clock … watching time, the only true currency

A journal from John B. Roberts

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Entries from April 2009

Book: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

April 24th, 2009 · No Comments

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam might also have been subtitled “the forgotten war.” Vietnam dominates modern political and military history in this country. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan elicit comparisons to Vietnam time and again. But Korea provided an earlier example of what happens when political and military [...]

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Tags: Books · History · Non-fiction

Book: The Eight

April 24th, 2009 · No Comments

Katherine Neville wrote The Eight more than 20 years ago. Thanks to The Da Vinci Code, this form of modern-day treasure hunt for mythical historical artifacts found a new audience (its first?). Neville’s book was reprinted and can be easily found in bookstores.
I picked it up on the way to Hawaii in February, and read [...]

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Tags: Books

Book: The American West as Living Space

April 10th, 2009 · No Comments

In contrast to Murakami, I’ve read most of Wallace Stegner’s fiction, and embraced his non-fiction, too.
So, finding a new-to-me slim 1987 volume of three lectures thrilled. The American West as Living Space at its heart explores how water — and its absence, often enough — defines the region.
We’ve endured our third dry winter in a [...]

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Tags: Books · Non-fiction

Book: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

April 9th, 2009 · No Comments

I haven’t read a word of the fiction that makes Haruki Murakami famous. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running logs the author’s real-world training for the New York City Marathon. The structure of the training journal doesn’t bound the words or topics, though. Subtitled “A Memoir,” the book explains the start of [...]

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Tags: Books · Everything · Running