Recent Acquistions #56

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

Possibly too many to list here, as I've been slack, and they've piled up, but let's see.

Hermetech by Storm Constantine;
Pennterra by Judith Moffett;
The Third Eagle by R.A. MacAvoy;
A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski;
Legacies by Alison Sinclair.

(all off the Mistressworks wishlist and all bought from Awesome Books under their 'buy 5 save 10%' offer)

Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead;
Lightborn: Seeing is Believing... by Tricia Sullivan.

(both from the The Hive)

and, while collecting those from my local bookshop, I picked up The War in Pictures in six volumes, published by Odhams Press Ltd. 'The war' is WWII. Couldn't resist all those pictures.

All six volumes were piled up neatly on the chair next to me, but that was Before the Kitten.

From the charity shops:

Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer;
Girl Reading by Katie Ward (liked the title and decided to take a chance on it);
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (yes, back to that pesky WWII)
and
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer (about which I have doubts, tbh; 'bawdy' doesn't usually offer much for gurls).

Let me see, what else?

Husband brought me a small stack of books from one of the charity shops in the town where he works. Wasn't expecting them at all.

An Anthology of Women's Writing: Erotica, edited by Margaret Reynolds (!);
Eye to Eye -- Women, edited by Vanessa Baird;
Living With Contradictions: Controversies In Feminist Social Ethics, edited by Alison M. Jaggar
and
Women in the Muslim World, edited by Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (presumably because I had An Argument with someone about whether a white Western woman could really understand the experiences of Saudi women) (where the white Western woman was Hilary Mantel) (who, just to be recursive, blurbed Girl Reading).

Recently Completed #11

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

Last night, I finished reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. It was something of a trudge through the epilogue and the postscript, as I was really wanting to be done with the book. It's fascinating, but deeply disturbing, even though it never goes into explicit details. The sheer numbers of people driven out, transported, murdered are staggering. It's impossible to get your head around the statistics.

I would unhesitatingly recommend this book, which is well-argued, honest, and does a good job of placing Eichmann in context. Arendt responds to the criticism that she did not cover resistance movements within Germany, such as the White Rose Movement, but her response is not entirely convincing. However, she does draw interesting contrasts with the behaviour of the SS in countries like Denmark where public opinion was not on the side of the Final Solution. The concept of Germany as a criminal state is compelling--as much a reversal of 'the natural order' as when the inmates take over the asylum. Unusual problems demand unusual solutions.

Still, I'm not convinced that it was legal or proper for Israel to kidnap Eichmann in order to put him on trial. It might have been cleaner, and more honest, to shoot him in the back of the head, Russian-style. This from a pacifist.