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The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan M. Katz

comics:

Trash Market by Tsuge Tadao

selected articles:

Why ISIL won't be defeated [An interview with John Mearsheimer] (al Jazeera, 12/8/15)
Fifty Japanese scholars attack McGraw-Hill, U.S. academics on ‘comfort women’ issue by Jesse Johnson and Magdalena Osumi (Japan Times, 12/11/15)
With US help, Saudi Arabia is obliterating Yemen by Sharif Abdel Kouddous (pri.org / Global Post, 11/30/15)
Critics try, but fail to kill $1 billion weapons deal for Saudi Arabia by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos (foxnews.com, 12/12/15)
The Man on the Operating Table (about a patient killed during the US attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz.) Photographs and story by Andrew Quilty (Foreign Policty, 12/15)



Be a freak, like me too
I didn't find a thread about books, comics... You're reading! It could be nice to have suggestions about interesting books, comics or even magazines.

Yesterday, I've read Un Arbre en furie (Lewis Trondheim), the seventh book of his "Nothing Diaries", Trondheim is one of my fav French comic creator. He tells his creator comic life with humor and melancholia.



I've finished also yesterday the sociology book Masculine Domination by Pierre Bourdieu. He analyzes the Kabyle society and the social mechanisms (in the institutions as school, church, state, family) to understand this subtle symbolic violence which is present in our daily life.

And now I'm reading Black Hole (Charles Burns). It's weird




And soon...

I've loved his comic book about Jeffrey Dahmer.

And you?!
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"We wanted to change the world, but the world changed us."



For comics there's this thread, though for a while now people have just been lumping their comic and text reading together in the Reading Tab.

The best newish comics I've read this year have been these two:



I'd also recommend these:





These are some of my favorite newish books that I read in 2015:

(fiction)




(non-fiction)





Finished these over the four-day weekend.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
Bone to be Wild by Carolyn Haynes

comics:

Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels by Tom Devlin (editor)



Just finished reading Band of Brothers. It's a fantastic book, especially for WWII enthusiasts like myself. Can't wait to watch the TV series now, which I've heard nothing but great things about.
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-KhaN-'s Avatar
I work for Keyser Soze. He feels you owe him.
Started my first re-read of A Song of Ice and Fire, such an awesome series. Can't wait for Winds of Winter to come out...
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“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”



I just finished The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.

And I'm about to read The Martian by Andy Weir. I've been saving the Movie till after I read the book, and I got the book for Christmas. So I'm very excited to read it!





Hip Hop Family Tree Vol. 2 by Ed Piskor -

Here's almost my entire reading list from 2015 (doesn't include re-reads or articles). I've been reading more new books lately so maybe by the end of the year I'll have top 10s for 2015 (and some other recent years).



Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1910-2010 by Michael Kupperman
Santa inhaled from a massive hookah that was next to his chair. All the while his baleful eyes glittered at me. Then he spoke as he exhaled.
"Mister Twain, of course I know who you are. For you and I are part of a very small society of men who cannot die. And when we meet, we must fight." He stood, and, moving surprisingly swiftly for a man of his size, went to the wall, where two enormous swords were mounted. He threw one to me, and I stepped to the side and let it clatter on the floor. It looked sharp! He raised his sword and let out a mighty yell: "There can be only ONE!" "One what?" I shouted back over my shoulder as I ran away. He followed me out of his grotto and all through the mall, waving and slashing his huge sword. "Stand still so I can kill you!" he bellowed. Thinking quickly, I grabbed my lighter and set fire to a cinnabon. The thick, greasy, buttery, sugary smoke helped me to distract Santa and make my escape.

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner
If kidnapping posed a thread to the freedom of individual black New Yorkers, the rise of the colonization movement placed in jeopardy the entire community's status and future. The gradual abolition laws of the northern states, including New York's, said nothing about removing free blacks from the country; it was assumed that they would remain in the United States as a laboring class. But the rapid growth of the free black population in the early republic alarmed believers in a white America. Founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society directed its efforts toward removing from the country blacks already free, but the long-term goal of many members was to abolish slavery and expel the entire black population. In the 1820s, most organized antislavery activity among white Americans took place under this rubric.

[...]

Most black American, however, rejected both voluntary emigration and government-sponsored efforts to encourage or coerce them to leave the country.

[...]

Asserting their own Americanness, free blacks articulated a vision of the United States as a land of equality before the law, where rights did not depend on color, ancestry, or racial designation. "This Country is Our Only Home," declared one editorial in the Colored American. "It is our duty and privilege to claim an equal place among the American people." Through the attack on colonization, the modern idea of equality as something that knows no racial boundaries was born.
I also found this on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 interesting wrt "States' Rights":
Compared with the brief measure of 1793, the statute was long, complicated, and draconian. It created a new category of federal official, that of U.S. commissioner, appointed by a federal judge and authorized to hear the case of an accused fugitive and to issue a certificate of removal, a document that could not be challenged in any court. The fugitive could neither claim a writ of habeas corpus nor testify at the hearing, whose sole purpose was to establish his or her identity. For this, a document from the owner's state with a physical description of the accused would constitute "conclusive" proof. The commissioner would receive a fee of five dollars if he decided against the owner and ten if he issued a certificate of removal, on the grounds that the latter involved more paperwork. (This set the price of a northern conscience at five dollars, abolitionists complained.) Federal marshals could deputize individuals to execute a commissioner's orders and, if necessary, call on the assistance of local officials and even bystanders. The act included severe civil and criminal penalties for anyone who harbored fugitive slaves or interfered with their capture, as well as for marshals and deputies who failed to carry out a commissioner's order or from whom a fugitive escaped. No action by a state or local judge and no local law could interfere with the process; northern personal liberty laws were specifically mentioned in the act as examples of illegitimate "molestation" of the slaveowner. To forestall resistance, the federal government at its own expense could deliver the fugitive to his or her owner.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 embodied the most robust expansion of federal authority over the states, and over individual Americans, of the antebellum era. It could hardly have been designed to arouse greater opposition in the North. It overrode numerous state and local laws and legal procedures and "commanded" individual citizens to assist, when called upon, in rendition. It was retroactive, applying to all slaves who had run away in the past, including those who had been law-abiding residents of the free states for many years. It did nothing to protect free blacks from kidnapping.
And articles...

Whither Reconstruction Historiography? by John Hope Franklin (The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 1948), pp. 446-461)
The Trials of Alice Goffman by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (New York Times Magazine)
The Amistad case in fact and fiction by Eric Foner (History Matters)
What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like?by Stephen M. Walt (Foreign Policy)



Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I'm on a mission to read 52 books this year. The last one I finished was Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. It's the first one of her books that I have read and I really enjoyed it. Magic, humour and romance.



Is anybody on here on Goodreads? I am looking for some more goodreads friends so PM me with a link to your profile or ask me for a link to mine and I'll add you.



Finished 6 more books and a comic since my last post.

Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 by Kathryn Olmsted
Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer by Pierre Mac Orlan
The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt
Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K. Dick
The Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past by Ishinomori Shotaro