Last updated 03-03-2024
In September 1969 I had some savings and started full time studying of Architecture by inter-library loans, guided initially by a syllabus and facilitated by the local Vermont village librarian. I have kept a list of my reading ever since. Currently this reading list includes 85 single spaced typed pages and a more recent 162 hand printed pages that include film in addition to books from my public library in Portland, Oregon.
Designing and building houses for myself and friends, and building an office addition for a general contractor, financed my return to college and graduate work. I am only credentialed in civil engineering, structural option. BS, 1979. The dean of the school offered me a living stipend and waiver of graduate tuition if I would continue with a thesis supporting funded research. That stipend was the down payment for my current house. I completed all my coursework for a MS, the research for my thesis, and the report for the funded research, but that interesting work then completed, I chose to skip writing my thesis and start my own business in computer programming. I am not including those text books in these lists below.
Thus by far the greater part of my education was by independent study indulging my interests in the social sciences from the personal scale to foreign policy and my reading list reflects that.
Some of my reading has become available opensource online. The late Donnella Meadows taught at Dartmouth College and founded the 270 acre, 23 household community, https://www.cobbhill.org/ Her foundation has her very interesting publication on leverage points. It you are an activist, it is important to chose the most important leverage point if you want to be effective. The problem you are trying to solve is the way it is because someone has an interest in the status quo, so you have to research what is important to them, why, and how attached they are to that specific issue. In any living system, there are negative and positive feedback loops. Find a leverage point that amplifies your effort and avoid those that waste your time and disempower you like community policing meetings which are designed to coop you into the status quo.
https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/.
If I have time to create a searchable database, that would be more useful to others. For now these lists characterize how I have spent the majority of my time during these years. When my paternal grandmother died at age 104 in 1993, it was discovered that my father’s college letters to his own parents had been saved. He had predeceased her in 1976. I was able to interview three women he mentioned. I also received a photo of my grandfather at a meeting with Black intellectuals at Dillard University in 1944. This lead to two years of research into the intersection of the history of progressive education with advanced Black education, with the connecting link being the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowships. Rosenwald’s daughter, Edith Rosenwald Stern had hired my grandfather in 1929 to found and direct a private k-12 coed, progressive days school in New Orleans for her children.
Books&Film_11-15-2017_01-24-2024
These lists do not include 600+ films I have attended in 33 years of the annual local PCC Cascade Festival of African Films.