Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
Politics as Religion
This is not a republication or rewriting of Gentile's study of political liturgy in Itally, but a sustained and general study of the sacralization of politics ("Political Religion") as such - and covers everything from its beginnings in the writings of Rousseau and in the cults (myths, symbols, and liturgies) of the American and French Revolutions, through Mazzini, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalinism -- with a final chapter on Third World nationalizing socialisms of Kim il Sung, Ceausescu, Mao, Nkrumah (in which he follows a path first opened by Gregor) -- ending back with American political pieties. The book is marred by too much emphasis (in my opinion) on general, theoretical discussions -- but they are generally astute, and the brief discussion of the physiognomy of totalitarian regimes at pp. 46-48 is brilliant and itself worth the price of the book. But the point proven, the book (150 fairly dense pages) could have been halved.