The Haul Video -- College Book Version

 Listening to NPR the other day I learned of yet another youtube genre: the "haul video."  As in, "look at what I hauled in from the store."  Pretty amusing.  In honor of graduation, which is this weekend in Chapel Hill, I think I'll talk about some books I brought back from my parents' home last summer.  I brought a couple of boxes of books from their garage, which I hadn't looked at in years.  And so now it's time to go through them, in imitation of the video.  I don't have a camera, though; so I'll spare you that aspect and just write about this.

There were a bunch of books I'd more or less forgotten about, including a couple of stat books.  Really scary thing here, I looked through Hildebrant -- the professor of my stat 101/102 course was also the author of the book, which I found really impressive at the time.  You know what?  I  found a bunch of notations that I'd made in it, few (maybe none) of which make any sense at all to me now.  Amazing how much I've forgotten over the years....  And for our friends over at els, get this: a manual for SPSS.  The IBM 370 version.  Again, amazing how much I've forgotten over the years.  One of my work study jobs in college was running data from the Philadelphia Social History Project through SPSS, so I used to lug one of those reels of tape around campus.  Amazing how times have changed, eh?  Here's Fairley and Mosteller on statistics and public policy; at least that one has English in it.  I like to think I could understand that if I put my mind to it.

Then there're a couple of books from modern American history (it stopped with the election of Reagan, because that's about where we were when I was in college!)  Great thing about history--we're always making more of it.  Allen Matusow's The Unraveling of America -- really enjoyed reading that and I remember it well, because I used a bunch of footnotes in it to get sources for a paper I was writing.  Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism.  Oh, here's one that I remember -- very sad book,  C.D.B. Bryan's Friendly Fire.  The author died recently.  Here's a book I obviously didn't read, because there are no markings in it -- Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion.  Wonder what the deal with that was -- maybe it was an optional book.  Or was it one of those that the prof ordered but we never got to?  My guess is the latter.  Also -- get this -- Richard M. Freeland's The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism.  Argued in essence, as I recall, that the Democrats licensed McCarthy's attacks on communism.   Didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time, but it's been a hugely successful book.  And this I remember about it, one of the blurbs came from the Detroit Free Press: Henry Ford said history was more or less bunk and this book confirms it.  How's that for turning criticism into praise?

Here're books from my freshman anthropology course.  The prof , Edward (a.k.a. Bucky) Schieffelin, assigned his own book about his field work in New Guinea.  I enjoyed that book, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers, though even then as an 18 year old college freshman I was wondering if I was getting an idiosyncratic view of cultural anthropology.  Here's Adamson Hoebel's The Cheyennes of the Great Plains!  I remember reading that book and thinking, I'd like to do this.  It was a key step on setting me on the road to law school.  Worth going back and re-reading it.   But wait a minute, what's this?  Napoleon A. Chagnon's Yanomamo: The Fierce People?!  No way.  I don't remember this book at all, but it has marks in it, which show that I read it once.  I'm familiar with it now because it's been the subject of a lot of attention of late over the ethics of the field work.

Well, that's enough of a trip down memory lane right now.  One of these days I'll go through the law school books that I brought back.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Al,

Inspired by several of your titles, I'm hoping today's college students will one day recall (in no particular order) Stuart Banner's How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (2005), Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Matthew L.M. Fletcher's American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law (2008), Pekka Hamalainen's The Commanche Empire (2008), and S. James Anaya's Indigenous Peoples in International Law (2004 ed.).

[Matt]

I don't remember this book at all, but it has marks in it, which show that I read it once.

That's happened to me several times- I take a book that I don't remember having read, and find that it's full of my marginal notes. My big worry is that maybe this is where my more "original" ideas come from!