Bout of Books 31: Wrap-Up

 I did pretty well during this bout of books. I was reading for research, with a little of fiction reading in the morning...as a treat. 

During the week, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future by reading about 50 pages a day. 

I also finished the much-hyped Lockdown by Peter May, during bouts of insomnia, and have to say it was just awful. The representation of the lockdown itself was OK, but the rest of the story was unbelievable. Without revealing too much *SPOILER ALERT*  here's a question that you will probably ask if you get more than halfway through: "could a person really walk around doing evil villainous stuff if they had been so badly burned that they were literally missing all of their skin?" 

I listened to 12 hours or so of the audio version of Ann and John Tusa's The Nuremberg Trial. I highly recommend this audiobook. It's already a good narrative history of the trial, and Cosham is a really good narrator for it. 

I finished Robert Paxton's excellent book on Vichy France, most of a fascinating edited collection on the U.S. relationship with Charles de Gaulle, and got about 80 pages into a book on the history of Denazification in Germany by Perry Biddiscombe.  I'm finding the Biddiscombe book annoying, unfortunately. It lacks adequate citations and is written from an anti-left point of view.  Despite that, it's a relatively recent synthesis of existing scholarship, so it's useful for getting an overall sense of where the field is on this subject right now. I've ordered a bunch of other books from the library based on reading it. I also started reading an ethnographic study of contemporary Italian fascists by MIT professor, Alessandro Orsini. It's one of those rare academic "page-turners," that provides some interesting insights into the worldviews of European fascists today. Not surprisingly, anti-immigrant racism is the dominant platform.   

Overall, I'd say it was a good week of reading, but I didn't keep track of how many pages I read.