My wife has expressed interest in the book Sugar in the Blood. It delves deeply into the social history of one island in the Caribbean, (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
My new Web site
The World and Acquiring Ergativity
05/17/2020 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsTwo books came, one yesterday on Ergativity and one today by Richard Haass who is seen a lot on Morning Joe. I’ve started both and (Continue Reading)
Why We’re Polarized
04/14/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI dropped my 22 books I’m reading every day to spend 3 days reading Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. As a life-long liberal Democrat, I (Continue Reading)
Anthropological pitfalls
03/31/2020 Pat Barrett 1 CommentTrying to understand another culture is an amazing adventure. I have never lived in another culture other than my adjustment to African-American culture coming from (Continue Reading)
Reading for March 21, 2020 the year of COVID 19
03/21/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentOnce before I wrote up what I’d read in my reading ladder on one particular day. Things have changed around here, especially two: my grandson (Continue Reading)
Amy Chua on Tribal World
03/06/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentForeign Affairs put out an issue in July/Aug 2018 that featured an article on each division of our divided world: Realist, Liberal, Tribal, Marxist, Tech (Continue Reading)
A Maxim to remember
03/05/2020 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsSkidelsky writes of the Rothschilds in the 19th century that “profts came before peace” despite their resistance to financing wars. And now profits come before (Continue Reading)
Autism in bygone days….
02/20/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentReading Patrick O’Brian’s well-drawn characters in his Aubrey-Maturin novels, I am struck over and over again by the way the behaviors of some of the (Continue Reading)
Chilling memories prompted by Trump
02/19/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentSharp comparison given in article by George Packer on William Holbrooke quoting a woman who lived through the Balkan wars and was watching a Trump (Continue Reading)
The True History of the Modern GOP
02/06/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAt the Republican National Convention in the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964, a piercing reminder of what these people have been thinking all (Continue Reading)
Nous – observations and questions
02/06/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn NOUS, pp. 78-79 I’ve noticed some interesting things. A chapter is titled Une drole de journee. I had read that de is used after (Continue Reading)
Finishing two books
01/30/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’ve finished Berlin and am finishing tonight Trade. Both deal with African slavery, the former in the U.S. The first is very readable and I (Continue Reading)
The way it really was…..
01/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn the wake of the Civil Rights Act passing, some people took it seriously. Here is an example of what happened (from Rick Perlstein’s Before (Continue Reading)
Cross fertilization
01/21/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy reading tonight started with 3 books on economics and one on early Christian morals. (Morality, Money, Duflo, Pluto) In Morality, Meeks quotes MacMullen on (Continue Reading)
I’m reading about why my wife sees family the way she does
01/16/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn Generations of Captivity, Berlin has a passage characterizing the Black family toward the end of the period of slavery when many free Blacks and (Continue Reading)
A page from one day, Jan. 4, 2020
01/13/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentJust a note that I’ve added Rachel Maddow’s Blowout to my list to replace Aspect, which I finished. Another note: my blog guru, Wes, has (Continue Reading)
Preliminary write-up on What I’m Reading Now
01/01/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe books I’m reading fall into four main categories: the African Diaspora, Language, Economics, and History. Eight books make up the reading on the African (Continue Reading)
List of reading books
12/27/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentBecause I’ve started blogging routinely on what I’m reading now, it will be easier to use abbreviations for the books, so I will list them (Continue Reading)
Starting blogging on daily reading Dec. 23, 2019
12/23/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentAs I follow my reading program, I find myself going to this blog to write another entry. So rather than do that, I will react (Continue Reading)
Reading Babel, the author not the tower
10/03/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentOut of frustration at not being able to continue my language reading project of Harry Potter in several languages, I grabbed a copy of Isaac (Continue Reading)
Book regrets
09/08/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhat I’m (not) reading now: Back in 1967 I was working in a B. Dalton Bookstore (remember those? (liquidated in 2009) when a book titled (Continue Reading)
Which aspect? It all depends…..
01/04/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentSo often here and elsewhere I’ve recounted the hilarious presentation at ACTFL, not meant to be hilarious, on the preterit and imperfect in Spanish. The (Continue Reading)
Linguistics and current politics
12/24/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy new orders just came. Amazon’s delivery system is amazing. I got Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right and Steve (Continue Reading)