Recommend Books on This Thread

10 posts

Thomas777
:tard2:
sugartits

:square: by :ameritard:

and anything by Dostoevsky or Nietszche

Savrola
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Savrola

Fiction
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Other

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O'Zebedee

Gene Fowler's Minutes of the Last Meeting is an admittedly sentimental look at the author's then fast-fading friends, but since his friends were people like John Barrymore, WC Fields, John Decker (painter and set designer) and Sadakichi Hartmann (poet, critic, secretary as a young man to Walt Whitman) it's pretty fascinating stuff. Everyone named (including the author) is a true eccentric, but Hartmann (whose father was German and mother Japanese, a dangerous combination to have in WW2) topped them all in delusory and strange behavior. He's the subject of the book, though anecdotes about his better known companions take up much of the actual writing; there are some excellent stories about WC Fields (who knew he was dying and didn't waste time with pleasantries because of it), Decker and Barrymore. Fowler - who counted Jack Dempsey, Damon Runyon and "king of jazz" bandleader Paul Whiteman among his lifelong friends - was also a great stylist; Minutes of the Last Meeting makes it as much on the writing as the "Old Hollywood" gossip.

Niccolo and Donkey

FFS Breck, at least discuss the books you recommend :thumbsdown: (And if you're gonna post pix of their covers, make sure we can actually see their titles).

Niccolo and Donkey
Quick and to the point.

Take the lesson, Breck.
Thomas777
Confessions of a Yakuza by Jinichi Saga. The book is presented as a factual account of life in a Yakuza clan from the war years to the later 20th century as told by an aging oyabun to his physician. The verifiability is dubious, but its nonetheless a fascinating description of how and why the Yakuza exists and from where its solders are drawn and their psychological motivations for joining these organizations. Its effective in dispelling the claim that the Yakuza is simply a ''mafia'', and it explains how disgraced ronin, gamblers, reviled burakumin, and Korean expats came to identify openly and formally as ''losers'' and ''outsiders'' often with the blessing of their countrymen. There is an impression given that the Japanese aim to impose order upon everything, including racketeering, and incorporate all spheres of social existence into a racial and national milieu that traces its contemporary institutions in direct lineage back to the primordial origins of the Japanese race and their feudal ways of life. I've found that ''Radical Traditionalists'' and ''pagan'' accolytes of Alain De Benoist appreciate this book, as they think it bolsters their claim that Christianity traumatized the Western world irreparably by breaching entirely with the indigenous perennial traditions and practices. Whether any reader accepts or rejects that interpretation, its a quick and interesting read, although the translation is often choppy.

Sympathy for the Devil and Night Dogs by Kent Anderson. Anderson is a strange author with a style to match his idiosyncracies. He dropped out of law school to join the Vietnam War with the Army special forces (when the United States was actively losing the conflict) and he chronicled his experience at a remote outpost near the Laotian border and later as a Portland police officer in two thinly veiled fictional narratives. His alter-ego/protagonist is called ''Hanson'', and Hanson is an apolitical narcissist. He reads WB Yeates in between jungle ambushes, rarely eats solid food, and loves cheap beer and amphetamines. Overtime he reaches the conclusion that he hates authoritarian institutions, but he immerses himself in them because in his view, they are the only means by which young men can be ''freed'' to engage in barbaric conduct for its own sake. Hanson finds himself indifferent to the North Vietnamese army other than as a threat of convenience and proximity that allow himself and his two pals an opportunity to kill people and risk being maimed/killed themselves without interference by civilization. Hanson returns to the United States and tries to explain to people (both 'hawks' and NLF sympathizers) that he doesn't care about Communism he was and is only interested in warfighting, and both camps of the uninitiated become infuriated with him. Hanson ultimately joins the Portland Police Bureau and reflects upon what function he and others like him should fulfill in 1970s America, and he concludes that policework is analagous to a ''game'' developed by his fellow cops where the feral dogs that haunt the streets of north Portland are hunted down, shot, and run over w/police vehicles so that the hunters can score ''points'' for the kills and earn bragging rights. He speculates that police are only charged with hunting creatures who have become feral on grounds of urban life and that, as in Vietnam, the reasons why are essentially meaningless; the process endlessly repeated allowing men like Hanson to live among us without killing indiscriminately moreso than protecting ''us'' from the night dogs.
O'Zebedee
There's a book somewhere around my apartment with a section about two old buddies from Vietnam who end up on opposite sides of the law after, both admitting that they enjoy the "game" more than the idea of law and order.

People do not want to know these things about their fellow humans.
Niccolo and Donkey