What We Are Reading Today: The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars

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Updated 06 September 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars

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  • By one reputable estimate, 9.7 million civilians and 9 million combatants died in World War I, while World War II killed 25.5 million civilians and 15 million combatants

Author: Cormac O Grada

Soldiers have never been the only casualties of wars. But the armies that fought World Wars I and II killed far more civilians than soldiers as they countenanced or deliberately inflicted civilian deaths on a mass scale. By one reputable estimate, 9.7 million civilians and 9 million combatants died in World War I, while World War II killed 25.5 million civilians and 15 million combatants.

But in The Hidden Victims, Cormac O Grada argues that even these shocking numbers are almost certainly too low.

Carefully evaluating all the evidence available, he estimates that the wars cost not 35 million but some 65 million civilian lives—nearly two-thirds of the 100 million total killed. Indeed, he shows that war-induced famines alone may have killed.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Discrete and Computational Geometry’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Discrete and Computational Geometry’
Updated 13 October 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Discrete and Computational Geometry’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Discrete and Computational Geometry’

Authors: Satyan L. Devadoss and Joseph O’rourke 

“Discrete and Computational Geometry” bridges the theoretical world of discrete geometry with the applications-driven realm of computational geometry, offering a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to this cutting-edge frontier of mathematics and computer science.

Now fully updated and expanded, this richly illustrated textbook is an invaluable learning tool for students in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and physics.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Trouble with Happiness’

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Updated 13 October 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Trouble with Happiness’

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  • Each story delves into the inner lives of regular people

Author: Tove Ditlevsen

I don’t often read fiction; real-life stories are much more interesting and usually compelling enough. However, Danish author Tove Ditlevsen’s work intrigued me. On a recent trip to Denmark, I picked up a copy of “The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories” and spiraled into her dark world — in the most enlightening way.

A collection of short stories, each with its own moody and simple sensibility that oozes authenticity, the book is small but mighty. Known for her deeply psychological and slightly melancholic writing style, Ditlevsen brings us along for the lonely, disappointing, and often fleeting moments of happiness.

The book is aptly named.

Each story delves into the inner lives of regular people. Her chosen narratives of everyday women are a powerful exploration of human vulnerability and longing for connection. The writing is witty and drenched in emotional honesty. It is quite depressing at times, as the author indeed struggled with depression during her 59 years of life, before her death in 1976.

The version I read was translated by Michael Favala Goldman. Although I was unable to read it in its original form, this translated version allowed me to get a sense of who Ditlevsen was. Many of the stories in this book were published previously, in the 1950s and 60s, albeit in slightly different iterations, in prestigious publications such as The New Yorker, Apple Valley Review and Hunger Mountain Review. But to have them contained in one book was powerful, and I had a hard time putting it down.

In “The Cat,” Ditlevsen plainly writes about ordinary people and places but infuses the mundane with her poetic sense: “They sat across from one another on the train, and there was nothing special about either of them.”

She continues: “They weren’t the kind of people your eyes would land on if you tired of staring at the usual scenery, which appears to rush toward the train from a distance and then stand still for a second, creating a calm picture of soft green curves and little houses and gardens, whose leaves vibrate and turn grayish in the smoke streaming back from the train, like a long billowing pennant.”

The stories are short and sharp, cutting you in a way a knife cannot.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘I Was Working: Poems’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘I Was Working: Poems’
Updated 12 October 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘I Was Working: Poems’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘I Was Working: Poems’

Author: Ariel Yelen

Seeking to find a song of the self that can survive or even thrive amid the mundane routines of work, Ariel Yelen’s lyrics include wry reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker and commuter in New York.

In the poems’ dialogues between labor and autonomy, the beeping of a microwave in the staff lounge becomes an opportunity for song.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Supercommunicators’

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Updated 12 October 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Supercommunicators’

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  • The book offers many practical insights into the science and art of effective communication, focusing on how people can improve their ability to connect with others and within themselves

Author: Charles Duhigg

In “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection,” Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg explains what a “supercommunicator” is, and why we might want to refine our communication style to become more like one.

“Conversation is the communal air we breathe. All day long, we talk to our families, friends, strangers, coworkers, and sometimes pets,” Duhigg — author of “The Power of Habit” and “Smarter Faster Better” — writes in the book, which was published earlier this year.

But, he adds, not all forms of communication — or types of conversations — are equal. Why does communication sometimes fail to, well, communicate?

The book offers many practical insights into the science and art of effective communication, focusing on how people can improve their ability to connect with others and within themselves.

It highlights strategies that great (or “super”) communicators use to build stronger relationships. It discusses different types of conversations, offering practical tips on how to engage in meaningful dialogue, avoid miscommunication, and align with others’ perspectives.

Duhigg emphasizes that anyone can become a “supercommunicator” by learning how communication functions and by applying certain techniques in everyday interactions, whether personal or professional.

He also examines how communication can help shape and restructure relationships, careers and entire societies, offering specific examples alongside scientific research, common sense insights, and practical advice.

Once you reach a certain level of awareness, Duhigg suggests, one can master the art of meaningful conversation, leading to deeper connections.

Perhaps the most compelling reason why this book is a must-read comes from the author himself. “Supercommunicators aren’t born with special abilities — but they have thought harder about how conversations unfold, why they succeed or fail, the nearly infinite number of choices that each dialogue offers that can bring us closer together or push us apart,” he writes. “When we learn to recognize those opportunities, we begin to speak and hear in new ways.”

 

 


What We Are Reading Today: Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

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Updated 11 October 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

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Author: Rhodri Lewis

In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it— of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter.
After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare’s tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author’s nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning—from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial.

 Lewis’s Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them.