Richard Yeselson Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Richard Yeselson

Pull a book off the shelf you’ve owned for almost 20 years without having read and….what a helluva great book!: The Dream Life, J. Hoberman’s scholarly hallucination of sixties myth, refracted thru media and movies. Earns its cover blurb by Mike Davis: https://t.co/mGMeCyE28L

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Richard Yeselson

@LeahAtWhatPrice @n_j_dames @mervatim @magsrdoherty Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a nearly perfect novel of a man just doing little things. Not a word out of place.

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Richard Yeselson

@SamAdlerBell Nancy Miller wrote a great book on women writing in men’s voices. A great example too recent for that book is Jane Smiley’s husband-dentist in her novella, “The Age of Grief.”

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Richard Yeselson

@lionel_trolling @DouthatNYT I think John almost buried his lede in that Herf’s “reactionary modernism” template so precisely embodies Thiel’s world view. (Herf’s trajectory from left to right is an interesting story itself.) It’s hard to find any democratic project in Thiel except instrumentally.

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Richard Yeselson

@jonathanchait @njhochman Would also say that, slightly (but only slightly) off topic, the sociologists, Mcveigh and Estep’s The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment” (a book) is perhaps the best analytic framework I’ve seen for making sense of Trumpism.

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Richard Yeselson

Notes from the Underground. So many other examples, but anything by Thomas Bernhard, of course. I “like” The Loser, but, while his narrators go very wrong, a reader can’t go wrong with TB. https://t.co/lzPWGvjhFd

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Richard Yeselson

@jbouie @dwaldenwrites It’s a real thing, but not that thing. Somewhat lower on the household income scale, it’s this thing: Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class https://t.co/lINEqbi2Ir

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Richard Yeselson

Anybody have strong and informed views about which of Nadine Gordimer’s post-apartheid novels are most interesting and compelling? I realized I’ve never read anything beyond the Conservationist/Burger’s Daughter (extraordinary) and July’s People.

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Richard Yeselson

@baseballcrank @SeanTrende @CitizenCohn Vann Woodward wrote, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow.” Over time, historiography is subject to history, too. Woodward (and the CRM, backed by the power of the federal government) won that argument. So majoritarianism doesn’t get us very far here.

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Richard Yeselson

@EricColumbus @jbouie Right—in fact, the historiography was almost entirely articulated and controlled by generations of white liberals. Arthur Link, John Milton Cooper—these guys controlled the discourse about Wilson. The racism and red scare was soft pedaled, the regulatory structure was praised.

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