From the Desert - A blog from the Arizona Desert

Ken's Reading List

Louis L'Amour - Education of a Wandering Man
Definitely disjointed and incomplete, this memoir by the beloved western author possess a raw enthusiasm for life and for books that is too rarely encountered today. L'Amour recounts anecdotes of his knockabout years as a sailor, prize fighter, silver miner, and longshoreman who ranged from New Orleans to Singapore. L'Amour's sincere love of books and reading and his faith in humanity lend the book considerable charm.


Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
Out of the great profusion of Neruda's poetry, Stephen Mitchell has selected forty-nine poems and brought them to life for a whole new generation of readers and listeners. These are poems of a happy man, deeply fulfilled in his sexuality, at home in the world, in love with life and its infinite particular forms, overflowing with the joy of language.


The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years
It's difficult to understand the arrogance of JFK's serial adultery or Teddy's murder at Chappaquiddick without an in-depth inquiry into the stock that bore them. This book explains why the Kennedy family has reaped what they have sown.


Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys
Christina Hoff Sommers tells how modern feminists, no longer satisfied with mere equality seek to destroy the male gender and have turned being a boy into a pathology. Unlike other works by "scholars" like Carol Gilligan, this book is fully footnoted and supported, rational, objective, critical, and eye-opening. Sommers cites the available data to debunk the myth of Gilligan's "Girl crisis". If you have a boy in school today, you should read this book.


Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Court
This book is a must read if you want to understand the birth of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the civil rights movement. You don't have to be a lawyer to enjoy this book. Much more than a book about the law, "Crusaders" describes the personalities, inter-organizational conflicts,and the conflict within the Legal Defense Fund over Greenberg's refusal to represent Angela Davis. If you read only one book this summer, this should be the one.


Bob Woodward, The Secret Man
There's nothing earth shattering here, but this is an interesting look at Mark W. Felt, AKA Deepthroat and his relationship with Bob Woodward during and after the Watergate years.


Thomas Dilorenzo, The Real Lincoln
Dilorenzo shows us his libertarian Neo-Confederate roots in this sad attempt to re-write history. One who knows Lincoln at all understands that the Hagiographic images which we have lived with for so long are not accurate. This angry screed at the other end of the spectrum is equally inaccurate. Dilorenzo is a member of The League of the South which is a Southern Nationalist organization whose ultimate goal is a free and independent Southern republic. You do the math.


Steven D.Levitt, Freakonomics
This is one of the most startling books I have read in a long time. Levitt draws some surprising and unorthodox conclusions from the available data.



Michael Ruhlman, The Soul of a Chef
Michael Ruhlman gives us an inside view on what it takes to pass the Certifed Master Chef exam at the Culinary institute of America. If you are a foodie, this is a must read.



William L. Shirer: Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
Maybe the best single-volume history of any war, any time; a must if you want to understand the European theater of World War II.



Larry Colton: Goat Brothers
Follows the lives of five men who meet as fraternity brothers in 1960's Berkley, CA. Their stories are engaging and compelling. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would.