The occasional scrivener

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A good overview of some of the weirder ideological views behind Bitcoin, and internet libertarianism in general.

While I’m sure there’s a lot of background to get if you follow the sources, the book itself makes a lot of assumptions about the reader’s own political stances, which are assumed to be more or less the same as the author’s.

This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam

These books are good read together. Fehrenbach’s, written in the 1960s, is better at describing the actual course of the war , while Halberstam excels in the top-level politicking between Truman and MacArthur.

Irving Penn — Resonance

A greatest hits collection. I like Penn better than a lot of other fashion photographers in that he has a bit more range.

Berning & Di Battista — Confluence

A pretty vapid collection of huge prints of scratched images of stereotypical blonde models. Forgettable.

Like a Horse

The sleeper hit of this visit. Great collection of works centered around horses and the people who ride and care for them. Horse culture is coded feminine here in Sweden and it was great to see that side shown in the work from Swedish artists.

Comprising of the books An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 ★ The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 ★ The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945.

An excellent history of the US involvement in the Western theatre of the Second World War.

Atkinson is deft at moving between the highest and lowest levels of combat, leading to a very readable account of the main points of the entire series of campaigns. He almost always points out the number of casualties and deaths after each action, which through constant repetition brings the entire awful conflict into perspective.

His narrative is marred by frequent set phrases (“sheets” of artillery fire, units “sidle” into position) that over the course of three fat books become a bit jarring.