In 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)
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
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)
president or President?
12/24/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentMax Boot had trouble spelling President with a capital P when Trump hit the scene. It made me think why I defer to the President….. (Continue Reading)
How history class dumbs us down
10/21/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentLies My Teacher Told Me is filled with eye-opening vignettes of how textbooks for high school students distort the history of our country. Faced with (Continue Reading)
Whither jazz without the church?
10/08/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentNPR played a nice piece on currents in jazz, the dropping of the boundary between different approaches to jazz. They played a piece by an (Continue Reading)
How to establish facts
08/30/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentOver and over again, I’ve stumbled over the resistance to the Right to facts. How do we show people who not committed ideologues (or just (Continue Reading)
Euro-American Alliance
08/18/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn The Wise Men I am just reading about McCloy’s efforts to bring Europe together right after WW II. His success in this endeavor was (Continue Reading)
I’m struggling with something
08/06/2018 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsI’ve started reading Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve experienced a perspective shift. Others, according to the preface to the book, experienced the same sort (Continue Reading)
Harry Potter and the Great Whale
07/07/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentSomewhere I broached this topic but I can’t find it on my blog so here I go. Literary critics take a novelist’s work and assume (Continue Reading)
Lots of new books and lots of old
03/18/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentI have inundated myself with books to read and am loving every minute of it. I found the second and third volume of Taylor Branch’s (Continue Reading)
The seeds of our divisions
12/29/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe other night I was chatting with a young man and the issue of the cultural divisions in the country came up. He mentioned he (Continue Reading)
What a bit of decency can accomplish: a new world order
07/13/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhen the Democrats lost the November election in 1946 and Truman, blamed for the loss, returned to Washington, only ONE PERSON was on the platform (Continue Reading)
Some new turns in my reading as I come out of recovery
05/13/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentThings are settling in. Some anticipated but new for now turns have been taken (see today’s Music of the African Diaspora and Personal Language Learning). (Continue Reading)
No political/linguistic alignment
04/11/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentMackridge in Language and National Identity in Greece 1766-1976 notes that there was little to no alignment between cultural and political views and views on (Continue Reading)
My drive for synthesis reaches new heights
04/11/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentFriends say I am good at synthesizing disparate elements. I am better at that than at analyzing, but before synthesizing must come analysis. At times, (Continue Reading)
Three fat books
03/16/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentAs I prepare for a lengthy rehabilitation period after bilateral knee surgery, I have 3 nice, fat books to read. One, The Wise Men, the (Continue Reading)