartment, out of fear of the evil outside world, even putting linens on the windows to block avery contact; a disturbed state of mind maybe originated in the traumatic experience of having a stepmother and of her tragic dead? The paranoia of Clara slowly progresses and after some years, she shuts herself and everyone else (the dying father and the growing up daugther) in the apartment, isolated from the outside world, even from the midwife neighbour that used to buy them the groceries. Only the rooftop seems to be an escape for Clara. This is not exactly a light story, it is actually rather dark stuff and even more so because it is written in first-person, but I enjoyed it very much. |
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Baïkal-Amour by Olivier Rolin Collection Démarches Paulsen, Paris, 2017 Travel book about the author's journey along the BAM (Baikal-Amur Mainline), a railway line in Siberia which leaves the transiberian line in Taichet, about 650 Km before Irkutsk, and finishes about 5000 Km later in the port city of Sovietskaia Gavan, on the Pacific shore. Along the way the author takes us in a wonderful journey through the present and past of this remote Siberian region, and the people he gets to know (some friendly, others not so much), while describing the history of the line and its construction, never too far away from the Gulag slave labor that was the main workforce until the end of Stalinism, but also the enthusiastic young volunteers that came from all over the USSR in the last few stages of the construction. And also the strolls the author takes in towns and cities along the way, ending up with a visit to Sakhalin. As usual with Rolin's books, references to History, to Literature, and to writers have their natural place along the way and, in this book, a strong presence at the end, with reference to Anton Chekhov's presence in Sakhalin in 1890 and its present day reflection on the Island. An enjoyable book about very far away places I would love to visit, and do it by train... |
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O Baile by Irène Némirovsky Difel, Lisboa, 1987 A disturbing short story about social arrivistes, the inhumanity and artificiality of social relations, and the cruelty of youth. All encapsulated in a brief week in the life of a recently enriched Parisian bourgeois family between the wars. |
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Baku, Últimos Dias by Olivier Rolin Sextante Editora, Porto, 2012 In this book Rolin describes his life and thoughts during a visit to Baku in 2009. In this book, Rolin also crosses the Caspian Sea to Central Asia, visiting several places in Turkmenistan, and travelling across Central Asia's steppes. As usual in Rolin's travel books, we are led not only through the present day place, but also to ramblings about literature, history, politics, culture, and on. I found this book a very nice reading about a mysterious and (to me) far away exotic city and region that, most likely, I will never visit. |
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La Balada de los Bandoleros Baladíes by Daniel Ferreira Ficcíon Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, 2011 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Jonathan Schneer Random House, New York, 2010 As is well known, the Balfour Declaration is a short statement signed by Britain's foreign secretary Alfred Balfour in November 1917 and addressed to the head of the British branch of the Rothschilds, in which he pledges the support of the British government to the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, or, as Arthur Koestler famously stated, was an instance of one nation promising to another nation the land of a third nation. The history of the Balfour Declaration is the topic of this book. It turns around four different but interrelated subjects: the Zionist's dealings with the British government and officials in London, the British dealings with sharif Hussein of Meca, the Anglo-French negotiations about post World War I arrangements in the Middle East, and, finally, the contacts aiming at a separate peace with the Ottoman Empire. The main topics, however, are the relations between the Zionists and British officials in London, on one hand, and between the Arabs and the British officers in Cairo, on the other hand. An extraordinarily interesting book about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Britain's role in it before the beginning of the Mandate. |
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O Banqueiro Anarquista by Fernando Pessoa Colecção Mínima, vol. 1 Ulmeiro, Lisboa, 1994 This tiny little book is a masterpiece. The afterlunch chat between the narrator and his friend: a banker, investor, speculator, anarchist... The overwhelming power of the argument that turns a true anarchist into a true (anarchist) banker, by the foremost 20th Century Portuguese writer. Great stuff! |
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O Bar dos Dois Caminhos by Gilbert de Voisins Sistema Solar, Lisboa, 2021 This is the Portuguese translation of the French original, Le Bar de la Fourche, first published in 1909. The story takes place mainly in and around a saloon in a mountainous region of the "Old West" and is narrated by a young man (originally from the Jura region in France) who is the protégé of the (anti)hero, a Dutch adventurer called Vicent Van Horst whose obsessive but unrequited love for the teenager Annie Smith is the trigger for Van Horst's progressively more violent behaviour, ending in a paroxysm of violent revenge in a dark scene in the forest. Reflecting the crude, violent, and lawless life of frontier's men and women in the Western United States, it is still a very enjoyable reading more than a century after it was first published. |
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O Barulho das Coisas ao Cair by Juan Gabriel Váquez Alfaguara, Carnaxide, 2012 This book is the Portuguese version of the Spanish original El Ruido de Las Cosas al Caer. The killing, in 2009, of a hippopotamus that had escaped from the former Pablo Escobar zoo, leads the narrator to remember the story of Ricardo Laverde, a mysterious man he used to play billiards with when he was a young university professor, more than a decade ago, and was killed right next to him by payed assassins on a motorcycle. After this brutal event, the narrator becomes deeply affected psychologically and starts a quest to know more about the past of Laverde. The result is a panorama of the life of a young idealist couple, the Colombian Laverne and his American Peace Corps wife Elaine, in the 1970's Colombia. An era of exciting promises, but also the time when the narcotrafficking began to establish its violent hold on society. The events around Laverne's live in the 1970s, but also the narrator's quest in the late 1990's is actually what constitutes the noise of falling things (both the society and the individual), although the poetical title of the book makes its appearance in page 96 (of this edition) when the narrator completes the earing of a tape record of the cockpit talk in American Airlines flight 965, a real 1995 aviation accident in which the author puts Laverne's wife Elaine. This book won the 2011 Alfaguara prize. Very good! |
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As Batalhas no Deserto by José Emilio Pacheco Ovelha Negra, vol. 1 Oficina do Livro, Cruz Quebrada, 2006 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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Beowulf: A Verse Translation, revised edition translated with an introduction and notes by Michael Alexander Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, London, 2003 One of the oldest and most important literary works in Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) language, this epic poem (or, according to J.R.R. Tolkien, an elegy) whose manuscript dates from 1000 CE (given or taken 25 years) is still worth reading at the start of the 21st Century, in spite of the fact that its story is not exactly the type of plot that I enjoy reading: set in 6th Century Scandinavia (present day Denmark and South Sweden) it describes the deeds of Beowulf, a hero of the Geats (or Goths, the inhabitants of Götaland, in present day Southern Sweden), comes to the aid of king Hrothgar (\(\approx\) Roger, in modern English...) of the Danes whose hall in Heorot has been under attack by the monster/giant Grendel, a descendent of Caim. Beowulf kills him and then Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is also killed. Beowulf returns home and becomes king of the Geats. After ruling for fifty years, Beowulf is forced to face a dragon that had started to burn Geats' houses and lands in anger by the stealing of a jewelled cup by a slave in order to appease his enraged master. Beowulf, abandoned by all his entourage but for Wiglaf, defeats the dragon but is mortally wounded in the battle. Definitely a classic oeuvre from the early Middle Age that is quite interesting and worth reading even by those that, like me, do not care much about Fantasy fiction, a genre that Beowulf had a deep influence in. The introduction, geneaological tables, map, and notes by Michael Alexander are exceedingly helpful! |
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Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the
Abuse of History, Updated Edition by Norman G. Finkelstein University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008 This book has two main themes: the "new anti-semitism" and the poor Israel human rights record. What unites both is an utterly devastating rebuttal of the book The Case for Israel by the Harvard Law School professor and preeminent member of the Israel lobby, Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein's work is, as usual, powerful, deeply informed, and, in stark contrast with his target, intellectually very honest, providing the reader with a detailed and very precise references that the reader can check if he/she feels the need. The book is divided into two parts and an equally thick set of afterwords (Postscript, Appendices, and Epilogue). Finkelstein rebuts Dershowitz's various statements about the "new anti-semitism", about Israel "purity of arms", its use of torture and human rights violations, its treatment of Palestinians (including the record of Israel's High Court decisions), as well as Dershowitz's attacks on international, Israeli, an Palestinian human rights organizations. All this is done resorting to appropriate examples, citations, and sources, it is written with such a precision and and fine attention to detail that, in any society that nurtures true and intellectual honesty, Dershowitz's Israel statements would have been disqualified and forever marked as an unremitting fraud and justly shoveled away. Being things as they are, it was Dershowitz who preassured right and left until he finally got his way and Finkelstein was denied tenure by his University (as we learn in this book's Epilogue, written by Frank J. Menetrez), in what constitutes a very lively illustration of the U.S. Israel lobby at work and the power it has to stifle speech critical of Israel. As for this Finkelstein book: a must! |
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Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture by Alan Sokal Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008 A compilation of papers by Sokal about Science, Philosophy of Science, Culture, and Politics, including an annotated reprint of his famous 1996 Social Text hoax. Discussing issues related to postmodernism and science studies, philosophy of sciences, and religion, this collection should be read by everyone worried about the dire consequences of sloppy reasoning in academia and in everyday life. |
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Blues by Patrick Neate Colecção Gradiva, vol. 98 Gradiva, Lisboa, 2002 Translation of the English original Twelve Bar Blues. A novel with several interwoven stories spanning three centuries and three continents. A tale of love, hate, magic, jazz, and the quest for one's identity. Good reading! |
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As Boas Intenções by Max Aub Ulisseia, Lisboa, 2010 This is the Portuguese translation of the Spanish original Las Buenas Intenciones. Good intentions can produce more damage than no action at all, that is one of the morals one can infer from this tale: the hero, Agustín, assumes the paternity of an illegitimate son of his father so that his mother does not get hurt by the discovery of his father unfaithfulness. This first well intentioned lie starts up a series of humorous situations in this wonderful novel of manners set in bourgeois Spain of the 1920s and 1930s. |
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A Boca Cheia de Vidros by Henk van Woerden Ficção-Verdade, vol. 11 Temas e Debates, Lisboa, 2002 This book is the Portuguese translation of the dutch original Een Mond Vol Glas, the first book-length biography of Demitrios Tsafendas, a Mozambican of Greek descent who, in 1966, killed South Africa's prime minister and principal architect of the apartheid state, Hendrik Verwoerd. A humane portrait of a troubled man in a pitiless era. |
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The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd by Alexander Rabinowitch Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2007 Written by a respected American historian of the Russian revolution and early soviet period, this book kind of completes a trilogy about the Bolshevik ascension to power that started with the author's study of the failed July 1917 coup (Prelude to Revolution) and continued with his study of the October revolution (The Bolsheviks Come To Power). This volume, the first to benefit from the opening of the soviet archives in the 1990s, is devoted to the study of the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Bolsheviks in the first year after October 1917. This early period of soviet rule (1917-1918) saw truly revolutionary changes in Russia, and in Petrograd in particular, and in this very interesting study we can read about them in a masterful way: the dissent within the Bolsheviks, the election to, and the dismissal of, the Constituent Assembly, the separate peace with Germany and the Brest-Litovsk treaty that precipitated the end of the coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the inauguration of the Bolshevik one-party rule that would remain in force for more than seventy years, until the downfall of the soviet regime, and also the catastrophic domestic social, economic, political, and military situation, in Petrograd and in the country, in the Spring and Summer of 1918, that led to the proclamation of the Red Terror, the onset of the civil war, the formation and early development of the Cheka. All these momentous events are seen from the perspective of a city that lost its capital status to Moscow and whose dire economical and social conditions led to a growing disenchantment of the workers with the Bolshviks, resulting in the formation of independent political bodies, and the increasing depopulation of the city. The attempts of the Bolshviks to remain in power at the various levels of decision making (from factory committees and trade unions to city, local, and national government) in face of mounting difficulties and opposition lead very quickly to the dismissal of all democratic mechanisms and to the concomitant increase in the repression apparatus that would be one of the soviet regime staples. Rabinowitch's new book is an important contribution to our understanding of these turbulent times. |
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Boneca de Luxo by Truman Capote Colecção Mil Folhas, vol. 22 Público, Porto, 2002 This short novel, the Portuguese translation of Breakfast at Tiffany's, tells the story of a country girl in the big city. A girl with a precise view of what she wants, but utterly egoistical in her dealings with others, which suits her fine, considering the human landscape that surrounds her. A very entertaining reading. |
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A Borra do Café by Mario Benedetti Cavalo de Ferro, Lisboa, 2024 (A comment will be posted here soon.) |
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Bourbaki; Uma Sociedade Secreta by Maurice Mashaal Caleidoscópio, Casal de Cambra, 2007 An history of the group of French mathematicians, created in 1935, that had such a tremendous influence in mathematics and its teaching in the second half of the twentieth century. A very interesting book (although with a rather shameful proofreading, both on the Portuguese and on the mathematical levels) with a lot o interesting and curious informations and anecdotes about the group and its members (e.g.: the symbol ∅ for the empty set is an André Weil's, a Bourbaki member, invention of 1937.) Apart from the unfortunate exaggerations of the late 1960's and 1970's, namely the disastrous consequences of the pedagogical experiments of "Modern Mathematics", the original idea and much of the work of Bourbaki had important and everlasting effects in the way mathematics is presented and published. An interesting book about this episode of the history of last century's mathematical and intellectual lives. |
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Breve História da Ciência em Portugal by Carlos Fiolhais and Décio Martins Gradiva/Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, 2010 This book is a brief history of science in Portugal. Of course, being Portugal a country with a notoriously poor record of scientific achievement, there is not much to say about its science that could be of international interest, since very few of the Portuguese practitioners of science ever got any kind of impact and recognition outside the country's borders (suffice is to say that there is only one Portuguese Nobel laureate in scientific disciplines). In any case, even if, with precious few exceptions, Portuguese scientists have not been at the forefront of their fields, some have made noticeable contributions and a short book like this, aimed at the general public, is a commendable initiative. |
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O Burro de Ouro by Apuleio Cotovia, Lisboa, 2007 This book is a Portuguese translation of the Latin literature classic. Apuleius' book, also known also as the Metamorphoses (not to be confounded with the namesake work by Ovidius) narrates the story of Lucius, who accidentally transforms himself into an ass. The adventures he experiences in that sore condition among all kinds of people, as well as a good number of side stories (such as the famous Cupic and Psyche tale) are the subject of this very entertaining and, at times, funny book. |
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La Búsqueda del Tesoro by Andrea Camilleri Salamandra, Barcelona, 2013 Another Montalbano story, with the usual ingredients that turn this Camilleri's series an entertaining reading. This one starts in a strange way, when a brother and sister elderly couple start shooting passersby from their apartment... |
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O Busto do Imperador by Joseph Roth Coleção Gato Maltês Assírio & Alvim, Porto, 2022 This book is the Portuguese translation of Die Büste des Kaisers, a novela by Joseph Roth first published in several instalments in 1935 in the German language newspaper Pariser Tegeblatt, published in France by refugees form Nazi Germany. In it Roth expresses his longing for the European world before World War I through count Morstin, the aristocrat of the village of Lopatyny, in the eastern confines of the Hapsburg empire, and his inadaptation to life after the break of the empire into a myriad of national republics with their new officials (who the count no longer has influence upon), borders, passports, and the like. In response to his disgust with this new nationalistic environment he puts a bust of the late emperor in from of his residence in the village, until an official of the new Republic of Poland passes by the village in inspection duties... This is a very nice short book, and a perfect expression of Roth's disgust for the world that came to an end with the disappearance of the multinational Austria-Hungary monarchy in 1918 and with the triumph of nationalists everywhere. His contempt is more clearly and explicitly expresses in the short but brilliant chapter II. Written in 1935, when nationalist ideologies were on a rise and Roth himself was already a refugee from the most radical of the nationalist regimes, Nazi Germany, then only two years old, this book still matters today, almost a century later, when the ideological scourge of nationalism seems to continue unabated in Europe. |
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Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust by Mary Fulbrook Oxford University Press, New York, 2023 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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Los Cachorros by Mario Vargas Llosa (Edición de Guadalupe Fernández Ariza) Letras Hispánicas, vol 169 Catedra, Madrid, 1998 A short story about the coming of age of a group of upper middle class Peruvian youths. As usual in this series of the Spanish publisher Catedra, the book is put into the wider social and literary context by an informative and well written introduction. |
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A Cadela by Pilar Quintana Dom Quixote, Alfragide, 2021 A very nice novella around the relation of a poor forty years old women with her female dog, mixing love, loyalty, disappointment, violence, guilt, and the trauma of not being able to have a child, in the setting where her and her husband live: a small village in the Pacific coast of Colombia, where the jungle, the ocean, and an oppressively hot and humid weather permeates life. |
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Os Cães e os Lobos by Irène Némirovsky Ficções, vol. 185 Relógio D'Água, Lisboa, 2012 This is the Portuguese translation of the 1940 novel Les Chiens et les Loups. Némirovsky explores the subject of the impossible love between a lower class girl and a high society boy, in the context of East European Jewish life in the first few decades of the twentieth century, first in the Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), later in Parisian exile. This is an engaging book, not least by the portraits of life in a by now, fortunately, long gone Europe: a place of stifling official prejudice, old regime social barriers, and the recurring violent pogrom. Némirovsky has that je ne sait quoi that forces me to keep reading her books nonstop. Maybe is the way she slowly builds up tension, or the way the end of a chapters pushes for the beginning of the next one, or her extraordinary capacity to create, or recreate, an overall atmosphere (check the first ten chapters, with the action placed in an Ukrainian town prior to World War I, and in particular chapters 6 to 8, whose action takes place in the terrifying experience of a pogrom.) Whatever the reason may be, I finish reading this wonderful book in a single day. |
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Café República: Folhetim do Mundo Vivido em Vila Velha (1914-1945)
by Álvaro Guerra Biblioteca de Bolso [Literatura] vol.42 Dom Quixote, Lisboa, 2002 First volume of the Café 's trilogy, this book is a wonderful portrayal of life in a small Portuguese town in the first half of last century, and its relations with events in the rest of the country, and in the world at large, seen through the eyes and actions of a well chosen set of skilfully build characters. |
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The Calculus Gallery: Masterpieces from Newton to Lebesgue by William Dunham Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005 This is one of the most interesting books on the history of Calculus that I have ever read. It does require a moderate amount of mathematical knowledge (although not more than the standard first year undergraduate Analysis courses), but it is written with such a brilliance that one reads it with the eagerness more frequently experienced when reading a good thriller. But then, the history of Mathematical Analysis is, when we look at it in the proper way, one of the most fascinating and thrilling episodes in the intellectual history of mankind. This book is but one of the different stories that can be written: not being the history of Calculus, not even a history, it is, as the title indicates, a gallery, like an art gallery: reading along it we travel from the founding fathers Newton and Leibitz, until the pinacle of rigor and generality (and beauty!!) attained in the beginning of the 20th Century by Baire and Lebesgue. Along the way we visit some of the brilliant ideas of the Bernoulli brothers, Euler, Cauchy, Riemann, Liouville, Weierstrass, Cantor, and Volterra, and we see how, in two and a half centuries, the combined work of these (and others) outstanding minds shaped one of the most beautiful and powerful of all human creations. Like in any art gallery, a lot of names, some of then genius, are missing, but what is there is enough to tell a story, to disquiet and to awe the visitor. All in all, this is a magnificent book that all teachers and students of mathematics should read. It is also a work that should sadden us for the beauty herein is not likely to be appreciated by many more. It comes to mind the following famous poem by Fernando Pessoa, one of the most celebrated of all Portuguese poets (in my loose translation): Newton's binomial is as beautiful as the Venus of Milo. The trouble is that few people can be aware of this. And the (generalized) Newton's binomial expansion is just the beginning: it is the very first section of the first chapter in this book... |
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O Caminho para a Solução Final:
A Conferência de Wannsee e o Início do Holocausto
by Peter Longerich Vogais, Lisboa, 2023 This book is the Portuguese translation of the German original Wannseekonferenz—Der Weg zur «Endlösung». Apart from the notes, index, and the like, taking more than two fifths of the book, the remaining part, about 180 pages long, is about the event itself and its significance. The Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942, is a now infamous meeting with special relevance for the process of murdering Europe's Jewish population. The book starts by a chapter situating the Wannsee conference in the context of the anti-Jewish policies and actions that had already taken place, in 1941, in German occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, and ends by another describing the extreme radicalization of the Jewish policies in its aftermath, resulting in the systematic murdering of the Jews living in German dominated Europe along the year of 1942. The central chapter, based on the only surviving copy of the minutes, describe the discussions and the participants in the meeting. Interestingly, the conference was also (maybe even mainly) part of the power struggle between Heydrich and Himmler to design and control de Final Solution; a struggle that was soon afterwards overcome by the running of events, the evolution of the War, and by the death of Heydrich in early June 1942 as the result of wounds inflicted in an assassination attempt by the Czechoslovak resistance in late May. This is a short and extremely interesting book. |
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Canción by Eduardo Halfon D. Quixote, Alfragide, 2022 This book is the Portuguese translation of one of a series of autobiographically inspired novelas by the famous Guatemalan writer. In this, Halfon revisits his youth years and, a few years before he was born, the story of the kidnaping of his grandfather in 1967 by leftist guerrillas, the name of one of which gives the book its title. The narrator Eduardo Halfon tells the story of his grandfather, a Lebanese jew who migrated to New York and then to several other places finally settling down in Guatemala, becoming very affluent (and influent), and in the process situates the story within important aspects of Guatemala's history in the second half of last century (Arbenz government and attempts at reform, the CIA coup, the leftist guerrillas and civil war.) All in hardly more than one hundred pages of a very concise and captivating style. An excellent book. |
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Canciones para el Incendio by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Narrativa Hispánica Alfaguara, Barcelona, 2019 This collection of nine short stories by the famous Colombian writer has some I found very nice: Las Ranas, where an apparently harmless, normal, encounter and conversation in a commemoration of army veterans and their families develops into a potentially very damaging situation, or the one that gives its title to the volume, which tells the story of a notable woman whose life the author researched while writing La Forma de las Ruinas and that, being somewhat lateral to the main plot, did not go into the final version of that novel but it was not only too good to be lost forever, but also it was quite capable of standing on its own as a short story. |
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Cândido ou O Optimista by Voltaire Tinta da China, Lisboa, 2006 A Portuguese translation of the famous text Candide, ou l'optimiste, by Voltaire. A really delightful and funny reading with helpful annotations by the Portuguese historian Rui Tavares, who also translated the text. |
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O Cão de Barro by Andrea Camilleri Literatura Estrangeira Difel, Algés, 1999 A Montalbano mystery where the gruesome discovery of two young bodies in a cave, guarded by a terracotta dog and laid down in a peculiar setting, leads the inspector into a forgotten story of a local family past. |
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The Capital by Robert Menasse MacLehose, London, 2019 This book was a best seller when it was published in Germany in 2017, it is a satire of the inner life of European Union bureaucracy in Brussels, with the collusions and fights among different departments, both on trivia and on serious business, the personal ambition and jealousy , but also the comradery and companionship among the crowd of public servants coming from the huge array of member states and working in the administrative business of keeping Europe a working institution. Crossing all these stories there is a crime that seems to be too inconvenient to be investigated and a dark conspiracy by fundamentalist catholic Polish priests. Overall: an entertaining book. |
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Capital Científica:
Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e
História Contemporânea de Portugal organized by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, Lisboa, 2019 I found this book an extraordinarily interesting work: organized in three parts, its various chapters discuss the creation and development of several scientific and higher education institutions in Lisbon, from roughly the second half of the nineteen century until the end of the dictatorship in 1974. In this grand view of Science in the Portuguese capital we get acquainted with the social intervention of engineers, medical doctors, and scientists since the end of the Old Regime, and the importance they, and the institutions they created, developed, and worked in had in the construction of Lisbon as the Capital of the modern Portuguese nation-state. Among the most interesting chapters, and taking into consideration that these choices are always subjective, I would list all chapters in Part I (about the Escola Politécnica and the Escola do Exército, the astronomical observatory, the geological services, and the Instituto Industrial), the two chapters about biomedical research during the First Republic in Part II, and the Chapter about my alma mater, the Instituto Superior Técnico, and the national laboratory of civil engineering in Part III. But, really, all chapters are worth reading. A very welcomed addition to the History of Science and of scientific institutions in Portugal. |
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Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon Allen Lane/Penguin, London, 2010 Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio) is, among the world's greatest painters, one of the more mysterious. He basically left no written record of his life or work by his own hand and, in spite of the large amount of research that have been accumulating over the years, part of it remains obscure even today. This biography of Caravaggio, engagedly written and beautifully illustrated, is based upon the three early biographies (published in the seventeen century) complemented and corrected by other contemporary sources and present day scholarship. It describes Caravaggio's short and tumultuous life (1571-1610) and presents the historical context that was the background for his life and work. In the analysis of his paintings (illustrated in full color in excellent photos), Graham-Dixon provides the reader with the information needed for a full appreciation of Caravaggio's revolutionary achievements. All in all, this is a marvelous book that I very much enjoyed reading and that I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone, not only to Caravaggio's enthusiasts but to those who are not yet Caravaggio's fans for they are bound to become ones at the end. |
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Carlota Fainberg by Antonio Muñoz Molina Alfaguara, Madrid, 2000 Beautiful. Sad. A great little novel by the famous Spanish writer. |
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Cartas de Casanova, Lisboa 1757 by António Mega Ferreira Sextante Editora, Porto, 2013 This epistolary novel is made of a series of purported letters by Giacomo Casanova who, after its evasion from prison in Venice, arrives in Lisbon in the summer of 1757, almost two years after the city destruction by the Great Earthquake. His life in the ruined city, among the chaotic atmosphere still prevailing, his interactions with Portuguese notables, as well as (and inevitably) his love advances, is superbly created by Mega Ferreira in this nice novel. There is, of course, no evidence that the real Casanova has ever been to Portugal. |
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El Cartero de Neruda by Antonio Skármeta Contemporánea, vol. 236/1 DeBolsillo, Barcelona, 2003 This famous book by Skármeta came to life as the result of the success of the movie Ardiente Paciencia, directed by Skármeta himself in 1983, after his homonym play got an enthusiastic reception in Europe and the US. Another film adaptation (The Postman), by Michael Radford, won an Oscar and became a sort of cult movie. To capitalize on its success, the novel started to be published with its current name (sometimes with its original title in parenthesis.) It is a lovely novel, about the friendship between a young postman and the poet Pablo Neruda, mixing in a beautiful way tales of friendship, love, politics, literature, and the everyday life of a small fishing community. All interwoven with an exquisite sense of humor. Definitely worth reading. |
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La Casa Grande by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio La Navaja Suiza No. 2, Madrid, 2017 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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A Casa de Papel by Carlos María Domínguez Colecção Pequenos Prazeres Asa, Porto, 2006 A story about how books can change a person's life ad also how a person can change the ''life'' of books. About the passion for books and a bibliophile's loss of reason that leads him to build a house out of his library, literally: by cementing his books into the walls of his residence. A beautiful and at points disturbing story that left me pondering about the ephemeral nature of much of humanity's treasures. |
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Casamentos e Outros Desencontros by Jorge Buescu Ciência Aberta, vol. 191 Gradiva, Lisboa, 2011 This is the fourth book on the popularization of mathematics written by Jorge Buescu. The author, a mathematician at University of Lisbon, an outstanding professor (students dixit) and a dear friend of mine, is arguably the present day best math popularizer in Portugal. In this book, as in previous ones, Buescu offers a set of short chapters previously published in the monthly magazine Ingenium of the Portuguese engineering association. These seventeen short stories are a wonderful way to get introduced to a number of issues in contemporary mathematics in a relaxed and non technical way: from the Lie group \(E_8\) and its potential physical relevance, to crocheting the hyperbolic plane, from the Sangaku tradition in Japan, to Parrondo's paradox, and many many more. A wonderful little book that one devours in a single gulp. |
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The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge NYRB Classics New York Review Books, New York, 2004 This book is a forgotten masterpiece! Its author, Victor Serge, was born in Belgium in 1890, of exiled Russian parents, become an anarchist, went to revolutionary Russia in 1919 where he fought for the Bolsheviks, then became a left oppositionist to Stalin, being expelled from the Party, imprisoned and deported to Central Asia, then expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 as a result of an international campaign. He died in Mexico in 1947. Of his many works, this novel is widely regarded as his fictional masterpiece, considered by many as the finest piece of literature ever written about the Stalinist purges. This is indeed a wonderfully conceived work, with a structure that in a certain sense seems to mirror conditions under Stalin's reign: Tulayev, a member of the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Party is murdered by mere chance, in the first chapter, by an anonymous disgruntled Moscovite youth. Then, in succeeding chapters, members of government, party functionaries, and known oppositionists (all of them entirely innocent of this particular crime,) are charged of being part of a wide conspiracy, arrested and interrogated. As the action unfolds, the diverse independent characters become ever more connected, at least in the perspective of the officials in charge of the investigation, not a few of which end up also arrested as conspirators... After a number of life sentences for the supposed plot are passed on and duly executed, the true culprit discover, by chance, in the last chapter, the tragic dimensions his act has produced. The way the main investigator of the case deals with the anonymous letter he receives from the murderer is a telling parable of a totalitarian state contempt for the truth. All this evolved story is written with such a superb wit, and even brilliancy at times, that the reading of this book is made into an indelible experience. |
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El Caso Kurílov by Irène Némirovsky Salamandra, Barcelona, 2010 Twenty years later, exiled in Nice, a former Bolshevik remembers the time when he was given the task of murdering Valerian Kurílov, the minister of public instruction of tsar Nicolas II. Getting admission to the minister inner circle he gets to know the dreaded minister more intimately while preparing the attempt at his life, just to realize that matters are not that black and white. |
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Casos do Beco das Sardinheiras by Mário de Carvalho Caminho, Lisboa, 2007 A small volume of short stories on the everyday life in some fictional alley in one of Lisbon's old neighborhoods. Some funny stories with the overall motto that serves as a subtitle to the work: "onde importa sobremaneira não confundir género humano com Manuel Germano", a nearly untranslatable pun. |
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Cem Anos de Solidão by Gabriel García Márquez Ficção Universal, vol. 39 Dom Quixote, Lisboa, 1998 The Portuguese translation of Cien Años de Soledad, this is the masterpiece of García Márquez. The saga of the Buéndia family across several generations and a portrait of life in Colombia's Caribbean region, in the fictional village of Macondo. As exquisite and involving novel mixing realism and magic, love and hate, humor and drama, and loneliness: a pinnacle in Marquéz's art as a story teller and mood creator. If someone is to read only one book of Marquéz this should be it. |
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Center of the Storm: a Case Study of Human Rights Abuses in
Hebron Disctrict by Peter Bouckaert et al, Human Rights Watch, New York, 2001 Based on the results of two fact finding missions to the city and region of Hebron, Palestine, in November 2000 and February 2001, the facts related in this report are absolutely appalling. It is really unbelievable how the acts and policies described herein continue to be done with impunity by a country that calls itself democratic (actually the "only democracy" in the region) and reacts with such outrage when the myth of its army "purity of arms" is questioned. To know what military occupation is all about one needs only to read the grim cases related in the last two chapters. After that, anyone can understand only too well why any normal Palestinian will be quite happy if a number of Israeli soldiers and settlers were send to meet their creator sooner rather than latter... |
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O Centro do Mundo by Ana Cristina Leonardo Lígua Comum Quetzal, Lisboa, 2018 A novel having as hero the white Russian adventurer Boris Skossyreff, and also the town of Olhão, in southern Portugal. Skossyreff arrived in Olhã in 1936 (after being expelled from Spain following his attempt to get hold of Andorra's throne) in search of a boat to take him to Marroco. The interplay between the "Big History", like the World Wars, The Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Gulag, and the Olhã uprising against the French invaders of Portugal in 1808, and the "Small History" consisting in Skossyreff's troubled life, and of Olhãs small town notables (and not so notables) in the first decades of the twentieth Century. At times it brought to mind some of Sebald's books. Overall, this is a very entertaining, reality inspired, fictional book, based on some events I knew nothing about, and accompanied by allusive historical photographs. |
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Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting by Donald G. Saari, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 2001 Of the two expository books by Saari on the mathematics of voting systems, this is clearly the more mathematically oriented , although it is not exactly a mathematical text, containing no proofs of the stated theorems but only illustrative examples and very clear explanations. Saari also refers the reader to the most relevant contributions in the technical literature, including his very many papers and his excellent mathematical monograph Basic Geometry of Voting. Being a kind of middle of the road text between the Social Sciences and the Mathematical communities, this book can leave some people unsatisfied, not exploring in depth neither of the fields. For me, I found it very interesting and a useful stepping stone between Saari's book Decisions and Elections and his mathematical papers and monograph that every serious student of the field must sooner or later plunge into. |
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A Chegada das Trevas: Como os
Cristãos Destruíram o Mundo Clássico by Catherine Nixey Desassossego, Porto Salvo, 2018 This is the Portuguese translation of the book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, describing the clash between Christianity and the Classical World under the Roman Empire. The portrait that comes out of its reading is very much at odds with the popular idea (unsupported by facts) that the triumph of Christianity resulted in the substitution of a decaying brutal Classical civilization by an enlightened and gentler Christian one. It was nothing of the sort: Christians and their Church were, for the most part, brutal and ignorant zealots who, gaining enough strength and state support in the decades after the conversion of Constantine, destroyed or defaced statues and works of art, turned temples into rubble, burned libraries, and persecuted and killed pagans throughout the empire in far larger numbers than those previously suffered by the Christians. That is, in fact, the natural result of the control of the mechanisms of state power and coercion by a totalitarian religious cult where the existence of a unique god makes any other god a false one that must be obliterated, together with the artifacts of its cult, and any texts (being them religious or philosophical) not conforming to the supposed teaching of the one true god: a Taliban like practice by the early Christians that we in the Christian world, being descendent of the victors, very comfortably forget. This book is a timely opportunity for the general reading public to remember what "our" religion and its promoters are capable of doing if left unchecked; much like the uncontrolled fanaticals of any other religion. |
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O Cheiro da Noite by Andrea Camilleri, Colecção Mil Folhas, vol. 79 Público, Porto, 2003 This was the first book by Camilleri that I read and my appreciation of it can be gauged by the fact that I then proceeded to read another ten of Camilleri's books in slightly more than a month: it is entertaining, funny, and intelligent. This book is a Montalbano mystery: the famous police inspector works on the mysterious disappearance of an entrepreneur of dubious character. A Faulkner short story intrudes itself into the book's plot and in its conclusion. |
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The Christians and the Fall of Rome by Edward Gibbon Great Ideas, vol. 9 Penguin Books, London, 2004 A short extract of the great oeuvre of Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline an Fall of the Roman Empire, this book is concerned with the primitive Christians and the spread of Christianity in the roman world. Considering this was written and published in 1776, it is a matter of wonder to see the very unflattering way the primitive Christians, their beliefs, and their way of living is sometimes portrayed by Gibbons. |
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Churchill's Shadow: An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy by Geoffrey Wheatcroft The Bodley Head, London, 2021 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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A Cidade Ausente by Ricardo Piglia Teorema, Lisboa, 2010 This is a very strange, confusing, book. It baffled me in many levels, the first of which is what is the story? There are parts about a love story, others about a strange machine, about automatons, one about a police torturer son of a famous writer, a bizarre one about language on an island (!). It looked more like a bunch of disparate texts (some nice, but most of them not really catching...) loosely put together than a single coherent book. I read it until the end with the expectation that as I approached the end a denouement would clarify matters, but the expectation grew dim with the progression of the reading and in the end came to naught. |
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A Cidade e os Cães by Mario Vargas Llosa Ficção Universal, vol 286 Dom Quixote, Lisboa, 2002 The Portuguese translation of La ciudad y los perros, the first novel of Llosa and the one that, when it was first published in 1963, turned him world famous overnight and provoked a bitter reaction by the Peruvian military establishment, particularly those connected with the Leoncio Prado military college, in Lima, where the action of the novel takes place. Llosa was himself a cadet at the college, and the book is a brilliant denunciation of the physical and mental violence, and of the hypocrisy, of the military institution. |
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A Cidade Que Não Existia: Amadora 1970-2020 by Alfredo Cunha (with text by Luís Pedro Nunes and presentation by Carla Tavares) Tinta da China, Lisboa, 2020 This book is the catalogue of a photographic exhibition by Alfredo Cunha (who is a well know Portuguese photographer and photojournalist, who become famous by his photos of the 25th of April 1974 revolution). All the black and white photos were taken in Amadora, a suburban city just outside Lisbon, about half from the 1970s, when Cunha was a young man in his twenties and Amadora was a fast growing heavy industrial centre and dormitory town attracting many tens of thousands poor migrants from Portugal's hinterland. The other half of the photos were taken in 2020, when the city has lost most of its heavy industry, and the population changed markedly by the influx of a large number of foreign migrants. The photos are quite nice (some are, I think, outstanding) but what impressed me most was, on one side the poverty of many of the 1970s pictures (those on the Ribeira da Falagueira shanty town are particularly stricking), and on the other hand the vast improvements (shanty neighborhoods, muddy sidewalks and unpaved streets are gone) and huge changes in the human landscape. Having lived in Amadora in my youth (from the early 1960s to the late 1980s), and still going there from time to time, I very much enjoyed the book and its photographs. |
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A Ciência em Portugal by Carlos Fiolhais Ensaios da Fundação, vol. 10 Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, Lisboa, 2011 A brief panoramic essay on the state of the Science in Portugal at the end of 2010 (although some data goes only up to 2008). An interesting and informative little book focusing on the exact, natural, medical, and engineering sciences in Portugal, particularly on their institutional organization, their relation with the economy, technology, and society at large, the production of Science, its teaching and popularization. |
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A Ciência na "Aula da Esfera" no
Colégio de Santo Antão 1590-1759 by Henrique Leitão Comissariado Geral das Comemorações do V Centenário do Nascimento de S. Francisco Xavier, Lisboa, 2007 The Aula da Esfera ("Sphere's Course") was the mathematics course of the Jesuit college of St. Antão, in Lisbon, from 1590 until the expulsion of the Company from Portugal in 1759. It had an important role in the scientific education of the Portuguese elites and in the preparation of scientifically informed missionaries leaving for the Far East (mainly China). This non technical book, by the foremost present day authority on the Aula da Esfera, the Portuguese historian of science and of mathematics Henrique Leitão, is a superbly produced volume with wonderful color reproductions of books, manuscripts and tiles (from the existing walls of the classroom where the Aula took place). It has a number of clearly written short chapters about the history of the Colégio and the importance of the Aula for the history of mathematics in Portugal. A book of History of Science for the general public with an uncompromisingly high, yet accessible, scholarly level. |
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Cinco Esquinas by Mario Vargas Llosa DeBolsillo, Barcelona, 2017 A novel of Vargas Llosa that turns around a (at first), singular, unexpected, homoerotic experience of two women friends from Lima's high bourgeoisie. On parallel dramatic lines, events like the kidnaping of a friend by revolutionaries, the blackmail of one of the women husband by a journalist of a scandal tabloid connected with the government, and the murky politics of the last period of Fujimori's dictatorship, all helps to make this novel not only an entertaining story, but also a canvas of Peruvian high life and society at the closing years of the 1990s. |
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City of Stone: the Hidden History of Jerusalem by Meron Benvenisti University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998 This is the second book by Benvenisti that I have read, and I am quickly becoming a devoted reader of him! The way he writes about notoriously polemical and difficult problems; his (at times) common-sensical remarks, so natural but so seldom stated; his deep knowledge of the history, both distant and recent, of the city and of her conflicting communities and interests; the intelligence and fairness with which the issues are analyzed; all this makes the book a very rare and important work and should enshrine its author as one of the very few knowledgeable and balanced persons whose opinions about these matters, even when one does not fully agree with them, are always worthy to listen to. |
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The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity by Tariq Ali Verso, London, 2003 Tarq Ali is a writer and filmmaker, well known for his bitter criticisms of contemporary political events. This book is a demolishing account of both, western politics concerning the Islamic world (mainly Arab, Iranian, Pakistani, and Indonesian cases), and the inner politics and motivations in the Islamic countries themselves. Being the author a "non-believer" that had, at some point in live, attempted to define himself, paraphrasing Isaac Deutscher, as a non-Muslim Muslim, the utter repulsion and contempt he feels towards the upper hand gained by religious fundamentalists in the politics of many an Islamic country, be there in Iran, in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, or in Pakistan and Afghanistan, comes as no surprise. It may, however, surprise some readers the instrumental role that western powers (mainly the US and Britain) had in the support of Islamic religious fundamentalists in some places and times, past and present. An excellent book about a much talked about but not really much understood subject. In addition, the author writes in such a clear, lucid way, that manages to disentangle seemingly irrational conflicts and provides historically rational and brilliant analysis that turn the world, if not into a better place, at least into a much more intelligible one. |
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O Codex Arquimedes by Reviel Netz and William Noel Edições 70, Lisboa, 2007 This book is the Portuguese translation of the English original The Archimedes Codex. The wonderful tale of the (re)discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest, of the research that allowed us to read Archimedes' text, and of what we have learned (so far) from it. The book intersperses chapters about the book as an object (its history as well as the techniques for its restoration and study) with chapters about Archimedes and his mathematics. Of course the part about the history of the book is jaw dropping, but those chapters concerning Archimedes' mathematics, both of what was already known and of those parts unique to the Palimpsest (the actual infinity in the Method, and the combinatorics in the Stomachion) are truly great. Our mind really boggles when thinking either about the geniality of Archimedes' thought in the 3rd century BCE, the incredibly hazards this manuscript (a copy probably written twelve centuries after his death) has suffered, and the extraordinary refinement of the late 20th century technology that was needed in order to recover the original text and to have in from of us the words written twenty three centuries ago by one of the most genial minds that has ever lived. |
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Coisas de Loucos: o Que Eles Deixaram no Manicómio by Catarina Gomes Tinta da China, Lisboa, 2020 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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Os Comboios Vão Para o Purgatório by Hernán Rivera Letelier Ulisseia, Lisboa, 2010 A wonderful story by this Chilean writer that has acquired a big reputation in the last decade or so. The plot takes place in a train traveling North through the desolated landscape of the Atacama desert in Chile. A remarkable set of characters inhabit the claustrophobic and overcrowded carriages along almost two thousand kilometers and several days. If there was a train truly headed for purgatory, this was it. To be read with pleasure, fun, and attention to the details... |
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The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans The Penguin Press, New York, 2004 This book is the first of a three volume work on the history of the Third Reich. It covers the pre-history of the Nazi regime, namely Germany before the Great War, the loss of the War, the revolution, and the Weimar regime, and the Nazi party history, from its very beginning, the Beer-Hall putsch of 1923, and the reorganization of the party during the second half of the 1920s. The second half of the book, dealing with the final ascent to power in the wake of the deep crisis brought about by the Great Depression and of the behind the scenes manipulations by a reactionary and utterly preposterous political elite, and with the dramatic changes in every aspect of life in Germany during the first few months of Nazi rule, are absolutely outstanding. If the remaining volumes in this oeuvre will be of the same high level, this work will probably become the standard general work, in English, of this disastrous Era in world's history. |
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The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus Scribner, London, 2003 A novel about cinema, propaganda, and politics in Russia, stranding from the last days of Tolstoi's life, in 1910, to the death of Lenin, in 1924. The protagonist, a young Russian filmmaker, is the center of a story turning around cinema, religious icon, and soviet politics, involving Lenin's wife Krupskaya, Stalin, and a physician specialized in embalms. A weird plot. |
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Como Reconhecer o Fascismo ·
Da Diferença Entre Migrações
e Emigrações by Umberto Eco Relógio D'Água, Alfragide, 2017 This book contains the Portuguese translation of two short essays by Umberto Eco, titled, in the Italian original, Il Fascismo Eterno and Le Migrazioni, La Tolleranza, L'Intollerabile. Both are quite interesting, but I found the first one an enlightening short masterpiece: to have in twenty pages an essay by the penetrating mind of Eco which concludes with an eight page long well organized list of fourteen points of characteristics of what the author calls Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism, is indeed a precious document that we should keep close to our mind. Just in case... |
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Como Se Eu Tivesse Asas: As Memórias Perdidas by Chet Baker VS. Vasco Santos Editor, Lisboa, 2019 (A comment will be posted here as soon as possible.) |
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A Companhia de Estranhos by Robert Wilson Colecção Gradiva, vol. 86 Gradiva, Lisboa, 2001 An espionage thriller with a brilliant first part, whose action takes place during World War II and covers more than half of the book, but somehow fails to maintain the level till the end. Pity. |
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A Concessão do Telefone by Andrea Camilleri Grandes Narrativas, vol. 96 Editorial Presença, Lisboa, 2000 This book has a very original structure: it alternates between "written things" and "spoken things" chapters; the first ones are letters exchanges by the several characters, while the second ones are the usual dialog type chapters of a novel. The story is a very funny one: at the end of the nineteen century a Vigàta businessmen writes three successive letters (one each consecutive month) to Montelusa's mayor asking for a telephone line. This seemingly innocent request originates an incredible set of misunderstandings involving local politicians, the police, the Carabinieri, the fledging Mafia. All in the amusing and slightly ironic Camilleri style. |
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Concierto Barroco by Alejo Carpentier El Libro de Bolsillo, Biblioteca de Autor, vol. BA 0193 Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 2000 Concierto Barroco, first published in 1974, is a great little book by the late Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, one of the fathers and leading exponents of magical realism. Its writing was inspired by the the libreto of Vivaldi's opera Montezuma (whose score, thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2001 among the archives of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, returning to Berlin from Kiev, where they had been taken after World War II.) It is a fantastic story of the journey into the Old World, in the first half of the 18th century, of a wealthy Mexican nobleman of Spanish ancestry and his servant Filomeno. Displeased with the stay in Madrid, they head to Venice where, arriving at the Carnival holidays, they mingle with the crowd, the master dressed as Montezuma, and meet Vivaldi and Haendel, with whom he picnics in a cemetery in an outlying venetian island, discuss opera, inspire Vivaldi to write the opera Montezuma, stumble upon the grave of Igor Stravinsky (!) and, on the way back to the city, they cross Wagner's funereal procession... This, after an incredible jam session between Vivaldi, Haendel, and Domenico Scarllati, appearances by Louis Armstrong, references to Wagons-lits, railway stations, and the Eiffel tower, results in an amazing piece of literature that is utterly funny to read. |
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Condor by João Pina Tinta da China, Lisboa, 2014 This beautiful and terrible book portraits the repression of the South American dictatorships, and in particular the concerted efforts of the repressive apparatus of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, from 1975 until the mid 1980s (the so called "Condor Operation") to persecute, imprison, torture, and in many cases kill, the left wing oppositionists. The book is a photographic record of a number of surviving resistants, complemented with accompanying texts about their lives. In between these life stories João Pina includes black and white photos showing the prisons, the former torture chambers, the secret rooms used by the political polices, and similar grim items in the repression landscapes of those fortunately bygone regimes. |
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Confissão de um Assassino by Joseph Roth Cavalo de Ferro, Amadora, 2018 This book is the Portuguese translation of the novel Beichte eines Mörders, first published in 1936. In a single night, behind the closed doors of Tari-Bari, a Parisian restaurant owned by an emigrant from Odessa, the exile Russian Semion Golubchik, a former member of the tsarist secret police Okhrana, tells what he claims to be his life's story to a short party of fellow drinkers that includes the narrator. Mixing an illegitimate son search for his father recognition, a related conspiratorially fed envy of his supposed half-brother, the entry in political police service(somewhat reluctantly at start, but later accepted with gusto), and a love story starting in Russia before the start of the 1st World War and continued in Paris after its end (and the Russian Revolution that prevented the ex-Okhrana agent from ever return home). |
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Conquered City by Victor Serge NYRB Classics New York Review Books, New York, 2011 With its action taking place in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1919-20, this book portrays the difficult and violent times of the Russian civil war at the early times of the Bolshevik regime, where a very shaky authority was able to hold to power due to their vision and obstinacy, as well as an almost unbelievable degree of violence. Several episodes involving party members, Cheka agents, dissatisfied workers, white conspirators, are masterly interwoven by Serge, an intelligent and articulate participant of the events and someone who knows that, independently of one political stand, choices are rarely between black (or, in this case, red) or white. A very interesting book. |
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A Contadora de Filmes by Hernán Rivera Letelier Grandes Narrativas, vol. 492 Editorial Presença, Queluz de Baixo, 2011 Another book by the Chilean author famous for his portrays of the rough live in the far North of Chile, among the destitute saltpeter mines communities. In this short and moving narrative, a young girl is chosen by her father to be the family's movie storyteller: money is somehow gathered to pay for her movie theater ticket, and she afterwards tells the story to her family. Her magical ability at storytelling becomes legendary in town and her eager and poor audience quickly expands. |
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Contes Populaires du Cambodge, du Laos et du Siam by Auguste Pavie Objectif Terre Olizane, Genève, 2016 A republication of the original edition of 1903, this nice book of popular short stories of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand is illustrated by original drawings by Amélie Strobino. The stories are nice (some more than others) and, to my western sensibility, frequently strange. But being living in Laos for a couple months when I read this book, I was immersed in an everyday existence that was also, at times, strange, and so this book was a good complement! |
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Contos by Álvaro do Carvalhal Colecção Beltenebros Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa, 2004 Álvaro do Carvalhal was a fleeting star in the landscape of 19th Century Portuguese literature, having died in 1868 with just twenty four years of age. This book collects his short stories, all of them could be classified as Gothic, some written with a vocabulary that forced me to use the dictionary quite a number of times. A good reading though. The book finishes with a fifty pages enlightening biographical essay on the author by Gianluca Miraglia. |
