Good Book Hunting, September 3, 2022: Half Price Books, Overland Park, Kansas

So we had a little time to kill after going to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival for a bit on Saturday. As we were booked to stay in Overland Park, Kansas, a city of 200,000 people, I hoped we would find some used book stores. But only one, and to be honest, I confused the number (1/2) with Books-a-Million, the national chain (I was only 999,999.5 off, which is within political polling’s margin of error). But it is a used book store, a higher-priced used book store that looks like it might cater a bit to the university trade (a lot of textbookish titles in theology and philosophy).

I looked mostly in the clearance section in the back, and I bought a few things.

I got:

• Bendigo Shafter by Louis L’Amour since I did not find it at ABC Books last week.
• The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Looks to be a sociological textbook about work/life balance originally from 1989.
• The Science of Happiness by Ryuho Okawa. Given that the subtitle is 10 Principles for Manifesting Your Divine Nature, one can expect this to be a Buddhist apologetic or mindfulness tract more than science.
• A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller, a play.
• Breath! You Are Alive by Thich Nhat Hanh. A modern Buddhist sutra.
• Stay Alive All Your Life by Norman Vincent Peale, a modern Christian Buddhist sutra.
• Descartes’ Error by Antonio R. Damasio. Subtitled Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, it looks to be a commentary on dualism. Given that it has “The Human Brain” in the title, one wonders if the author feels the error is in not being materialist.
• The Art of Strategy: A New Translation of Sun Tzu’s Classic The Art of War by R. L. Wing. It’s been a while since I’ve read a translation of The Art of War. Given this is a 1988 translation by a translator whose name is Wing, we will take it with a grain of salt.
• A The Teaching Company course on CDs, Great Scientific Ideas that Changed the World by Professor Steven L. Goldman. Gentle reader, this course was $3 for 36 lectures. I won’t see this good of a deal in a couple of weeks at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. Whose half-price day falls on the same day that I will be climbing 110 stories of steps. So I might not make it to the book sale, and what would I lose? A couple (dozen) records, a couple of monographs to browse during football games, a couple audio books and courses I won’t listen to because I’m not driving anywhere these days, and a couple of chapbooks…. Alright, alright, alright, you have convinced me to go!

All right, gentle reader, you know me well enough by now. Even though I brought a book (one!) for my overnight trip, you can probably guess which book I started (and finished) in Kansas over the weekend. Which was it?