One of my greatest pleasures in life is seeing to it that someone gets just the book they need at that moment in their life. Below the fold is a list of books that I've given to friends and relatives in relatively recent history. I had a much longer list, but decided to cut it in half and maybe submit the rest later. Thought this would make for some nice night-time diversion.
I should probably start off with gifts I've gotten my aunt. She got political in the early 90s, when she went on strike. She's the one who introduced me to Air America Radio - which I'm pretty sure is the way I discovered Daily Kos, after hearing Markos on the Sam Seder show (and damn, does Mr. Seder have a lucky wife). In any case, because she's into lefty politics, the books I get her are probably the most pertinent for readers of the site.
- Don Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. One for my own reading list. My aunt's initial comment was that it was "long."
- Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban. A friend of mine read me excerpts that had me rolling on the ground. My aunt also found it pretty hilarious.
- In a moment of serendipitous luck, I got her Jim Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. She had actually meant to order this for herself, but put it off. When it arrived, she was confused at first, only to realize a moment later that I'd had it sent to her.
- I picked Vijay Prasad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World based on a review in The Progressive - later, I bought myself a copy.
My Dad, on the other hand, is a FOX-watching Republican, so the scenario's a bit different here. He enjoys indulging stereotypes; it's just what he does. Still, as a potential academic, I got tired of hearing about how all professors "are liberal and have no common sense." For some reason, I fell into the temporary delusion that facts might put a dent in his thinking and bought him a copy of Jean Bethke Elshtain's Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in an Unjust World. Well, first the sales clerk criticized my purchase. I agreed with him politically, but as someone also working in sales at the time, I was more taken aback by his lack of professionalism. Then, when I gave it to my dad, my step-mom simply assumed it was a leftist screed and started lecturing me with her finger in the air. No, seriously, finger in the air. Later, my dad called me and said, "This book is more in line with what I think than what you think." Yes, that was the point. And yet, he went right back to "all professors are liberal and have no common sense" in a short amount of time. So, a wasted effort on every count.
Also tried to share a little bit of what I do with my work by getting him a couple of books on biblical scholarship. The first was a translation of 1-2 Samuel by Robert Alter, The David Story and then I got him a standard introduction to the Documentary Hypothesis, Richard Eliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? He thought the first book had distracting footnotes, which I thought were some of the more interesting parts of the book.
At Christmas, I bought my now ex-roommates Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing by Rosemary Radford Ruether, which I subsequently reviewed (link goes to the review). For my other then-roommate, an artist, I got Mary Ann Staniszewski's Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art, which my mother, an art historian, thinks is one of the best introductions to art in general.