This is mostly for Andy and Kyt ....... but I know there are quite a few who love books as much .... :clapping: quite a collection here !! I have to say that going through the list here - my heart missed a beat when I found he had included Carl Sagan and then to realise his anniversary is on the 20th ! .... my son loved Carl Sagan and at one point even struck up an email conversation with him at Cornell ... it was the thrill of his life .... I've just been going through his books this week and Cosmos was front and center ... plus the tapes of every episode of the series ( the 1st one !!!!!!!! ) Airminded · Books
The blogger does seem to have a certain, for want of a better word, snobbishness. He keeps saying academics this and academics that. For example, in his section on Unwritten books he writes about books that academics haven't written. The areas that he is concerned with cover ones where there are lots of books. OK, so they aren't written by university lecturers, but are these people the only ones who can validate a subject? What about the plethora of books written by enthusiasists? People who have devoted there lives on researching and writing on subjects, on top of holding down a day job? My shelves are full of books written by these sort of people, and they are excellent. And I have read books by "accredited" academics which are dry, boring and so turgid that they fail to convey any true sense of the subject. Sorry, rant over eep:
Well he was doing his thesis after all .... surprising the tone people get when they are doing that !!!!! they think nobody else knows anything !! :noidea: I don't take any notice of that .... it was his selection of books I was interested in !! I think it must be a "man" thing ............... :becky: Annie
Have come across his blog before when searching for specific titles. Looks like I need to read through it more carefully. I do like how he lists his acquisitions. Thanks, Annie.
Guess where I went today ? ....... I only went looking for one .... ended up with seven !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I was really excited to find T. E. Lawrence The Mint .... I had it once and somebody borrowed it and didn't give it back ..... but now I have another .... :clapping: Why does buying books always make me feel so satisfied ??
It seems I hit a nerve. Not so much with the blogger (Brett) whose has replied with a considered note but with some of his commentators: Airminded · On being a snob If they should happen to read this then let me first contextualise. I too have a PhD, and have 15 years of working in universities (in my case it was sociology) and so am quite conversant with the way that academics, write, and most importantly, for whom they write. In most cases, it is for that lovely little merry-go-round called academia. the shrinking Amazon forest is probably partly due to the tens of thousands of papers and books that get published every year that then sit on library shelves or departmental shelves. when there is a new article or paper that comes out, there is a flurry of activity for a short while by other academics who write off agreements or refutations, and then they are only used to bulk out references and bibliographies. There are a number of reasons for this: 1) Access to the papers/books. Without access to a university library just how many of these publications are accessible to the lay person 2) Cost. With small print runs or the exobertant rates that journal publishers charge for copies of articles, most lay people will not be able to read them 3) Language. Language is suppossed to be a way of communicating. So why do academics write in a form that excludes the vast majority of the population? I know exactly what I am talking about because I used to do it too. It's not big and it's not clever Now, of those books written by non-academics. So, why is it that they are so popular? Could it be that it is because they are none of the above? Could it be because they are actually addressing issues and covering information that people really want to know. One commentator on the blog has an issue with (to paraphrase) rivet-counters, and those who produce books for that audience. He/she would rather have books of [the] real effect on history and the impact it had on events. Well, there are plenty of books of that sort written by non-academics too. One just needs to go out and look for them. My i9nterest, though, is not in rivet counting. My interest is in the human aspects of the war. In this area I again reiterate my point that books written by non-academics are far superior to those written by academics. Academic historians have almost all completelky failed to contribute to this area in any form that I would find interesting and informative, Those written by sociologists and psychologists take a macro level approach snd try to then extrapolate some sort of meaning on war experiences. Yes, useful to a point. But the enthusiasts go out and actually talk to the people who were there, the families, the comrades etc They don't just rely on the original documents. They are the ones who, more often than not, allow the voices to come through. So yes, I do have an antipathy towards academics. I've been there, down and dirty. They have their place, but I know what I prefer on my shelves.
