James G. > Recent Status Updates

Just frickin great. Too much to pack into a pithy pitch. It’s just 140 pages of all I love & care about. With a ton of footnotes to lick up like jam squeezing out of the PB&J.

What I posted on FB: “Listening to 🚗 Highly recommend. Refreshing to hear “lectures” on intellectual and cultural history. Lasting material, created mostly before the ascent of the Axis Powers and manifested after, all informed by cultural adjacencies to fascism. Deep, clear language, helps you fathom depths. Powerful right now.”

I got this book at the same time when I purchased The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I thought was much better. I actually read both of them, not audiobooks. Hamid has an extraordinary neck for language, and I’m curious how many he speaks and writes in. The other book had poetic passages, lyrical things, that were really quite refined. I like that these books are reminding me of Vonnegut

She doesn’t lose often. It’s an extraordinary story of accomplishment, read aloud with humility and a willingness to make little mistakes. The way in which she accumulates, devoted friends across her lifetime is an indication of what a remarkable woman she is. I think she carries with her, a strange or maybe universal sense of always potentially under performing. Maybe that’s what those who seek excellence do.

This book ain’t easy to find; and as a heavy hard back, it’s dense, but well worth reading, as I prepare to take a group of SJICA Board and donors to Miami this December ‘23. It’s a lengthy, touching and self-absorbed memoir that makes for a remarkable view of modern Miami and an amazing 20th century American man.

An incredible read filled with of poetry, pathos, inner mind and out of body experience that inspires you to think about one’s own life dearly.