7 Comments

I hope your students are gripped by the thought that the loss of freedom renders humans 'slaves or beasts'. That fear of the loss of freedom is a hallmark of liberalism, a great motivator and a fate we must very much contemplate for us, now, in my beloved America.

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Hmm. I am a person who likes books of all description, and so it is the rare laudatory book review that does not make me want to read its subject, and yet here we are.

My counter-recommendations are Vasily Grossman's "Stalingrad" and "Life and Fate", and (probably more relevant to students who have trouble imagining how the course of history might have been different) Jo Walton's small change trilogy. The Grossman novels are too long to assign to students, but the Walton ones certainly aren't.

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Grossman is great, but very long. Walton is, I think, great too...

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Your site http://j-bradford-delong.net/ has been unreachable for the last two days at least.

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I recommend All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski.

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Thx!... -B

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"the world we live in is much better than the world that we seemed headed for during the second quarter of this century." 2001 indeed. I suppose that's the point, now.

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