Ah, the season for giving. So, as a grateful getter, let me make use of this week's new book release schedule to do some major hinting around about what others can give me for Christmas this year. And it's real easy, too, if you just remember my ever-changing bipolar brain and its schizophrenic needs. This time around, satiety's just a page away with a grand big-picture archeological dig on the move and a small-scale still-life of Southern California social history.
In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppers Shaped the Modern World, David W. Anthony reclaims a magnificent and influential civilization from the past when he traces the source of the Indo-European languages and English and unravels a mystery that has stumped scholars for two centuries. Having turned the Eurasian steppes into a booming transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange, these original Indo-European speakers, Anthony recounts, spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in mining, warfare, and political institutions, ushering in an era of vibrant social change. A topic of such audacious sweep, that reconciles and ties up many historical loose ends, has enormous appeal for me.
But when it comes to the gift you can open again and again, my "mandate also includes weird bugs" — to paraphrase Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, when he once allowed for a little variety-is-the-spice disclaimer to some too-lofty philosophizing. Not that Aimee Semple McPherson and the Making of Modern Pentecostalism, in its concern with the scandal-plagued Los Angeles-based radio evangelist and media sensation of the 1920s and 1930s should necessarily be considered in that eerie, cartoonish light. I'm sure, however, that Chas H. Barfoot's book has much to say about the peculiarly Southern California mindset and the regional transformation and exploitation stemming from the population boom of the time, about the mid-west influx and its influence, the Depression-era societal norms, and other cultural growing pains that has historically helped accommodate any and all put-it-up-a-flagpole religions and spiritualistic fly-by-night ops.
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