It is time once again to share what I am currently reading. Books on the bottom of the pile are the ones I’ve been reading the longest. One difference from what is normal is that I have a library book in my current stack. As usual, my stack contains a good mix of what interests me: history, biography, philosophy, general knowledge, and pedagogy.

I’ve gotten past the Civil War section of the Sherman book, which I’m happy about. Military history was never terribly interesting to me, so I am anxious to read about Sherman’s post-Civil War biography (though he was heavily involved in the Indian Wars of the Great Plains so I suspect I have more military history to wade through).

The Louis Menand book continues to inform about art in American during the Cold War, a topic I realize as I read more of this book, that I didn’t know much about. Ever heard of the Black Mountain College? Neither had I.

Lepore’s book has been a slog because at the moment Constitutional history isn’t much piquing my interest. However, Lepore has a new book coming out soon so that has motivated me to keep making progress on this one.

Finally, the big biography with the glasses on the spine is about British historian Eric Hobsbawm, and the book intrigued me because it combined two elements I enjoy, biography and history. I must say, it is interesting to read about Hobsbawm’s support of the USSR in the 1930s as a young Briton while also reading about (in Johnson’s Modern Times) the sadistic, evil, depraved way Joseph Stalin ran his government at that time, existing in a symbiotic relationship with Hitler and the Nazi’s with regards to developing and implementing methods of totalitarian brutality. Hobsbawm cared about the working class and had magnanimous intentions, but he missed the f’in boat on the Soviet regime! Moving deeper into the biography, it will be interesting to learn how (and to what extent) the historian reconciled his initial positive impressions of the Soviet Union with the reality as it became known after World War II.