Books like Alexander's Bridge — picked by fans

Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, was not, he said, “a book about what is, but a book about what could be.” Further, “it is mostly about managers and engineers” and more precisely, about automation and what American society could become if machines took over work, and labor, as we have known it, was made redundant. His imagined city of Illium was socially and physically split between the managers and engineers of its industrial plant and the former workers had been displaced by automation and now led meaningless lives of busy work provided by the government. The engineer Paul Proteus becomes disaffected and joins in a revolution being plotted against the new order. They succeed, but soon realize that the people of Illium were “already eager to recreate the same old nightmare.” The logic of the machine continued its sway.

I like that you have to watch Vonnegut carefully.… show more.

It is hardly news that housework is gendered. But in this classic study Cowan, by taking housewifery seriously as work and kitchen utensils and appliances seriously as technologies, opens up the whole panorama of production and consumption in a domestic setting. The influx of new appliances, and in a more convenient form old materials (such as powdered soap) in the early decades of the 20th century worked to, in a sense, “industrialize” the home. Unlike factory workers, however, housewives were unpaid, isolated, and unspecialized. Their managerial role shrank (hired help disappeared from most homes) and rather than being drained of meaning, like the work of factory hands, theirs became burdened with portentous implications of love, devotion, and creativity. Finally, as housework became “easy,” standards rose. At one time changing the bed might have amounted to putting the bottom sheet in the wash and the top sheet on the bottom,… show more.

My admiration for this book is demonstrated by the way in which I quite shamelessly ripped off its title for my own. It has been said that America is the only nation that began perfect and hoped to improve. The engine of that improvement, from the earliest days of the Republic, had been new technologies but by the middle of the pre-Civil War period some Americans began to realize that the “improvement” they had unleashed was beginning to erode the very “perfection” that they had hoped to enshrine in the nation’s foundation. Writers, artists, and creative intellectuals in general are society’s canaries in the mine shaft, and the great names of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, George Innes, Charles Sheeler, and their colleagues—attempted to describe, understand, and perhaps heal the destructive effects of the machine. As Marx concludes, “what was a grim possibility… show more.

Adler demonstrates that the lie detector is a rather simple machine, "a banal assemblage of medical technologies" (as he calls it) to measure blood pressure and perspiration, that has been widely used in America since its appearance between the wars. It was purported to sort out lies from the truth but the science behind it ranged from junk to speculative, and its evidence has never been accepted in courts of law. It has not been used anywhere else in the world, and Adler concludes that it “belonged to [the]…American strain of the Enlightenment project to replace personal discretion with science.” As he shows however, personal discretion, in practice, lay at the very heart of its use and popularity. It was no doubt more humane than the “third degree” so commonly used by police to obtain confessions, but it was a machine that manufactured something less than the Truth.

This will look like nepotism because Richard is a dear friend who provided a quote for my book cover, however I am mainly friends with him because we are of the same mind about most things, including death.

We both deal with it using a good dose of sarcasm and humour whilst also being big old existential softies who have our moments.

His book about his cancer diagnosis sees his coping mechanism of humour balanced with the honest sadnesses of potentially leaving behind young children who might forget him, before returning to humourous disapproval at his wife's imagined new man.

My own firmly held belief that you can't live well without the shadow of death also comes through as he starts to live better and healthier in recovery, thanks to his brush with the reaper. 

I wept through the first chapter of this book. Again, it might not appear as a mental health book on its surface, but as I was invited into a deeper understanding of how culture, and specifically what we call ‘patriarchy,’ shapes us all, it shook me to my core.

This book helped me understand that this is a shared cultural burden and that while I might “benefit” from it, I am not strictly the ‘problem.’ As it relates to mental health, it helped me understand that the emotional castration our culture imposes on young boys who become men leads to anger, violence, and trauma, seen most evidently in the oppression of women. That trauma hurts us all and underlies almost all mental health issues. 

The men who fought the American Revolution were often young, in their teens and twenties, and the war coincided with their transition to adulthood, interrupting the traditional passage into beginning a career and forming a family. Ruddiman recaptures what it meant for the revolution to happen not just at a particular time in the nation’s history but at a particular time in the lives of the men who fought it. For officers, the war was an unmatched opportunity to enhance their social status because it cemented their reputation as gentlemen—especially when they really weren’t genteel by any other standard. It’s a reminder that status mattered a lot, even in an army fighting against aristocracy.

Wiley tells a guy how to stop being an aimless fool and start being the man of the house. His lessons tell you how to earn authority, not through domination but through toughness and a determination to give your family what they need from you. Wiley wants men to create strong shelters for their wives and kids, so that they can thrive and become independent themselves. It’s practical stuff, like, fix your own damn appliances. Women: If you want men with spines in your life, have them read this. And if you find yourself having to be both mom and dad in your house, do what Wiley says so that you can act with authority as well as compassion.

The author, R. W. Connell, is a fascinating person, originally a man, who became a woman, in the midst of a very successful career as a student of masculinity. Her work was among the earliest I’ve encountered to deal with that subject. And what a fascinating perspective! In this work, she posits four power-related configurations of masculinity: Hegemonic, complicit, subordinated, and marginalized. Although originally among those who emphasized mainly negative and unitary features of manhood – something I categorically reject – her views have broadened over the years, recognizing considerable diversity in values. This work remains a classic in the field and provides readers with some excellent insights into one influential form of masculinity.

This book insists that we need to think about the ways that what we read or view may shape the way we see the world.

Greg Daddis has waded through mountains of “macho pulps”—the massively-popular war-focused men’s adventure magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, with titles like True Men, Male, Valor, and Battle Cry—to show us how they portrayed men and war.

He asks how these stories of outsized heroism (often accompanied by sexual conquest) may have shaped the expectations of the young men sent to fight in Vietnam.

Pulp Vietnam is a masterful balancing act, never insisting that A → B, but refusing to treat popular culture as nothing more than a story. And the color photo insert is worth the price all by itself!